Fringe

By Wendy

You gotta love the "stop" button.

When I graduated from college, I made myself a promise to never again finish a book unless I absolutely wanted to--a promise I have kept over and over again. 

And I've always been willing to walk out of shows at intermission, because I don't want to waste my time after I've already wasted my money.

But for some reason, in the world of streaming, I found myself finishing seasons and series of shows even when they were no longer worth my time. Now I'm pleased to announce that I've broken that bad habit. There is too much to see and read and do to spend any time finishing up a show just because I started it.

Fringe is a show I might have kept up with in the past. It stars Anna Torv, an Australian actor whose work I've enjoyed a great deal. It also stars Joshua Jackson, who isn't particularly good, but he can be enjoyable and he's nice to look at. The third lead, John Noble, is tasked with playing a very annoying man, and he's altogether too good at it.

The storyline: Torv is FBI. Weird stuff has been happening. Noble is a mad scientist sentenced to life in an asylum for criminals after a lab explosion that killed his assistant. Torv knows that Noble has information that will help her on her case, but only a family member can access him. She tracks down Jackson, Noble's son, who is of course estranged from him and doesn't want to get involved. But, blah, blah, blah, they end up working together at Noble's old lab at some university (Yale, maybe?), where every single episode goes like this:

• Something weird happens: a plane full of dead people, a baby who grows to old age in minutes, all sorts of bizarre deaths
• Torv gets the case
• Noble posits some bizarre explanation
• Jackson pooh-poohs the suggestion in derisive terms
• Noble turns out to be right
• Noble--whose memory is erratic at best--realizes that the phenomenon in question may be the result of his own earlier research

In terms of character "development," Torv is stubborn, Jackson is cynical and stubborn, Noble is weird, brilliant, and stubborn.

The show does have moments. My favorite may be when a bunch of bank robbers somehow temporarily soften the material of a wall so that they can walk through it. When one of them gets delayed leaving the vault, he ends up stuck with his back half in one room, his front half in the other, and his middle at one with the wall. Pretty cool (though not for him, of course).

Overall, however, the joys are far outweighed by the tedious predictability, and what a pleasure it was to just press "stop"!