It was the first show that I can remember that was able to survive major shifts in the way the story was told.
🎶bong sounds🎶 Ah, yes I remember Fringe. The tale of the the lost little boy and the mad scientist who broke 2 universes in his grief. It may be time for a rewatch, let's make LSD!
I love Fringe and grateful that we got so many seasons after endless cancellation worries at the time.
Fringe suffers from the JJ Abrams problem of "create all this sci-fi lore to hook you, then hope the audience forgets the rules to tell a relationship story." That's a really hard sell when you do stuff like encode glyphs in the commercial break bumpers, it kind if points to them expecting the audience to be sitting there with a pad and paper taking notes.
For example...you find people with mystery little discs in their hands. Why do we not scan everyone connected to the pattern with those? Ok, so then Loeb. We find out he's secretly with ZFT, oh no! Let's arrest him, then ask him questions. Wait he won't answer? End of the wiki entry, he's not important anymore. Hold on, in Season 1 episode 1, don't you have mind-connecting tech that can literally interrogate someone to give information even after death? Maybe we could, I dunno, pull him out of jail and super-question him? Or are we just gonna forget that detail?
I dunno, many times in that show I felt like it had so much potential but just kind of forgot a lot of its own lore to keep looping the story back to the family/relationship stuff. JJ does this with SO much that he makes...Alias when the Rambaldi device is made and the red orb is floating over Russia...then the sisters connect, and we just kind of move on from the world-ending uberweapon. Or Lost. Or Trek, how he made a world where if you have a whole bunch of Khan's on ice making blood, you kind of cure death, but then that's never referenced again.
I never made it past season 1.
Every episode was:
(Weird creepy thing happens)
"Walter! Could this be related to your research??!?"
"I HAVE TO GET BACK TO MY LAB!"
"Oh Walter! You so crazy!"
(Weird creepy thing totally related to Walter's reaearch).
"OMG! Walter was right all along!"
Alien eating mustard.
I was a big fan back then, however, I never got into the last season. They basically swapped out everyone I liked except Walter, who's character was changed too much for my liking, and I quit almost immediatly. Is there anything worthwhile in there? Now that I'm thinking about the show, I might go for a rewatch soon.
Dude, fellow Fringe nut right here. Season's 4 not-reboot is when I started to... not care that much. I still love the show, but it went a little too much into its own lore, and got convoluted. Yet season 5 was not that bad, since they realized they dodged the cancellation bullet one last time, the show-runners got to work and tied everything with a nice bow. No loose ends, and satisfying ending for almost all characters. Still unconvinced about the whole "Watchers as the Bad Guys" mumbo jumbo, but in the end the show focused on the main characters and, in my opinion, it delivered.
Let's talk about some old stuff.
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