If you're like 80 percent of sci-fi fans, you've been meaning to get around to binge-watching Fringe for a while. The supernatural drama—about an off-the-books FBI team that investigates "fringe science" (time travel, drug-induced superpowers, alternate dimensions, etc.)—wrapped just last year but is already on track to be a cult fave. It's had such a slow, steady rise to popularity that now the mere mention of Fringe can invoke several "Man, I still need to watch that" responses simultaneously.
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Freaks and GeeksThere's a reason for that. *Fringe'*s creators combined the best of its predecessors' successes and built them into a bendy, windy maze of brilliant science fiction that is often woefully underrated—except by those who've actually seen it, of course. Fringe is basically Alias meets The X-Files with investigator Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) serving as the perfect Dana Scully/Sydney Bristow hybrid, weathering a nonstop barrage of insane murderers and superpowered zealots with a freakishly cool disposition. At her side are super-scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his son Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), and between the three of them there's enough oomph for a cornerstone sci-fi series, ripe and ready for some long-overdue absorption into your cultural lexicon.
So if you keep saying you should watch, now's your chance. Go forth, quantum explorer. Keep this guide stowed in your tailored blazer pocket, and make sure you bring back some custard when you return.
Number of Seasons: 5 (100 episodes)
Time Requirements: Roughly 83 hours and 20 minutes—about three and a half days. Each episode is about 50 minutes long, so if you clock 10-hour days (600 minutes, or about 14 episodes) on Saturdays and Sundays, it'll only take up 4.5 weekends, or 9 days, of your life. Want to stretch it out? Watch four episodes per night for 30 days. Feel like skipping Season 5 (because it isn't all that great)? You'll cut about nine hours and 45 minutes from your tenure.
Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix, Amazon Prime, DVD
Best Character to Follow: Resident Faustian genius-weirdo Walter Bishop. The harebrained scientist who both creates and resolves most of the show's dangers is beyond brilliant, beyond insane, and—as an increasingly forgetful old man whose only crime is loving his son too much—100 percent the glue that holds the show's emotional fabric together. Basically, the rule of thumb is this: Never skip a chance to follow any character played by John Noble.
Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:
Let's put this in shorthand first: Season 1 is "the one where you learn about Olivia and her, let's say, abnormal childhood and all its fallout." You also get a bunch of freaky events that sometimes have little or nothing to do with the show's myth arc, other than being either "Cortexiphan stuff" or "weaponized other-dimension stuff." Season 2 is "the quantum mechanics one," introducing the creepy Observers and the alternate dimensions, which will produce the show's most important points and, more or less, its raisons d'être. By Season 3 we've headed full-tilt into madness, the two alternate universes and their mirrored characters battling for their own dimension's survival at any cost (which, they believe, necessarily means destruction of the other). By Season 4 the show has gotten a little shaky, but its reasoning is still mostly going strong. It's also "the one where we learn through William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) how thin the line between genius and insanity truly is." The premise of Season 5 is basically but what would happen if the Observers took over and this show became a dystopian thriller?!?!, which is fine, if you're into that sort of thing. Now that you understand those arcs, here's what you can skip entirely.
__Season 1: Episode 2, "The Same Old Story" __ A bottle episode—if not in name, then certainly in practice—in which a Frankenstein-esque scientist creates and artificially ages his "son," who then is encouraged to abduct, murder, and harvest unsuspecting civilians' pituitary glands to keep himself from hyper-aging and dying. The only thing you'll miss by skipping this one is the freakish opening few minutes in which a fetus is born, grows into a man, ages, then dies—all in a matter of minutes.
Season 1: Episode 12, "The No-Brainer" Another pretty insignificant episode in which Sheriff Andy Bellefleur from True Blood creates and disseminates a video via the Internet that literally boils the watcher's brain.
Season 2: Episode 7, "Of Human Action" A tween boy steals mind-control drugs from his father to highjack a bunch of people to find his mom, who he is convinced was driven away by his jerk dad. Teens are the worst, and none of this matters. However, at the end Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) emails William Bell, who is supposedly dead (hmmmm), about their mind-control experiment being a "success." So there's that.
Season 2: Episode 19, "Brown Betty" To get any kick whatsoever out of this silly space-filler episode you'll need two things: one, a real passion for the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the Enterprise crew cosplay as detectives and dames in the holodeck; and two, to have enthusiastically watched the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer no fewer than 10 times. If these criteria apply to you, maybe you'll dig Walter's musical (and heavily allegorical) noir fairy tale, which he concocts to amuse Olivia's niece after Peter disappears. If they don't apply, stay far, far away. There be choreographed numbers here.
