Thursday, September 17, 2009

This Week in Fringe: 9/17/09

It's finally here, the second season of Fox's Fringe, and the start of a new This Week In feature. I may have only gotten into Fringe recently, but after finishing watching the entire first season last week, I was more then ready to get some more; especially after finally seeing Leonard Nimoy as William Bell. So, coming into this episode I was definitely excited to see more of the elusive Mr. Bell and find out more about this "alternate universe".

Episode 1 - "A New Day In The Old Town"

The episode opens up with a mysterious man fleeing from his crashed car, and then soon reveals that he can mold his face into that of others with the aid of small device. Later, from that same crash scene, agent Olivia Dunham returns by flying out the same windshield... weird, I know, but what else would you expect from Fringe?

The thing with this episode is that there's two stories running, you have the whole Olivia returns / Olivia is mildly crazy story, and then there's the face-changer who seems to have connections with the alternate universe. The problem is that the stories get separated a bit longer than they should, and end up feeling unimportant even when they're supposed to be.

Quite frankly, considering after the last season's great final two episodes, I was a bit disappointed with this season premiere. Nothing really seemed to happen, nothing from the first season finale was really explained, and overall this felt like it should be a lousy mid-season episode and not the season premiere. Maybe I'm just a bit annoyed that Leonard Nimoy didn't show up like I had hoped; but I really didn't find this "creature of the week" to be that interesting, and I know that Fringe has done and can do much better than this. There's always next week I guess...

Overall Score: 7/10

Missed the episode? Watch it on Hulu (starting tomorrow!)

Reminder: As of next week, This Week in Fringe will be a Friday morning feature, as Thursday nights will be dedicated to FlashForward, which happens to air in the same time slot as Fringe.

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