TV: Fringe

Starring: Anna Trov, Joshua Jackson, John Noble, Lance Reddick
Category: Sci-Fi
I just watched the seventh episode of the third season and I am excited beyond belief.
I've been watching this since the beginning and for a long tine I introduced it to friends as a more edgier, more Sci-Fi X-Files. FBI unit investigating the strange and unknown; that bill fits them both. Similarities don't end there. It was also threatening to be like the X-Files that it had story arches and stand-alone episodes. Especially the first season where you could see they were carefully repeating the lore each and every episode so that you could broadcast some episodes out of order. Another way it was also mimicking the X-Files was the way it was threatening to become insular, self-referencing and plain old confusing to the average viewer. Show creator J.J. Abrams went through great lengths to distance this from his other TV creation, Lost, which invented new levels of confusion. His promised to keep Fringe accessible to all and for the first season, it worked.
Then in mid-second season something snapped. That is the only I can describe it as. Suddenly, it abandoned it's hand-holding pace and script structure (repeating introductions, etc). It was as if the people driving the show suddenly pressed the accelerator. All of a sudden, events that were hinted on and inevitably to occur in some future episode a season or two away, occurred in rapid succession. It was as if someone threatened to pull the plug and the story writers decided to tell as much as possible before someone did.
This has happened before in other series, where the pace of story development picked up so much that soon there was nothing left or new to tell. That was the problem with the X-Files too. Once the nature of the aliens and their human conspirators were known, everything else after that seemed bland and seemed tacked on. They even began repeating themselves by making Mulder missing yet again.
However, for Fringe, it was as if someone decided that their viewers were smart enough and if some people didn't get it by now, those people would never get it anyway. They knew that not only were their viewer smart, they were smart enough to see the plot points that they were building up to. So instead of making a spectacle out of it or milking it for all it's worth, they simply got it over with and moved the story forward.
Where they moved to is something really interesting. This is where I can't decide whether I like it or not. Spoiler alert ahead. One one hand, the concept of two worlds colliding is really great. The show even has a different color opening titles to help users orient themselves as to which world the episode is primarily set in. But having two parallel character sets can be confusing. To make it more confusing, one character from one world has crossed over and taken the place of the other, pretending to be the version of themselves in that world. This is coming close to Lost-confusing levels. So far, a lot it is managed through distinction. By having distinct characters that does not exist in the other world play major parts (and have a lot of screen time) clearly indicates the different scenarios and essentially hints to viewer which world they are viewing. This could be quite confusing to watch but show is juggling this story very well.
Fringe has turned out to be a delight to watch and follow. Even if you don't normally like Sci-fi, the show also works as a drama, with plot twists that are surprising but not as mind-bending as those on Lost. If you are new, the background story is getting a bit thick by now. It is worth watching the DVDs for the first two seasons to catch up and watch the slow burn turn into a raging fire. Like real fire, I hope the show writer can control it and not get consumed by it.