PURE GOLDER Why Fringe Is Playing A Dangerous Game

The weekly sfx.co.uk editorial turns its sights on Fringe, Merlin and Medium

Fringe returned to UK screens this week with a low-key season premiere a new format that seems designed to a) give fans of the show lots of fun Easter eggs and hidden bonuses to discover and b) totally bamboozle casual viewers. You certainly can’t accuse the makers of the show of lacking chutzpah. Fringe, while never having been on the brink of cancellation, has neither achieved massive ratings success; it’s always been more of a hit with critics than the great unwashed. So you’d have thought the writers may have been tempted enter the third season with more accessible stories; maybe not a return to the monster-of-the-week format of the early days, but plots that make sense without the need of a flow chart and Powerpoint presentation.

Instead the show has gone in completely the opposite direction. The “Story so far…” segments at the start of the episodes are beginning to feel like a trailer for a trailer for a highlights show; random staccato images and info bursts that threaten to make your brain overheat.

The new format seems almost a two-fingered salute to any notion of appealing to casual viewers. In case you didn’t know (mild spoilers ahoy, but it’s started in the UK now, so I feel no guilt), series three flits back an forth between two parallel universes, with the same actors playing different versions of themselves in each. It’s even more complicated than that; the Olivia from our world is stuck in the alternate world, while their Olivia is pretending to be our Olivia in our world (which basically requires her to look like a startled bunny most of the time, but Peter hasn’t noticed so that’s okay).

If that weren’t enough, the show isn’t even flitting between the universes within episodes. What we’re getting is an episode set in the alternate world one week, then in our world the next week, and so on. If you’re not religiously following the show, that’s going to be mightily confusing. For instance, say you’ve never seen the show before and you watch it one week and enjoy it, when you tune in next week, it’ll be like watching an entirely different show with the same actors.

I feel qualified to comment on this as I spent three episodes of Farscape back in the day, utterly, utterly baffled because I missed the episode in which Crichton was cloned, and each one went off with different set of crewmates. For a good stretch of the season the show alternated episodes between those two crews (you can see the similarity to Fringe). Having missed the crucial explanatory episode “Eat Me” I was tuning in for the next couple of weeks puzzled why Crichton was in two places at once. But hey, I watch enough of this skiffy nonsense to guess that something like that must be going on; the less sci-fi literate might not be so forgiving.

So I fear that Fringe may be playing a dangerous game. On the other hand I’m glad it is. While the pragmatic side of my brain is worried for the show’s populist credentials, the fan side is doing a little Numfar dance of joy. It’s a clever, complex, intriguing, outrageous and audacious show that just keeps on managing to surprise (and disgust) in ever more ingenious ways. I love spotting the subtle differences in the alternate universe  (The Red Lantern, The Red Arrow, a hit musical called Dogs) and I love the way that the episodes set in the alternate universe have a credit sequence with a different colour scheme. It‘s geek attention to detail that appeals to, well, geeks like me.

My only hope is that there are enough viewers out there like me, to keep the show safe from cancellation.

Over on Merlin, the crew seem to have hit on a new format too: remaking old episodes but remaking them better. The comedy Goblin episode seemed like a second stab at the ghastly Troll two-parter from last year, but this time it was actually genuinely funny. The Gwaine episode was the Lancelot episode all over again (even down to Gwen getting flirty and the episodes simply being titled “Lancelot” and “Gwaine”), but benefited from the fact that cheeky chappy Gwaine was a lot more interesting than the insipid Lancelot. The show really does seem to have found its stride.

But one thing that’s getting really annoying is that Merlin himself doesn’t seem to have any magic other than telekinesis. Worse still for poor old Colin Morgan – who has to learn the lines – is that every object seems to require a different spell (and accompanying babble of old English) to move it. Just for once, in a fight scene, it’d be nice to see Merlin use invisibility, or create some flames, or vanish something, or even produce a rabbit out of a hat or some flowers from up his sleeve. But no, as soon as you see Arthur getting in a pickle, you know Merlin’s going to levitate a stick or unbuckle a horse saddle. Invisibility is cheaper than telekinesis, so it can’t be a budget issue, so come on, Merlin writers – more imagination please.

(Talking of pickle, anyone else notice a pickled egg agenda in the show this year?)

Finally, this week, a quick word about Medium. Now, I’ve always loved Medium (while gently taking the mick out of the way Allison’s dreams conveniently drip feed info at the right dramatic moments), but even I was wondering by the end of season six if I wanted a seventh. It wasn’t that the show was actually degenerating badly, but its trademark quirkiness was becoming a bit run-of-the mill. But with season seven so far the show seems to have discovered whole new levels of silliness, and a second wind. If the Freaky Friday antics of the season premiere weren’t enough (Allison and her daughter Bridgette swap lives) we got Allison’s six-year old (also psychic) trying to explain asex dreams in the second episode (“They were fighting in their underwear”) – you have to wonder what the actress’s parents thought. Even the integration of Allison’s visions seems better thought out and less of a handy plot crutch. Her powers, though, are growing more extraordinary by the week; quite how having visionary dreams and seeing ghosts leads to body swapping is a leap of fuzzy logic that only a show like Medium could pull off. You can only shudder at the thought of Ghost Whisperer trying to pull off the same trick (or ghastly Aiden attempting to act like his Jennifer Love Hewitt).