Fringe: Action Packed Successor to the X-Files

Fringe premiered Tuesday, September 9th on Fox, and for those of you that missed it, you will want to check local listings to see if you can catch an encore.

This is a new series by JJ Abrams, creator of of Lost. The first episode starts out with a plane crash, but unlike it's sister show on ABC, things get scary before the first commercial break. There is no doubt from the beginning that the story unfolding before you deals with the supernatural.

Don't be put off by the opening plane crash. Things go from Lost to X-Files pretty quickly.

Like X-Files, Fringe is all about solving cases that regular FBI agents would never touch, dealing with so called "fringe science", a catch all phrase for invisibility, telepathy, mind control, and anything else that has been theorized about but never proven by mainstream science.

Unlike X-Files, there is not a Scully/Mulder love relationship, though there is a tortured love story between the protagonist Agent Dunham and her boyfriend. You won't find very much kidding around or slightly off humor. Fringe stays moody and dramatic. Dunham is asked to work for a shadow agency outside of the FBI, so one has a feeling that she will not face the scrutiny that Mulder and Scully were subject to when they could not explain what really happened during some of their cases.

Also, there's conspiracy.

One of the reasons that I think Fringe will be successful is that there is an actual construct for an overall conspiracy. If X-Files dealt in shadow, Fringe deals more with the what-ifs that could be discussed over the evening news. What if our enemies developed a new synthetic virus? What if there were a way to make soldiers unstoppable? While X-Files dealt with these same subjects, we were never really sure who was pulling the strings of the conspiracy. Abrams gives a name to the conspirators, as well as the group that is trying to stop them. And it appears that members of government agencies are involved with both.

The relevant question becomes: who is on which team?

In the years after 9/11, I think the audience in general finds large scale conspiracy more believable. In the 90's when X-Files was at its highest ratings, few viewers would have bought the premise that conspiracy could exist on such a large scale, even under the guise of fiction.

For those of you familiar with JJ Abram's other work, he does not disappoint. Fringe has a good quotient of action. There are car chases and explosions, dream worlds and agents gone awry, all while Dunham tries to save the world, and the man she loves, if possible.

And just think, that's only the first episode so far.