Fringe (new JJ Abrams show) : Mad scientist, flesh eating virus, a cow and talks with the dead

the unusual aspects, while crazy and out there, don't completely jar you out of the show altogether.

yah by the end of the 1st season ive just granted them license to operate entirely outside reality & just wanted to see how far theyd go with ~concepts~ & they go p damn far, really

im not really emotionally attached to any of the characters but the central mystery is really compelling - it starts seeming to be so stupid & formulaic but im honestly unsure of a # of characters atp

Haha, my wife has almost had the opposite reaction to alterna-Olivia's bangs. She was really hoping real Olivia would keep them!

i think it's really to Anna Torv's acting credit that the two Olivias really do feel like real and separate people. the differences in how she plays them are quite subtle instead of all 'oooh, evil twin'. thought her scene with the washing machine was totally great/heartbreaking.

seems they are still hiding the observers in the backgrounds too. there was one to the left of Springsteen Station.

Yeah that washing machine scene was heartbreaking

i thought this show was boring and seriously derivative when i first saw it (and promptly tuned out). now that i've seen the whole first season i've changed my mind—it's pretty much exactly as entertaining as the good parts of 'alias' or 'lost'.

i was impressed by anna torv's post-car crash 'injured' acting.

s2 really gets going w/ the olivia in peril shit huh? wonder if joshy jacks requested the writers make him seem like less of a pussbot or what

ok, i officially love this show.

http://www.tvline.com/2011/01/fringe-spoilers-violet-sedan-chair/

Awesome Twin Peaks reference ('my friend Dr. Jacoby from Washington state')

lol am watching this now and was just coming to post that. so good!

Rang a vague (William) bell when I watched it but I am disappoint I didn't catch the reference.

Good ep, dammit want more.

For a sec I thought he said 'my friend Derek Jacobi' which prompted some I Claudius flashbacks

And a hope that the Master would guest-star on Fringe

Have to say this last one was pretty flawless

It was aight, but this was pretty lolzy:

http://www.fringefiles.com/gallery/albums/episodes/312/normal_Fringe312ConcentrateAndAskAgain017.jpg

yeah, I caught that. I think that by the end of this season the 2nd Universe will have run its course

Also noticed that the last episode they were conspicuously using Dells in the lab, though in episode prior to that, they were using Apples. Hmm!

Commercial sponsorship is a tricky beast!

Posted from my Sprint Videophone (tm)

it seems like they made good use of the mind-reader on the liv-peter luuuuv plot.

Sam Weiss!

Walter draws the line at ghosts; I draw the line at bad math.

I liked this past episode but the episode before it with the ghosts was iffy. I didn't really feel it when Peter and Olive hooked up but maybe that's because my tv room was full of annoying people talking when I watched that episode. I feel like I missed a few lines of dialogue.

What was yalls opinions of that one?

'i'm compiling some recordings on my new betamax…'

i guess the conception of the ghost episode was ok—it wove together some of the gotta-get-past-our-bad-emotions hints from earlier episodes with the war-with-the-other-universe stuff (and i liked how they started upping the stakes on the crumbling of the home universe)—but the execution seemed tepid. i don't know where the weak point was, though. peter and olivia's reconciliation was pretty fast. maybe if they had delayed the episode a bit more, the convergence between the personal storyline and the ghost monster-of-the-week storyline (two pairs of people who can't accept the current state of their relationship because they can't recognize the other as not really the one they loved in the past, one pair of whom notices the other couple and changes) would have been stronger.

i get the sense that they're trying to set up a variant on the story from 'the constant' from 'lost'. which is good. but how long had desmond been in exile / searching for penny before that came together?

i wasn't quite clear from this last 80s episode: is the idea that as she was confessing that her stepfather hit her, olivia was appearing to walternate, or had actually passed over to the other side, and then was pulled back just as the real walter entered the room?

i'm also having trouble remembering what grown-up peter's attitude was toward his childhood when it came out that he wasn't from this universe (as an adult, last season). this episode suggests that he would have had a pretty good grip on the memories of his childhood doubts, but i don't remember them being alluded to in past episodes; is the idea that he must have just pushed them down somehow and that partly explains his character as it is as an adult, or were there more definite indications that he did retain those doubts and i'm just not remembering them?

the last scene between young peter and his mother made it seem pretty plain that peter didn't believe her and just began to play along with her lies, which probably works with either interpretation (peter continued to remember, since he deliberately chose pretense, or peter had to suppress his childhood memories and feelings, in order to be able to keep up / live with the pretense).

i wasn't quite clear from this last 80s episode: is the idea that as she was confessing that her stepfather hit her, olivia was appearing to walternate, or had actually passed over to the other side, and then was pulled back just as the real walter entered the room?

