Fringe: Power Hungry
By fred | October 15, 2008
(S01E05) Allow me to start by mentioning something I’ve already talked about in the past, but it really irritates me. Fringe isn’t the only show I watch, far from it, but it seems to be about the only one where I often myself having to turn the volume down a notch whenever there’s some music playing. Should it be actual music, like early on when Joseph was listening to some himself, or when it’s music used to, well, here I’d say yell to the audience how to feel, it’s always much louder than the rest of the time, and it’s incredibly annoying. Seriously guys, please, you gotta fix that.
Alright, on to the episode. It seems more evident to me each week that Fringe has not only flaws, but full-on problems that it really needs to addressed. Sure, for now the show is still pretty good, cool “fringe” science experiments and all you need to have a good time, but there’s still things that needs to be addressed very soon, otherwise people might start to lose interest - if that’s not already the case.
I know I said it before, but here we go again : While Fringe has been compared to The X-Files it really is nothing like that. Simple reason: The X Files was never the same. Each week, Mulder and Scully would be investigating a new mystery, which could really be about anything, from your usual secret military experiment to science-fiction-ish alien technology to anything, really.
Not only that, but they were investigating an actual mystery. Fringe has a problem not just because it follows a very strict formula every week, but also because there’s no mystery. Olivia and her team aren’t sent on a new mysterious event, where they’ll first have to figure out what’s happening, and then who’s behind it, they usually know from the start that it was for example a bus filled with gelatin-like substance and everyone in there got “frozen”, or a baby who grew rapidly and died at age 80 a few minutes later, so there’s no real mystery.
And even when they don’t, as was the case this week, we still do. Because every episode follows the same path : something weird happens, result of what seems to be an inexplicable - or impossible - science phenomena, we’re witness it so we know what’s happening; they’re called in to investigate; Walter has a theory, but needs to ran some tests first; Olivia finds something she tells Broyles about, only to hear him answer back that they know about it already, and will now share the file; Walter’s theory is right, that was indeed based on some of his past work; Olivia pretends that a regular investigation could be useful, but they’ll of course resort to another of Walter’s experiment to actually find the bad guy; Olivia catches the bad guy, end of story.
There’s no problem with not willing to commit to a serialization, and want to remain good old procedural, but procedural doesn’t have to mean formulaic. Each episode could be self-contained, and yet begin with a mystery Broyles heard about somewhere in the world, or the US at least, and send Olivia and her team there. From then, anything could happen, in how they would find out what’s going on, in what actually is going on, it could always be entirely open and different week after week.
