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

So this thing has just started and I cant seem to find a thread on it. Seeing as the Lost contingent is quite large on ilx, I would have thought that there would be much discussion about this new JJ Abrams show. As for me, the first episode has left me a bit underwhelmed. Which surprises me quite a bit seeing as there was indeed a mad scientist, flesh eating viruses, a cow and people questioning other dead people.

I'm going to keep watching, but it definitely wasn't as good as any of the shows it's aping.

i think it was discussed a bit on the lost thread, but i was thinking of starting a thread, too! thanks!

it was srsly underwhelming. i am just hoping that the pilot was laying the groundwork and things will get more interesting as it moves forward.

yea a few of us did talk about it a bit on the Lost thread when the pre-air screener leaked a while back. consensus = nice visuals, decent cast but generally meh.

standalone episodes is a good idea though cause i'm getting a bit sick of heavily-serialized shows, but I don't know how they're going to keep that balance seeing that they're already introducing what seems like a fairly complicated Big Mystery Arc.

Dreadful pilot, but I suppose it might get better. Loved the intro scene, and the "OMG DID HIS FACE JUST FALL OFF WTF GROSS" moment, but it went downhill straight after that. Pacey's fun but the lead lady is dead dull, and the old scientist dude really doesn't do it for me -- some dreadful "crazy" acting there.

Also surprising how close it seemed to be to the (much better) Alias pilot, what with the boyfriend getting offed, and the lead character discovering A WORLD BEYOND HER WORLD etc.

On the plus side:
** The way Daniels says "honey" = obvious attempt awesome to placate Wire nerds, but awesome anyway
** A friend of mine used to date her FBI partner, said he was a total dick, so it was fun watching him die horribly

she is dull and i figured it's because she's australian trying to do an american accent that doesn't quite work and instead makes her sound affected. i have decided (gross generalization, i know) that australians are really bad at american accents. for a few years i thought naomi watts was a really horrible actor but i finally realized it was the accent (though i think hers has improved over the years).

yeah every time lance reddick showed up on screen i got a little squee. man, i miss the wire.

I just started watching The Wire a few weeks ago and i'm already on season 5 now. so fucking good! why didn't anyone make me watch this before?

Pacey's fun but the lead lady is dead dull, and the old scientist dude really doesn't do it for me -- some dreadful "crazy" acting there.

Weird, I thought the lady was great and Pacey was terrible, and scientist dude was fine for me. I couldn't stop thinking of him as Denethor, though.

JJ doesn't have a good track record for being the long-term showrunner, he's really ADD when it comes to storytelling.

Over/under on when Lance Reddick appears shirtless: episode 8.

I thought this was a good and entertaining program! I have to admit the main reason I watched it was bcz of the several-times-a-night ad on Coast to Coast AM. "We're having a FRINGE party!" Looks like YOU just invited the whole nation!"

Wasn't too crazy about...angry-looking Mr. Puffycheeks BUT I think he will get better. I thought it was really, really good for a PILOT. Has anyone ever seen a not-crappy pilot? (Twin Peaks fans are not allowed to say Twin Peaks pilot (man are they ever biased)). I didn't watch Futurama for years bcz I hated the first episode. That was stupid! They get all the origin story shit out of the way in a pilot. I wish shows beginned ned in media res, but it's America. What do you expect?

NB I have never seen any J.J. Abrams thing ever.

It was fun to make joeks about when the lady would turn into an ape & bust out of the tank. Also, "How do they drive down that ROAD when it has the word BOSTON floating around, blocking all the traffic?" That joke didn't even sustain the whole episode, but I had a hard time not making it & it will be a challenge in the future. I enjoy a bad running joke for about 70x longer than most humans.

yeah that was a really bad graphic design/whatever choice.

I was glad they at least took a chance.

"Where are we here in Baghdad? The building under the giant capital letter Q."

Twin Peaks pilot r0x0rz though!! And wtf Futurama pilot did too u r taking wtf pills. Sports Night had a bang-up pilot, as did Freaks & Geeks.

What did I say.

Something kinda wrong IIRC.

They do that "look at this word on this beach" thingy on Heroes! except Fringe's is in 3D.

JJ doesn't have a good track record for being the long-term showrunner, he's really ADD when it comes to storytelling.

