Follow Up – Fringe
Fringe – FOX – 3 Seasons – USA / GO! – 9:30pm Wednesday – AUS
The third season of Fringe kicks off in Australia tomorrow night on GO! and season three finds us deep into heavy mythology territory as we follow the real Olivia in the alternative earth, and the fake Olivia in the real earth. Just as the show deals with split realities, and more than one of everything, Fringe itself seems to exist in two separate realities as well. There are two Fringes – one side of Fringe is one of the best shows on television, and certainly the best sci-fi show on television. The other Fringe is a weak X-Files knock-off that follows a freak-of-the-week formula in favour of the far richer and more interesting on-going story.
Now there’s nothing wrong with Fringe the X-Files knock-off, and there are a good handful of stand-alone episodes that are great in their own right. The problem is that the show can occasionally get bogged down in the same formula week after week. This usually happens around the middle of the season, Season 2 was hampered by a run of six or seven mediocre episodes that virtually ignored the overreaching story in favour of a freaky procedural format. There are only so many times you can watch a regular person start coughing, stumble around, fall over (either outside or in an office building) only to have some other person run to check on them and as they turn them over they find that the victims face has either melted, blistered over, crumbled to dust, turned their eyes blood red, turned their hair white, etc, etc.
Fringe is a slick show but CSI: With Monsters isn’t compelling enough to warrant long term investment. Thankfully by the final six episodes of Season 2 the writers of Fringe knew this as well and kicked the game into overdrive. If the start of the third season is any indication this is the direction we’re headed in now. Worlds will collide, Olivia Dunhams will face each other, red opening credits will smash with blue opening credits, and it’s going to be awesome. Unfortunately what’s good for the creators and good for long-term fans of the show is not good for the network and that’s where Fringe runs into trouble.
FOX wants Fringe to be a massive hit. It was their big launch title of three years ago. FOX would love it if viewers were looking for a complicated serialized sci-fi mystery series, but as the series has progressed and it’s become harder and harder for new viewers to switch on and pick up what’s actually going on the ratings have started to slide. FOX wants the best of both worlds, it wants hard-core fans and it wants the show to reset at the end of every episode so that somebody with no knowledge of Walternate or a red-headed Olivia can pop in whenever they see a cool looking monster in the ads.
The third season isn’t really going to remedy those fears for FOX as switching between two universes makes everything infinitively more difficult to keep track of for casual viewers. You know what though, stuff them. Casual viewers be damned, Fringe is at the top of its game when it’s delving into fascinating world that it’s created. There’s no need to be worried just yet about the fate of Fringe but it seems entirely likely that this will be the last season of Peter, Walter, Olivia, Broyles, and Asterisk, sorry, Astro, sorry, Astrid. If that is the case and this is the last we’ll see of Fringe Division than I hope they stick with the ongoing storylines, the deep mythology, and the troubled past of the Bishop family, because if this is the last season of Fringe we’ll ever get to see I don’t really want my time wasted as the writers drag their heals during the inevitable mid-season lull.
