I can't compare it to X-Files, which I only started to watch recently (was a bit too young for it in the 90s), but I would say that Fringe shows some originality in its background story, which needs some time to pick up and solves the loose ends as well; the episodes are mostly driven forward by single cases and the style doesn't change that much, and I guess there's a greater focus on drama then in X-Files, but if you're mainly bothered by lack of development, you should at least try to watch the first series to the end and then decide if the pace of storytelling is too slow for you. There will always be "filler-episodes", but judging from what I've seen from X-Files and also from Millennium so far, that wasn't different in these shows, too. In these cases, there's still John Noble to enjoy.

Yes, you should. Disclaimer: This statement is by a party who has only seen bits and pieces.



The thing is though, these shows had strong writing teams as well as strong casts with work ethic. They didn't just wing the filler episodes - A lot of thought was put into them. In fact, with X-Files the "fillers" are a whole lot better than the actual overall plot of the show. That was just downright lame after the first one or two seasons. I always skipped the plot episodes and just stuck around for the fillers. Some of them weren't that good, but some of them were downright excellent.

So.... just like every X-Files ever?


Seriously though, Fringe is unadulterated garbage. Terrible storytelling (here's a drinking game, take a gulp whenever John Noble refers to an experiment he worked on in his past which somehow is becoming meaningful), terrible characters (the girl has to be the most boring lead ever and John Noble's "quirky fringe scientist" gimmick gets old really fast), terrible writing, I gave up early in S1 because it was so bad and intelligence-insulting. I was never such a huge fan of X-Files but it was way better, at least the writing was solid and it had a decent cast of characters.

The latest episode of The Americans was fantastic. Quickly becoming one of my favorite shows airing right now. I'd put it about on the same level of quality as Homeland.

More or less my thoughts. To me it just felt like those NCIS and Bones shows with a mediocre and poorly executed mysterious element, not too dissimilar to the forgettable Mysterious Ways, trying to masquerade as something different and intelligent when really it's the same filtered and unresearched garbage as before.

So far I've found Fringe not so much 'bad' as it is 'not good'. There is a difference, albeit an minor one.

The main problem is that I'm over half of the way through the first season and not a single episode makes even a lick of sense by itself. Every. Single. Episode so far ends in the same pseudo-Deus Ex Machina fashion: "we'll show you how this works and/or why this matters... later." The show is constantly hinting at broad-reaching intra-government conspiracies, extra-terrestrial interference or burgeoning corporatocracies (all valid, if not exactly original subjects that I would still totally find amusing to watch unfold), but so far there's been less than no effort to try and reconcile any of the dozens upon dozens of loose ends the show keeps throwing at its audience. It's not so much lazy writing as it is procrastinatory... although if this trend continues much longer, it will be lazy and I'll reward it by dropping the show forever.

As to the characters: Old dude is 50% brilliant, 50% dogshit and never, ever anything in between. The rest of the cast is serviceable, I guess, but pretty much everyone just falls into stock TV right now... though Lance Reddick manages to sculpt the totally boring "chief commissioner" character he was given into someone that I actively look forward to, which just provides further evidence of how great Lance Reddick is and how weak the writers are.

Even still, it's aeons better than superficial procedural junk like NCIS and Bones and Medium and Law & Order/CSI: City.

Or maybe just aeon. Haven't gotten far enough to make that kind of judgement.

Yeah...I watched a few episodes of Fringe when it first started and found every single character unmenorable and uninteresting. So not only can they not save such a badly written show but they would probably still suck in anything else.

Every time I'm talking to someone and they mention liking these shows I give an involuntary mental-sigh and lose a little bit of respect for their taste/judgment.

Oh the plight of having "good taste"/being an elitist.

