Cast:
- Kirk Acevedo ... Charlie Francis
- Blair Brown ... Nina Sharp
- Joshua Jackson ... Peter Bishop
- Jasika Nicole ... Astrid Farnsworth
- John Noble ... Dr. Walter Bishop
- Lance Reddick ... Phillip Broyles
- Anna Torv ... Olivia Dunham
Created by J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci (Star Trek, Mission Impossible III, Alias). Premiered Sept. 9, 2008 on Fox.
What Happens
FBI agents John Scott (Mark Valley) and Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) are in the middle of a secret tryst when they are called in to join a Homeland Security task force investigating a bizarre phenomenon: somehow every single person aboard a Boston-bound plane was killed and their bodies ravaged, leaving a jumbo jet filled with caked blood and gruesome corpses.
After a run-in with the task force leader, Broyles (Lance Reddick), with whom Olivia has a history from her days as an investigator for the Marine Corps, the two agents are sent to investigate a tip at a storage facility. There they find garages full of lab animals and strange substances. Surprising a suspect, John chases him but is caught in the blast when the suspect detonates his lab. The resulting chemical exposure starts to convert John's skin into a translucent form that will soon kill him.
Desperate to save John, Olivia tracks down an expert she's certain can help, Walter Bishop (John Noble). Unfortunately Bishop has been institutionalized since the death of an assistant 17 years before, and only family members can see him. Olivia bullies his son, Peter (Joshua Jackson) into helping her meet with Bishop.
Bishop, unfortunately, can only help is he knows what compounds John was exposed to, and that means they must find the suspect. But since Olivia didn't see him, Bishop proposes a startling and dangerous alternative: using certain chemicals, an immersion tank, and an electrical connection, Bishop can arrange for Olivia to enter John's mind and see what he saw just before the explosion.
Rare Birds
Fringe is meant to be mysterious and cryptic: there's an overarching conspiracy which even after the pilot we've barely glimpsed, supporting characters who are enigmatic and of debatable intent, and events which range from inexplicable to merely bizarre. The entree for the audience is the trio of central characters: Olivia, Walter, and Peter. For the show to work, we need to be able to connect to these three as they're being exposed to things that don't jibe with traditional science or police work.
Fortunately this aspect of the show works extremely well, despite some roughness in the embryonic relationship between the three. Their characters are profoundly different: Olivia is a non-nonsense, "just the facts" investigator; Peter, a brash, cynical, and impatient drop-out; Walter, a detached and damaged avatar of unconventional science. The awkwardness of their still-forming rapport, though it might be counted a flaw in the show, may be better viewed as the natural kinks that would occur if three such rare birds found themselves needing to work together. Example: At first, a scene where Olivia and Walter speak intensely to each other about possible extreme solutions to a problem, ignoring the caustic sarcasm of Peter's comments, made me feel like Joshua Jackson was wedged into a scene that made him extraneous; but the subtext of the scene is Peter being drawn unwillingly into his father's world after he'd expended to much effort to get away from it. Jackson's gravity throughout as Peter marks him as John Noble's son, a difficult standard to meet.
Seen but not Heard
The two-hour pilot, which reportedly cost $10 million, has lush production values and a theatrical feel. The pathogen- and chemical-induced afflictions suffered by the airline passengers and by Agent John Scott are realized all too well. The direction and cinematography are exemplary, easily creating mood and tone. The acting throughout is strong, though some regulars are given little to do.
Is newcomer Anna Torv up to the task of shouldering this show? It looks that way. She plays the character as written, a driven, focused FBI agent with a feminine sensibility -- sort of like Clarisse from Silence of the Lambs as played by Cate Blanchett. She's got a good crooked smile when she's flirty. And she's beautiful in a way that doesn't have the slightest whiff of Hollywood or Vogue. I buy her as Agent Dunham. Noble and Jackson come across as pros who know how to handle the nuances of their characters, so no worries there.
Broyles (Lance Reddick, The Wire) is suitably intense; Charlie (Kirk Acevedo, Invincible) is largely a bystander until a late speech about the simple agent's role in the brave new world of science flying off the rails (though the speech is delivered with the camera on Olivia the whole time, poor guy); but Astrid (Jasika Nicole) literally fetches coffee and supplies with barely a line to her name. I hope the writers remember she's there at some point, as her character has potential for leavening the lead characters' various obsessivenesses.
Answers, and More Questions
The pilot's imperfection comes not at the level of craft but of the conceptual through-line of the episode. This episode starts with the murder of a plane-load of people, and should have been about two things: the resolution of how and why that happened, and the coalescence of Olivia's team and the beginning of their efforts to investigate the plane deaths and other future events.
But the passengers' deaths are a gory opening set piece that starts things going yet has no weight in the plot. Olivia is motivated not by their deaths but by John's affliction. And even though the "how" is addressed, the "why" of the airline deaths is submerged in the obscure depths of the conspiracy, which Broyles calls "The Pattern." The motivation and means for the conspiracy must of course be left murky for as long as possible, but in this kind of a situation not really getting a handle on why this particular disaster occurred is more frustrating than intriguing.
There are other traps here. Having a brilliant scientist opens the door for impenetrable technobabble that magically solves the problem at hand, which is always alienating. And as yet there's really no reason for Peter to be around: supposedly he's minding his supposedly insane father, but functionally in the pilot he mainly served as the muscle (he chases and beats up the suspect, and later commits further violence on him) and future love interest. Olivia begs him to stay at the end, saying he's the only one who "speaks Walter"; since she's communicated fine with Walter, is this plea coming from lonely Olivia, or the writers?
