PREVIEW: FRINGE 1.1 - "Pilot"

Writers: J.J Abrams, Robert Orci & Alex Kurtzman
Director: Alex Graves

Cast: Anna Torv (FBI Agent Olivia Dunham), Joshua Jackson (Peter Bishop), John Noble (Dr. Walter Bishop), Jasika Nicole (Astrid Farnsworth), Blair Brown (Nina Sharp), Lance Reddick (Phillip Broyles), Kirk Acevedo (Charlie Francis), Mark Valley (FBI Agent John Scott), Shaun Shetty (Indian Man), Gregg Blake (Passerby), Bernadeta Wrobel (Flight Attendant), Joan Barrett (Old Woman On Plane), Chris Britton (Dr. Bruce Sumner) & Katerina Taxia (FBI Agent)

When all the passengers on a flight from Hamburg are found dead, FBI agent Olivia Dunham investigates. But the only person who can help has been institutionalized for 17 years, meaning Olivia must gain access to him through his estranged son...

Any television show from the creative minds of J.J Abrams (Alias/Lost/Cloverfield) and writing duo Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (The Island/M:I-III/Transformers) is going to be big news. Fringe is the result of this meeting of minds; a sci-fi thriller heavily influenced by The X Files, with a twist of The Twilight Zone, and all the movie-quality flash $10 million can muster. It also stars actors from Lost, Lord Of The Rings, Dawson's Creek -- and features a lab assistant named after the frail professor from Futurama? If this doesn't draw an audience of genre fans, nothing will.

Anna Torv (Mistresses) stars as FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, a committed and intelligent investigator having a secretive relationship with hunky fellow Agent John Scott (Mark Valley). Both are part of an inter-agency investigation of an international flight from Hamburg, which appears to have been the target of advanced biological terrorism: every passenger dissolved to the bone.

Despite a prickly relationship with Homeland Security's Phillip Broyles (Lost's Lance Reddick), Olivia soon impresses by finding a link between the Hamburg incident and pseudo-scientific experiments carried out by Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who has been institutionalized for 17 years for killing a lab assistant. After Olivia's lover becomes afflicted with the same contaminant that killed the airline passengers, his body is frozen to delay the cellular degradation, meaning Olivia must gain access to Walter through his estranged genius son Peter (Joshua Jackson) and hope his proficiency in "fringe science" can find a cure...

I really enjoyed Fringe's Pilot, which manages the difficult trick of introducing all the characters, creating a tonal identity, laying the foundations of a mythology, and never forgets to tell a good story that fills 80-minutes very nicely. Comparisons to The X Files are inevitable, but this manages to be quite different, while definitely playing in the same sand pit. The best injection of freshness comes from the central trio -- a female federal agent, a "mad scientist" and his bitter child prodigy. It's not a typical dynamic, and the show is at its best whenever Torv, Noble and Jackson are allowed to bounce off each other. Crucially, the Pilot made me hungry to see them tackle more bizarre occurrences, which is half the battle of an opening episode.

I was surprised to see Torv shoulder the whole episode, as she a recognisable face, but it's clear J.J Abrams' knack for spotting female talent continues, after launching the careers of Keri Russell (Felicity), Jennifer Garner (Alias) and Evangeline Lilly (Lost). Torv is tough and sexy, but has a rawness that nicely prevents her being just another implausibly beautiful FBI babe.

John Noble is great fun as Walter, first seen with a unkempt beard in a mental institution, before proceeding to equip a basement laboratory with gizmos, gadgets and... a cow? While definitely the broader character of the three, used mainly as comic relief in his obscure demands, blunt social interactions and incontinence, Walter's great fun and could develop very nicely. This episode only needs him to be the eccentric kook, and Noble does that extremely well -- while still hinting at hidden depths and complexities, particularly in his frosty relationship with his son.

Speaking of which, Joshua Jackson is also very good as Peter. I never saw much of Dawson's Creek, so everything I know about Jackson is from the generally poor films he's been in since leaving that teen drama. And I was pleasantly surprised by his cynical, sceptical, smart-talking character, particularly as my expectation for an Olivia/Peter partnership (of Mulder and Scully-style dynamism) was avoided.

It's possible, perhaps even likely, they'll become a firmer partnership in future episodes, leaving Walter in his lab while they do the field work, but time will tell. For now, I liked how Peter is sceptical of his father's left-field theories and pseudo-scientific background, while still acknowledging his successes -- particularly after one scene, where Walter enables Olivia to enter her comatose lover's sub-consciousness, via a floatation tank and dosage of LSD.

All the other characters are sketchy, but Lance Reddick brings his glowering intensity to bear once again as Broyles -- the man who will seemingly become their boss, and who has knowledge of a mysterious "Pattern" of activity around the world. Yes, it seems the Hamburg incident is just the tip of the iceberg, as the second half of the Pilot begins to reveal a worldwide threat -- apparently coming from Walter's multi-millionaire former lab partner, who's now CEO of global business Massive Dynamics.

Production-wise, director Alex Graves (The West Wing) does a marvellous job of creating a miniature movie, and there are several excellent sequences, such as: the opening, frightening attack on the airliner, Olivia's hospitalization after an explosion (shown in sharp, bright, audio-visual flashes), and a Bourne-style car chase for the climax. The ambience is slick and accomplished, and while regular episodes won't be as epic, it's easy to imagine the vibe Fringe will be aiming for week to week. I also liked the way location legends were shown hanging, three-dimensionally, in mid-air -- a trumping of Heroes' episode titles.

Overall, it's hard to find much to moan about here. Fringe is clearly a collection of old ideas, but that's been J.J Abrams' stock-in-trade for years now. Alias was obviously indebted to countless espionage shows, Lost is Robinson Crusoe-meets-The Prisoner, and Cloverfield was just an American Godzilla. Abrams' great strength is how he can breathe fresh life into ideas you'd imagine would be quite limiting. I mean, who expected Lost to evolve to where it is now, based on season 1's Cast Away en masse?

The biggest problem facing Fringe is how it's going to tackle science-based subjects in an interesting way, coming after 9 seasons of The X Files. Chris Carter's '90s phenomenon soaked up a lot of sci-fi material, and it's all relatively fresh in audience memory -- so is Fringe's corporate conspiracy and triptych of unusual characters enough to stave off feelings of repetition?

A true measure of Fringe's success just isn't possible yet -- we need a few more episodes to judge how these characters and its premise will play. But this is definitely a compelling, inventive, engaging, and creepy first step onto the fringe of a brand new TV show. And its final line is killer.


Premieres: 9 September 2008 (US), FOX