The New Season: Fringe
The New Season:
Fringe
So here begins my update of the new season after taking a month off from my blog. This was, for of course, a lot of reasons that I just won’t get into now. However, I begin this new season appropriately with reviewing an old favorite of mine – Fringe.
I don’t think I need to say that this was one of my favorite shows of the past two seasons. Smart dialogue with amazing character and solid acting provide the backdrop for some great sf horror plots. And of course, a handful of bad ones as well. The end of last season left us with Olivia trapped in the other dimension with Alter-Olivia sent to spy on the original one. This sets me up to be very worried about this season.
Why? Because I personally hate stories about mistaken identity, because frankly, they’re unbelievable. And in a show about alternate dimensions and swarms of mechanical butterflies that can cut people up, having character plot lines that are believable are very important; it grounds the show in reality. So this season with Peter pursuing a relationship with Peter, I find it very hard to believe that Peter could not notice that Alter-Olivia is not HIS Olivia….especially since he’s dealing with alternate dimensions anyway.
The first episode of this season starts with Olivia in the alternate dimension with Olivia being kept, against her will, in a mental institution being conditioned to remember Alternate Olivia. To become Alternate Olivia. She breaks out because Olivia is awesome and so begins her journey through Alternate NYC in an attempt to get home while being pursued by that world’s Fringe division.
There are two things that stand out here: I really like the alternate Fringe division, because they’re not bad guys. It creates a great moral quandary where you’re rooting against them but they’re really, in this world, the good guys that are being manipulated.
By the end of the episode Olivia is entrenched in that world’s fringe division, and we switch to the first world with Peter, Walter, and yes, the other Olivia.
This is where the problems come in. Anna Torv is a good enough actor to portray the two different characters with enough differences that they’re distinct and yet similar. Yet its those distinctions that make them obvious to the viewer (and not just because we know it’s there). Put it this way: I’ve known twins – I’ve taught twins – and while you can’t always tell the difference when just looking at them, you can tell the difference just by hearing them speak.
The problem of course isn’t that it’s happening, but how long it promises to happen. And given how the first, and to some extent the second, episode went, this promises to go on for quite some time, alternating between the two worlds.
In a show about super intelligent people trained to watch for patterns, that’s somewhat hard to take.
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