About Last Night: Fringe Mid-Season Checkup

Because Alias was great and Lost was good until the finale, Butler steps in to the ring for more abuse from J. J. Abrams with Friday's return of Fringe.  More after the jump!

So do people actually WATCH Fringe? Is this a thing?  I'm dead serious, because apart from the solitary friend who recommended that I persevere through the hell that was the first part of season 1 to get to the main conceit of the show, and myself, I know absolutely nobody that watches this show.  It ate up a fair chunk of my holiday downtime and has been on the air for 2 and a half seasons now, however, so I figure this show must have an audience.  Anyway, none of us are getting any younger here, so let's dive in to the latest episode after their protracted break.

This latest offering from Abrams and co. was incredibly observer heavy, and when I see an episode prominently featuring an observer in the first 5 minutes it immediately puts me on edge, as I am convinced that these characters exist for no other reason than for ol' J. J. to smugly hint "hey, my show is going somewhere, you bet your sweet ass.  Just as soon as I'm done wanking around."  The original observer (ie. the first one we saw) is going around performing course correction for unseeable outcomes of Walter having taken Peter from the alternate universe, but honestly, I just finished watching the episode 5 minutes ago, and I don't really understand to what end.  Yes, all of the baffling coincidences led to Walter not dying from his serum from the beginning of the episode in a convoluted way, but who cares? It's not like they're going to kill any of their main characters mid-season.

"Next week on Fringe: The inevitability of mortality!"

I feel like there is very little to write about this episode, as it felt more like a quick and dirty rehash of what has happened from late season 2 until now (also known as 90% of what actually matters in the show).  Drama with Peter and Olivia moved haltingly towards reconciliation, but honestly, does anyone really care how that turns out?  Peter and Olivia aren't very interesting characters, and they have about as much chemistry as a steel plank paired with an iron girder.  Christopher Lloyd made a cameo as a senile old rocker that was amusing, but simply felt irrelevant.  The B-plot that his character was involved in was uninteresting for the majority off the episode, and then they simply unceremoniously washed their hands of him and rolled him off screen.

To wrap things up, as much as I hate J. J. Abrams and the stupid bullshit that he pulls, there is a reason that I put up with it, and that is that so far he has a 50% success rate with really satisfying end games (Alias.  Lost made me want to hurt children).  When this show actually buckles down and devotes the entirety of an episode to the overall mythology, it is a sci-fi epic that could rival at least post-season-2 X Files.  The scenes from next week looked like they were going to answer some more questions, but I watched Lost and I feel like I've fallen for this before.  But my chump ass is still going to be watching it.

Watching it, and hating you every minute, Abrams.