Season finale week continues!
Tonight is the two hour finale of Lost with a clips show before hand. In a word: Exciting!
And last night I subjected myself to the season finale of Fringe, entitled “There’s More Than One Of Everything.”
I guess the nicest thing I can say about this show is that compared to a lot of what else is out there on TV, it’s not horrible. It’s not godawful. It’s not even stupid or pointless.
It’s just weak. More often than not, though it’s had one or two bright spots. In fact, going back to my original review of the pilot, I kind of feel the same after forcing 20 episodes of this show upon myself: It sets up a nice laundry list of ridiculous sci fi concepts that I would love to see happen and then if panders to me enough to take one of those concepts down off the shelf, dust it off and play with it, it’s done kind of flaccidly.
It’s super cool sci fi concept du jour (that it has been leading up to all season, both cryptically and not so cryptically): Alternate realities. In fact, the show so far would have you believe that like The X-Files has aliens as their raison d’etre and every other probing into the supernatural or paranormal was just the garnish, for this show it’ll be invaders from a different universe.
It just reminds you that The X-files (minus the last two seasons) were so fucking good. What is this show doing wrong that that show did so right? The nice thing about this show is that basically everyone on here isn’t all “I WANT TO BELIEVE,” but more “I KIND OF HAVE TO BELIEVE BECAUSE THIS CRAZY SHIT IS JUST POPPING UP ALL UP IN MY BIZNESS 24/7!” Well, for the most part.
In fact, SPOILER FOR THE LAST IMAGE OF THE FINALE:
Very evocative of Planet Of The Apes, although the US remake of Life On Mars used essentially the same trick in the first five minutes of it’s pilot to key you into the fact that you were in a earlier section of the timeline, but it reminds me a lot of the first season of Lost. Remember back that far? I won’t go into it, but let’s put it this way, William Bell, the guy who seemingly has all the answers and has been mentioned but never seen in every single episode of this series thus far, well, he’s the hatch.
SPOILER FOR TIDBIT RIGHT BEFORE THE END OF THE FINALE:
Oooh. Alternate universes are hot right now.
At least in the mind of J.J. Abrams and his creative ilk, right?
Makes me wish I had an evil twin. You know what I mean?
Ultimately I did kinda like this episode. It wasn’t great, but it had some interesting reveals (the grave!) for an hour of sci fi television and I’ll probably take a peek at the second season in the fall (of which they’re already filming so there was a preview trailer for it at the end of the episode) just to see if this storyline advances anywhere interesting. Nimoy’s appearance here reminded me a lot of his appearance at the end of that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I have my doubts on how long he’ll be with this show. But I have to give it kudos to how it took out David Robert Jones (which is the real name of Davie Bowie, in case you were wondering)(and it’s sad to see Jared Harris leave, because he was one of the most compelling things about this show, but he’s off to better things) by literally cutting him in half with a closed portal between worlds.
And how did it happen? Pacey ran out and pointed a remote control at him and clicked it. He turned off the TV on the window into another reality. There’s something so wonderfully meta in that that my fucking brain wants to explode.
But I still wish I had an evil twin.
