Fringe looks like it could be a great show. It also looks like it could be terrible. Here’s why. Spoilers ahead.

No Passion

These people aren’t driven by a desire to uncover the truth, or to find a sister taken from them years ago. Olivia Dunham is just another agent of the government doing her job. The closest we get to her having real passion for her new position investigating “fringe science” is her interest in the fucked up cases Lance Reddick’s character lists off. Which is really more of a “wow that’s pretty fucked up” interest than a “the world deserves to know the truth and I need to try to find proof” interest.

This lack of passion can be good if you take the show in a different route, but right now the show isn’t like X-Files in that way. With the X-Files, the fantastic things Mulder investigated were, for the most part, real. Aliens were out there, Tooms really did eat peoples liver to live longer. Most of the cases had at least a smidgen of scientific basis behind them. But in the world of The X-Files, no-one believed them. In the world of Fringe, these modern-day miracles are no longer on the edge of science only accepted by wackos. People have robotic arms. Corporations resurrect people for interrogation. We are no longer in a world where science cannot explain the seemingly magical. We are in a world where science is indistinguishable from magic. Granted, the worlds of Fringe and X-Files aren’t too different in this respect, and as the world is developed in the coming episodes they may diverge or coalesce, but right now the world of Fringe is full of people who have no vested interest aside from solving the case. That might work for your basic procedural, but I’m pretty sure Fringe isn’t hoping to be your basic procedural.

No Red Tape

Olivia Dunham is described as an inter-agency liason, which basically means she’s everyone’s boss. So instead of the local sheriff busting their chops about jurisdiction, she can just pull rank and get shit done. That’s great because very often that seemed to me like an arbitrary limitation the writers introduced to elongate a story that could be told in less than an hour. But it’s also terrible because red tape and people incredulous of the truth make you empathise with the protagonists. Of course, this world seems to be filled with true believers. The closest the show got to a skeptical response in the pilot was Joshua Jackson’s character, who is really played off as comical. His doubts aren’t seen as those of a rational scientist, but those of someone blind to the obvious truth. Even when Scully was obviously fighting the truth of the situation, you could see that she wasn’t simply saying “Mulder that’s ridiculous.”

Missing Time

This is purely a complaint on my part. There is no positive side to this. Walter Bishop and William Bell worked together in the 70′s on these bizarre things. Then Bishop was put in an institution and Bell moved on to create the biggest company in the world. Now, Bishop is back helping out Dunham and his son on cases similar to things he worked on back then, and Bell seems to be related to it. So my question is this: in the intervening years, no one was able to move beyond the things Bell and Bishop were working on all those years ago? Bell himself did nothing to move the field beyond what was developed thirty years ago? It’s a leap that I’m not willing to take and I have to hope that in future episodes they’ll come upon things vastly more advanced that even Bishop cannot explain.

Kirk Acevedo is Sorely Underutilized

This is just a personal rant about the misuse of actors in general. Kirk Acevedo played Miguel Alvarez on Oz, one of the first critically acclaimed shows for HBO. On that show, he got an opportunity to play a complex disturbed character, and he played it superbly. Over the years on Oz, that character was one of the few to remain compelling and likeable despite the numerous unpleasant actions he commits over the years and that’s a testament to both the writing and the acting. And every single role I’ve seen Kirk Acevedo do since then has been painfully one dimensional. This isn’t a problem with Fringe per se but rather a problem inherent in television today. TV shows have been getting more respect in recent years, but it still has a long way to go before clearly, because most TV shows today still function with barely awake characters thrumming through dialogue meant to continue the plot rather than to drive the characters. Admittedly, this is a shallow judgement given that only one episode has aired so far, but at the moment I’m not optimistic.

Well that’s all I’ve got for now, and it’s not much. Most of my issues are primarily with the implications for the rest of the series that the pilot sets up. They could be handled well, and one of my favourite shows of all time had a very substandard first season so I’m not completely giving up on the show, but I’m not yet in the thrall of this show and they’re going to have to work to convince me.