Thursday, October 29, 2009

Fringe in danger? What!?!

TV Guide has listed Fringe among its shows that are in danger due to the ratings so far this year. True, it is in a more competitive night and much tougher time slot, but...really?

Do those guys want me to come down there?

Here is the TV Guide list. No surprise about Dollhouse, it was pulled from November sweeps and apparently isn't going to get a second miracle rebirth.

Is Your Favorite Show in Danger?

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Is Nimoy's time on Fringe almost up?













Here's a link to the LA Times article where Leonard Nimoy suggest his stay on Fringe may not last much longer. Some other good Fringe stuff from him in here as well, however.

Leonard Nimoy says his 'Fringe' experiment may be coming to an end

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Trent Reznor Fringe Promo

If you haven't seen Trent Reznor's Fringe promo, here it is. The promo features a reworking of the Nine Inch Nails song Zero-Sum by Reznor, who goes on to recite lines of dialogue from William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) over the music. It also has a great upcoming line from Walter in it. Creepy and neat!

The folks over at Fringe have said Razor is welcome to come over and be on the show anytime, though he'll probably get his head blown off or something.

Trent Reznor Fringe Promo

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Fringe "Momentum Deferred" review

Here's my review of the latest Fringe episode "Momentum Deferred" featuring really stand-out performances from John Noble and Joshua Jackson as the Bishop Boys.

Nimoy Disappoints on Fringe, but John Noble and Joshua Jackson Save the Day

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Olivia up and shooting, but Joshua Jackson steals show

Fringe season 2, episode 2 aired last night and you can read my review of it right here!

This week's monster isn't great, but Joshua Jackson makes up for it with a strong performance as the new large-and-in-charge Peter.

Olivia Up and Shooting On Fringe, but Joshua Jackson Steals the Show

Who is Anna Torv?

Learn all you need to know about the star of the television show Fringe and the PlayStation game Heavenly Sword here:


Who is Anna Torv?




Fringe shocks, impresses in Season 2 premier

The season 2 premier episode of Fringe finally arrived last night, and it featured a powerhouse performance by Joshua Jackson as Peter, as well as two genuine fall-off-the-couch reveals.

Check out my review here:



Fringe Shocks, Impresses in Season 2 Premier

Fringe 2 season premier

Well, the start of the NFL season was mostly a bust for me, but at least Fringe debuts this Thursday for season 2!

The promos have looked great. Here are a couple of links to get you ready:

Fringe season 2 publicity shoot video

Fox Hit Fringe Set for Second Season

Fringe sneak peak

Here's a clip of a little over a minute from the upcoming season premier episode of Fringe.

It features Peter and the introduction of a new character likely to be important to the show this season-- Meghan Markle (below) as the brash Agent Jessup.

Markle is a model who formerly appeared on the show Deal or No Deal.

Fringe: A New Day In the Old Town Sneak Peak


Season 2 Premier photos

Fringebloggers has some Fringe season 2 promo photos up, all from the first episode. This one is without a doubt my favorite-- just looking at it makes me laugh.

If you want the rest you can check them out here:

Fringebloggers Season 2 Premier Photos

Two articles from me today revolving around the upcoming second season of Fringe. Check them out below:


FOX Hit Fringe Set For Second Season

Joshua Jackson Says Father and Son Dynamic Key to Fringe



Fringe photos

The new promotional photos for season 2 of Fringe can be found here: Fringe Promo Shots Season 2.

The new season starts up on September 17 as the show slides into its new 9 pm Thursday time slot behind Bones. I'll have some articles on Season 2 upcoming very soon.

You can check out the Comic-Con panel on the official site here: Fox Official Site: Fringe.


Anna Torv Emmy snub

So, despite my lobbying on this blog Anna Torv did NOT get an Emmy nomination for Fringe. In protest, I'm running her picture anyway.

This kind of outrageous unappreciative Hollywood prejudice against hot women is the sort of thing that has kept Jessica Alba and Liv Tyler from their well-deserved Oscar nods for years.

BTW, if you can think of any OTHER reasons to run Anna Torv pictures in the future, please email me as the TV season is still aways off and I'm running out of them.
I don't usually OMG. But, wow.

Talk about information overload for Salty!

With folks still reeling from the Fringe finale fallout and producers defending the twist at the end, news comes down that FOX is apparently planning to renew Dollhouse! That's the biggest season finale surprise of all.

Here you can see both Anna Torv of Fringe and Eliza Dushku of Dollhouse in one pic (which has just become my favorite current pic).

For my stories on Dollhouse's renewal and the ramifications of the controversial Fringe twist, see below.

What a crazy Saturday already.

Dollhouse Renewed in FOX Shocker

Fringe Producer Defends Shocking Twist

Fringe "Bad Dreams" review

Fringe, which is already a show about wacked-out disturbing things going bump in the night, took a turn toward the even-darker side in last night’s new episode. “Bad Dreams” may or may not have been the best show of the series’ first season, but there’s no question it was the most disturbing, as the crazy events and phenomenon that the Fringe Team investigates came home to them big time in the form of unsettling revelations into Olivia’s past and Walter’s role in it.

