Fringe: the bitch pudding recap
Mar. 18th, 2011 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficOkay, so Fringe is a lot like many J.J. Abrams productions – an episode from the original Star Trek series, stretched out in length and hammered at with verisimilitude until it can be understood by the target audience of American Idol (all the fun and excitement of karaoke, now with the charm and likeability of Jennifer Lopez!). Not to be mean, but c'mon, Lost boiled down to two god-like entities manipulating mortals into their conflict. Kirk could've handled that in forty minutes.
Fringe is an entire series dedicated to the mirror universe, so naturally it takes a season for anyone to mention the premise, which is when mad scientist Walter Bishop casually states that déjà vu is a result of parallel universes. 'Yeah, okay,' everyone else seems to go.
Prior to that, most of the stories revolve around a high-tech Luddite terrorist group that Bishop accidentally started, the ZFT. Bizarrely, even though they're established as having insanely sophisticated technology and multiple spies in the U.S. government (including Olivia's superior: In this universe, boss fire you. In alternate universe, you fire boss!), they just kinda disappear after Olivia splits their leader in half. So that's the first season right there. Also, it turns out that Walter's sarcastically useless son Peter is really the Peter from another universe, who Walter kidnapped after his son died.
The second season is A. Walter wangsting over how he kidnapped his son, B. People figuring out that Walter kidnapped his son, and C. Walter trying to tell his son he was kidnapped. Also, something about shapeshifters.
Peter finally figures it out and then runs off, resulting in an entire episode of Peter on his own, which is doubly annoying since I thought we had a tacit agreement with TPTB that Walter Bishop was pretty much the point of this show, not "which script can we pass off as not having been stolen from the X-Files reject heap?" (seriously, this episode features a serial killer who completely coincidentally is cutting out the exact part of the brain that arch-baddie Newton specializes in). Also, the episode is one of those annoying "are you sure this isn't not not a sci-fi show and you're just insane?" shows. That should totally be a show. Twelve episodes of the hero fighting vampires and demons and shit, then an episode where he wakes up in a mental institution and the rest of the series would be him dealing with his paranoid schizophrenia. And it would still be more satisfying than Lost.
Anyway, I have possibly forgotten to mention Olivia. At first Olivia seems bland, but she's really just chill. TPTB really do their best to give her material to work through, even though they've kinda written themselves into a corner. Peter is useless (the most he ever does is somehow know a guy who's able to do a given task… like video manipulation… better than a top-secret branch of the FBI), but he's got this Chosen One thing going. Meanwhile, Olivia is competent, but as written she's about as interesting as, well, watching a professional law enforcement officer doing her job professionally.
So she keeps getting trauma like her boyfriend dying, being in a car accident, being experimented on, et al. Probably the most egregious is in the second season, when after being thrown through the windshield of a stopped car, she has to do an entire little arc of getting her groove back. Because being strapped down and harvested for your spinal fluid is traumatic, but being in a fender-bender? Jesus. Also she turns into Daredevil for an episode. And to humanize her, she gets her sister and her cute niece to stay with her, because showing her playing with a kitten for a few minutes each episode would be too pandering.
Oh, I should mention that in the second season premiere, they include a new character, Agent Jessup, who looks like she's going to join the team before she disappears forever, possibly because the writers realized they already have more characters than they know what to do this (The actress who plays Astrid must have the smallest ego in Hollywood. "Wow, an alternate universe! Do I get to be some sort of badass commando?" "You're a human calculator."). Also, the show makes a point of her being a Christian, with her comparing cases to the Book of Revelation, presumably before the writers realized that, while this would be interesting and thought-provoking if the show were a mystery like Lost, since we know it's all cuz of alternate dimensions, someone saying that everything was the work of the Devil would get old fast. Then, in her last episode (also known as her second), she finds a clue in a Bible. Because she's religious, you see. Christian-sense… tingling!
End of the second season, Peter returns to his home dimension and Walter rounds up a gang of kids he used to experiment on (don't ask) to get him back. So some of the old freaks of the week come back and they're pissy with Walter because he totally forced them into A. giving people cancer and B. killing/mind-raping people. I'm just saying, if the choice is between dying of cancer and giving other people super-cancer, you should take responsibility for giving people super-cancer.
I kind of like the idea of the parallel universe better than the actual execution. In theory, Earth 2 would be our guys, only they've been through hell and now they're totally ruthless. Like, a lot of us would wonder what we would do in a disaster scenario, and now Olivia comes face to face with exactly who she'd be in those circumstances. But, in effect, it's just our guys, only a little sassier and with thigh holsters. And since the lead character is a woman, she doesn't just have an evil double, she has an evil double who makes funny jokes and has lots of friends and looks really pretty with red hair and has a cute boyfriend. Chicks, man. This brings us to Low Self-Esteem Olivia.
