Lower Decks

The following review contains spoilers for Fringe through the current episode, “The Ghost Network,” originally broadcast September 23, 2008.

For two reviews now I’ve concentrated on one particular aspect of Fringe, being its creator. This week I’m not doing that anymore, because at this point, if the show can’t interest me beyond the cognitive association of J.J. Abrams, then I apparently have no real interest in the show itself. Thing is, I do.

I used to be the guy waiting every fall for the new batch of TV shows and returning favorites, just salivating at the possibilities, watching seemingly everything. It’s true I used to glut myself on Star Trek, but I always seemed to find time for something else as well. This began to change right around the time Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled. By that time, I had already made a long-term commitment to a show called Lost. The next season Prison Break debuted, and somewhere along the way, I became addicted to Grey’s Anatomy. Combined with my long-term obsession with Survivor, as work started to squeeze away at my availability to watch whatever I wanted, I noticed that I began to lose interest in the fall season. That’s how I somehow missed the boat on Heroes. I just couldn’t drudge up the interest. Not until How I Met Your Mother became a new obsession did I begin to open up again, which led to a long-term interest in The Big Bang Theory. Heroes finally followed. Then this new fall season began, and I suddenly realized, even with this rehabilitation, I couldn’t find some new show to have real enthusiasm for. Even Fringe.

That’s the attitude that bubbles below the first couple of reviews. Even Life on Mars, starring an underdog favorite of mine, Jason O’Mara, I’d forgotten how to care. Truth is, I’d fallen completely out of habit, right after my last VCR stopped working. I’d given up hope on anything like routine. But watching Fringe over the past three weeks, working up a new routine, something finally clicked. “The Ghost Network” is something like that, too. There are certain elements contained in the episode , some of which build on what we already know, others that promise the kind of long-range arcs that’ve always been the hallmark of, yes, a J.J Abrams project. Certainly, there’s also the fact that the basic fringe science plot this week maintains the same level of intrigue, actually builds on, that was evident in “The Same Old Story.”

The ghost network turns out to be linked to the Pattern, the conspiracy our merry group of heroes have assembled to try and stop. It’s found thanks to an old test patient of Walter Bishop’s who in the years since has developed a sort of psychic link that allows him to piggyback on an extra-sensory connection members of the Pattern use to clandestinely pass information to each other, see whatever they see. Fortunately, it doesn’t come across as dry as that may sound, but rather as a set of circumstances that start out in exactly the kind of standalone perspective from last week and gradually fold into our team’s investigation.

Then there’s Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) of Massive Dynamic, the lady with the cybernetic arm who’s appeared since the first episode, whom Agent Dunham keeps coming back to for one reason or another, clearly a prime player in the Pattern, and a surprise development concerning Dunham’s handler, Broyles. Sharp is a benign presence in every way but indication, clearly someone to keep an eye on, whose importance will only grow as the series develops. Speaking of which, Walter’s son Peter apparently has secrets of his own, which are hinted at somewhat nonchalantly, until Walter himself makes a point of bringing it up later. And then there’s the fate of Dunham’s late partner John Scott (Mark Valley, who starred in Keen Eddie, among other projects), whose body is being held by Sharp and the Pattern. The audience knows what really happened to him, how his mind was switched with someone else’s during the pilot, but Dunham doesn’t, which makes her continued bitterness, even during his funeral this episode, all the more intriguing as we wait for more to come of it.

I can’t say much more for Anna Torv than I have previously. I recently learned she’s Australian, which colored a bit of my interpretation of her acting this week. Given time, she might grow into a more involving presence as the central figure of Dunham, but for now, she’s being overshadowed even by Joshua Jackson’s Peter, who doesn’t have a lot to do besides act exasperated by John Noble’s charmingly eccentric Walter. There’s something to be said for a generally even-keel Torv, whose character can’t be expected to be anything close to settled with everything that’s been going on so far. It’s interesting to watch the show just to see how Dunham fares week to week.

The gimmick of having Walter Bishop around, though, walks a razor’s edge. On the one hand, it’s nice to have a specter of the past hanging around the present, informing on old mistakes and new corrections (as this week clearly demonstrates), but sometimes it just seems too coincidental to have this guy involved in all this activity, no matter how brilliant he was then and now. It’d be nice to just have him along as the guy who understands things, not who more or less facilitated them in his fabled pre-asylum days. The character has all the potential in the world, but he can also become a caricature.

That may be true of the series as well. Where the X-Files became a little too interested sidetracking freak cases, that’s exactly what this show is built around, but it’s also got to find the balance of relevance with the Pattern and how the central arc progresses while exploring how fringe science is essentially bigger than such concerns. That’s what Walter Bishop should ultimately represent, really, the center of the show, what everything pivots around. His son Peter and Dunham each have their own reasons to be involved, and they should evolve accordingly, but if anything, this is show built for the regular appearance of additional characters, not merely as guests-of-the-week, but who can provide more and more perspective on matters. Fringe can be Alias, it can be Lost, and it can be its own show entirely, which it clearly is, or has the potential to be.