Fringe: The Same Old Story review

September 18, 2008

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While the Fringe pilot suffered from a severe identity crisis, trying to decide whether it was a police procedural, comedy, or a conspiracy mystery, the second episode, The Same Old Story, steers the show sharply into The X-Files sphere.

The premise of the episode is a little shaky. We have a scientist’s son who kills women because he needs the pituitary hormone to stop him from fast-forwarding to an early, unnatural death. For whatever reason, neither he nor his dad, the brilliant scientist, think of walking to the nearest pharmacy and just buying the hormone.

Nevertheless, The Same Old Story feels a lot more even and cohesive than the pilot. The characters’ roles are a little clearer and the interactions smoother and less forced. The three leads are introduced from a slightly different perspective: Olivia (Anna Torv) has swapped the feelings of loss for those of betrayal, we were given insight into some of the morally shadier things Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) did in his presumably saner years, and his son Peter (Joshua Jackson), we learn, also has some kind of an anomaly on his medical file, which is something that makes him, a civilian doing what is apparently top secret work, almost belong in the show.

The episode also confirms the recurring elements of the show, already seen in the pilot: mystery, investigation, crazy experiment, case resolution, the inevitable teaser at the end.

Dr. Bishop’s big experiment now involves projecting the last thing a victim sees - frozen on her retina right before her untimely, gratuitously naked & violent death - on a television screen. (The idea was used as comic relief once on Homicide: Life on the Street, with a detective trying to worm out a confession by telling a not very bright suspect that this was as good a way as any to catch criminals.) Peter Bishop is employed as the voice of common sense here, making the insanity of the notion sound a little less insane. While this might bring him a bit closer to the viewer, he still has a long way to go from being a plot element/buffer zone for suspense of disbelief and story contrivance, to being a character in his own right. And he is not alone in this.

With the exception of John Noble’s mad(-libbing?) scientist, the dialogue is pretty weak and there are details that, upon second viewing, make little sense. Why, for instance, would a doctor hysterically scream at the sight of a baby if the only weird thing about it was that it was aging too fast? Why does the scientist’s son have to kill people to get the hormone?

The Same Old Story is definitely an improvement over the pilot, but makes Fringe feel less distinctive on the whole. Not that it was all that special at first, mind you, but between John Noble and the cow, things looked promising.

Related articles:

Fringe pilot review - J.J. Abrams’ latest