Fringe: The Ghost Network
By fred | September 24, 2008
(S01E03) Long before it even premiered a few weeks back, Fringe was compared to many different series, one of them being, of course, The X-Files. I think the producers themselves might have even referred to the show, among others, when trying to describe Fringe, but they also insisted that this show wouldn’t be like The X-Files, or anything like another J.J. Abrams’ creation, Lost, when it comes to the serialization aspect of things.
They didn’t want a show that you need to watch every single week to be able to understand what’s going on and follow all the stories, they wanted to make a procedural, one people could tune in at any moment in time and still understand and appreciate what they were watching. And is it true, this show is nothing like The X-Files…
But I don’t actually mean that in a good way. It’s nothing like Chris Carter’s show, because back then when tuning in to follow the latest case FBI special agents Fox Mulder & Dana Scully would investigate, you had absolutely no idea what it would be like, or be about. Oh sure, there was this ongoing theme about aliens and a major conspiracy from the government, but those were only some of the unlimited amount of possibilities we would face each week.
Because not every case looked or felt the same, sometimes it was aliens, sometimes it was secret military experiment, others it was genetic mutations, others it was mysterious bugs or wild animals no one ever knew existed, there were simply no limits, it could always be anything.
But on Fringe, it’s like the complete opposite of that, it is always the same : one weird event occur, usually always in the same town or so, putting light on some “fringe” experiment, something often people thought was only real in science-fiction movies. Then, we find out it’s actually based on some preliminary work our very own Walter used to work on back in the days, only it’s been improved, completed and/or perfected, and then there’s the connection to Massive Dynamic.
Then it’s time for Walter to make some experiment of his own, allowing Olivia and her team to get information in a very “unusual” way, information leading to the resolution of the episode, if not the case of the week. The end.
This was the storyline for the pilot, for last week’s episode, and for this week’s as well. Something tells me next week won’t be any different, and that’s a major problem for the show. It was clever of them to address those issues directly on the episode, as Olivia questioned the very fact that MD always seemed connected to all those events, to which she was told that it’s just because anything and everything in that department of science is linked to them, one way or another.
It was said that it’s all in the way you look at things, and if you focus on what MD does, they will of course be involved. It as good to address the issue, but unfortunately that’s not enough and that doesn’t make it any less real : every episode follow the same pattern, week after week, and soon it will be incredibly boring, if it’s not already. How are we to get any sense of suspense or mystery in such conditions ? How can there be a conspiracy behind The Pattern if we all know who’s always behind it, one way or another ?
