Hey, Fringe is back. Another one to add to the big bag of shows returning to the air and I bet you had no idea. Why would you though? With the anticipation for so many shows, It’s Always Sunny, Eastbound & Down, The Office, the intensity of the mid-season Mad Men is enough to make you not care about other runners as it is, and of course same goes for HBO’s big-player Boardwalk Empire. So it makes it hard to focus; it’s like being at the Casino and winning the jackpot on the (bullshit, rigged, money-eating) slot machine and somewhere (no doubt) some poor prick is being thrown out after making a scene when he gambled his mortgage away. Exactly. You didn’t notice. Jesus, was that even a proper analogy? Screw it, I spent way too much time thinking that one out. Oh yeah, Fringe. Maybe this works better, I am writing a review for Fringe but undoubtedly got off-topic thinking about amazing shows, so off-topic in fact, I lost what the topic even was. So that should about sum up my useless point.
I actually am excited for Fringe to be back however, especially after what we were given during the end of the second season. Which forced you to question how the show’s creators were going to carry on-ward and deal with the repercussions of what they setup. Not that I doubt the creativity of the show’s writers, especially after a fantastic season where the core of the show shined brightly and we were given less and less of the case-to-case episode format. My worries about the cliff-hanger dealt with planning; I want to believe that the path has been laid out since many episodes before “Over There (Part 2)” and has been thought-out much past it as well. Obviously, it is way too early to tell if there is a such plan but it would be shallow to doubt its creators’ direction. After all, these are the same guys who suggested “Patterns” and “Alt-Universe’s” way before we knew they actually existed. Which in turn creates the core of what Fringe is and why we all watch. The scale of the mythology is extensive, which makes it easier to tolerate some of the standalone case episodes, and let’s be honest, even those episodes are good.
I’d like to think that “Olivia” is the parallel to last season’s “Peter” and if that’s the case it could say a lot about our direction. A lot like to think (and they aren’t wrong) that season two is centered more around Peter. (Which gets more and more obvious as the season plays out) That being the case we might call this season Olivia’s. Which is obvious, considering the circumstances. I’m not sure if it’s a good sign however, that “Peter” outranks “Olivia” on the great episode scale. Maybe it’s not supposed to. Now I’m not sure if I am remembering this right but I thought I heard something in the episode about this taking place years later. Which, that being the case is a little unexpected. Not hard to imagine though, President Walter-nate’s strategy to trick Olivia seems to have worked so it wouldn’t be hard to believe that he and his team have been running tests on Olivia for sometime. Not to mention the extreme amount of past needle injections scarring on Olivia’s arm. Of course, it gets clearer and clearer what our battle is in this episode: hoping that Olivia doesn’t succumb to thinking she is someone she is not. She puts up a good fight getting (Wire actor) Andre Royo to drive his cab (unwillingly) to the places she thinks can get her back until it becomes more and more futile.
One of the better parts about season two’s finale was “crossing-over” to the Alternate Universe and finally seeing the other side. With that came seeing some of our favorite characters living and dead! Hey there, Charlie. Whats that? You’re slowly dying with some kind of worm infesting in your body? So you take a shot to survive? Even Olivia couldn’t pull the trigger on Charlie again when she had the chance and since we will being seeing quite a lot of this Alternate now, it is nice to have Agent Francis back. How about robot-like Farnsworth? She has no emotion whatsoever. A bigger “wow” about the Alternate is the fantastic acting overall from the cast, who are all playing mostly different apparitions of the character they have been playing for years now and it’s great to see it work all around. “Olivia” is really an episode that could reach out to newcomers to the show, where you could begin here and work your way back watching without anything being taken away or spoiled, while being satisfying to regular Fringe viewers for answering (and creating) more questions that look to drive an entire season. Although “Olivia” is undeniably entertaining it’s not quite “amazing”. It will come though, and more than likely through the use of a thorough plan which will payoff big in the long run and really make or break it.
Pondering:
Is Olivia really the one Walter-nate needed all along?
How is Olivia going to get on this Blimp that flashes through Universes?
What/How/Who is going to convince Olivia she is not Alt-Olivia?
