This begins as a tidy copy of The X-Files and takes most of a season to find out what it is for. Stay with it, because once it does, John Noble’s Walter Bishop carries it somewhere stranger and kinder than the pilot promises.
Fringe began in 2008 with the names of J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci on it. A plane lands itself at Boston with everyone aboard dead, an FBI agent is assigned, and a man who has been locked away for years is let out because only he can help. For most of its first season it is a case-of-the-week programme: something impossible happens to a body in Massachusetts and a scientist explains it in a basement. By the end of that season it is a story about a father, a son and what the father once did, and it stays one for four more seasons. We are recommending the second programme, and you must sit through much of the first to reach it.
The opening is properly horrible. Michael Bonvillain lights the cabin a sick green, the passengers are still strapped in, and what has happened to them we watched with a hand over our mouth. The horror is not matched for months; what the programme finds instead, and quickly, is John Noble. He plays Walter Bishop as a man who has been away from the world for years and is delighted by all of it: custard, LSD, his son. The grief is in the pauses. He will be halfway through explaining a body and stop, because he has remembered something he did, and Noble lets us see the memory arrive before he covers it. It moved us more than a programme with this much goo had any right to.
Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham is the problem early reviews named, and the programme solves it. In the first year she is a badge and a dying colleague and not much else, and Torv plays it tight and quiet, which reads as flat. By the second season the writers, Jeff Pinkner and J. H. Wyman prominent among them, have worked out that the quiet is the character, and Torv is asked to do things we will not describe. Joshua Jackson’s Peter Bishop keeps the tone honest, sardonic about his father and then, gradually, not. Lance Reddick’s Broyles speaks as if each sentence were being billed to him. Jasika Nicole’s Astrid Farnsworth is the assistant whose name Walter cannot remember, a joke the programme runs for five years without wearing out. Blair Brown’s Nina Sharp fronts Massive Dynamic, the company that seems to own everything.
It is made on a production line, nine cinematographers and a dozen editors across a hundred episodes, and the achievement is that it looks like one thing. The lab under Harvard is the same lab in the last season as the first: brick, tanks, a chalkboard. Location captions arrive as huge white letters standing in the landscape itself, three storeys high beside a bridge, a small idea and one of the best the programme has. Directors including Brad Anderson and Akiva Goldsman keep the cases brisk and the lab scenes slow, so the weekly horror is dispatched and Walter is given room.
The middle of the first season is a run of episodes in which a man in a suburb is found turned into something wet and the word Pattern is said in a tone that expects us to shiver. We were bored, we said so to each other, and we nearly stopped. The John Scott thread, with Mark Valley as the partner who keeps not being dead enough, outstays its usefulness.
Most critics disagree with us. Nearly every review we have read was written on the pilot alone, and the pilot is a competent, expensive imitation of The X-Files (1993) with a wittier scientist. Judged on that, a score in the sixties is fair. Judged on the whole, it is not.
Abrams’ Lost (2004) taught a generation to distrust a mystery series on the grounds that nobody had thought about the answer. Fringe has an answer, and its five seasons get there, with a final run of thirteen episodes that feels chosen rather than imposed. It carries a 15, mostly for the goo. Watch it with someone patient, agree that the first season is the price of admission, and let Walter have his milkshake.