Seriously, when she finds out that Peter slept with Altlivia, she has an entire monologue about how of course Peter would sleep with Altlivia, Altlivia has a mom and friends and Peter is just sitting there like "oh, shit, I tripped the mother lode, ABORT, ABORT!" and Olivia is like "I need to go find a gas station bathroom! You sleep on the couch tonight!" and he's like "We don't live together" and she's like "Fuck you!" Then she goes home and plays The Cure and all the lyrics are about her and it's raining and she stares stoically out the window, taking her gun apart and cleaning it and shit.
Or maybe there was something about a dead ballerina? I forget.
Okay, this is where the show actually gets pretty ambitious, as Olivia spends the first half of the third season in the alternate universe, thinking she's Altlivia, while Altlivia is in our (you know) universe, pretending to be Olivia… and making time with Olivia's man. Oh-no-she-dinnit and such. Here's where it gets complicated: Altlivia is in a committed relationship, but she has sex with Peter to convince him that she's the real Olivia (under the theory that as long as he's getting HOT AU SEXXINS, he won't question too much where it's coming from. It works because he's a dude). Olivia thinks she's in Altlivia's committed relationship, but she doesn't actually have sex with him because he has to go do doctor things in Texas:
And, of course, when Olivia finds out about Peter and Altlivia, she actually gripes about how she could've had sex with Altlivia's boyfriend, then who'd be laughing, huh? Oh my god, this show is its own high school AU.
Also, I must comment on the fandom here, since there seems to be a whole mess here, with some people taking Olivia's side that Peter should've known it wasn't her (people who've had the T-1000 for a partner should've throw stones, Dunham), with others taking Peter's side that, uh, he was kinda raped? In a Revenge of the Nerds sorta way? But then again, it's been three seasons and about the only consensual sex has been Nina Sharp, who gets more ass than a toilet seat. I mean, William Bell, Walter Bishop, AND Phillip Broyles? Get it, gurl.
Oh, and Altlivia develops actual feelings for Peter, since whoring yourself out for the universe is a great basis for a romantic relationship. "Hey, honey, remember that time we went kayaking? You thought I was the woman you'd actually fallen in love with and not a complete stranger. Good times."
Also, there's this artifact with unimaginable power, developed by an ancient civilization and scattered across the globe, and somehow it doesn't involve a big floating glob of red liquid. Peter is the only one who can use it, because he's the Chosen One, because I guess that's how genetics work. Nazi spy > mad scientist > Chosen One. And since the machine has the power to destroy universes, Peter will be the one to pick which universe will live, and it comes down to which Olivia he likes best (we know this because a man in a bowling alley said so. He also wrote multiple books about the ancient civilization in different languages, signing each with anagrams of his own name, because… it gets boring working in a bowling alley?).
So yeah, this is all going to come down to good and evil… vying for Joshua Jackson's affections.
Olivia: I hate talking about my feelings and would love it if our relationship could be confined to meeting in motel rooms for sex. I'm basically the woman man has been dreaming about for millennia.
Altlivia: Red hair. And, as the sassy evil one, you know I'd be up for threesomes.
Olivia: You can have a threesome with me… and Joey Potter.
ETA: Did you know the Wiki article for Joey Potter includes a list of notable relationships AND the reasons they broke up?
• Jack McPhee
• Boyfriend
o Beginning: "The Reluctant Hero" (2.08)
o Broke Up: "...That Is The Question" (2.15)
Reason: He finds out after reading a poem that he's gay
Katie Holmes dating a gay dude? Who could've seen that one coming?
So there's a pretty big attempt to have a theme of love, with even the most inhuman cast members, like the Observers and the shapeshifters, getting episodes pointing out that they're capable of love, and the Big Bad Walternate seeming to not give a fig if he kills his own son to save the universe (in addition to the fact that he's a Walter that never learned his lesson on hubris, which is another meaty idea that John Noble gets to sink his teeth into). Which is fine, even though it's really silly to literally have a love triangle more important than the universe.
Altlivia: Peter, I have your baby!
Olivia: I can get a baby! Give me two hours and a pair of pliers!
ETA2: This is possibly the only show ever where the heroine doing a Leonard Nimoy impersonation is a cliffhanger.
Fringe is an entire series dedicated to the mirror universe, so naturally it takes a season for anyone to mention the premise, which is when mad scientist Walter Bishop casually states that déjà vu is a result of parallel universes. 'Yeah, okay,' everyone else seems to go.
