Adding up "Fringe"

There’s been a lot of stupidity on “Fringe.” Bad science, stupid investigating, and plots that hint at forward movement by obliquely referencing people and things that might have something to do with…something.

The stupid has been neck-and-neck with the interesting – the creatively gross stuff, the enjoyable banter between mad scientist Walter and his sardonic son Peter, and Lance Reddick’s awesomely sharp jawline.

But with its first episode after the winter break, the stupid-to-interesting quotient on “Fringe” has officially tipped in stupid’s favor. And so, I’m 80% certain I’m giving up on the show.

Let’s add it all up. -1 for every stupid moment, +1 for every interesting moment:

-Olivia escapes her kidnappers by asking for a drink of water, which they oblige without issue (-1) – and when her captors sit her up to drink it, she smashes the glass over the one guy’s head (-1 for giving her an ACTUAL GLASS).

-Then she throws a knife at the other guy and it plows straight into his back (+1)

-She sneaks up behind another guy, knocks him out, takes his gun and the keys to his car, and even swipes some evidence on her way out, finds the proper car and speeds out, at which point she uses the stolen cell phone to call in the whole thing (+1 because she really hauls ass throughout the whole sequence).

-Later, it turns out “fringe division” (-1 for actually giving this previously-unnamed subgroup a silly name) is being investigated by the guy our hero, Olivia, had previously prosecuted for sexual harassment (-1 for asking us to believe a guy with such an obvious conflict of interest would be put in charge of investigating this particular division).

-Meanwhile, a giant slug thing kills an immunologist and crawls out its throat (+1 for doing what “Fringe” does best – being gross as hell).

-Olivia starts solving this and that (+1 for giving her a personality – it took 13 episodes, but she has finally developed “enthusiasm for her job” as a secondary trait, past “earnestness for her job”).

-Then, she realizes the double-agent guy in the FBI is the one who kidnapped her, through skillful deductive powers of noticing the same dollop of WhiteOut on his shoe (-2 for being so fucking stupid that THIS is how she puts it all together – this is Scooby-Doo shit, right here).

-Despite her suspicions, she can’t investigate the guy, so her partner goes to known criminal Peter to tap double-agent’s phone off the books (so the FBI can maintain deniability). He does this by standing in the room while Peter makes calls to his criminal buddies, and helping him set up the illegal wire-tap (-2, one for the idiocy of FBI partner, and another for the utter bullshit of this wiretap setup).

-Fortunately, Peter has tapped in JUST IN TIME to hear FBI double-agent call his wife – from his DESK AT FBI HEADQUARTERS TO THEIR HOME’S LANDLINE – to tell her “Olivia CANNOT LEAVE THE HOUSE ALIVE.” (-3 for the amount of phrases I had to put in aggravated caps.)

-Then Olivia shoots the wife in the head, narrowly missing a bullet herself (+1/2. Not too awesome, but…I gotta give ‘em something at this point.)

-So they catch double-agent, and in the interrogation room, Olivia breaks him by revealing she killed his wife (+1 because she gritted her teeth in kind of a cool way). Double-agent cracks hard and starts spewing in a really oblique way about how they weren’t kidnapping her, but SAVING HER, and now she’s RUINED EVERYTHING!!! (-3, two for the caps, one for the truly annoying vagueness of his “admission.” Nobody is ever this vague about anything.)

-Oh, and in the end, the investigator guy has to admit Olivia knows her stuff (still -1 because that still pisses me off.)

So let’s look at the tally:
+5.5
-15

Okay, it’s official: I’d have to be a real glutton for punishment to keep watching a show that hurts my brain this much.

Wait, what’s this?

Next time on “Fringe,” people’s brains liquefy and leak out their brains?

Oooooh…damn.

Tuesday Throwdown: "Fringe" Vs. "The Mentalist"

Last week’s “Fringe” featured an “Audrey II”-esque plant thing squeezing a man’s heart. What did last week’s “The Mentalist” have? Its lead character explaining the concept of a memory-tower to his co-workers.

You might be surprised which I found more interesting.

It’s all about the successful execution of a procedural. “The Mentalist” aspires to be nothing more than an engaging detective show, and as a result, everything it does above-and-beyond – things like character development, personality, and understated visual and tonal style – make it that much more impressive.

By contrast, “Fringe” seems to think it’s a lot better than it is. It’s so sure people get that it’s “not just” a mere procedural – by dropping increasingly annoying “Larger Forces At Work” hints and allusions to upcoming Stories To Be Told (including a rather smarmily-titled episode called “In Which We Meet Mr. Jones”) – that it seems to have ignored the fact that it has so far told basically the same story five or six times in a row now.

In fact, it seems a bit arrogant about that fact, having Lance Reddick irritably inform his subordinate that she’s always going to have more questions and basically, she should consider that just a part of the job, because she’ll know more when he’s ready to tell her.

