![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaOkay! So, since I'm unable to work on my current vidding project because I had to send my laptop to laptop-hospital (ZOMGS!) for a week, I have instead, apparently, decided to steal my parent's computer and clip the crap out of Fringe in a desperate attempt to convince all of you who are not already watching it to watch it.
This is, needless to say, from my own TERRIBLY BIASED perspective, so if I concentrate more on certain aspects of the show, I'm not sorry. THEY ARE THE AWESOME PARTS! :p Also this is largely spoiler free without context for the clips. The two big "reveals" for the end of season one are left unspoiled, although most of Olivia's backstory as it is revealed through the first season is included because I think it's kind of necessary to her character.
There are a lot of embedded clips here - my intention isn't so much that you watch them all as watch the ones you think will appeal to you.
General overview of the show.
The show itself is kind of like the X-Files in that it has a government agent investigating the unknown and it is a mix of standalones and more mythology-arc type episodes, although, thankfully they are veering more and more towards the mythology type episodes by the end of the second season and the third promises to be mythology-heavy.
Where it differs from the X-Files is in its cast - we have one FBI agent (Olivia Dunham), who is assisted by an expert in "fringe science", Dr Walter Bishop - a brilliant man now suffering from mental illness after being incarcerated in an institution for 17 years and unable to remember much of his previous life's work, and his son, genius and perennial nomad, Peter Bishop. More details about them and the supporting cast follow.
The other major difference is that far from trying to prove the existence of the paranormal and suspecting the government of collusion, strange and bizarre occurences, known as "the pattern" keep occuring and the government want to know what's going on and suspect a giant corporation known as Massive Dynamic of collusion. The real nature of "the pattern", those behind it, and the role of both Massive Dynamic, and Walter Bishop himself in its existence, forms large parts of the show's mythology.
Questions get answered and new questions get raised with a fair amount of frequency, although I can't pretend to you that I always understand exactly 100% what those answers mean, or rather, whether I'm supposed to regard the issue as answered or be suspicious for the future, it at least provides a nice feeling of "getting somewhere".
As I mentioned above, there are two very big reveals at the end of the first season - one about the nature of the world and "the pattern", one about a character, both of which really made me sit up and pay attention so...so far at least, I grade them quite high on the WTF MINDFUCK factor.
Olivia Dunham.
So the main character is FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, who investigates this stuff. She is awesome. She kicks ass action hero style and is probably destined to save the world in the same way as Kara Thrace, but her personality is much more that of Laura Roslin. Olivia has the same quiet stoicism, the same bravery, the same determination and sheer force of will. She suffers and has angst, but never uses that as an excuse to grandstand or act out. She puts her own needs last and gets the job done.
I think this clip kind of tells you everything you need to know about who she is:
password: birthday
Another thing I love about Olivia is the way the show handles her and her gender. Occasionally, yes, she ends up stripped to her (sensible) underwear and put in a crazy science experiment. But in general the show is surprisingly good at not sexualising her beyond the fact she is, of course, a very beautiful person. She wears sensible clothes, ties her hair back very plainly, and honestly, is a really interesting example of a woman put into a traditionally male narrative role with very little amendment to her behaviour. While obviously not perfect, I really do believe Fringe has some quite good gender politics and part of that is the fact that Olivia, um, strides about the place like a dude. Yet the fact she wanders around like a man never makes her "butch" in the negative-stereotype sense and once she flat out calls her superior on the fact that being overly emotionally involved in a case is something that is always brought out as an accusation against women, but never against men - when their righteous anger on behalf of the victims is instead seen as motivating them and/or providing them with angst.