Yep. Abrams is great for starting ideas and he's a genuinely bankable name, so anything with him involved is practically guaranteed to get people on board. he's not the showrunner on Fringe - Jeff Pinker (exec producer/writer on Lost) is.

oops that would be Jeff PinkNer.

Weird, I thought the lady was great and Pacey was terrible, and scientist dude was fine for me.

Totally agreed. Oh, J.J. Abrams, when will you stop miscasting late 20s/early 30s-ish male leads? He seems to do great with older actors, but younger ones are totally hit and miss... (see: Cloverfield, Michael Vartan)

Show is kind of weak, but I'll give it some time, I guess. The other new show I've been watching, Sons of Anarchy, seems more promising so far.

how was cloverfield miscast?

I know arguably you're not really supposed to like the actors, but I found them all pretty unbearable. Especially the ones you were "supposed" to root for in the end.

I'll give this show a couple more episodes, but it seems pretty nondescript in a Threshold sort of way.

More to the point, I liked this show better when it was on ten years ago and called The X-Files

Fun Facts:

* Leading Lady is Rupert Murdoch's niece.
* Pilot cost $10.5 million.
* Ratings it got were a 6.6/10, which is not great at all... but next week it starts to follow "House," which rates very well.

I agree that the leading lady isn't all that great. Sometimes it felt like she was completely out of it. Mad scientist is ok, I just wish he had kept his beard all the time. I liked it when he was having a good time eating chinese, watching spongebob. The love interest to be between Bishop's son and leading girl felt a bit forced. I actually liked the 3d words floating around and was all giddy when the camera went through one of the O's in Boston.

freckle faced leading lady was hot, ok?

She seems like a sweet person & I think, for TV, she's a totally decent actress.

Redhead bitch w/cyborg arm was bitchin'g, yes?

Leading lady sometimes reminded me of Cate Blanchett. She is hot, though there were a few shots of her where she looked weird. Bitch with cyborg arm was awesome. I really liked those bits, cyborg arm, see-through body...

Jibe except for your fondness for stupid 3D push-through letters (hello Alias again!!!!), we are of a mind.

Mad scientist is ok, I just wish he had kept his beard all the time.

YES!!

I liked it when he was having a good time eating chinese, watching spongebob.

OMG YES.

The love interest to be between Bishop's son and leading girl felt a bit forced.

Welcome to JJ Abrams' world!

More time needs to be spent on cyborg lady's assistant, i.e. her with the barely onscreen but nonetheless hueg rack.

Never having seen Alias, I did not know that JJ was a fan of such stuff. Actually, I cant remember anything like it in Lost (except for the opening credits). My fondness for those silly letters arises from the fact that everytime the camera went through a letter I secretly hoped for it to crash INTO them. Forced love interests are indeed a typical Abrams fare (at least they are in Lost) but not from the first episode onwards!

Redhead bitch w/cyborg arm was bitchin'g, yes?

It's the lady from The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. Am I the only person who remembers that show?

Walter Bishop definitely the best character on this show. LET'S MAKE SOME LSD! I love that he's basically playing the same deranged old dude he did in Lord of the Rings, only a FRINGE SCIENTIST instead of a STALWART STEWARD OF GONDOR.

I really didn't like the pilot when I saw it last week, but weirdly it's grown on me over the week. I'm actually sorta looking forward to it tonight. Is this usual with Abrams' stuff? It sucks during the watching, but you recollect it fondly later?

is joshua jackson playing george clooney or what

Damn, how the hell did they get away with that gory shit, the surgeries, the eyeball (UGH), on public TV? I was seriously turned off by it. The rest of the episode was okay, I guess.

Didn't seem any more graphic than any given House episode.

the eyeball was totally loltastic

This was awful. First episode wasn't great or anything, but it wasn't this bad. I don't even mind the clunky-as-fuck exposition of the first 5 minutes. The dream-sequence pregnancy thing? Yeah, I saw Aliens. The last image from the eye? I saw Wild Wild West too.

Felt like they were already out of ideas.

That played-out jaded horseshit stance where folks show off that they've watched movies and TV shows and read books and remember things from them and act like hot shit when they find these things in other movies / shows / books? Yeah, I liked it better when they didn't share.

Expected Chris Carter, got Joss Whedon.

Clearly, I really will watch Lance Riddick in anything.

