Fringe Season 2

As I think I mentioned in my review of the Season 3 premier, last season I made a concerted effort to watch the show when it aired (or more specifically, the night after it aired on Hulu). This didn’t survive past the third episode. And in fact the only episodes I watched of the second season was the first 3 and the last 2. As such I really didn’t know where things were going, other than the fact that the season finale really threw me for a loop by throwing the alternate Universe side of the story front and center. Threw me for a loop in a good way, that is.


So I was pretty psyched for Season 3. I tried to get a hold of the Season 2 disks as soon as I could. I wanted to finish Season 2 before the premier, just so I’d be caught up. However, the disks did not arrive until the day of the premier. But maybe this was a good thing. Because I went into Season 3 knowing that the show really stepped up to the plate and was willing to go somewhere instead of keeping everything hidden and mysterious.

In any case, I really didn’t know too much about Season 2. I’d read a few reviews and articles and knew that the show started off strong, lost most of its steam during the middle, and came back for a strong finish. In hindsight, I’m not entirely sure I agree. The show remained pretty compelling while I watched it from start to finish. But, the show did very much loose its focus in the middle with a bunch of stand-alone episodes that really added nothing to the mythology of the show. For a serialized show, that’s less of a problem watched back to back but it can be a major pain when watching it on the air.

Season 2 did, however, suffer from a major issue that Season 1 mostly avoided. Fringe is a sci-fi show with the trappings of a police-procedural show. However, Fringe has always had a larger mythology in which everything had context. What made the first season so inspired was that most of the Fringe investigations were eventually showed to tie into the mythology as a whole. Each pattern event was related to people and individuals using advanced technology as part a world-wide plot. And each episode served to peel backs some of the people behind it, and their motivations. Though there were some true stand-alone episodes in there too, those were few and far between.

Season 2, however, still had the group investigating strange and gross things. But in a lot of cases, they were ‘just’ strange and gross and rarely had any additional meaning to them. While most of them were fine to watch, they really didn’t add anything to the show. Another thing that was unfortunately missing was some of the groups from the first season. While the new villains, the shapeshifters, were interesting they only showed up occasionally. And honestly they weren’t used all that effectively. Though I will admit that I liked their leader, Newton, who had quite a lot of charisma for as little as we saw him.

Once the truth about Peter came out, the writers really started playing with the format of the show and experimented with things. For the most part that worked pretty well, with the notable exception of the ‘musical’ episode…if there is one show where a musical episode doesn’t work it is this one. And, of course, the two-part season finally really ended the season with a bang.

Overall, Fringe Season 2 suffered only from a minor sophomore slump which lasted a mercifully short period of time. And unlike Chuck Season 3…Fringe Season 3 starts with a bang, not with a whimper. So, now I think I’m going to go back and re-watch the first season as well and maybe compare the two a bit more closely. I’m looking forward to it.