Broken Frontier

Upcoming Scenarios You Might Soon See on J.J. Abrams’ Fringe:

A tight faced man pushing a shopping cart filled with Ho-Hos down the produce aisle in a Piggly-Wiggly in rural Atlanta takes a Thermos of coffee out of his man-purse, unscrews the lid a quarter turn, places it atop the flattened end of a watermelon and reverses course toward the exit doors. An unmarked black sedan whisks him and the Ho-Hos away. There’s a huge explosion of light from within the store; six minutes later everyone inside the store is found crammed within the last remaining phone booth in South Boston. Clues to the mystery are found in a Bangladeshi toddler’s finger paintings rendered in strained carrots on his dinner tray.

Walter recognizes that painting with food was a project he once fiddled with and abandoned in the late 70s. The clues lead Olivia and Peter deep into a techo-consipiracy that seems to involve Massive Dynamic. The episode is yet another example of The Pattern.

A tight faced man places a quarter into an incredibly weathered Batmobile kiddie ride outside an abandoned Dairy Queen near Burlingame, California. Put into motion, a delicate set of mechanisms hidden for years inside the base of the ride unleashes synchronous energies that awaken autistic sleeper agents throughout the Western world, overwhelming international police forces and threatening to erode the underpinnings of democracy around the globe.

Walter, who vehemently denies he was ever a sleeper agent, but acknowledges he once slept through the night before massive drug use screwed up his inner clock, discovers that he can channel the last sensation of a victims taste buds directly into his own cuticles. While this doesn’t help solve the mystery, it’s really fun to watch. A cuticle fragment leads Olivia and Peter deep into a techo-consipiracy that seems to involve Massive Dynamic. The episode is yet another example of The Pattern.

A tight faced man dressed in a pink ninja suit breaks into a …

Hey … you get the picture.

Don’t get me wrong, I like watching Fringe for all the right reasons: fun characters doing fun things, quick dialogue, a bit of wit, good reveals about strange happenings, some clever plot hooks, and a few (sometimes) unexpected twists.

For instance, in “The Ghost Network,” a bus load of passengers is frozen solid within a solid block of silicon compound. Clues from the crime scene lead the good guys to decipher what the criminals were looking to recover from one of the passengers on the bus, and why they’ve awakened an old communication technology that combines wireless with wetware.

In this case, the most fun comes from the rehabilitation of Roy McComb, a man who sees visions of crime scenes. While I initially thought this was the specter of ESP rearing its ugly little head yet again (the most recent being the first season of Heroes) the show’s handlers managed to tie Roy’s visions into one of Walter’s old lines of research. While this was clever, it’s really going to get tired if ever single little line of technology somehow ties through Walter and William Bell, the founder of the incredible edifice known as Massive Dynamic and one of the richest men on the planet. Discovering (and tuning) the workings of the Ghost Network by tying Roy into one of Walter’s old scientific doohickeys was both visual and visceral. And it moved the plot forward in a way that was much more enjoyable than last week’s over the top cloning of a Tony Scott film.

It’s too premature to know whether the insular little world of Fringe is going to prove too insular for any real growth, (growth that’s believable, that is). The show is just getting started, after all. But if the repetitive beats of each week’s plot begin to get a stranglehold on originality, that won’t be a good sign.

Standing outside the place of the show’s initial bus attack, Peter says, “Whoever did this wanted attention.”

Yeah.

If you’re the creative luminaries behind Fringe, what you don’t want is the formulaic nature of your shows to draw unwanted attention.

See you next week. Hopefully the episode won’t begin with a tight faced man doing something …