Throughout the first part of the show we are invited into Olivia’s dreams, visions that would seem like nightmares were it not for the look of satisfaction on her face in them. It seems she is dreaming of killing folks and…you guessed it…people are actually dying in the ways she is imagining. At first the team explores the possibility that Olivia is murdering people with her mind as some kind of “reverse empath” killing machine—able to transfer her thoughts into others’ actions. It’s a theory Peter refuses to embrace but that Walter, more stern and blunt than usual, tells him is a distinct possibility.

From the beginning, even as Olivia is popping caffeine pills and begging Broyles for permission to investigate these unrelated deaths, it’s clear Walter knows more than he’s letting on. We already know that Olivia may have been a lab subject back home in good old Jacksonville, and may have been treated with the drug Cortexipahn, although she has no memory of it. We know the drug was given to children by the mysterious Dr. William Bell, possibly to create “soldiers” for the upcoming war described in the ZFT manifesto. And we know the manifesto was written on Walter’s typewriter. By the show’s end we find out for sure that Bell wasn’t the only bad man in the bad lab when Cortexipahn was being dosed out to kids.

Olivia is jolted out of her living nightmare when the team finds a common link (other than her) to the crimes in the form of a recently released mental patient named Nick Lang. Nick has a new scar on his head, a history of obsession with the idea that he was experimented on as a child, and the ability to infect people with his own emotions—which are unfortunately often self-loathing and suicidal, leading people to kill themselves or others.

Nick also is able to transfer his thoughts to Olivia, so we get some truly disturbing scenes of her committing murder, as well as one intense (although far less disturbing and far more distracting) kissing scene between Olivia and a stripper Nick encounters. Olivia feels her way through Nick’s interactions with the stripper under Walter’s hypnosis in an embarrassing and hilarious scene in the lab—after Peter and Astrid have quickly picked up on it, Walter is the last one to go “ohhh” when it’s clear that Olivia is having a virtual reality experience of the sexual variety.

Unfortunately the stripper ends up dead too, but Olivia now has enough information to track down Nick. This climaxes in an amazingly dark visual sequence where Olivia confronts him on the roof of a building, along with a bunch of other folks standing out on the ledge waiting to jump at Nick’s emotional command. Nick calls Olivia “Olive” and tells her the little he remembers about their past together as children in the lab.

Olivia remembers nothing, but Nick has expected that. “I think they wanted us to forget,” he says. At least until they were “woken up” for the coming war, a war Walter has already inadvertently hinted could be fought between parallel universes. “What did you just say?” Peter asks. Walter never answers.

Nick has always remembered some of the past, but now he has been “woken up” for good. Exactly by whom and for what we’re not sure—what we get is "the man in the glasses". He wants “Olive” to kill him. “You were always the strong one,” he says. Certainly fits, doesn’t it?

Olivia does her best in a no-win situation, and we don’t escape without casualties. But the worst casualty in this episode is the bond of trust between Olivia and Walter. I fear it will only become more fragile, or break entirely. At the end, we see Walter alone, finding an old VHS tape, and viewing “Olive” as a child after an incident where it appears she has burnt or blown up her lab room.

There are three distinct voices on the tape talking about the what happened, in a clinical nature, while we get the disturbing visual of a small girl huddled back against the wall. One voice is clearly Walter’s, the other is the lab assistant (who we know died under strange circumstances which led to Walter’s long internship in the mental hospital), and the last voice is that of Bell (and what a wonderfully familiar voice it is Star Trek fans!).

What’s clear is that the earth is about to ripped out from under the alliances in the Fringe Team. Olivia obviously possesses strange powers and abilities, as a result of the drug treatment she received as a child from Bell…and Walter. How will Olivia react to the revelation that Walter treated her as a lab rat (or cow, in this show) as a child? For that matter how will Peter react, since he already has dim views of his father’s morality and obvious affection for Olivia?

The biggest question of all, however, will probably only be answered by the appearance of Bell himself in the season finale. When Olivia is “woken up” and her powers are revealed, what is it exactly that she’s supposed to do?

Fringe "Unleashed" review

As I suspected, Fringe did not have two down weeks in a row. After last Tuesday’s middling episode, my favorite crazed sci-fi police procedural rebounded with “Unleashed” which was a genuinely suspenseful stand-alone show with strong performances by characters beyond just Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham.

Last week’s show was carried by Olivia, who was again this week strong, smart, and sexy as usual. This time, however, the two Bishops-- Walter (John Noble) and Peter (Joshua Jackson)-- and fellow FBI agent Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo, pictured) do the heavy lifting.

The plot involves the attacks of a creature I can best describe as a lizard-tiger-snake-bat thingy. It’s something Walter may or may not have cooked up in that lab with William Bell years ago. The monster starts off murdering some animal rights activists who are far more active here than those UNCG animal rights folks I remember from college. In a neat twist, we actually get to see the whole creature eventually—a rarity on Fringe.

