Fringe: Season 3

The fate of two universes hang in the balance. The alternate Walter Bishop, Secretary for Defence, wants to destroy the prime universe to ensure the continued survival of his own. To this end he has imprisoned Olivia Dunham and set her alternate counterpart to infiltrate her team and help in this cause. Trapped in the parallel universe, Olivia needs to escape back to her own world.

The third season of Fringe picks up shortly after the previous season's finale and establishes a new format. For the first few episodes of the season it alternates between the parallel universe and the prime one, with the opening title sequence changing colour depending on which is the focus of each episode. This is a smart move, establishing the parallel universe and its characters in more depth. The writers, directors and actors work extremely hard to ensure the alternate world is convincing, and by setting entire episodes there (even a stand-alone mystery episode) they manage to pull it off. The devil is in the details and these details - the still-standing twin towers, people keeping badgers as pets, sheep being extinct, everyone using bluetooth headsets, the Statue of Liberty still having its bronze covering - are finely-judged.

The show does go through a mid-season patch when, with the opening situation rectified, it falls back on its more traditional mystery-of-the-week storylines. However, the show remains inventive and entertaining even when dealing with what might have easily descended into filler. An episode set in the parallel universe dealing with people who are consumed by parasites is Fringe at its most queasily effective; an episode featuring Walter bonding with an aged rock star played by Christopher Lloyd is both geek-pleasing and superbly-acted (John Noble, of course, is on top form throughout the season). Best of all in this set of episodes may be an instalment set in an apartment block gripped by strange events which appears to be a stand-alone case but eventually dovetails rather nicely into the main, ongoing storyline.

Later episodes in the season take an unexpected turn for the predictable: a storyline where 'our' Olivia is possessed by another character strains even Fringe's elastic notions of credulity (despite Anna Torv's superb performance), whilst a regular character getting pregnant and thus causing drama may tax the patience of many viewers. However, there are upsides even to these storylines: the possession storyline leads to an episode that unfolds mostly in animation and is the show's craziest and most inventive hour to date, whilst the pregnancy storyline turns out to not quite be as critical as it initially appears. The concluding three-episode arc resolves the season-spanning story arc quite effectively, as well as negating a potentially cheesy background element and ending things on a startling cliffhanger that leaves the show able to make a fresh start in the fourth season.

The third season of Fringe (****½) strains credulity a bit more than the second season and by the end has taken so many twists and turns you may regret not taking notes. However, the cast is as excellent as ever (Anna Torv stepping up to the plate with multiple versions of Olivia is particularly noteworthy), the plotting is assured and the show's mix of tragedy, action and light comedy is as satisfying as ever. The season is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Fringe: Season 2

More than twenty years ago, Walter Bishop set in motion a series of cataclysmic events by opening a doorway between this world and somewhere else. Those events have manifested as the Pattern, evidence of reality itself becoming malleable and where the rules of science have become less rigid. As Fringe Division continues its attempts to discover the secrets of the Pattern, the consequences of Walter's decision make themselves felt, with possible dire ramification

Fringe's second season picks up moments after the ending of the first season, with Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) transported to another world. In an interesting dramatic choice, the writers do not immediately focus on Olivia's adventures on the other side, instead concentrating on the impact of her absence and unexpected reappearance on the more familiar characters. It's not until several episodes into the season that we get a flashback to the events of the Season 1 finale and learn more about what's going on. In the meantime, with the show wearing it's X-Files inspiration more blatantly than ever (for the first few episodes at least), our team have to face off against a group of shapeshifters from the other side.

The second season of Fringe still unloads a few solid stand-alone stories to the audience (most notably a quarantine drama set in an office block ravaged by an unknown disease), but the focus is much more closely on the serialised elements relating to 'the other side', Walter and Peter's backstory, the experiments run on Olivia when she was a child and how much the megacorporation Massive Dynamic know about what's happening. We get a new recurring bad guy in the form of Thomas Jerome Newton (an amiably villainous performance by Sebastian Roche), whose opposition to the Fringe Division's efforts creates much of the tension for the season.

As with the first season, the cast continues to deliver excellent performances, particularly Kirk Acevedo as FBI Agent Charlie Francis, who is given a meatier role in the opening and closing episodes of the season. The stand-out, of course, remains John Noble as Walter Bishop. His performance in the first season was already remarkable, but over the course of the second season it apotheosises onto the 'Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: The Next Generation' level of sheer dominance. Whether it's playing his traditional befuddled scientist role, lapsing into trauma at the memory of a two-decade old tragedy or temporarily regaining his old memories and becoming cold, arrogant and condescending, Noble plays his part to perfection, winning the audience's sympathy or, for his more morally dubious acts, at least their understanding.

The season reaches a huge emotional and acting peak in Peter, the fifteenth episode of the season and a major 'gamechanger' of an episode. Told mostly in flashback (complete with a retro, 1980s style music and title sequence), it not only explains much of the series's backplot, but it also gives us a look at the man Walter used to be and establishes the motivations of several major characters in the show. This kicks off a run of high quality episodes which mess around with the established formula, including one episode that is a bizarre noir thriller (the result of Walter - on various substances - trying to tell a children's story) and another that is a solo adventure for Peter out in the backwoods of Washington State (and may be a homage to Twin Peaks). The season concludes with a two-part finale which is the most epic thing the show's ever done, featuring multiple castmembers in different roles, impressive visual-effects shots and the successful depiction of portraying a world that is familiar but different. The cliffhanger ending is a bit of a doozy as well.