ANYWAY - what this means is sometimes Olivia gets to do awesome shit like grab people by the lapels and shake them:
password: lapels
Or RESCUE HERSELF in truly awesome style. Olivia is frequently seen running around with a gun rescuing many other people. But at the end of one episode, she gets kidnapped, and I think to myself, great, the next episode will probably be all about the rest of the team trying to find her for once. Okay, I can deal. EXCEPT, at the start of the next episode, interspersed with the rest of the team getting ready to try and find and rescue her, WE GET THESE CLIPS. All this happens before the teaser.
password: rescue
Olivia also has a family - a recently-divorced sister and her daughter, Ella. During the second half of the first season they're living with her and I love their family unit like pie. I haven't exactly found the right clips to illustrate it, but basically it becomes increasingly obvious that Olivia has taken on the role of Ella's overworked father to the point that she and her sister hang out drinking late at night discussing which one of them Ella takes after. Ella has totally internalised the "don't bother daddy while he's doing his important job," stuff and in return, Olivia indulges Ella like crazy but also does things like dump her on her assistant when she has to take her for the day. Anyway, have a very sweet clip of naptime.
password: sleepover
FINALLY, Olivia has, um, superpowers. Possibly. Maybe. Sort of. This is something of a spoiler, but - and this should give you some idea of the spoiler-level of the actual reveals - I kind of count it as more of a part of her character than a big shocking reveal. So, avert your eyes if you can't stand to know. ;)
Basically, when she was a child, Walter Bishop and his lab partner, William Bell, were the awesome type of folks to conducted drug trials on children, one of whom was Olivia, although she does not find this out until halfway through season one. The perceptive abilities these trials may or may not have granted Olivia are still the subject of a developing plotline, suffice to say something I love about the whole thing is how it affects the relationship between Walter and Olivia. Because neither Olivia, nor Walter, nor the show itself absolves him of what he did, which is explicitly called out as abuse on more than one occasion. And yet, there is the reality of Walter - a broken, sick man, who no longer even recalls much of what he did or why. A man with whom Olivia has formed a bond: she cares about him and is furious with him simultaneously.
password: cantremember
Speaking of Walter, let's move on to him:
Walter Bishop.
As a younger man he was a brilliant scientist funded by the government to invent the bizarre and the impossible, alongside his lab partner, William Bell. While Bell went on to found Massive Dynamic, the largest, most powerful corporation in the world, Walter spend 17 years in a mental institution after the death of his lab assistant in a fire. His incarceration made him mentally unstable, unable to remember many things, most critically, the fact that he may have been responsible for the genesis of many events that form the very dangerous "pattern". While often used for comic relief, the underlying darkness of the fact he may well be responsible for the dire peril the world is facing, and the fact that he is a very broken man, are never forgotten. I've seen criticisms of Walter for trivialising mental illness, but I can't, at this point, find myself agreeing. There is too much power in John Noble's performance. He's easily the best actor in the cast (although none of them are bad), and he breaks my heart usually once an episode.
Here, Walter has had to go back to the mental institution he was at in order to try and get information from another patient.
password: incoherentloon
This clip is more along the lines of the comic relief he provides -
password: rustytank
And here he is in a rather darker mood; I like this clip for two reasons. Firstly because, disturbingly, given the world they have found them in, Walter has a point, and secondly because it's always good to be reminded that Walter can be a scary guy.
password: killed
A key aspect of Walter's character is his relationship with his son, Peter. Let's move on to Peter.
Peter Bishop.
Peter Bishop is a genius, but very disaffected. He moves from place to place, working every different job under the sun, lying, conning, cheating and charming his way through life. He essentially gets blackmailed into staying with Fringe division because Walter can only be released from hospital into the custody of a direct relative. Peter does not have a good relationship with Walter because he worked through his childhood and spend most of his teenaged and adult life in a mental institution. However, throughout the show, Peter proves to be very good at calming Walter down and getting him to focus, and also begins to repair his relationship with his father, though, similarly to Olivia, the show does a good job of not losing sight of the fact that Peter is really, really angry at his dad in a lot of ways, some of them rational.
