fajrdrako: ([Fringe])
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For the past couple of weeks,[livejournal.com profile] maaseru and [livejournal.com profile] explodedteabag have been watching a lot of Fringe and very obviously enjoying it. I was doing other things.

Mostly, I thought I didn't have time to watch a new show, but it had negative connotations for me. I'd watched the first few minutes of the first episode back when it first aired, got grossed out by what happened then, and never went back to it. And somehow the character people seemed to be talking about was the same one I kept seeing in trailers and clips from people pimping the show. They thought John Noble as Walter Bishop was wonderful. I thought he looked, well, unimpressive - TV seems to have a lot of crazy characters these days, so why would I want to watch another crazy old guy?

Right. One episode and I'm converted. But it isn't John Noble as Walter Bishop who hooked me: it was Anna Torv as Olivia Dunham, heroine extraordinaire. She's amazing. Not conventionally pretty, but with such personality and character and realism and depth and a subtle, brilliant charisma. Why aren't more female protagonists on TV this good? This real?

I also really like Lance Reddick; especially his voice.

When people talked about this show, they never said much about what it was about. Except maybe that it about this crazy old guy. Now I understand why they were reticent. It's sort of difficult to explain. It's a bit like X-Files, a bit like Alias (no doubt the J.J. Abrams influence there), a bit like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a bit like the more stylish comic books of the past five years... And it has an elusive: just when you think you know what it's about, it slips away from you.

A few specific comments about
  1. They surprised me. Several times, they surprised me. I hadn't thought Scott would survive the episode, but I thought he'd be the equivalent of a refrigerator woman. I thought Olivia would go after the Truth about, well, whatever, because the man she loved was a victim of whatever was going on. I had no idea he'd be... connected.

  2. It's Toronto playing Boston. (Hmm, sounds like sports.) I kept forgetting it was Boston as they went to all these places I recognized: U of T, the Gardner Expressway.... Makes me rather fond of the setting.

  3. One of the great joys was that I couldn't predict the plot as it went along. Sometimes I'd think I could, in small ways, but it kept twisting and changing. Which is wonderfull.

  4. I loved the character of Peter Bishop. Joshua Jackson reminds me of Tom Hanks (whom I go out of my way to avoid) and Patrick McFadyen (whom I feel vaguely neutral about) so I surprised myself by liking Bishop. I like the way he almost understands his father, in spite of himself. I like the way he seems lost between worlds, wanting to escape his role yet not doing so.

  5. Despite my initial resistence, Walter Bishops' air of vulnerability and confusion amdist his craziness won me over. Anybody who has a secret lab underneath Harvard University has my respect.

  6. One of the reasons I thought Scott would die was that I don't like Mark Valley. At all. So I was rather happy with the way his role developed. Didn't recognize him at first as Christopher Chance, though it seemed like a very similar role.

  7. A favourite scene: Walter Bishop, Astrid Farsworth, and Peter watching Sponge Bob Squarepants with the cow.

  8. It seems that 'Massive Dynamic' is the bad guy, though I wouldn't take anything for granted at this point: I'd suspect that there are a lot of grey areas here and the good guys and the bad guys will morph into each other from time to time. Still. I love corporate villainy. Cyberdyne, Hammer Industries, Roxxon, Blue Sun, LuthorCorp - love 'em all, the evil monsters.

  9. Nice use of grunge technology.

  10. Good lines, too. Excellent writing. I hope it keeps up the quality.



More, I want more.

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