messier object

Hooray, Fringe is back – and back to direct calques of X-Files episodes.  In this case, s1e21: “Born Again.”  There’s a girl and freaky memories she can’t possibly have and a dead dude and whoooooa.

This time, Fringe is much more into explaining what the heck is going on: in “Born Again,” the strange coincidences of death and birth (or was it conception?) were more than enough to explain what was going on; nearly 20 years on apparently we need more explanation.  Because of Experimental Radiation Poisoning Treatments (Fringe‘s treatment of radiation, in general, is really on the lines of a fifties b-movie.  I’m just waiting for the Night of the Lepus calque.) and dying violently a murdered USN sub officer ends up in the head of a dying Catholic schoolgirl, who is instantly reanimated because, well, brains and spirits and dumb shit and I dunno a weird non-dualistic theory of mind, because she gets his brain’s radiation poisoning too.

Aside from the deeper digging into What’s Going On In Radiation! Science, Fringe is also taking a less agnostic tack than The X-Files towards religion, of all things.  While Fringe doesn’t have characters who are even occasionally defined by their faith like Scully was, the show is in general a lot more respectful of the notion of faith in a way I have trouble pinning down.  I can’t see Mulder (much less Scully) ever defending exorcism or actual demonic possession, for example – while The X-Files treated the weird as undefinable, it was never treated as anything symptomatic of bigger cosmic structures.  An episode like “The Căluşari” doesn’t try to reveal any truths about the existence of anything beyond the weird shit that’s happening in the here and now.  I don’t know to blame this on a change in culture in the past couple decades, or the overarching plots of the shows, with Fringe‘s whole-universe-defining mytharc.  Time, I guess, will still tell, although Walter’s ending beat calling on Isaiah and the old science-and-faith-are-the-same-thing duck wasn’t all that promising.  If you ask me, at least.

So while John Noble throws around a bunch of technobabble (although “What happened to subjects 1 through 5?” “I believe the University settled with them out of court.” was a pretty good exchange) about Tibetan theories of the mind and the right kind of drugs to do an exorcism with, we get to watch Olivia and Charlie run around Boston looking for clues.  That’s right, Charlie.  Because this isn’t actually a season 2 episode: it was made, but not aired, for the first season, which gives us the chance to see how far the show’s come since then.

The show has, frankly, improved a lot.  Importance of minor characters (neither Broyles nor Astrid do a thing in this, which makes them basically boring space-fillers) has been upped, John Noble’s Walter has gotten more sensibly nutty (or at least he’s gotten a little subtler and smarter than “whoa he’s drinking milk from the cow from a beaker! wacky”), and – this is probably the best change – the whack-you-over-the-head romance plot with Peter and Olivia has nearly been killed due to the total lack of chemistry.  When you have a one-ep victim character pushing something to happen, you should know you’re in trouble.  So in conclusion: thank god season two is back.