Fringe Cringe

I like the TV show Fringe, I truly do. But I confess that I really, really want to love it.

And I realize that this is largely due to the separation anxiety/grief that is going to hit me after the series finale of Lost.

It’s a sad and lonely thing, hoping to find love with another before the first relationship is over, but when something is ending it’s not unnatural to start to look to the future. It is perhaps cold and calculating, not waiting until the credits have rolled and the television corpse is cold, but there will soon be a cathode ray void to be filled.

Having said that, it does however put a lot of pressure on the next best thing.

While Lost has hit a handful of rocky patches during its run, it has remained captivating for six seasons. My faith in the show is so strong that at this point the finale is a journey worthy of a televised Icarus: I may worry whether the wings will work, but the only way to find out is to take that final leap of faith and hope that it soars into the sky, but not so high that it causes everything to come crashing to the earth. In other words, I hope it doesn’t try so hard that it loses sight of The Island and all the people that inhabit it.

Over the years the masterminds behind Lost have convinced me to make that leap. The show has been captivating and confusing but I never felt that it pandered to its audience. It showed how strong network television can still be. It was worthy of a leap of faith because even when it occasionally went down the wrong path it was always a journey worth taking.

However, because of the season finale of Fringe, I am now concerned that I will never be able to trust a show in quite the same way.

The two part finale of Fringe, which had the main characters fighting to escape from an alternate universe and get back home, was going fine until the very end of the final episode when it had a moment of such cringe-worthy stupidity that I found myself grinding my teeth and thinking “Ah c’mon, they can’t really be doing that.”

Because I hate it when smart characters do dumb things just to advance the story. Stupid people doing stupid things is fine and can lead to great tragedy and comedy, but when smart people do dumb things the result is a mess of epic Humpty Dumpty proportions. I don’t mean doing stupid things like trusting the wrong person or falling in love and it leads to disaster; I mean doing something they’ve learned was a mistake and doing it again as if they never had the first experience.

Here’s something I learned from television…


The classic television series The Prisoner is a show that has a smart main character doing smart things. Things rarely worked out in his favor (and even when he wins, it’s uncertain whether he won anything at all), but he is always consistent in his actions.

There is an episode entitled “The Schizoid Man” (and, as an aside, I always thought there was a ‘t’ in the word ‘schizoid’ – I'm glad that never came up in Spilling Bea) that is particularly relevant when discussing the finale of Fringe.

In that episode the main character, Number Six, has to protect himself when another agent is brought to The Village in order to impersonate him and then psychologically break him. Of course, as is always the case with The Prisoner, there is much more going on as well – betrayal, the on-going battle against authority, the right to privacy and secrets, and what it means to be an individual. There is always a lot of stuff going on in The Prisoner.

What I learned from that episode many years ago was this: always, always, always have a password that only you and a handful of your most-trusted friends know. That way if you and your team ever get split up, kidnapped or sucked into an alternate universe where everyone has a doppelgang-ing duplicate, there will always be a sure fire way to ensure the real you comes back home.

A secret handshake, the punch line to a favorite joke, the answer to a simple question (Q: Who’s your favorite superhero? A: Swamp Thing) would all be examples of identity checks. They’re not perfect and I’m sure they could be tricked, teased or tortured out of someone, but at least an effort has been made to protect everyone. Because if body snatching aliens are coming from outer space, there better be some kind of test in place to check if your best bud is now a pod person.

And it’s not as if the characters in Fringe are new to this stuff. Even if they’ve never watched an episode of The Prisoner they have seen a lot of weird stuff including (most friggin’ important of all!) shape-shifting alternate universe invaders. And once you’ve seen your best friend killed and then impersonated by some bad guys, you would think that some sort of safety protocols would be put in place. Cuz, y’know, you probably don’t want something like that to happen twice.

Simple questions like “Who was the first girl that ever slapped you” or “What color is your underwear on a Sunday” or “That was no ladle, that was my knife!” would elicit a response that no alien shape-shifting body snatcher from another universe could ever hope to duplicate.

And it drives me up the wall when smart characters do dumb things or don’t act as smart as I think they should. Put it this way: if I can think of it, they should have thought of it, too.


I’m still going to tune into Fringe next season, but the show is going to have to try a little bit harder. I like it, but I’m not sure if it’s ever going to be true love.

Oh the loss of Lost. Will I ever feel the same way about a television show once you’re gone?

(By the way, my super-secret password question and answer: “Q: Who was the greatest baseball player of all time? A: Frank Mahovlich!” Go ahead, let some shape-shifting alien figure that one out.)