TVQuesting: Fringe is Actually Pretty Cool

TVQuesting: Fringe is Actually Pretty Cool

TV Questing
It’s hard to consider being body slammed by the flu as having any kind of benefits. Like most of the people where I live I started feeling crappy, then worse, then spent an entire night trapped in some kind of a fugue state. Not quite conscious, but not quite unconscious either there is a period of what wound up being a little over eight hours that at the time felt like weeks filled with the world spinning around me while the temperature fluctuated between incredibly hot and incredibly cold, punctuated by the need of a bucket for when the spinning got too much.

None of that, of course, was beneficial. What came after, though, was more than a week of near overwhelming exhaustion coupled with sleeping eighteen hours at a time. Those few hours I was awake I was still so fatigued that all I could do was queue up episodes of Fringe and watch them in succession before once again falling asleep.

Across the time it took for me to be able to remain awake for any proper length of time I managed to watch the entire run of Fringe, from the first episode right up to the current spot deep in the fourth season, and it’s surprising how much that show can grow on a person. At the beginning I found myself hyper critical, picking up on some utterly ridiculous dialogue and other small annoyances. But like most shows I’ve found myself sticking with it morphed from a ‘monster of the week’ formula to an interesting narrative which, in this case, spans across two universes which contains doubles of almost everyone from the show.

It was the doubles which really clinched it for me. Every single actor on the show, as far as I can tell, has managed to portray their double as unique individuals. In particular, Anna Torv, whose portrayal of the main character on the show has always felt wooden to me, manages to play her double with an actual personality. It only took a few episodes of her as her character’s double to flip my opinion from ‘Oh man, she’s not a good actress’ to ‘oh wow, she’s actually a really good actress’.

Other than that we’re kind of sitting through another television drought. There’s Game of Thrones, of course, which has thus far been almost entirely excellent, if a touch slow. Not enough to make the show entirely boring or anything, but the small tastes of large scale battles they’ve had so far are enough to make me want at least one full battle played out. If the second season runs the entire length of episodes without a full on battle until the end it’s going to be The Walking Dead’s farm all over again.

The upside for comics and cartoons fans is that Young Justice finally finished its first season, and instead of another lengthy break it’ll be kicking off season two immediately and adding a bunch of new characters to the show. So there’s always that to look forward to, while we wait on some new shows and old favorites to start hitting the air.