Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Fringe season 1 ::
by William the Bloody
An airplane flying from Germany for Boston has landed... with no one on board left alive. FBI agents Olivia Dunham and John Scott are called in to investigate this bizarre occurrence, but when John suffers severe chemical burns of an unknown origin, Olivia seeks the aid of a scientist who worked with something similar in the past. The only problem is this scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop, is brilliant but also insane and has been residing in a mental institution for seventeen years. To get him out, Olivia needs a blood relative to escort Walter and the only one on record is his son Peter who would much rather gallivant abroad than have anything to do with his crazy old father. Olivia manages to blackmail Peter's begrudging help in procuring his father's intellect but the paths his mind takes them to solve this mystery opens up doorways to many more. The strange plane deaths may only be a small piece to a larger, even more unbelievable and frightening puzzle.
The Good: If you like crime and mystery solving dramas with a twist, then you'll love this. After the plane incident, Olivia is assigned to a special task force to investigate more bizarre phenomena with the help of Dr. Bishop's brilliant scientific expertise, and these phenomena are bizarre indeed. Just about everything revolves around "fringe" science such as pyrokenesis, telepathy, and parallel worlds. There is an underlying link to all the mysteries and the episodes, which starts out thin, but expands as the series progresses. The character of Dr. Walter Bishop is one of my personal favourites, as he boarders on the edge of mad scientist, sometimes seeming to have fewer morals when it hinders scientific exploration and progress. Peter Bishop is good, too, as he is the only person who can reign in his father's idiosyncratic behaviour and get him to calm down and back to reality with the rest of us. I generally like the outlying FBI characters as well. On most programmes like this, the lead character would often disobey orders from their immediate superior, sneak around, and do private off the record investigations to get results. Fringe, however, gives Olivia Dunham the full support of her team and immediate superior who often trusts her hunches despite lack of hard evidence. This was a nice change of pace from those other shows. As the season-spanning subplots came to a head, some of the ideas brought on in previous episodes played a part in the climax, which is always a swell touch, indeed.
The Bad: The lead character of Olivia Dunham bothers me. Her character is so boring and bland that I cannot stand it. She hardly smiles, doesn't seem to have any sort of hobbies, delivers all of her lines in nearly the same fashion (she could be telling someone their mother died or buying milk, it doesn't matter), the list of reasons goes on for a while. Sometimes, this does seem to come off as intentional, as about twice in the season the character needed to "charm" some information from others and her personality there seemed very different, but who knows? There are a couple of episodes that I felt left dangling, unresolved plots. You know how on television, some episodes will start with an event that leads to another event which is the REAL plot? Well, they sometimes forgot to wrap up both events, even in later episodes. That was rather frustrating. Oh, and it's almost, kind of a rip off of the X-Files, so there's THAT.
Overall, it took a few episodes to really get me solidly interested, but they did succeed. The series had a rather slow start, but once it got going, it was entertaining and engaging. The supporting cast does an excellent job of carrying an unappealing lead. Some of the fringe pseudoscience was pretty cool to boot.
A-