I will be honest, while I know Peter is the favourite character of many in the fandom, I don't really see the appeal. So I do apologise for not doing his character justice here. But I know he participates regularly in those heartbreaking Walter moments I mentioned above, so here are a few clips of the two of them.
Their first meeting in 17 years -
password: fatter
Awwww, don't tell me this ain't kinda heartwarming -
password: fishinglure
Finally, there are three other characters I need to talk about.
Nina Sharp, Philip Broyles & Astrid Farnsworth.
So I actually really like every one of these characters, and feel kind of bad for shoehorning them in here, but they are more supporting than main cast, much as I might wish otherwise and this post is getting long as it is. Plus, I actually found it quite difficult to find good illustrative clips because I'm not superfamiliar with the series and a lot of their characterisations is built up over time in smaller scenes.
Take Nina Sharp for instance. She is the second-in-command of Massive Dynamic - the shady corporation mentioned above, which seems both vested in helping and in hindering Fringe division. She is middle-aged, morally ambiguous and has a robot arm. In short, she's awesome and she tends to have very charged, bechdel-test passing conversations with Olivia once every episode or so. But all the ones I found were REALLY spoiler, thus you can't have any.
There's also Philip Broyles. He's Olivia's boss and knows more about the pattern than she does, and more about Massive Dynamic than she does and sometimes Olivia gets pissed at Broyles for holding out on her. In the first episode, he is a giant jerk, but turns out pretty awesome and supportive after that. Mostly he stands around looking STERN or occasionally CONCERNED. I won't lie, I very vaguely ship Olivia and Broyles, but mostly I think that's just because I wouldn't mind Broyles getting some more screentime - I think he'd be more interesting if the series let him.
Plus, I do not ship Olivia/Broyles anything like as much as I ship Nina/Broyles. Throughout the first season, those two had fascinating scenes together basically confirming that Massive Dynamic knew as much as the US Government about this crap and they seemed to have an established working relationship. Then, in season two, we get this scene.
I would give you more context, but there is none, and trust me, it's better that way. I honestly just wish that Nina would walk around and snog more random guys like this.
password: randomkiss
Astrid Farnsworth is a junior FBI agent assigned to assist Olivia. Again, she needs more screentime. And, for the record, I kind of vaguely ship her and Peter just because I think they have actual chemistry, while I see none for the primary ship in fandom (Olivia/Peter). But mostly I love Astrid for other reasons. Including, but not limited to, her relationship with Walter. She ends up stuck in the lab having to deal with his weirdness a lot of the time, and his inability to correctly remember her name (this is a running gag), and Astrid and the actress who plays her, does a really good job of showing, quietly, throughout the background of S1, how they go from being two people forced to work together, with Astrid not really trusting Walter and his dangerous behaviour and demands to the two of them becoming really good friends and really caring about each other. It's a very wonderful, understated, but powerful friendship. Again, much of this is the sum of small moments throughout many episodes, or very spoilery moments, but I think this clip illustrates their friendship quite well, and without context is not too spoilery.
password: brownbetty
AND THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS WHY YOU SHOULD GIVE FRINGE A SHOT. It's the hiatus! You have lots of time to catch up! You know you want to! :D
This is, needless to say, from my own TERRIBLY BIASED perspective, so if I concentrate more on certain aspects of the show, I'm not sorry. THEY ARE THE AWESOME PARTS! :p Also this is largely spoiler free without context for the clips. The two big "reveals" for the end of season one are left unspoiled, although most of Olivia's backstory as it is revealed through the first season is included because I think it's kind of necessary to her character.
There are a lot of embedded clips here - my intention isn't so much that you watch them all as watch the ones you think will appeal to you.
General overview of the show.
The show itself is kind of like the X-Files in that it has a government agent investigating the unknown and it is a mix of standalones and more mythology-arc type episodes, although, thankfully they are veering more and more towards the mythology type episodes by the end of the second season and the third promises to be mythology-heavy.