Lance is class.

xxpost

I'm not one for "I've seen this done elsewhere", nor do I think calling back upon Wild Wild West is anyway anyone can consider themselves hot shit. The point is really that a writer (or writers) should do well enough for someone not to notice. The eye thing has been done many, many times before, and it is usually a pretty cheap trick when someone's written themselves into a hole/can't be bothered to come up with something better. And the Aliens gag was weak.

I think I just find the world they've set up to be jarring and inconsistent. I don't mind being derivative, certainly not of genre tropes in a genre show, but they've got to help the viewers a bit. If you want to make a campy sci-fi/horror show, then do it. If you want a scary, serious thriller, then do that. There is no sense of humour in this show as far as I can tell, unless the cow thing was meant to be funny.

Kerm OTM, but at least Whedon seemed to have a sense of humour. He would willingly acknowledge from the get-go that the Hellmouth and Willow's hacking abilities was just an easy out for the writers, who were more interested in character anyway. I was hoping for a quality X-files deal, and I'll take a campy paranoid fantasy in its stead, but I can't be bothered with some inconsistent series aiming for somewhere in the middle, especially when it's as dull as this one.

I think I'm just disappointed, really. Hopefully it will get better, but I'm worried that it feels like they ran out of ideas in the second episode. Sorry if I offended you David R.

for the record, other than the seatwarmer gag I'm really really failing to see the whedon in this.

Didn't seem any more graphic than any given House episode.

Still dig Blair Brown, Lance Reddick and John Noble, but the other actors still have a ways to go. The pilot already lowered my expectations about the monster-of-the-week plots, I agree with the mediocrity as Gukbe describes.

Definitely neither Chris Carter nor Joss Whedon. The former had really sharp character work every episode and the latter had a sense of humor. I think what really disappoints me the most is the female protagonist. I can't even remember her name she's so unmemorable. I don't know if she's just getting awful writing from the writers, or she's just a poor actress.

they really fucked themselves by starting this show off admitting there's a "pattern" to all of these things. oh, and the old guy just happened to work on anything involved in the pattern. magic computer can tell you EXACTLY where magic photo from dead girl's eye was taken. there weren't enough machinas in this episode for deuseses to be ex-ing from.

HOWEVER, i am still giving it a shot. but along with house tonight, this was kinda like fox's "ugh, come on, no way" tuesday.

I actually liked House tonight. But I don't think I've ever seen a House ep that I didn't enjoy.

The point is really that a writer (or writers) should do well enough for someone not to notice. The eye thing has been done many, many times before, and it is usually a pretty cheap trick when someone's written themselves into a hole/can't be bothered to come up with something better. And the Aliens gag was weak.

As you might've gathered, it didn't really chafe me quite as much, tho I can't recall the eye thing being done before, and you can't really do a pregnancy "gag" without inadvertently referencing "Aliens". But to each their own -- I've got plenty of reservations about this thing (including my fear that it's going to resort to having a WACKY SCIENCE GIMMICK for every episode) (oooh do cold fusion next!), but I'm not not enjoying it. One request, tho (since the show makers are of course reading this): more Kirk Acevedo.

BTW, Gubke, sorry for getting pissy w/ my earlier comment. (I blame the internet.)

They Macgyver defibrillator bit was just ridiculous.

Fauxlivia's bangs 4 eva

oh wow, didn't realize that my #1 celeb crush (Ari Graynor) was Olivia's sister until the Evil Spam Popup episode.

I'm having my own oh wow btw - THIS guy

http://i60.tinypic.com/2ywu98n.jpg

is NOT the same as this guy (from Taken, the Spielberg mini series)

http://i61.tinypic.com/bguxab.jpg

second guy is the 4400 guy right?

and first guy is Human Target?

2 x yes

Did they ever have any accidents with those giant letters? Would think you might hear about them falling on someone in a bizarre show related accident.

Just watched things through from series 3, which means I saw half of that season and the next two for the first time.
Season 5 does look a bit tacked on and might have been better as being something else. It's not as execrable as I've seen it made out, not quite but I don't think it's where i'd want to leave the series.

Gone back to watching the first 2 seasons since I haven't seen them since around 2008, or whenever I managed to get hold of them. & certainly never saw them on a full sized tv since I was using a portable for a long period.
Seeing weird echoes after seeing the later stuff first. Wondering if they had thought about the later usage of ideas as part of the development of earlier ones or if they were takes on things that came to them later.

Fringe almost refreshingly seemed like a show where they had not really thought things out

Except that the final season fell a bit into the Lost trap of probably being some idea JJ Abrams came up with when they were writing the show bible, and the show runners felt they had to stick to it or face the "OMG are they just making this up as they go along!" fan reaction.

I just watched an extra thing presumably from the dvd for season 5 where they talked about trying to make sure there was some level of feasible science behind ideas in the show.

Also saw another where they were talking about maybe doing a film in a couple of years, which I don't think I've heard anything about.

& can think about at least one great glitch in the thinking at the end of the series that would be very central to the whole story but better not go into that if other people haven't got that far yet. Probably find out it's already been talked about at the time of the tv showing though.

you should talk about it--just say "Spoiler Alert for Show that Ended Years Ago" at the beginning

OK, spoiler alert.

Whence Peter if they've just erased the situation that allowed Peter to be saved from drowning. & therefore there was never a September?
Or is it that with no September there was no September accidentally preventing Walternate from saving his son, in which case Walter presumably wouldn't have taken him over to the main Earth in the first place. September was about the first Observer to arrive, not sure exactly what happened in 1987. & I didn't notice anything saving the Earth 1 Peter
subsequently the point they looped back to at the end of the series was not one they could have got to was it?

that's an interesting question. I think itt we had given up on trying to follow the time logic as it seemed the show had its own idea of causation and whether events in the past caused by people traveling back from the future would still have happened if those future people never traveled back...

Aspirin <3

https://scontent-kul1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/t31.0-8/s960x960/11754389_10153172703773668_933776780444871422_o.png

I just found out that when Olivia's lover is a see through catatonic in the early episodes it's actually the genuine actor. Would've thought they 'd just use a dummy. Surprised by that

I've been copying Fringe episodes to my media center computer and was skimming through them to make sure I had them labeled correctly when I had to pause, because wait, is that a future princess of England shooting a guy in the chest?!

I'd completely forgotten she has a brief appearance in this series

LSD MILF, yes?

'do you still like bacon?'

<music swells>

'i love bacon'

On recommendation of hearing this show is really out there and good I started watching the pilot. OK so I kind of like it, but also, it is, for lack of a better word, SO NETWORK -- like, just lots of people looking gravely at other people and saying "I want them out of here -- NOW" and "There isn't much time" and "Will it work?" "It has to" and shots of a dude in a mental hospital facing away from the camera and dramatically turning to face the viewer and etc. etc. Like fundamentally the show is not that weird and I want to be weird. Is it all like that and I just have to accept it? Or is there a place in the run I can pick it up where it gets weird and "how was this actually on TV?" That's what I want.

Walter at his best has some good out there-ness (tamped down after the first season and a half, though) but overall it's less out there than the X-Files at their best.

The show kind of infamously takes most of the first season before it breaks from the sub X Files stuff. But when it gets good, it is thrilling and, and at its best, heartbreakingly beautiful.

the longer it goes the less networky it becomes

like even Hannibal started as monster of the week, Bones-ian team of weirdos in the lab

i think it’s just what shows had to do to get dumb studio execs to give them a deal

I really loved this, bought the bluray box set, but still never managed to finish the last season (didn't care anymore), so I don't know how it all ends. I'm going to soldier on with the whole thing, one day. maybe.

haha, I even said it here in this thread 8 years ago - 15 minutes into the first episode of the last season I stopped watching.

So do I need to go through the whole first season to get it or can I start with S2E1 or at some other point?

suck it up & do the work! imo

jk do what u want but its not like s1 is bad. there are far worse things than formulaic ffs

S1 is fun, definitely wouldn’t skip.

the s1 finale was the first big WTF moment - season is definitely worth watching just to get there

I could tell we had lingering love for Fringe when My wife and I were watching The Last of Us and when Anna Torv showed up we both yelled “Bolivia!”

buuut if you wanna cheat cannonically you do so thusly:

hazy cosmic jedi (abanana)
Posted: July 15, 2010 at 7:04:22 AM
watch these
Season 1: 1 (pilot), 4, 5, 7, end of ep 8, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20
season 2: 1, 4, maybe 7, 8, 10, maybe 14, end of 15, 16 (Peter), 17, 18, 22, 23

The pilot is considerably more dramatic than even episode 2; I think it lightens in tone quite a bit, for the better, so don't give up yet. One thing I really liked is that mythology builds on little moments scattered through S1, and not always the ones you expect, so I don't think S1 should be skipped, although it is a bit monster-of-the-week

I miss Walter and Astrid together, there were such sweeties

IIRC the third season is fantastic, and then the fourth season goes back-to-basics in a somewhat unsatisfying way. Then the fifth season, the Days of Future Past season, is pretty good again.

That Peter Weller episode though :(

We started rewatching S1 and ended up bingeing almost the whole season today

Can report that it is all still v watchable, love this show so much

Also lots of good cameos: Betty Gilpin! Ebon Moss-Bacharach! Jared Harris! etc

Finally made it to S2e10 “Jacksonville” aka LETS FUCKING GOOO

truly this show still holds up so well, i fucking love it <3

But people living andcwaljingbunder suspended place names... were there ever accidents, like.

Walking under

So we have been bingeing this like crazy and are now about 5 episodes into Season 5

watching it back to back definitely made everything make a little more sense to me this time around, I felt way less confused by the timey-wimey shenanigans of Season 4 for sure.

some stray thoughts
- the Observers kind of suck? (pre S5 Nazification, I mean). Like they're just really not good at their jobs and just absolutely fuck up entire timelines every time they try to 'fix' something.
- that being said, Michael Cerveris as September is the ONLY convincing Observer, in terms of performance. Such a soulful delivery and he has such a lovely tone to his voice. All the other actors act like dead-eyed robots.
- big Fathers/Sons thematic energy throughout this show, like when you see it all lined up the whole show is really about Walter's love for Peter
- Lincoln Lee is still lovely
- Olivia/fauxLivia/third-timeline Olivia - how I sum this up to an extent: Peter would bone her in any timeline, basically LOL

also, most importantly

While i don’t mind the story of S5 & its quite exciting in its way — it does a thing I don’t like — they AGAIN re-maternalize Olivia, like they did in S1 “oh she’s too much of a cold fish lets give her a kid etc”

Olivia becomes much more of a overwhelmed-by-feels emo sidekick in S5 in this very boys-own-dystopian-verse which is kind of a bummer

While i don’t mind the story of S5 & its quite exciting in its way — it does a thing I don’t like — they AGAIN re-maternalize Olivia, like they did in S1 “oh she’s too much of a cold fish lets give her a kid etc”

This was one of my biggest disappoints with the last season; the show basically started off as the Olivia show, and then she gets turned into Lyra in the second and third HDM books.

yeah it’s a bit disappointing

esp w the September backstory reveal it’s like, ok huh it’s just dudes & dads all the way down then ok good

Yeah Peter even gets the last shot of the show iirc. Pacey gets a proper arc with closure, Olivia gets multiple soft reboots instead.

i wanted them to do more w Olivia & the Jones/Jared Harris character! their scenes in those early seasons were so electric

also that observer kid Michael?
his facial expression looked exactly like Eminem, could not unsee it

http://scifiempire.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Michael-played-by-Roman-Longworth-Fringe-Liberty.png

https://yve.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/18-lucruri-interesante-despre-Eminem.jpg

my big takeaway:

these dads just need to grieve for their dead children & stop trying to time travel everytime a kid dies.

also: is it just me or was there some kernel of possibility that David Robert Jones was Olivia’s real father? like a story thread that they may have hinted but never picked up. i was v fixated on the way he said “that’s my girl” after she completed the lightbulb test originally

maybe it’s just me

anyway we finished the series

Fringe aka Dads: A Love Story is a very good series & 100% holds up

the worst part of the whole series was Peter turning himself into an Observer but even that wasn’t terrible bc the rest of the story was good. oh and Joshua Jackson’s cry-acting is a bit too much, still bringing the old Dawson’s heat lol

Give John Noble all his flowers, what a blessing he is to the series. Denethor The GOAT.

https://media.tenor.com/UtjjTDOuP1YAAAAC/dawson%27s-creek-basketball.gif

ahaha stone cold classic
RIGHT IN THE FACE

The entire series is on sale in the Apple TV store for $30. Heck of a deal if you don't mind all-digital

Just started back in with this on Max, having stopped midway through season 2. The season 2 episode with Peter Weller as a time traveler, "White Tulip," is fucking incredible. Noble and Weller have a scene together that might be the best thing I've seen, TV or movie, all year.

i love that episode so much, still hits as beautifully as it did the first time