Fox's Fringe: Feeling a Little Lost?

On Tuesday, September 09, 2008 Fox premiered the pilot of what may promise to be the station's latest smash hit: Fringe. The new show is brought to viewers by the same creative minds behind series like Lost and Alias and movies like Mission Impossible III and Cloverfield. With projects like these under their belts, and J.J. Abram's spotlighting the creative thought-box behind the series, Fringe already promises to be yet another head-scratching, mind-boggling fan favorite.

True to his typical form, J.J. Abrams submits viewers to yet another series of strange images, even stranger events, and an all-around confusing edge-of-your-seat series premiere. Few can probably forget the number of questions sparked by the pilot of his other smash series, Lost: What caused the plane crash? Where are the survivors? What's that creature in the woods? Well guess what? Fringe is no different. This pilot pulls out more questions from the viewing audience than it throws out answers, to be sure. It's a little frustrating . . . but it's also what tends to keep Abrams' fans watching.

While I would love to go into the plot of the pilot, I have to admit it wasn't the actual episode that captured my attention as it was the few seconds before a nicely timed commercial interlude. In these brief seconds, Abrams and the crew behind Fringe displayed images introducing the commercials: a butterfly, a leaf, a hand, apple, and frog. Each image seems normal enough . . . until you take the time to look at them closely (which the show's producers hardly give viewers enough time to do, a thing I'm sure is very intentional).

If you don't look closely enough, you'll miss the fact that the hand has six fingers, perhaps reminiscent of the famous three-toed foot on Lost. The leaf has a triangle in the center. The butterfly bears the image of skeletal hands on each wing. The symbol for the Greek letter Phi appears on the back of the frog. The apple half's core contains the image of a human embryo where the seeds should be. Each comes equipped with a small golden dot somewhere around it. And each leaves viewers wondering a question any J.J. Abrams fan is familiar with: What does it all mean?!

It's upon considering this question that J.J. Abrams fans might also recognize a developing pattern in the developmental process of the acclaimed creative mind behind Lost. This realization, of course, leads to another question: He's pulling a Lost on us, isn't he? Thus far, the question seems to be yes. We're already being plagued by strange symbols, all with great symbolic significance (possibly) and mathematical/scientific possibilities (not unlike the numbers and hieroglyphics on Lost). The first strange event we see is the mysterious event revolving around, what else but, an airplane. People we assume are dead are, presumably, brought back to life. There's even an amusingly humorous presumed crazy guy; Hurley, meet Dr. Walter Bishop.

Oh, and let's not forget the mysterious corporation behind all these scientific anomalies. In lieu of the Hanso Group, we have William Bell and a company called Massive Dynamic. Throughout the pilot of Fringe, advertisements are seen for Massive Dynamic, including a billboard with the slogan: "Massive Dynamic: What do we do? What don't we do." Later in the episode, another display reads "Massive Dynamic: Your world is ours." Besides being slightly reminiscent of the old video game adage "All your base are belong to us," the slogans seem to be a big "nah-nah-nah, boo-boo" to all us out here in TV-Land left wondering, "Oh man . . . what does that mean?!"

Oh, oh! I almost forgot one little thing. Some people watching the premiere might have thought nothing of the name of the random kayak F.B.I. Agent Dunham saw in . . . er, one of the stranger moments of the show (don't want to ruin anything for those who haven't seen it yet). But anyone who knows anything about J.J. Abrams knows that anything with a name is probably significant. So when you see the name A. Zeno on the side of a kayak, it might not be a bad idea to let your mind wander to the old Zeno's paradoxes, Zeno machines, the quantum Zeno effect, and so on . . . all very mathematical, and all very mysterious.

The only thing J.J. Abrams and the creative geniuses he works with don't leave up to much question is the source of the show's title. Just as Lost focuses on a group of people who are lost, Fringe focuses on a group of people discovering the secrets behind an experimental science known as (you guessed it) fringe science. Even that seems like a possible tie-in to Lost. Some of the scientific weirdness occurring on that show is pretty "fringe." Teleportation and magnetic anomalies? Pair that with Fringe's reanimation and astral projection and you've got . . . well, a lot of really weird stuff.

So here's my theory. Fringe is actually a big, elaborate explanation of Lost. All the questions born from Lost-the island monster, the mysterious reappearance of people we all saw die, and more-will be answered on Fringe. The network change was just to throw us off, make us ask even more questions, and keep us guessing until the next set of questions emerges to distract us from the ones we've asked before. And what, you ask, will answer the questions we have from Fringe? Well, J.J. Abrams is behind the Star Trek movie set to come out next year . . .