Prior to that, most of the stories revolve around a high-tech Luddite terrorist group that Bishop accidentally started, the ZFT. Bizarrely, even though they're established as having insanely sophisticated technology and multiple spies in the U.S. government (including Olivia's superior: In this universe, boss fire you. In alternate universe, you fire boss!), they just kinda disappear after Olivia splits their leader in half. So that's the first season right there. Also, it turns out that Walter's sarcastically useless son Peter is really the Peter from another universe, who Walter kidnapped after his son died.
The second season is A. Walter wangsting over how he kidnapped his son, B. People figuring out that Walter kidnapped his son, and C. Walter trying to tell his son he was kidnapped. Also, something about shapeshifters.
Peter finally figures it out and then runs off, resulting in an entire episode of Peter on his own, which is doubly annoying since I thought we had a tacit agreement with TPTB that Walter Bishop was pretty much the point of this show, not "which script can we pass off as not having been stolen from the X-Files reject heap?" (seriously, this episode features a serial killer who completely coincidentally is cutting out the exact part of the brain that arch-baddie Newton specializes in). Also, the episode is one of those annoying "are you sure this isn't not not a sci-fi show and you're just insane?" shows. That should totally be a show. Twelve episodes of the hero fighting vampires and demons and shit, then an episode where he wakes up in a mental institution and the rest of the series would be him dealing with his paranoid schizophrenia. And it would still be more satisfying than Lost.
Anyway, I have possibly forgotten to mention Olivia. At first Olivia seems bland, but she's really just chill. TPTB really do their best to give her material to work through, even though they've kinda written themselves into a corner. Peter is useless (the most he ever does is somehow know a guy who's able to do a given task… like video manipulation… better than a top-secret branch of the FBI), but he's got this Chosen One thing going. Meanwhile, Olivia is competent, but as written she's about as interesting as, well, watching a professional law enforcement officer doing her job professionally.
So she keeps getting trauma like her boyfriend dying, being in a car accident, being experimented on, et al. Probably the most egregious is in the second season, when after being thrown through the windshield of a stopped car, she has to do an entire little arc of getting her groove back. Because being strapped down and harvested for your spinal fluid is traumatic, but being in a fender-bender? Jesus. Also she turns into Daredevil for an episode. And to humanize her, she gets her sister and her cute niece to stay with her, because showing her playing with a kitten for a few minutes each episode would be too pandering.
Oh, I should mention that in the second season premiere, they include a new character, Agent Jessup, who looks like she's going to join the team before she disappears forever, possibly because the writers realized they already have more characters than they know what to do this (The actress who plays Astrid must have the smallest ego in Hollywood. "Wow, an alternate universe! Do I get to be some sort of badass commando?" "You're a human calculator."). Also, the show makes a point of her being a Christian, with her comparing cases to the Book of Revelation, presumably before the writers realized that, while this would be interesting and thought-provoking if the show were a mystery like Lost, since we know it's all cuz of alternate dimensions, someone saying that everything was the work of the Devil would get old fast. Then, in her last episode (also known as her second), she finds a clue in a Bible. Because she's religious, you see. Christian-sense… tingling!
End of the second season, Peter returns to his home dimension and Walter rounds up a gang of kids he used to experiment on (don't ask) to get him back. So some of the old freaks of the week come back and they're pissy with Walter because he totally forced them into A. giving people cancer and B. killing/mind-raping people. I'm just saying, if the choice is between dying of cancer and giving other people super-cancer, you should take responsibility for giving people super-cancer.
I kind of like the idea of the parallel universe better than the actual execution. In theory, Earth 2 would be our guys, only they've been through hell and now they're totally ruthless. Like, a lot of us would wonder what we would do in a disaster scenario, and now Olivia comes face to face with exactly who she'd be in those circumstances. But, in effect, it's just our guys, only a little sassier and with thigh holsters. And since the lead character is a woman, she doesn't just have an evil double, she has an evil double who makes funny jokes and has lots of friends and looks really pretty with red hair and has a cute boyfriend. Chicks, man. This brings us to Low Self-Esteem Olivia.
Seriously, when she finds out that Peter slept with Altlivia, she has an entire monologue about how of course Peter would sleep with Altlivia, Altlivia has a mom and friends and Peter is just sitting there like "oh, shit, I tripped the mother lode, ABORT, ABORT!" and Olivia is like "I need to go find a gas station bathroom! You sleep on the couch tonight!" and he's like "We don't live together" and she's like "Fuck you!" Then she goes home and plays The Cure and all the lyrics are about her and it's raining and she stares stoically out the window, taking her gun apart and cleaning it and shit.