Yeah, I think that's what it was going for, but it wasn't terribly well-executed (imo) because I had the same doubts. But the end where Walternate tells his wife that she knows where Peter went to because he's found Olivia's picture book indicates that's what it was. (Btw, his wife's name is Elizabeth Bishop??)

I didn't like either of these last two, the latest because I'm annoyed at how small the Fringe universe is re: its characers -- Peter and Olivia met each other as love-at-first-sight kids???? And neither remember it in their adulthood? Come on.

btw, the puzzle that lil Olive was working on is taken straight from Alias.

Anyone else stoked for Fringe: The Search For Spock? ("Will Walter devise a Genesis Device in order to save Bell?")

I didn't like either of these last two, the latest because I'm annoyed at how small the Fringe universe is re: its characers -- Peter and Olivia met each other as love-at-first-sight kids???? And neither remember it in their adulthood? Come on.

Yep, my wife and I were annoyed by exactly this too. Unless we get some sort of memory wiping explanation soon, this will continue to bother me. I mean, obviously we're supposed to suspend belief for huge chunks of this show, but I find it impossible to believe they would have this deep connection and not remember it at all. Plus how could meeting Walter back at the start of Season 1 not ring some bells in Olivia's head? Considering how much apparent trust she put in him to tell him about her stepfather, its hard to believe even the common names wouldn't make her wonder.

Yeah, it's always interesting what little things break the suspension of disbelief for different people.

Little things? They have been fucking with continuity pretty hard, no need to be condescending.

Probably doesn't help that Olivia would have been around 7 or 8 in 1985 ("In 1981, I was three, living in Jacksonville, Florida") but they got a 12 year old actress to play her--and that in the past they made it sound like the drug tests were done on 3 year olds--who plausibly wouldn't remember much.

I think that at the beginning of the series they didn't intend the show to be so mythology-heavy and soapy, so they didn't really map stuff out.

I think the problem is that they started to fumble the mythology but instead of quickly trying to correct it they keep digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.

will these people never fuckin learn

Little things? They have been fucking with continuity pretty hard, no need to be condescending.

I was speaking more generally, i.e. it's amusing where people draw the line when it comes to suspending (or not suspending) disbelief.

Anyway, this last episode was pretty good, not to the level of earlier classics this season, but the cold open was like woah, and all the Bell-related scenes/reveals were totally lol.

Why does Bell sound more like Sean Connery than Leonard Nimoy when speaking through Olivia?

the… laws of physics are breaking down?

You've got me there.

'Zard... Oz. Zardoz!

a… compassionate… soul… vampire.

^YES^

very good episode and walter wasn't even being funny

ratings from Friday were abysmal. I'd really like this renewed.

Will the return of Belly be the first thing people cite as a shark-jumping moment? Or Soul Magnets?

I'm not saying it has! Just those are the kinds of things nerds lose their shit over.

Also hope it's renewed. But they put it on Friday, which is sort of saying they want to kill it, right? RIP Dollhouse.

Will the return of Belly be the first thing people cite as a shark-jumping moment? Or Soul Magnets?

I'm not saying it has! Just those are the kinds of things nerds lose their shit over.

If the nerds haven't seethed from the show saying that flipping 10 heads in a row signals a breakdown in the laws of the universe, I think they'll play along with soul magnets. (Also, I have to imagine that they'd get a kick out of Anna Torv doing her bizarro Nimoy impression.)

As for this last episode: suicide lady isn't Catholic, so what non-denominational Christianity does she practice that doesn't explicitly banish suicides from Heaven?

Also: at the end of the episode, was Bellivia making a play to occupy Peter's body when he had him drink TEA?

and major lolz at Bellivia perving on Astrid.

Fox Renews "Fringe" For Fourth Season

yeah this show has almost lost me :(

If the nerds haven't seethed from the show saying that flipping 10 heads in a row signals a breakdown in the laws of the universe, I think they'll play along with soul magnets.

the coin thing really angers me. i mean the show is ridiculous and i love/d it but surely it isn't "nerdy" to expect ppl to understand THE MOST BASIC RULES OF PROBABILITY THAT ARE USEFUL IN EVERYDAY LIFE

grrr

i think this season's high was at the start when it was constantly switching between universes - was really impressive how they handled that imo. i feel like it hasn't really recovered since coming back from the break