The season does have a bit of a stinker in Unearthed, easily the weakest episode of the show to date. It was produced as part of Season 1 and held back to the second, putting it out of continuity and also rather out of keeping with the rest of the show: outright ghostly possession seems a stretch too far for the show, which whilst flirting with the paranormal usually manages to provide at least an attempt at a pseudoscientific explanation for events. Luckily, the DVD and Blu-Ray release hides the episode in the 'special features' section, pleasing completists whilst also ensuring it isn't accidentally stumbled over whilst watching the main body of the season.

Overall, the second season of Fringe (*****) takes the excellent cast and premise of the first season and boots it onto another level, with exceptional acting (especially from John 'Criminally Emmyless' Noble) and some clever, coherent storytelling. The season is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Fringe: Season 1

A commercial airliner arrives at its destination with every passenger and crewmember on board dead. The FBI investigate. Clues suggest that the only person who can help with the investigation is a brilliant but disturbed scientist named Walter Bishop. Bishop has been locked up in a mental institution for seventeen years and the only person who can sign for his release is his son, Peter, a shady businessmen. FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and the Bishops successfully discover the answer to the mystery, encouraging the FBI to create a special unit dedicated to these 'fringe science' cases, which have exploded in frequency in the last few years. The cases are varied and individual, but together form 'the Pattern', a statistical trend that suggests a major event is coming.

It's easy to dismiss Fringe because of misconceptions. A new TV show from the creator of Lost, J.J. Abrams? And a premise that seems to owe rather a lot to The X-Files? The number of people who passed the show by, fearing (fairly or not) muddled mythologies and an inferior homage to an older show, must have been significant.

However, such reactions would also be unfair. Fringe distanced itself almost immediately from Lost by having a much smaller cast of characters, meaning a much tighter focus on the stories and the gradually-evolving backstory. Abrams also took a back seat after the pilot, letting other writers and producers come on board to direct the day-to-day running of the show. A key difference is that whilst Lost's mythology only got some direction in its third season, when an end date for the show was set, Fringe's mythology and story arcs were mapped out in advance from early in the first, giving the show a much stronger sense of direction.

The season kicks off with the pilot, in which the regular cast and premise is established. Anna Torv immediately impresses as Olivia Dunham, a no-nonsense FBI agent (though prone to unexpected bouts of deadpan humour) who has a lot of pressure riding on her shoulders. Joshua Jackson takes a little longer to convince as a businessman with shady contacts, but eventually turns in a very human and funny performance. The main weapon in the show's arsenal is the spectacular John Noble - previously best-known as Denethor on the Lord of the Rings movies - who plays Walter Bishop to perfection. Character traits and tics that would have been hokey or hammy in another actor's hands become utterly convincing in Noble's, who is able to play his character's memory problems and occasional emotional outbursts for either comedy or pathos as the script demands (occasionally both simultaneously). It's frankly worth watching the show just for Noble's performance. Also providing able support is The Wire's Lance Reddick as Dunham and company's boss, Philip Broyles.

The show's premise - that the FBI would employ a certified lunatic, an occasional criminal and a cow called Gene to investigate fringe science cases from a basement in Harvard University - takes a bit of swallowing. The show does its best in the pilot to try to make the premise a bit more palatable, but it's surprisingly late in the episode before 'the Pattern' and the great urgency to find out what the hell's going on (making it a bit easier to accept the desperate lengths the FBI are going to) is more firmly established.

That out of the way, the show quickly establishes a format: the mystery-of-the-week is laid out in the pre-credits sequence and our heroes rapidly show up to investigate, usually involving labwork from Walter and good old FBI fieldwork from Olivia. The procedural aspect of the show was apparently key to getting it on the air - the producers deliberately used it to entice Fox on board - but it's not too many episodes before it's being downplayed in favour of the crazy lab antics. These episodes also hit that early X-Files sweet spot of having (mostly) satisfying, self-contained stories with more serialised elements being laid down in the background.

It's not too long before Fringe's serialisation and mythology comes to the fore later in the season. A recurring enemy is established early on, followed by another, more dangerous one later on. Walter's memory loss, initially established for comedic purposes, later becomes far more important as Walter begins to discover the ramifications of experiments he conducted twenty years earlier. A key episode reveals that Olivia herself may be part of 'the Pattern' and the discovery of a manifesto belonging to a terrorist organisation spurs events in the series finale. Watching over events is a strange bald man in a suit and hat, who appears (if only fleetingly, or in the extreme background of some scenes) in every single episode and is more strongly featured in two of them. An off-the-cuff reference to quantum theory in one episode sets up a major storyline that emerges in the finale and provides the season with its final and most famous cliffhanger image.

This segueing from the stand-alone elements to the more-heavily serialised storylines is well-handled, though some may lament the decreasing frequency of the stand-alone mysteries in the late season. At its best Fringe is a surprisingly gory homage to The Twilight Zone, but at its worst can be trite and predictable (though allegedly the worst episode of the season was actually cut, showing pleasingly surprising creative integrity). Fortunately it's worst is very rarely encountered. Slightly more problematic - though perhaps unavoidable in these kind of shows - is the number of times that major reversals and deaths could have been avoided if the characters just stopped and talked to one another properly for a few minutes. Whilst far less of a problem than on Lost, it still niggles when Walter says something cryptically vital, Peter notices but then gets interrupted by Olivia and doesn't bother to raise the question again at the end of the scene.

Overall, the problems are few and outweighed by the positives. Season 1 of Fringe (****½) starts off as a finely entertaining slice of SF hokum before being carried by excellent performances and a reasonably compelling central storyline into a finale that leaves one eager to move immediately onto the second season. The season is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).