This is the producers momentarily hijacking a character to tell viewers to stop whining about repetitive stories, and stop complaining that being deliberately obtuse isn’t the same as telling an engaging story. Because it’s all Part of The Bigger Plan, you see. And the producers erroneously assume we care about The Plan.

By now, viewers are extremely savvy to the precarious scaffolding that is “Big Picture Storytelling.” We’ve seen when it goes right: “The Wire,” and perhaps “Lost.” And we’ve seen when it goes wrong: “Heroes,” and off-seasons of “24.”

My advice to “Fringe” is to take up a page from “The Mentalist”: don’t worry about the Big Picture. It’s less important to viewers than you think. What viewers like is engaging weekly stories. If they actually build to something more, great. But it’s never the reason to watch a show.

Meanwhile, instilling a rigid “freak-of-the-week” format – to get viewers used to seeing weird crap by redoing the same story with minor variations each week, while also draping a larger picture – is actually a bit insulting to the viewer.

Unfortunately “Fringe’s” problems are wider-spread. While “The Mentalist” has a cast that starts with the beatific charismata of Simon West and is uniformly enjoyable overall, “Fringe” is kneecapped with the presence of Anna Torv and Jasika Nicole, two frankly terrible actresses in underwritten roles.

The worst part? Neither character is actually necessary for the main plots. And Anna Torv is the ostensible lead character!

(And for now we’re ignoring the patent silliness of the “science” involved in the stories. I don’t need it to actually be plausible. It’s helpful when it sounds plausible, but even that isn’t really necessary when you’ve got the amusingly loopy mad scientist explaining it. I only need it to sound interesting. Which is iffy from case to case.)

Anyway. Both “Fringe and “The Mentalist” have scored full-season orders, so I’ll follow each through until May, hoping from the best from each. But while “The Mentalist” has actually delivered more than expected each week, “Fringe” currently has quite an uphill climb.

Nearly Worth Watching: "Fringe"

Caught the "Fringe" pilot early, so I can officially tell you that this is 80% a Show Worth Watching.
First, the bad: There’s a good deal of “Let’s Set Up The Series” stuff – characters speaking in exposition, vague subplots initiated, and a nice tour of the set you’ll get to see each and every exciting week, if the show gets picked up. It’s annoying, but on a pilot, everyone’s gotta just soldier through it, and assume this won’t be so prominent in later episodes.

The more painful bit of the bad is the fact that the lead actress looks like Kate Blanchett and performs like Elizabeth Rohm. She is startlingly bland, exhibiting almost no personality in the face of some truly weird concepts she’s supposed to be at the front of. It’s disappointing, firstly because how many decent, attractive character actresses are there who could deliver lines with a spark of excitement and curiosity – let alone decent AMERICAN actresses who could do the job?

But that’s something we have to cope with, since the rest of the cast makes up for it. In particular, John Noble, playing the scientific lead who will anchor the plot of the series itself. He isn’t charming or rakish. He’s not Dr. House. The Walter Bishop character is quite truly a Mad Scientist, delivering his lines like an autistic Vincent Price. At one point, he casually mentions that he’s pissed himself – “Just a squirt,” he clarifies – and that tells the audience quite a bit about the show that’s hopefully lined up.

I imagine a lot of actors chomp at the bit to play The Good-Guy Mad Scientist, quietly excited to inject an FBI agent with an LSD-Ketamine mix and toss her into a sensory deprivation tank. That enthusiasm is clear here.

Most surprising, I must admit, is Joshua Jackson as the scientist’s estranged son – also a genius, though a stubbornly directionless one. Though at first I thought he was trying a bit too hard to come off as “adult” despite looking like a youngish 25, as soon as he’s got Noble to play off of, Jackson comes alive, alternating between snarkily berating his father’s work and bemusedly translating for him, since he seems to be the only other one that “speaks Walter.”

That the show’s got J.J. Abrams’s “Bad Robot” company attached can be read one of two ways – “Lost,” or “Alias.” The vague references to “The Pattern” hint at the problems the latter series faced when it became clear that it had no real gameplan and just kept inventing new, obtusely-named threats. But I’m hoping for the quality of the former to keep it in check.

Helping that is the clever bits of gruesomeness displayed in the pilot. Not only the airborne toxin that turns people’s skin translucent – which the show manages to keep looking disgusting no matter how close up it gets - but more throwaway gags like the woman who casually strips off the skin of her arm to reveal a bionic prosthesis. If they can keep this attitude going, I’ll be impressed.

There’s a way of looking at this like a 21st-century redo of “The X-Files,” and hopefully that’ll be the case. The alternate is it devolves into a painful hybrid the last couple of years’ failed genre shows, “Night Stalker” and “Bionic Woman.” But it’s my hope Abrams and company have learned their lessons by now.