Or maybe there was something about a dead ballerina? I forget.
Okay, this is where the show actually gets pretty ambitious, as Olivia spends the first half of the third season in the alternate universe, thinking she's Altlivia, while Altlivia is in our (you know) universe, pretending to be Olivia… and making time with Olivia's man. Oh-no-she-dinnit and such. Here's where it gets complicated: Altlivia is in a committed relationship, but she has sex with Peter to convince him that she's the real Olivia (under the theory that as long as he's getting HOT AU SEXXINS, he won't question too much where it's coming from. It works because he's a dude). Olivia thinks she's in Altlivia's committed relationship, but she doesn't actually have sex with him because he has to go do doctor things in Texas:
And, of course, when Olivia finds out about Peter and Altlivia, she actually gripes about how she could've had sex with Altlivia's boyfriend, then who'd be laughing, huh? Oh my god, this show is its own high school AU.
Also, I must comment on the fandom here, since there seems to be a whole mess here, with some people taking Olivia's side that Peter should've known it wasn't her (people who've had the T-1000 for a partner should've throw stones, Dunham), with others taking Peter's side that, uh, he was kinda raped? In a Revenge of the Nerds sorta way? But then again, it's been three seasons and about the only consensual sex has been Nina Sharp, who gets more ass than a toilet seat. I mean, William Bell, Walter Bishop, AND Phillip Broyles? Get it, gurl.
Oh, and Altlivia develops actual feelings for Peter, since whoring yourself out for the universe is a great basis for a romantic relationship. "Hey, honey, remember that time we went kayaking? You thought I was the woman you'd actually fallen in love with and not a complete stranger. Good times."
Also, there's this artifact with unimaginable power, developed by an ancient civilization and scattered across the globe, and somehow it doesn't involve a big floating glob of red liquid. Peter is the only one who can use it, because he's the Chosen One, because I guess that's how genetics work. Nazi spy > mad scientist > Chosen One. And since the machine has the power to destroy universes, Peter will be the one to pick which universe will live, and it comes down to which Olivia he likes best (we know this because a man in a bowling alley said so. He also wrote multiple books about the ancient civilization in different languages, signing each with anagrams of his own name, because… it gets boring working in a bowling alley?).
So yeah, this is all going to come down to good and evil… vying for Joshua Jackson's affections.
Olivia: I hate talking about my feelings and would love it if our relationship could be confined to meeting in motel rooms for sex. I'm basically the woman man has been dreaming about for millennia.
Altlivia: Red hair. And, as the sassy evil one, you know I'd be up for threesomes.
Olivia: You can have a threesome with me… and Joey Potter.
ETA: Did you know the Wiki article for Joey Potter includes a list of notable relationships AND the reasons they broke up?
• Jack McPhee
• Boyfriend
o Beginning: "The Reluctant Hero" (2.08)
o Broke Up: "...That Is The Question" (2.15)
Reason: He finds out after reading a poem that he's gay
Katie Holmes dating a gay dude? Who could've seen that one coming?
So there's a pretty big attempt to have a theme of love, with even the most inhuman cast members, like the Observers and the shapeshifters, getting episodes pointing out that they're capable of love, and the Big Bad Walternate seeming to not give a fig if he kills his own son to save the universe (in addition to the fact that he's a Walter that never learned his lesson on hubris, which is another meaty idea that John Noble gets to sink his teeth into). Which is fine, even though it's really silly to literally have a love triangle more important than the universe.
Altlivia: Peter, I have your baby!
Olivia: I can get a baby! Give me two hours and a pair of pliers!
ETA2: This is possibly the only show ever where the heroine doing a Leonard Nimoy impersonation is a cliffhanger.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-19 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 05:10 pm (UTC)Of course, unsolicited commenters: what do they know? ;)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 10:58 pm (UTC)Which is fine, even though it's really silly to literally have a love triangle more important than the universe.
This storyline infuriates me so much. I hate that the fate of the universe is going to be decided by who Peter wants to boink more. This ridiculous plot-line is probably the reason, I'm barely making it through this season. Last weeks episode was the first one in a while I paid full attention to, and was mostly because I liked seeing Amanda Greystone, and the Bell!liva/Astrid and Bell!livia/Walter scene cracked me up.
But mostly, I'm like "Ugh, this show".
no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 05:02 pm (UTC)So with you there. (Walter used to get around too, eh? That woman in whose house he found himself in, Yoko Ono...)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 07:18 pm (UTC)Well, they have to have *some* way to make Peter important.
Great analysis. There were some pretty good episodes scattered throughout the early seasons, but as a whole the series has been steadily building in quality over time.