Eventually the monster attacks Charlie and it turns out it has impregnated him (uuuggghhh!) with small wormy versions of itself that will soon break out of his belly Alien (the movie) style (double-uuuggghhh!).

The whole thing gives Walter a crisis of conscious, and it’s nice to see Peter trying to comfort him and keep him on course after the bickering the two of them have done recently. The team eventually figures out they need the beasty’s blood to save Charlie, and things get more suspenseful when Walter decides to martyr himself to lure the creature.

It’s nice to get first glimpses of Charlie’s wife and home life, since we know so little about him compared to the other main characters. There is a particularly touching scene where he talks to his wife on the phone, laughing at a bad joke she tells as she is ignorant of his…ummm…condition and potential death.

Thankfully, things go at least semi-according to plan and we’ll get to keep Charlie around. I’m still of the opinion he’s probably evil, since he so damned NICE and PURE he just has to be.

We also get to see a little more of Olivia’s jealousy over Peter’s flirtations with her sister. I like it when they do this as long as they don’t go overboard. Fringe has really played down the romance since Olivia’s busted affair with her partner in the pilot. There is a lot of room to grow here, as Olivia and Peter have decent on-screen chemistry.

All in all, a good but not great episode. Next week looks to be another Olivia-centered show, and I always like those even when I don’t like them. Well, can you blame me?

Fringe "Inner Child" review

Olivia Dunham may be the perfect woman.

As played by Anna Torv on Fringe, she’s smart, intuitive, strong, tender, passionate, tough, gentle…it’s kind of hard to find an attractive trait that doesn’t fit the heroic FBI agent who occasionally takes a bit of LSD and slips into a water tank in her underwear (I do so like those episodes). Perhaps series creator J.J. Abrams figured he needed a protagonist with all those outstanding qualities to ground the viewer, because the world Olivia inhabits is filled with chaos, mystery, and ugly conspiracy that the worst paranoid schizophrenic would have trouble imagining up.

It’s up to Olivia and her team to steer us through these crazed waters, and while wacky Walter Bishop (the great John Noble) may be the best character on the show, the episodes’ quality come to rest firmly on the strong, capable shoulders of Olivia.

If Olivia has one character flaw it is that she can be emotionally inaccessible or unreadable at times. There’s no mystery about why, since her FBI partner lover turned on her in the series’ opener and gave her a nice gaping wound for her world to see. Even though she’s achieved some closure on that front, she still holds back. Witness her lack of movement on the chemistry between her and Walter’s son Peter (Joshua Jackson) despite the obviousness of their attraction to each other. Olivia is in a sensitive place, and she inhabits a very wacky world to be sensitive in.

We see the barriers break down a bit in the latest episode “Inner Child” which shows Olivia bonding with a mysterious youngster found buried alive inside a cavernous area by construction crews. Of course, in typical Fringe style the place had been sealed for 70 years, and there’s no way the kid (whose bald head and dark eyes bear an eerie resemblance to the mysterious Observer) could have been there. Walter has some ideas about the kid, but no one knows how he came to be…except maybe that guy from the Department of Social Services who is really a CIA agent (or so he says) and tells someone on the phone that they’ve found “another one.”

Olivia lives in a ultra-complicated world. It’s neat how she’s always trying to make the mystery smaller. Despite the fact that Fringe is a show with a huge hulking mythology we’re supposed to be figuring out, Olivia is a woman of feelings and action. She bonds with the child, less interested than everybody else about his secrets and more interested in what his fate will be.

The child reacts to this, and starts giving Olivia the clues that will help her catch a nasty serial killer she’s been hunting for years. How the boy knows to do this is unclear (if you can make anything out of Walter’s crazy ramblings and theories go ahead…I’m with Peter, he’s not making sense in this episode) but Olivia doesn’t waste time on the hows and whys…she never does.

In the end you know she’ll bag the bad guy and help the boy. But you also know there are larger forces out there moving chess pieces around to some bad ends, and we don’t need to see the bald head of the actual Observer (although of course we do) to figure that out.

“Inner Child” is not one of the better episodes of Fringe. Walter is quite hilarious at times, but here the humor seems forced and over-written. Peter is an interesting roguish character himself, but he isn’t given much to do, and neither are the shows other worthy stars— Lance Reddick as the intimidating FBI bossman Broyles, cute Jasika Nicole as Astra, the Bishop’s assistant and sounding board, or Olivia’s partner Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) who is still so kind and pure you just know he’s secretly a bad guy.

No, what good is in “Inner Child” comes from Olivia, as it always does on Fringe’s lesser shows. Even when the episode misfires she’s hard not to care about. So heroic, and so in over her head, she always finds a way to do the right thing with smoke and mirrors.

Next week’s show will likely be better, as they don’t usually go two down weeks in a row. Whatever the case, I’ll be watching. Forget the big mysteries, it’ll be Olivia Dunham pulling me back on the Fringe.