I am in the first few episodes and I am BUMMED about Charlie. I love Charlie Francis.
I am shocked and sad. I think Charlie rocks.I wonder if it will make me more sympathetic to Peter.
Fringe – On to season two
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Isn’t it Fantastic?
This is a pic from February of a storm on Saturn. The storm was three months old. Apparently it’s still raging with no end in sight. Wow! It looks like mad rushing water. Read more about it from Cassini and Phil Plait at Discovery Mag.
Fringe – the rest of Season 1 or I couldn’t help myself
I couldn’t help myself. I was going to blog all about each episode while I was watching Fringe, like they do in the big kid blogs, but I kept hitting play. Before I knew it, the season was done. And wowza, what a season. I really got sucked in. It was great! It was also not so great at times, but it was TV. You know?
The science it sort of ridiculous and mind bending. I love it. It is apparently not possible, but largely plausible according to Popular Mechanics. And what is more interesting than Hollywood science, right? I mean, it makes you think outside the box, or universe in this case. At any one moment, you could be using a jam box to walk thru walls or getting sliced up by an opening in the fabric of our dimension. Yes, absolutely out there. But what better way than to keep the mind lubricated and slippy?
Ultimately, Fringe is a drama, about people. And on this, the show doesn’t disappoint. The entire season is carefully constructed so that we end up with many more questions than we expected about the types of experiments conducted on Olivia, how an eight year old Peter can be buried in a cemetery yet still babysitting his father, and how an elevator can transport someone into a different dimension. And I really care. I love Olivia. I love how hard she is, how rarely emotional. I love that she always wears the same kind of clothes and never wears makeup. It’s just like me! I love that when she is emotional, it usually works to her favor. I am beginning to love Peter. I didn’t connect with his bad-assness in the first few episodes, but I totally bought that he was a sweet guy. And he is. And now when he is bad-ass, his motivation is his genuine nature. It’s better, not perfect, but better. As for Walter. Wow. What a freak! Love him. He’s a total mess. He’s funny, brilliant and pitiful. He has made so many mistakes, yet he tries so hard to fix them. And he certainly gets the best lines. like: “Well, you’re taking untested psychedelics, lying in saline with an electrical charge in the base of your cranium. Among other things, I thought it appropriate to pray you don’t get electrocuted.”
This is my first JJ Abrams show. I didn’t watch Lost, but I would guess it has some overarching similarities. I am very fond of this shows ability to weave a grand, not just big, picture. It is compelling, thoughtful and skillful. I am sucked in by the mad science and scientists and kept there by an emotional connection to a beautiful woman that I admire. This is my kind of chick flick!
PS what happened to Olivia’s sister?
Fringe Season 1, Episode 2 “Same Old Story”
Again, while watching, I wonder what the hell took me so long. I love this show! There is a little more backstory and character development in this episode, which I like because it’s sort of why I am watching from the beginning…
In this episode a woman, with a less than spectacular upbringing, who has just had sex with a man in a hotel room, becomes pregnant at an accelerated rate and gives birth within minutes of being driven and dropped off at the hospital by said man. The child that she has dies within minutes of old age. The FBI Fringe Dept is called in to investigate.
Commander Broyles introduces his new Fringe agents, Olivia, Peter and Walter, to Nina, bitchy as ever, among others who casts doubt on their abilities. Broyles defends them, and talks about Olivia’s great personal cost and pans to her looking super cool in reading glasses… again, my kind of woman! When explaining herself to Charlie she says, “Mostly I just wanna take a shower from the inside out.” I think from a woman’s perspective this is priceless. I have felt that way about a man before, too, and it makes me like her so much!
As they arrive on the scene at the hospital, we get some great lines:
Peter -”I haven’t agreed to anything, I am just a babysitter.”
Walter – “It’s wonderful, it warms your ass.”
As they investigate they realize that the man in the hotel room is a known pitutitary thief/serial killer. OH! Take me back! Wasn’t there some wonderful horror flick from my youth that revolved around a pituitary theif? I think it was Evil Dead…So they try to find the killer by getting the last image from the mind of a girl who is missing her pituitary gland, as if her mind is like a roll of film, so they can determine where to find him.
Peter -”Also a work of fiction, which is a small but critical distinction.”
Of course Olivia has to ask Nina for something so that they can develop the film…and while visiting Massive Dynamic she has a weird vision imagining herself pregnant while Broyles asks “were you safe? you weren’t”. What’s that all about? Foreshadowing? Setting something up, surely! And we get a peek at Walter’s secrets and a sort of shame when he says, “One of the inherent pitfalls of being a scientist… trying to maintain that distinction between God’s domain and our own.”
But even though I am totally loving the characters, the science is very compelling to me. In my naivety, I believe it could all be true! Then my imagination goes crazy, too. I appreciate that. I ened up dreaming about clones hopping out of their bodies after watching this one.