Ways to Make it Through the Wall

When the first few episodes of Fringe aired, I found the premise interesting and the hours fairly entertaining. As the season has progressed, I've grown to really like most of the characters and the shows mythology became more established and deeply compelling. Fringe gets justifiably compared to The X-Files, but Fringe is starting cut out its own identity while benefiting from the lessons learned from the nine seasons of the older show. (Note: There will be possible spoilers for the first seventeen episodes of Fringe.)

Where The X-Files mythology was made up and strung together on the fly, the creators of Fringe appear to have a solid grasp on their own long term story arc. At their core, both myths are fairly similar. The X-Files dealt with an impending alien invasion, whereas Fringe focuses on an impending war with forces from a parallel universe. Both shows had/have Monster of the Week episodes, but Fringe has managed to throw in splashes of mythology in these seemingly standalone hours ("Inner Child" is perfect example of this). "Bad Dream" seemed like a MotW, until the halfway mark and threw us some of the most compelling and frightening additions to the myth arc.

While having only two principal characters allowed for deep exploration and great acting on The X-Files, it didn't leave much room to wiggle outside the lives of Mulder and Scully, and some occasional Skinner. Fringe has its own Skinner in Broyles, but we've been given three leads and a few nice subordinates in Astrid and Charlie. This opens up the possibility of widening the character focus as what happened to Charlie Frances in "Unleashed". He's been around since the first episode as Olivia's guy Friday, but got to know the character a lot more once his life was put in jeopardy.

I'm like the three leads on Fringe, for the most part. While Anna Torv's Oliva is the show's primary hero, she's been the hardest character to enjoy. For most of the season, it didn't feel like I actually knew who this person was, outside of her job and affair with Agent Scott. Giving her a live-in sister and niece has helped humanize her while mythology hours like "Ability" and the awesome "Bad Dream" has given Torv a lot of fantastic material to work with. I'm slowly coming around on my opinion of Agent Dunham.

Walter Bishop is probably the most compelling character on the show. John Noble is in danger of being typecast as the go to lunatic (see Denethor the crazy steward of Gondor in Lord of the Rings). Still, Walter has been a wonderful balance of outlandish comedic asides and a man slowly uncovering the horrors his research has unleashed on the world. As he begins to unearth events that he has apparently blocked (or had blocked) from his memories, the more the greater myth expands.

The one character I've been surprised to find really interesting is Peter Bishop, played by Joshua Jackson (who is my vote to play Will Riker, if there's ever a call to reboot Star Trek: The Next Generation). As Walter's son, I'm sure we'll slowly learn about the experimentation that Peter was subjected to as a child. He may not have been in Jacksonville with Olivia and Nick, but something about him has drawn the attention of the Observer. Also, Jackson's character supplies some great humor and is a stand-in for the audience when it comes to questioning the absurdity of the cases faced by Dunham's team. He's the Scully to Olivia's Mulder.

I'm pretty sure that Fringe is set to be renewed for a second season. If the quality continues to improve and the mythology maintains it cohesion and depth, I'm definitely looking forward for another twenty or so episodes. I think that fans of The X-Files should check out Fringe especially if they would like to see how a similar concept can be improved upon.