Fringe Pisses Me Off

I know everyone thinks J.J. Abrams is a genius. Well, I don't. (J.J. Abrams is the man behind such television hits as Felicity, Alias and Lost, for those who don't know). I've never really gotten into any of his shows, and because a friend recommended it, I found myself watching the series premiere of Fringe on Sunday night (they re-ran it, I guess to try and get more people hooked).

And I think Fringe sucks.

Let's be clear: I was an avid, avid X-Files fan. I'm all about the creepy government conspiracy alien abduction demon possession television.

But Fringe is trying way too hard. Plus, the belief line in television is fine. Really, that's why it pisses me off. They over-explain the mystery to make it sound plausible. But inevitably in the over-explanation, there's a flaw that I just can't dismiss, a flaw that renders the entire plot completely implausible. X-Files was a real mystery/spooky conspiracy show -- nobody knew what the hell was going on, although they had their theories, and nothing was ever really explained. This gave the viewers the opportunity to conjecture solutions to the mystery on their own, plus it never tried to force some obviously fake solution into a good mystery hole. X-Files ruled.

I can even give a good example of this. In last night's episode of Fringe (which I had to endure watching because Damon, for some unknown reason, actually is engaged by the show), they were seeking a man who was murdering women and performing surgery to remove some part of their brains, the pituitary gland, for some unknown reason. At the beginning of the episode, the man had just had sex with a stripper and was preparing a sedative so he could do the surgery on her.

First problem: Strippers aren't prostitutes. I know that might seem like a small distinction to the writers of a television show, but really, they're not. Most of them, although they do choose to remove their clothes for money, have too much self-respect to ho themselves out on top of it. Not all, but most. So for this guy to find an attractive stripper willing to meet up with him in a seedy hotel room -- not likely. Just make her a prostitute, writers. What the hell?

Okay. So then, the stripper starts to experience severe abdominal pain. The guy puts her in his car and drops her off on the street. She winds up in the hospital and they tell her they need to do a C-section on her to "get the baby out." She tells them she's not pregnant (in between screaming bouts of pain). She dies on the operating table. Instead of reviving her, they do the C-section and remove whatever is inside of her. People start screaming and fainting when they see what it is they removed.

Second problem: Sure, don't even worry about the chick who just died on the table. I mean, she's just a prostitute. The "baby" is more important.

Then we find out that the thing inside her actually was a baby. Just a baby that grows really fast.

Third problem: That's not fucking scary. I mean, I wouldn't want that baby inside me, that's not what I'm saying. But come on ... it's a baby. It's a baby that's growing quickly. And you're going to scream and faint over that? Come on!

So we come to find that the serial-killer man was a result of an experiment to grow human soldiers for the military. The soldiers grew to the correct size very rapidly; the problem was stopping the aging process once they reached the ideal "age" for a soldier. This guy is a remnant of that experiment, and the only way he can keep himself from growing super-old, super-fast, and dying, is by stealing other people's pituitary glands and doing god-knows-what with them.

I know. I know.

So what happened to the stripper/prostitute? Well, before he was able to remove her gland, they had sex, and she got pregnant.

Fourth problem: A genetic experiment is unlikely to be able to reproduce. Bear in mind this experiment was supposed to take place back in the '60s or so. We hadn't even gotten as far as cloning at that point in time. Cloned beings probably can reproduce, but when you start messing with DNA and hormones to make something grow faster, or slower, or whatever it is that you're doing with it -- Mother Nature doesn't like that shit. She usually finds a way to make sure that whatever you're doing with her can't be replicated through reproduction.

And fifth problem: It takes several days after fertilization for an egg to implant itself into the uterine wall. That's what the morning-after pill does, people, it prevents the fertilized egg (now an embryo, I suppose) from implanting. And I guess I can buy that, if this magical genetic growing-and-aging man actually can reproduce, that once implanted, the embryo would grow at a frightening rate. But. Did the embryo suddenly develop little fins to swim itself down the fallopian tubes? No? Then I guess it's still going to take a couple of days to get to that point, isn't it, boys and girls? Yes.

I told you Fringe sucks.

So once I figure out what's going on in this lame show, I point out to D that none of this is feasible and that Fringe is stupid. He says, "Well, most people don't know that much about pregnancy." I guess we can thank the religious right for that -- I mean, why would it be remotely important to know the basics of how pregnancy occurs? Exactly.

If I were a Fringe writer, here is what I would have done: Forget about that stupid surgery crap to remove the pituitary gland. I would have made the soldier-man a sort of hybrid who could only reproduce via sporing or something crazy like that, because he's not human. So he tries to spore, but it doesn't work unless he has a protected area in which the fetus can gestate. He starts trying to use the uterus for such things, but obviously, the baby kills the women and usually dies right after birth. He's got this tremendous urge to reproduce, so huge that he doesn't care how many people he kills until he succeeds, and he just keeps trying these messed-up methods until he gets caught. That is some weird, alien, unbelievable television right there. A super-growing man stealing pituitary glands is just stupid. Like I said, not scary. Vaguely creepy, but not really. It's definitely no X-Files plot.

And whoever they have playing the lead female -- I don't know her name -- is no Dana Scully. And Pacey isn't even close to a Fox Mulder. Not that every show like this needs to follow an X-Files dynamic, but they're trying hard enough to copy the X-Files that it's obvious, except they're not doing a very good job.

And the worst thing about Fringe: It comes on during The Biggest Loser. Which, as you all should know, is my favorite show.

Next week, I'm putting my foot down. No more Fringe. It's lame. If I have to miss the ending of Biggest Loser again (yes, I missed the ending this week; yes, I was pissed off about it; yes, it was the season premiere; yes, Fringe sucks big salty donkey balls), then I'm going to take some drastic anti-Fringe action.

Fuck that show.