Where it differs from the X-Files is in its cast - we have one FBI agent (Olivia Dunham), who is assisted by an expert in "fringe science", Dr Walter Bishop - a brilliant man now suffering from mental illness after being incarcerated in an institution for 17 years and unable to remember much of his previous life's work, and his son, genius and perennial nomad, Peter Bishop. More details about them and the supporting cast follow.
The other major difference is that far from trying to prove the existence of the paranormal and suspecting the government of collusion, strange and bizarre occurences, known as "the pattern" keep occuring and the government want to know what's going on and suspect a giant corporation known as Massive Dynamic of collusion. The real nature of "the pattern", those behind it, and the role of both Massive Dynamic, and Walter Bishop himself in its existence, forms large parts of the show's mythology.
Questions get answered and new questions get raised with a fair amount of frequency, although I can't pretend to you that I always understand exactly 100% what those answers mean, or rather, whether I'm supposed to regard the issue as answered or be suspicious for the future, it at least provides a nice feeling of "getting somewhere".
As I mentioned above, there are two very big reveals at the end of the first season - one about the nature of the world and "the pattern", one about a character, both of which really made me sit up and pay attention so...so far at least, I grade them quite high on the WTF MINDFUCK factor.
Olivia Dunham.
So the main character is FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, who investigates this stuff. She is awesome. She kicks ass action hero style and is probably destined to save the world in the same way as Kara Thrace, but her personality is much more that of Laura Roslin. Olivia has the same quiet stoicism, the same bravery, the same determination and sheer force of will. She suffers and has angst, but never uses that as an excuse to grandstand or act out. She puts her own needs last and gets the job done.
I think this clip kind of tells you everything you need to know about who she is:
password: birthday
stepfather from jane doe on Vimeo.
Another thing I love about Olivia is the way the show handles her and her gender. Occasionally, yes, she ends up stripped to her (sensible) underwear and put in a crazy science experiment. But in general the show is surprisingly good at not sexualising her beyond the fact she is, of course, a very beautiful person. She wears sensible clothes, ties her hair back very plainly, and honestly, is a really interesting example of a woman put into a traditionally male narrative role with very little amendment to her behaviour. While obviously not perfect, I really do believe Fringe has some quite good gender politics and part of that is the fact that Olivia, um, strides about the place like a dude. Yet the fact she wanders around like a man never makes her "butch" in the negative-stereotype sense and once she flat out calls her superior on the fact that being overly emotionally involved in a case is something that is always brought out as an accusation against women, but never against men - when their righteous anger on behalf of the victims is instead seen as motivating them and/or providing them with angst.
ANYWAY - what this means is sometimes Olivia gets to do awesome shit like grab people by the lapels and shake them:
password: lapels
grab your jacket from jane doe on Vimeo.
Or RESCUE HERSELF in truly awesome style. Olivia is frequently seen running around with a gun rescuing many other people. But at the end of one episode, she gets kidnapped, and I think to myself, great, the next episode will probably be all about the rest of the team trying to find her for once. Okay, I can deal. EXCEPT, at the start of the next episode, interspersed with the rest of the team getting ready to try and find and rescue her, WE GET THESE CLIPS. All this happens before the teaser.
password: rescue
rescue myself from jane doe on Vimeo.
Olivia also has a family - a recently-divorced sister and her daughter, Ella. During the second half of the first season they're living with her and I love their family unit like pie. I haven't exactly found the right clips to illustrate it, but basically it becomes increasingly obvious that Olivia has taken on the role of Ella's overworked father to the point that she and her sister hang out drinking late at night discussing which one of them Ella takes after. Ella has totally internalised the "don't bother daddy while he's doing his important job," stuff and in return, Olivia indulges Ella like crazy but also does things like dump her on her assistant when she has to take her for the day. Anyway, have a very sweet clip of naptime.
password: sleepover
asleep on the couch from jane doe on Vimeo.