I watched the entire run of Fringe,
if you're having such problems with it so early on in the first season i can't imagine you'd enjoy the rest of the series,
things get only more complicated and inexplicable later on,
and while i am glad i stuck with the series, i sometimes found it taxing to get through episodes...occasionally letting 3,4,5 episodes to pile up before i rallied myself to catch up,
i won't spoil anything by revealing what comes later, but the show is almost more interesting in discussion of its ideas and mythology than watching the program itself

The languages themselves were pretty good, but that's cause they were handled by the same dude who invented the Dothraki and Valyrian languages in Game of Thrones. I hated how the elvish family (forgot their names) kept switching between English and their native language, though, that looked goofy.

Also the whole, "let's speak in English 99.9% of the time except when we swear so we can pass through the censors but still have edgy content" is growing really, really tiresome. In fact, I'm not entirely sure it ever wasn't tiresome.

Firefly is the only show I can recall where it didn't feel (as) awkwardly shoehorned in. On the other side of the fence, Farscape's 'frell' is probably the most aggressively annoying example... although Farscape in general could best be described as "aggressively annoying," so, par for the course.

I was under the impression that for the longer, Castithan-only scenes, when they start out in their subtitled language and then switch to English it's implied that they're speaking Castithan the whole way through, it's just "rendered" as English after a while to avoid too many subtitled passages. I mean, that's an old, pretty common technique, right?

Yeah, I mentioned that in my first post about the show. I agree with Az though, they perhaps want to have this strange ethnic flavor while at the same time pleasing the mainstream, I'm not sure it's quite good for their rating to have full scenes with subtitles :/ 3rd episode tonight, we'll see, the 2nd was lame.

About Fringe, I watched the first season in 2008, I thought it was interesting but I never wanted to continue. I've seen some episodes here and there and it had the same feeling that Lost has. The "it's complicated, we're doing a smart show, guys!!!" feel.

Fringe is at its core a pretty dumb/simple show trying to be clever and deep but mostly failing at it. It has its share of more interesting moments and some episodes were fun, though. And yes, John Noble is sort of a gimmick, but still, he's one of the best things about the series. Some nice one liners. They did develop a larger myth arc and focus on it later on, but I stopped watching around the 3rd or 4th season or so. I also think Anna Torv can act if she wants, that lack of emotion and stiffness is just her character.

Frack you!

I was never a big fan of frack, actually. And yeah, I wanted to like Farscape, I really did.

I THINK it's 'frak' for the re-imagined series. And I was sort of okay with it, since it was one of the very few (thank god) ties/tributes to the original BSG, but it was definitely a bit overused. When "motherfrakker" and, worst of all, "clusterfrak" started being dropped in common parlance, I wanted to revolt.

"Godsdamn" just totally sucked, though. Not even distantly amusing.

I actually liked it a lot. But that's just me. The ned was just so fucking weird. But the first 4 seasons are quite interesting. If you enjoyed any part of it you can enjoy pretty much the entire series.

I'll stick with Fringe for a while. For all its problems (and there are many of them), the sad truth is that it's still in the upper echelon of sci-fi television shows. To quote Todd VanDerWerff of The Onion AVClub, "it's not great TV, but it is great Sci-Fi TV." While I'd not go quite that far, it certainly is watchable, and that's more than I can say for Babylon 5...

And I rather like Anna Torv. She'd be a great Vulcan. That dude from Dawson's Creek, however, can go DIAFF.

I have friends who adore B5. I've tried soooooooo hard. I wish I liked it as much as they do.

So Heroes gets a bit of a bad rep these days, but I'm liking it so far. Despite its goofy moments, it's keeping me hooked and I have no idea what might happen next, which is more than I can say for a lot of things now. Pretty damn cool actually. Not really sure if the writing is legitimately good, but the fact that it's unpredictable so far counts for something for sure, and the cool setting is nice. The characters, while not all likable, are colorful and exciting to watch.

Was the new Defiance episode better than the last one?

I'm gonna watch it tonight. We'll see.

edit: hmm. Well. You know. It's cheesy. I find myself wanting to like it and looking past a lot of its flaws and lamer aspects though. This is coming from someone who enjoyed both SG-1 and Atlantis. I'm just craving SF.

