FRINGE -- WARNING

So you may have seen the kooky ads for JJ Abrams new TV show, FRINGE, which debuts in the fall. They're pimping it hard, so I'd be more surprised if you hadn't seen anything for it, despite the chunk of time between now and its premiere. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Hey! I like JJ Abrams TV shows! And this one looks like his take on the X-Files! How can it not rock!?"

It can not rock in many, many ways.

Written by Transformers scribes Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, along with JJ Abrams, I had the great fortune to watch the Fringe Pilot a few weeks ago, and I've been putting off writing about it because... well, because it was a huge disappointment. 

The gist of the show is this (from IMDb): A television drama centered around a female FBI agent who is forced to work with an institutionalized scientist in order to rationalize a brewing storm of unexplained phenomena.

Which isn't necessarily the most true explanation, but it hits pretty close to home.  Now, it sounds like a great concept. It's got a great exec, JJ Abrams, and it has a totally hot cast, in Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv. But where it fails is an arena that might seem familiar to you Disappear Here readers... it fails... in the writing.

I would like to preface all of my Fringe comments with this: I only saw the Pilot. And while I was horribly, terribly, utterly disappointed in it, it is JUST the Pilot. The TV development process can (and often does) enact incredible changes on a show between Pilot and Series. So while the Pilot blows... there is a good chance that the series itself could pick up and totally rock. As such, I will watch the first non-pilot episode when it shows up on TV. But not the Pilot. Ew. I've suffered enough.

We start on an airplane in the middle of a storm where some extreme turbulence upsets the passengers, one so much that he injects himself with something, which then proceeds to gelatinize his flesh, and soon enough, the flesh of everyone else on the plane.  And in a totally sweet opening, we see a plane-full of passengers melt. Great.

Olivia (Torv) and John (Mark Valley) are both FBI agents, and totally shacking up together, against the rules, and are called in to Logan Airport where the aforementioned plane, which had some new doohickey that lets the it land itself on autopilot, sits. They all go inside, discover the melted people, and proceed to immolate the aircraft. But why did these people melt? Ah, of course, the mystery. So Olivia and John, again hiding their romance from their superiors (including Lance Reddick, who you Abrams fans might recognize as Abaddon from LOST), go off to do some investigating. They seem to find the culprit... until a booby-trap goes off, covering John in the skin-melting shit, and, you know, making Olivia upset. 

So doctors put John in suspended-animation, so he doesn't melt, and Olivia must go on a quest to save her lover's life.

Which is cool. Except nothing happens. For the whole show. With such a great opening, and an explosion in the beginning, the possibilities for where to take the show are endless. But it turns out that a lot of where the show goes is laboratories, where lots of talking happens. And visits to other characters minds. And Iraq. Also, there's twins. And blah blah blah.

The coolest moment of the show is when Olivia visits the headquarters of Dr. Bishop's (the crazy doctor from the summary) former partner, who has gone off in the years Bishop was in a mental institute (don't ask) and formed a ginormous company, Massive Dynamics.  Olivia is inquiring into what exactly is up, and is told of The Pattern -- a series of paranormal (or generally not-normal) events which are being investigated by the government, and which the cyborg-armed Ms. Sharp (Blair Brown) tells Olivia that -- whoops -- maybe that's just a bit above her pay-grade. The sense of this larger mystery... of things much much more interesting than flesh-melting chemicals... is what could keep the show hop-a-loppin' along. The X-Files-ish nature of these things, but done as only JJ Abrams can. That's the show I'm waiting to see.

I'm not going to lie: This pilot bored the shit out of me. And not just me either -- RoboRoommate v. 1 watched it with me and was also sufficiently comatose'd. Other associates who have seen the Pilot have expressed similar feelings towards it. Which might explain why Fox is pimping it so hard -- when your show ain't the cat's pajamas, you got to make it all purty-like for the audience.

I think the cast is great, even the crazy doctor, played by John Noble, whose mumbles you can't understand half the time, and the set-up is awesome. But if the rest of the episodes are like this -- an awesome inciting event followed by lots of... talking... and being weird... and not much else -- I don't know how long it can last for.

But don't let this stop you from watching the Pilot when it airs. Just stick-around for the next episode, like I am, and maybe we can figure out whether or not JJ Abrams just had a bad pilot... or just a bad show.

-RoboNixon