Fringe: There’s more than one season of everything

Elizabeth’s back, sharing her ideas about Fringe this time, after musing on the musical TV shows and Glee’s success so far.

So now we’ve spent all summer shocked, amazed and desperate to know just why William Bell wanted to talk to Olivia in the still-existing World Trade Center. And … they waited another two and a half episodes to show us. It’s a strange cliffhanger, to be sure, being drawn out like that, but now at least she’s finally remembered her conversation with Bell, and the shapeshifting-soldier plot is moving forward — not to mention poor Charlie Francis is off the show for sure now. As character sendoffs go, it’s a pretty good one — both important to the plot and emotionally effective. He even gets Olivia to mourn him. At least he got one last chance to do something other than give exposition and act baffled.

Speaking of characters getting to do something more, Peter’s stepped up to take more of a leadership role while Olivia was out of circulation, which is a big step for his character but a welcome one. For now he’s gone back to helping out Olivia and making excuses for his father, so we’ll see what happens later on — especially if he finds out he’s not the “real” Peter, as that Rebecca woman Walter also used to experiment on saw without realizing. Now that he’s starting to have dreams that might be memories of having been taken by this world’s Walter, this new assertiveness of Peter’s could start causing trouble for everybody.

We’ll also have to wait and see if Broyles has any further trouble with office politics after the season premiere. Now they’ve gotten to the “oh no, the Establishment is shutting us down” stage already, which does not make this show seem less like the X-Files, though at least one of the administrators chewing out Broyles does mention “the old X designation.” Maybe Agent Doggett is still part of the FBI. Hopefully, if the producers of Fringe have been paying enough attention to the way X-Files turned out, they’ll know better than to keep starting up plot threads and turning the mythology into a huge, ungainly mess. So far, so good, but they better not start talking about bees.

In the third episode, Walter promises to get Olivia’s memory back with a kind of worm smoothie, which apparently tastes as good as it sounds (though he was going to mix it with strawberries). It does work, though, once he starts ringing bells as part of a “therapy” session with someone else. At least Olivia didn’t have to get pumped up with LSD this time.

It’s been a while since anybody mentioned the ghost of John Scott, so if the traces of him in her brain are really gone, does this mean she won’t be going back into the vision tank again? And does that mean she can stop worrying about color-coordinated underwear? These are important plot points to be settled.

Clearly the experiments Walter and Bell did on her as a child will continue to be important, and the Watcher may be playing into the ZFT plot. We’ve even seen Olivia’s sister again, if only in a quick scene. As long as the ratings can hold out against both CSI and Grey’s Anatomy, we might even find out if a new version of Robert David Jones or Charlie comes back from the other universe. Mr. Jones, of course, is now in 1963 New York (on Mad Men), but we know he’s gotten away from some tight spots before. Overall, so far it’s a strong new season.

Clacked by Guest Clacker
on Oct 16, 2009 @ 10:07 EST5EDT