Fringe: Safe
By fred | December 3, 2008
(S01E10) Before anything else I should warn you, this episode of Fringe was the last episode of 2008. That’s right, with it we’re saying goodbye to the show, and we will have to wait a few weeks to see how Walter, Peter, Olivie, Charlie and everyone else will deal with fringe scientific experiment in 2009. The next episode of Fringe will air on January 20th – still on Tuesdays at 9.00 but with American Idol as lead-in.
Now, this episode. Well this episode I’m not really sure what to think of it to be honest, because I’m not really sure what to think of the show right now. I used to think that the show had great potential and could become one of the best hour of television I’d look forward to each week, and that it only needed time to find its voice, its tone, but now I’m not so sure.
Or, I’m not too sure I like the direction the show seems to be taking. As I have said in the past, I really wish they would stop going the serialized way and start to come up with great, interesting, exciting, thrilling ideas, stories and episodes that are self-contained, where it all begins and ends inside one single episode, and where that’s more than enough to have a great time.
I feel that way for many reasons, the two main ones being that (a) that is exactly how the show was sold initially, and (b) I’m quite frankly not too thrilled by the mythology/serialization on the show so far.
Before anyone saw the pilot, the creative minds behind Fringe made sure to tell how this wouldn’t be Lost, where you need to follow the entire series otherwise you won’t understand a thing, it wasn’t going to be a serialized series, but a procedural with the good old self-contained episodes. But judging from the recent episodes, and especially this one, it’s becoming clearer every day that this is turning into a “Lost meets Alias” — and serialization all the way.
Which leads us to the second reason I’m not too fond of this direction : so far, the serialization is only a “meh” as far as I’m concerned. Because episodes fail to really be good on their own, only when set in a bigger picture, and if you want to make it simple, here’s how it goes : The Pattern, every weird science, every implausible experiment, everything fringe, it’s all Walter. Walter Bishop is about the man who did invent everything, back in the days.
He met with a lot of people, did a lot of things and was probably the most efficient and prolific genius science ever had, but then he got sent away, locked up in a mental institution. Since then, other people - mostly Massive Dynamics - are trying to make the most out of his work and continue to bend the rules of science.
It just doesn’t get things all that exciting to me. I really wanted to watch a good episode that would not require be have watched past episodes and watch future ones to get a resolution and grasp an understanding of what’s going on, I really wanted the show to offer great, exciting episode that didn’t require to invest a lot in a brand new mythology, and again considering how things on Fringe are very limited and not all that exciting, I’m even more disappointed to see that’s not the direction they’re going for.
