“The Same Old Story”
September 16th, 2008
“Would you just talk like a person?”
Peter Bishop asks his father this question at the halfway point of Fringe’s second episode, and I couldn’t agree more: except that I’d apply this to Peter, and Olivia and just about every other character on the show. Because at this point, it seems like nothing that happens in Fringe is something that would happen to people, and that nothing they say seems to make any sense to anyone but the crazy person who created it all, in theory, seventeen years previous.
In the show’s pilot, this felt like an introduction into a new world, a world where things would be different and where mysteries would take on new contexts. However, what “The Same Old Story” offers is…the same old serial killer story, just with some fairly gimmicky applications of the fringe science the show is hinging its success on. Now, you could say that this is nothing new: The X-Files was essentially the same process, and Alias was your normal spy-type show but with Rambaldi’s artifacts as the reason behind the missions.
But Fringe buys into its own hype: too often the music bombasts to the point of self-indulgence, the characters talk about their own intelligence in a way that feels entirely unnatural, and the episode’s attempt at creating an emotional connection between Olivia and this week’s case is ultimately undermined by our lack of time spent with these characters in such a context.
More importantly, though, there was absolutely nothing fun about Fringe – the charm of the characters were either forced or so overpowered by the impending dread that the show never had a chance to breathe. The result is an episode that felt overlong, overtired, and an example of a show that still has me wondering just how this will turn into a series…or, even if the parts are present, wondering whether Orci and Kurtzman have the smarts to put it all together.
Cultural Learnings 