Mid season TV chatter continued: Fringe
Dec. 13th, 2012 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessAnd speaking of Fringe --
Previous seasons of Fringe have explored the bizarre, the disgusting, the parallel, and the very bad science that happens when you keep a cow in the lab.
This season, Fringe has at least given up on the cow. (Unless it got Ambered, in which case, I don't want to know.) So that's a plus. But Fringe has also given up on something else, and it took me awhile to identify it: Hope.
(Also, "fun," but we'll get there.)
I'm behind this season, so perhaps this eventually did get addressed, but the first few episodes were almost relentlessly grim and depressing. Even the few moments of reunion/joy/happiness were, well, depressing. It probably doesn't help that the set designers, reading the scripts, have gone with, "Ok, well, grey it is then!" and the camera people have followed their lead with nice grey filters everywhere.
The result is a show that I'm just not looking forward to watching any more. It's odd. I'm not against grim and depressing – I mean, I've been reading and watching Game of Thrones. I will probably even end up watching Anna Karenina on DVD eventually, which if I remember correctly did not exactly have a happy ending in the book.
But some place in the third episode of this season I realized the problem. I'm assuming, because this is television, and this is the last season of Fringe and the showrunners know this, that the show is – eventually – going to end up with a happy ending. (As proof I show you the final episode of last season which had the possibility of being the last episode of Fringe ever when it was filmed.) And that's great. I love happy endings.
But they have to feel right. They have to feel justified, not contrived. And they have to fit into the universe of the story that has been written.
I could believe in happy endings in the first four seasons of Fringe: this was a show where people encountered monsters and flipped universes and parallels and fought or learned to work with them; the entire point of the show was, "secure the monsters for everyone's safety." But the part of the point of this season – set in a grim future – is to restore the damn monsters. So not only am I watching a grim, depressing and very grey future, I am watching a future where everyone wants things to go wrong again. (And on a sidenote, I'm watching a future that's suggesting that most of what was done in the first four seasons was completely wasted since they were all running around chasing the wrong monsters.)
I can accept the incredibly depressing ending of Anna Karenina because within the crafted universe of that story it can have no other ending. I have a bad feeling that at the end of Fringe, I'll be thinking of other possible endings. (For instance, not having this season.)
Anyway, thanks to this I haven't been watching as much Fringe as I generally would have, and while flailing to find something to watch that wasn't Fringe, ended up watching the new Upstairs, Downstairs. Oh, dear. Enough for its own separate entry. Which will have to wait a bit since I'm about to head out.
Previous seasons of Fringe have explored the bizarre, the disgusting, the parallel, and the very bad science that happens when you keep a cow in the lab.
This season, Fringe has at least given up on the cow. (Unless it got Ambered, in which case, I don't want to know.) So that's a plus. But Fringe has also given up on something else, and it took me awhile to identify it: Hope.
(Also, "fun," but we'll get there.)
I'm behind this season, so perhaps this eventually did get addressed, but the first few episodes were almost relentlessly grim and depressing. Even the few moments of reunion/joy/happiness were, well, depressing. It probably doesn't help that the set designers, reading the scripts, have gone with, "Ok, well, grey it is then!" and the camera people have followed their lead with nice grey filters everywhere.
The result is a show that I'm just not looking forward to watching any more. It's odd. I'm not against grim and depressing – I mean, I've been reading and watching Game of Thrones. I will probably even end up watching Anna Karenina on DVD eventually, which if I remember correctly did not exactly have a happy ending in the book.
But some place in the third episode of this season I realized the problem. I'm assuming, because this is television, and this is the last season of Fringe and the showrunners know this, that the show is – eventually – going to end up with a happy ending. (As proof I show you the final episode of last season which had the possibility of being the last episode of Fringe ever when it was filmed.) And that's great. I love happy endings.
But they have to feel right. They have to feel justified, not contrived. And they have to fit into the universe of the story that has been written.
I could believe in happy endings in the first four seasons of Fringe: this was a show where people encountered monsters and flipped universes and parallels and fought or learned to work with them; the entire point of the show was, "secure the monsters for everyone's safety." But the part of the point of this season – set in a grim future – is to restore the damn monsters. So not only am I watching a grim, depressing and very grey future, I am watching a future where everyone wants things to go wrong again. (And on a sidenote, I'm watching a future that's suggesting that most of what was done in the first four seasons was completely wasted since they were all running around chasing the wrong monsters.)
I can accept the incredibly depressing ending of Anna Karenina because within the crafted universe of that story it can have no other ending. I have a bad feeling that at the end of Fringe, I'll be thinking of other possible endings. (For instance, not having this season.)
Anyway, thanks to this I haven't been watching as much Fringe as I generally would have, and while flailing to find something to watch that wasn't Fringe, ended up watching the new Upstairs, Downstairs. Oh, dear. Enough for its own separate entry. Which will have to wait a bit since I'm about to head out.