FINALLY, Olivia has, um, superpowers. Possibly. Maybe. Sort of. This is something of a spoiler, but - and this should give you some idea of the spoiler-level of the actual reveals - I kind of count it as more of a part of her character than a big shocking reveal. So, avert your eyes if you can't stand to know. ;)
Basically, when she was a child, Walter Bishop and his lab partner, William Bell, were the awesome type of folks to conducted drug trials on children, one of whom was Olivia, although she does not find this out until halfway through season one. The perceptive abilities these trials may or may not have granted Olivia are still the subject of a developing plotline, suffice to say something I love about the whole thing is how it affects the relationship between Walter and Olivia. Because neither Olivia, nor Walter, nor the show itself absolves him of what he did, which is explicitly called out as abuse on more than one occasion. And yet, there is the reality of Walter - a broken, sick man, who no longer even recalls much of what he did or why. A man with whom Olivia has formed a bond: she cares about him and is furious with him simultaneously.
password: cantremember
i can't remember from jane doe on Vimeo.
Speaking of Walter, let's move on to him:
Walter Bishop.
As a younger man he was a brilliant scientist funded by the government to invent the bizarre and the impossible, alongside his lab partner, William Bell. While Bell went on to found Massive Dynamic, the largest, most powerful corporation in the world, Walter spend 17 years in a mental institution after the death of his lab assistant in a fire. His incarceration made him mentally unstable, unable to remember many things, most critically, the fact that he may have been responsible for the genesis of many events that form the very dangerous "pattern". While often used for comic relief, the underlying darkness of the fact he may well be responsible for the dire peril the world is facing, and the fact that he is a very broken man, are never forgotten. I've seen criticisms of Walter for trivialising mental illness, but I can't, at this point, find myself agreeing. There is too much power in John Noble's performance. He's easily the best actor in the cast (although none of them are bad), and he breaks my heart usually once an episode.
Here, Walter has had to go back to the mental institution he was at in order to try and get information from another patient.
password: incoherentloon
incoherent lunatic from jane doe on Vimeo.
This clip is more along the lines of the comic relief he provides -
password: rustytank
under water from jane doe on Vimeo.
And here he is in a rather darker mood; I like this clip for two reasons. Firstly because, disturbingly, given the world they have found them in, Walter has a point, and secondly because it's always good to be reminded that Walter can be a scary guy.
password: killed
believe her from jane doe on Vimeo.
A key aspect of Walter's character is his relationship with his son, Peter. Let's move on to Peter.
Peter Bishop.
Peter Bishop is a genius, but very disaffected. He moves from place to place, working every different job under the sun, lying, conning, cheating and charming his way through life. He essentially gets blackmailed into staying with Fringe division because Walter can only be released from hospital into the custody of a direct relative. Peter does not have a good relationship with Walter because he worked through his childhood and spend most of his teenaged and adult life in a mental institution. However, throughout the show, Peter proves to be very good at calming Walter down and getting him to focus, and also begins to repair his relationship with his father, though, similarly to Olivia, the show does a good job of not losing sight of the fact that Peter is really, really angry at his dad in a lot of ways, some of them rational.
I will be honest, while I know Peter is the favourite character of many in the fandom, I don't really see the appeal. So I do apologise for not doing his character justice here. But I know he participates regularly in those heartbreaking Walter moments I mentioned above, so here are a few clips of the two of them.
Their first meeting in 17 years -
password: fatter
fatter from jane doe on Vimeo.
Awwww, don't tell me this ain't kinda heartwarming -
password: fishinglure
fishing from jane doe on Vimeo.
Finally, there are three other characters I need to talk about.
Nina Sharp, Philip Broyles & Astrid Farnsworth.
So I actually really like every one of these characters, and feel kind of bad for shoehorning them in here, but they are more supporting than main cast, much as I might wish otherwise and this post is getting long as it is. Plus, I actually found it quite difficult to find good illustrative clips because I'm not superfamiliar with the series and a lot of their characterisations is built up over time in smaller scenes.