Whereabouts in the show are you now? Season one is amazing, I don't think anyone will disagree there. Season 2 is a trainwreck, then it gets a little better with Season 3.1, while 3.2 is terrible again. It goes on like that until it was eventually cancelled around S4 (Rightfully so).

Yeah, just the first season. A buddy of mine basically says the same thing. So who knows if I'll even make it that far. But I dig western-themed Las Vegas-like stuff, so this is pretty damn good so far.

Yeah definitely finish the first season. The second season is only about 10 episodes I think so I guess you'll make up your mind then to continue or not.

Err... amazing, really? It can be an entertaining show, but the writing has always been pretty spotty.

I haven't seen Heroes, but I imagine Misfits is better.

That's one I've heard about, and would like to see sometime. It's definitely on my list to check out if I can find it.

Utopia is great British TV as well and has one of the same main actors (the black guy, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett).

Misfits is absolute rubbish (seriously, how the hell can anyone like that?), but Utopia and Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror series have both proven very enjoyable, especially the latter.

I didn't like Misfits enough to keep watching/finish it, but it wasn't that bad. There were a couple episodes I really enjoyed.

edit: just finished the first season of The Americans. INTENSE! One of the best shows on TV right now.

The third Defiance episode was so boring. Why does sci-fi always suck? Bring back Firefly!

Yeah, definitely the weakest so far.

There's always Next Gen on Blu-Ray. It basically looks like a brand new show and, if it weren't for the occasionally silly 80s vogue hairstyles, really does look like it could have been produced just last year. Now that Season 3's out, it's pretty much the best sci-fi available right now.

Oh goodness. I think TNG may be my favorite TV show. Up there with The Wire/Breaking Bad anyway.

Have you tried watching any of the HD remasters? Fucking revelation, dude. You haven't seen Riker's beard unless you've seen it in full 1080p HD.


In other news: am I the only one finding the new Defiance episodes significantly better than the pilot? It's still not exactly 'good', but it's definitely passably entertaining.

Passably entertaining is a good phrase to describe Defiance. Kinda like a lot of Stargate for me, and even some Farscape.

I didn't notice a significant dip, no. All the eps have been about the same level of quality for me.

And naw...I've seen TNG so many times. The only way I'll watch it again anytime soon is if I enter a serious relationship and the girl hasn't seen it, as it's basically essential viewing for anyone who wants to be heavily involved in my life.

Fringe is turning much less shit in its second season... in fact, I'd hesitantly even call it actually good at this point. I still have no clue where the hell it's headed and I can't help but think the writer's may have felt the same way but it's still, slick entertaining stuff and I'm actually finding myself looking forward to each new entry. They've greatly de-emphasized the weak police procedural stuff and seem to have completely dropped the old dude proclaiming "OMG, this showed up in one of my old cases, we can now link plot points together with ease!"; two elements that nearly caused me to drop the show in its infancy. I'm glad I didn't.

Cronenberg aficionados and Monster-of-the-Week X-Files fans are strongly encouraged to check out this completely stand-alone episode, which could easily stand toe-to-toe with the very best of either of the aforementioned. If you only watch one episode of Fringe, make it this one.

I watched the pilot of Defiance during an episode of insomnia and it was entertaining, but really... Did they have a shopping list of clichés - setting- and plot-wise - that they had to hit to get the thing on air? Really now...

Also, after years since last seen it, I started on Millenium again, and man, I'd completely forgotten how dark, gloomy and apocalyptic it is. I mean, a lot of modern tv-shows go for that atmosphere, but for some reason, these 90s shows hit the mark much better. Maybe it's the way of portraying things - in pure black and white back then while today it's all different shades of gray. But yeah, still top notch.



I'm a big fan of both so I'll give it a shot, if I still remember this when I get home. If it isn't as good as you say, I swear to god...!

MacMoney is gonna have to choke a bitch.