‘Fringe’: J.J. Abrams Goes Far Out

It’s better than “Alias” and less confusing than the aptly named “Lost.” With “Fringe,” a new series making its premiere tonight at 8 p.m. on Fox with an ambitious $10 million, 95-minute pilot, the outrageously prolific writer-director-producer J.J. Abrams has created a compelling “X-Files”-style whodunit in which both the who and whatever they’ve done are seemingly beyond comprehension.The title refers not to cute Beatles-era haircuts but to the far verges of science — teleportation, mind control, genetic mutation, invisibility, reanimation, and, um, interrogating dead people. The opening episode begins on an airplane caught in an electrical storm en route to Boston from Hamburg. The event is enough to make the averagely nervous flyer reach automatically for the sick bag, but one passenger seems particularly alarmed. So much so that, sweating profusely, he pulls out a hypodermic needle from a briefcase under his feet and plunges it into the side of his stomach. One assumes he’s injected himself with a superpotent sedative, but within seconds he’s perspiring so heavily that he looks as if he’ll melt. Then he gets up from his seat and staggers down the aisle toward the cockpit, an alarmed flight attendant on his trail. By now he actually is melting, the flesh sliding off his face like goo. Within minutes, everyone else on the plane, pilots included, has turned to goo, too. Don’t be alarmed, though: Thanks to a new autopilot feature, the plane lands safely at Logan Airport — even if everyone on it is dead.When a plane turns up at an American airport with everyone on board reduced to a skeleton, you can bet a lot of cell phones belonging to important people are going to start ringing. One of the less important recipients of the call is FBI agent Olivia Dunham, played by the Australian newcomer Anna Torv, a blond actress with plus-size blue eyes that are by turns compassionate, clairvoyant, and businesslike. When the call comes, Olivia is shacked up in a motel room with another FBI agent, John Scott (Mark Valley), who has just declared that he loves her. But love has to wait as she heads off to Logan.Being relatively unimportant, Olivia is treated with open contempt by the man in charge of the investigation, Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), a tall black man with a face bony enough to border on the sinister. But you don’t get to be the heroine of a series like this without being both plucky and pushy, and Olivia persuades him to let her suit up in a germ-repellent outfit and take a look at the inside of the plane.What next? The Internet, of course, where Olivia does a quick bit of research on scientists and melting flesh and finds a man named Walter Bishop (John Noble). Bishop once headed up a science lab at Harvard that was supposedly dedicated to research on toothpaste but was secretly a center of exploration into teleportation, mind control, and all that other fun “fringe” stuff. Unfortunately, he’s been institutionalized in solitary confinement for 17 years, while his former partner, William Bell, has gone on to head up one of the biggest corporations in the country, the sweetly named Massive Dynamic.No one is allowed to visit Walter without a member of his family present, so Olivia grabs a flight to Baghdad to pay a visit to his estranged son, Peter (Joshua Jackson), who’s using his genius-level I.Q. in the Green Zone to make some quick money to pay off a very annoyed gambler back in the States. Genius or not, Peter, who looks a bit like a younger, chubbier George Clooney, falls for Olivia’s line that she has an FBI file detailing every aspect of his checkered past and is willing to use it against him if he doesn’t cooperate. He retaliates by repeatedly calling her “sweetheart,” but boards the plane to Boston despite the fact that he loathes his father and considers him a dangerous lunatic. Lucky for us, because Peter’s the most interesting character on the program.His father, however, is undoubtedly the strangest. When we first meet Walter, he’s got a scraggly beard, a bad case of the shakes, and a mind that seems half gone. But once he’s sprung from the joint, the beard is quickly shaved and the face that emerges looks like Tom Stoppard’s minus the sense of humor. The effect of 17 years of drugs and solitary confinement disappears almost as quickly as the facial hair. Walter is every inch the mad scientist, but functional nonetheless. And Olivia has personal as well as professional reasons for seeking his help. Not only is she convinced he’s the man to solve the mystery of what happened on the airplane, but there’s also the fact that her lover, John, has been zapped by the same flesh-melting virus and is now on life support.With the leading trio (Olivia, plus the warring father and son) finally assembled, “Fringe” hits its stride. In the effort to save John from his skin, Walter not only gets to re-enter his old Harvard lab (improbably preserved), but also to re-enact all his wackiest experiments. (“Let’s make some LSD,” he exclaims, rubbing his hands together in delight.) We are also introduced to a splendid villain, Nina Sharp (Blair Brown), an executive at Massive Dynamic who sports a bionic arm designed for her by Walter’s former comrade in scientific weirdness, William Bell, and inhabits an “office” so inhumanly white and huge it makes for an excellent joke on the marriage of corporatism and “avant-garde” art.From Nina, who assumes that Olivia has a higher security clearance than she has, we learn that the flesh-melting virus that struck the flight to Logan was not an isolated incident but part of something called “the Pattern” — a series of inexplicable occurrences around the globe. As Olivia’s boss (one of the select few who knows what’s going on) tells her, “It’s as if someone out there is experimenting, only the whole world is their lab.”Though the pilot episode of “Fringe” is the length of a movie, we are none the wiser as to what’s going on by the end of it. And that is how it should be, of course, since this is a television series. The point is that we are intrigued.

‘Fringe’: J.J. Abrams Goes Far Out

‘Fringe’: J.J. Abrams Goes Far Out

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