Take Nina Sharp for instance. She is the second-in-command of Massive Dynamic - the shady corporation mentioned above, which seems both vested in helping and in hindering Fringe division. She is middle-aged, morally ambiguous and has a robot arm. In short, she's awesome and she tends to have very charged, bechdel-test passing conversations with Olivia once every episode or so. But all the ones I found were REALLY spoiler, thus you can't have any.
There's also Philip Broyles. He's Olivia's boss and knows more about the pattern than she does, and more about Massive Dynamic than she does and sometimes Olivia gets pissed at Broyles for holding out on her. In the first episode, he is a giant jerk, but turns out pretty awesome and supportive after that. Mostly he stands around looking STERN or occasionally CONCERNED. I won't lie, I very vaguely ship Olivia and Broyles, but mostly I think that's just because I wouldn't mind Broyles getting some more screentime - I think he'd be more interesting if the series let him.
Plus, I do not ship Olivia/Broyles anything like as much as I ship Nina/Broyles. Throughout the first season, those two had fascinating scenes together basically confirming that Massive Dynamic knew as much as the US Government about this crap and they seemed to have an established working relationship. Then, in season two, we get this scene.
I would give you more context, but there is none, and trust me, it's better that way. I honestly just wish that Nina would walk around and snog more random guys like this.
password: randomkiss
smooches from jane doe on Vimeo.
Astrid Farnsworth is a junior FBI agent assigned to assist Olivia. Again, she needs more screentime. And, for the record, I kind of vaguely ship her and Peter just because I think they have actual chemistry, while I see none for the primary ship in fandom (Olivia/Peter). But mostly I love Astrid for other reasons. Including, but not limited to, her relationship with Walter. She ends up stuck in the lab having to deal with his weirdness a lot of the time, and his inability to correctly remember her name (this is a running gag), and Astrid and the actress who plays her, does a really good job of showing, quietly, throughout the background of S1, how they go from being two people forced to work together, with Astrid not really trusting Walter and his dangerous behaviour and demands to the two of them becoming really good friends and really caring about each other. It's a very wonderful, understated, but powerful friendship. Again, much of this is the sum of small moments throughout many episodes, or very spoilery moments, but I think this clip illustrates their friendship quite well, and without context is not too spoilery.
password: brownbetty
walter & betty from jane doe on Vimeo.
AND THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS WHY YOU SHOULD GIVE FRINGE A SHOT. It's the hiatus! You have lots of time to catch up! You know you want to! :D
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 12:50 am (UTC)Vimeo's being ridiculous about letting me watch, but right when I was reading and thinking "Gee, you could rather awesomely illustrate Nina and Broyles with the random kiss", THERE IT WAS! So A+++ and also for Olivia rescuing herself, which is the first time the show made me swoon. <3's
*postpones other thoughts*
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 01:02 am (UTC)EXCEPT, at the start of the next episode, interspersed with the rest of the team getting ready to try and find and rescue her, WE GET THESE CLIPS.
I loooooooved that so much. I'm still not over how pleasantly surprised I was by those scenes. <3
Also, I still really want to know about what Phillip used to do, and to watch him save the day once or twice.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 01:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 01:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 05:28 am (UTC)I have seen one episode of this on a plane, but it was after a long period of not sleeping, and looked like one of those standalone-ish ones and featured that canadian guy from Dawsons Creek pretty heavily, which is the one you don't like I think? So, it didn't make a very good impression, but that isn't exactly fair.
*moves show back to the 'to consider' pile*
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 11:53 pm (UTC)I'm definitely linking to this on my LJ!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 01:26 pm (UTC)HM. Better get Simon to hook me up with some seasons.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 06:37 pm (UTC)Olivia is badass and awesome and just !!! I can't wait to start the second season!
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: