TVoholic.com: Full episode reviews of your favorite TV shows & news about television

Fringe: Pilot

By fred | June 17, 2008

FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) will require the help from Bishop to investigate a case, which as the promos showed begins in an air plane. But because Bishop is a tiny bit crazy, as well as locked up in a mental institution, Dunham needs the help of his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) to “access” Bishop. This is our winning trio right there, under the supervision of agent Broyles (Lance Reddick), because “someone out there is experimenting, only the whole world is their lab“.

The show’s premise is that science and technology have advanced at such an exponential rate for so long that now it is beyond anyone’s ability to regulate and control it, and we are given a little glimpse of what the show might soon deal with. Those events are referred to as “The Pattern”, and whether it is trying to figure out what is “The Pattern” or who’s behind it and why, or simply focusing on each of those sci-fi mystery one at a time individually, it all sounds really exciting let me tell you.

If Broyles is the man in charge, clearly Olivia Dunham will be our man, or woman, when it comes to Fringe. Like absolutely everybody else on the show, Anna Torv delivers a terrific performance, and it looks like once again J.J. Abrams and co have nailed the casting, because everybody was (a) perfect (fit).

Dunham is our main FBI agent, and she’s got an “history” with Broyles. Not that they really met before, but he seems to have some kind of a grudge over her, because she did her job and went after military men (friends of Broyles) after they got drunk and possibly raped three women or something. Which proves that Broyles is actually not that much of a good guy, but there was a little something of sexism in he entire show to tell the truth. Every male around was giving her a “honey”, “sweetheart” or something along those lines, and I have to say it was a but weird/out of place, I mean we’re in 2008 people! (Yet, somehow, it mostly kinda worked because of whom it was coming from…)

I’ve read that people who’ve seen the episode felt like the character if Peter was a bit “useless” once his father was back in the game, and I really didn’t see that. From the start it’s obvious that Peter doesn’t/won’t have a prominent role, but he has a part in all of this and his role stays about the same all along. I can see why it may look like he wasn’t exactly required to be there, since it was his father who we were interested in, but I’m sure with the following episodes everyone will find his own place on the show, and I didn’t had any problems so far.

There is one thing that bothered me a little, though. There is one scene, it’s one of the first scene of the show, and as soon as you’ll see it you’ll recognize it. It’s a scene that, one second in, you know where this is going. Not that particular scene (though you do, too), but a much bigger part of the plot, because it is one big fat cliché.

And from this point on, a lot of what will happen over the course of the episode you can see coming, though there are some little variations on it, and it goes all the way till the end, to the event that pushes Dunham towards her new job, and that whole scene at the end was a direct consequence of the first scene two hours before, and you could almost see it coming by then.

That was actually disappointing, but it also affected me a lot more at the beginning. Because then, as time went by and everything started to unfold, it also appeared obvious that this was actually somewhat required, in order to tell the story they wanted to tell, because otherwise quite of few of Dunham’s actions wouldn’t have made sense. They needed a justification, and that’s where it came from : one fat cliché.

I still wished they tried to be a bit more original there, but in the end the episode is way too good (and I’m way too excited about it) so that I would let this ruin my experience of it. At first I felt it was huge, but by the end it was more of an unfortunate detail, an obligatory rite of passage if you will.

As I said in introduction, I was already super-excited before I started to watch the show, and once done I was still - and still am - as excited about it as I used to be. It’s not easy for a show to live up to the hype, and God knows there’s a lot of it surrounding Fringe, but it works. This pilot is a wonderful promise of a show that could, indeed, rapidly grow into becoming the latest big hit (of the season).

I can’t wait for the show to premiere, and to find out hat comes after that. Fringe premieres on Tuesday, September 9 at 8.00 on Fox with a terrific 2-hour episode, and I couldn’t recommend it more, especially if you like sci-fi.

In the meantime, we’ve already posted a preview of the show here with promo pictures and videos, and you can find a little interview of the man, J.J. Abrams himself, talking about Fringe here.

Posted in Reviews
Shows: Fringe