Fringe
A plane mysteriously lands by autopilot at Boston's Logan International Airport long after its last radio contact. As it rests ominously on the runway, authorities move in. The first cop to look through the window, we're informed, "threw up in front of his whole unit."
That tells families what they need to know about Fox's much buzzed-about Fringe, creator J.J. Abrams' Frankensteinian effort to stitch together CSI, The X-Files, Millennium and his very own Lost into a living, breathing sci-fi police procedural.
The outcome is fairly monstrous.
The title refers to fringe science: psychokinesis, parapsychology, reanimation, you name it. It seems a shadowy conglomerate is using these disciplines to wreak havoc in the world. So the U.S. government enlists real mad scientist Walter Bishop (Lord of the Rings' John Noble) to help piece these cases together. Bishop couldn't be more thrilled to earn release from the insane asylum where he has spent the past 17 years ("They have this horrible pudding in here").
While Bishop spends hours in his lab, FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) busts the show's ne'er-do-wells, and Bishop's son Peter (Joshua Jackson of Dawson's Creek fame) makes sure Pops doesn't wander away. But the drama's real showstoppers are its blood, gore and squirm-inducing torture scenes. Dozens of people meet a messy demise when an act of bioterrorism melts the skin off their skeletons like reheated Jell-O. Dunham's fellow agent/undercover lover fares only slightly better, spending most of that two-hour premiere in a coma, his skin grotesquely translucent.
The second episode is even worse. A prostitute dies, screaming, when her rapidly growing baby bursts forth from her body. Another is killed by a villain armed with muscle relaxant, a scalpel and a hunger for part of her brain. To find the murderer, Bishop has to pull an imprinted image from the victim's retina ("fringe science," remember?) and plucks an eyeball out of her skull to do so.
"I want her [Olivia] to vomit one time when she sees one of these things," Torv told The Los Angeles Times, "because I think she would legitimately feel that way." If a hardened FBI agent would react that way, what about the families stumbling upon this heavily hyped fall debut? Fringe also dabbles in profanity, immodesty and sexual situations, though its biggest shocks come from those outlandish quasi-sciences that feature good and evil characters playing God—with hideous results.
Episodes Reviewed: Sept. 9, 16, 23, 2008