Season 3: Episode 9, "Marionette" A very messed-up dude obsessed with a deceased ballerina steals all her donated organs and reanimates her body only to discover the corpse definitely is not the same woman anymore. It's quite a cinematic episode, but Frankenstein and Black Swan did it better. To know: Olivia is still kind of bummed Peter couldn't tell that it was Fauxlivia and not Olivia he slept with, which is both the fairest and least fair way to be about the love of your life sleeping with an alternate-dimension version of you.
Season 3: Episode 18, "Bloodline" These Fauxlivia-centric episodes will really start to wear on you after a while. It's not just because almost everyone in the alternate universe is an asshole in comparison with their prime counterparts, but also because—like a tall person wearing a hat at a concert—they obscure what you're really here for: the resolution of agonizing cliffhangers left in the previous episode in the "real" Olivia's dimension.
Season 5 Look, there are certainly Fringe fans who enjoyed the fifth and final season of this show, in which Olivia, Peter, Walter, Astrid (Jasika Nicole), and William Bell emerge in 2036 from a twenty-year amber petrification in order to stop the Observers, who have annexed Earth and enslaved the human race for its own good (or so they say). But to claim Season 5 is in any way on par with its four far superior predecessors is to spit in the face of its protagonists' awesome character development.
In the first four seasons, Olivia is an all-around badass genius with superpowers, capable not only of building a team and solving insanely complex and unlikely cases about the very fabric of existence, but also of holding her own in literally 99 percent of dangerous situations. In Season 5, writers thought it would spice things up to have this epic hero reduced to a limp damsel in distress caricature who can't recover from the loss of her daughter, even when the crew reunites with her in the future. More broadly, the final season just feels like the writers threw up their hands and said, "Eh, what the hell, we already finished the story we meant to tell. Let's just do whatever crazy stuff we want—and then erase all of it at the very end so our original conclusion stands."
Seasons/Episodes You Can't Skip:
Season 1: Episode 7, "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" The first time we start uncovering what is actually going on in the Fringe world. Jared Harris (aka Lane Pryce on Mad Men) plays David Robert Jones, an extremist who, even from a maximum-security German prison, manages to get exactly what he wants out of Olivia and the gang—a code-named location, extracted from Jones' dead colleague's brain—which as it turns out has quite catastrophic consequences.
Season 1: Episode 8, "The Equation" This is, if you're a return viewer, "the one with the flashing lights." A pattern of red and green lights is used by a nefarious network of double agents in the FBI to paralyze people for extended periods of time while they hypnotize pliable geniuses, a musical child prodigy, and a mathematician, to finish a formula that will allow them later to pass through matter, and—eventually—between dimensions. It's especially great because Walter volunteers to go back to the institution that utterly broke his psyche over 20 years ago in order to convince the mathematician, who is also institutionalized after being driven insane by the hypnotization, to help save the prodigy kid from meeting the same fate.
Season 1: Episode 13, "The Transformation" Without spoiling too much let's just say a scientist goes giant-vicious-hedgehog-Mr. Hyde while in-flight on a plane. You can imagine how well that goes.
Season 1: Episode 14, "Ability" In a harrowing race to disarm a bomb, Olivia discovers she was indeed part of Walter's all-children Cortexiphan trials when she was growing up with her stepfather on a military base in Jacksonville, Florida. This is "the one where Olivia turns off the lights with her brain." It's the "you're a wizard, Harry" episode, basically.
Season 2: Episode 16, "Peter" The episode in which we finally understand why all this weird crap is happening, and it all has to do with love—and a little bit of understandable selfishness.
Season 2: Episode 18, "White Tulip" The great thing about this show, apart from the head-trip pseudoscience and inter-dimensional warfare and everything, is how perfectly its actors play their characters and their relationships with one another. This episode uses a fairly common "I can save the woman I love from dying if I go back and alter history" structure to tell a larger, sadder tale about Walter and the disastrous consequences of his choice to alter the fabric of the universe to save his son. Via another man's story, Walter is able to explore not only faith but also forgiveness, learning that while his choice was cataclysmic, he has to find a way to deal with its consequences.
Season 2: Episodes 22 and 23, "Over There" Parts 1 and 2 Easily two of the best episodes of the entire series, this two-part finale has Peter reckoning with Walter's catastrophic decisions by agreeing to go back to his own dimension with "Walternate"—which, of course, is a very bad idea. (Plus, pssssssst! This is the one where Olivia and Peter finally get over their baggage and just accept they're meant to be. Finally.)
Season 3: Episode 7, "The Abducted" This one has a major metaphor in the Candyman, a kidnapper who abducts children and literally sucks the lifeblood out of them via their pituitary glands so he can stay young. If you don't tear up at least a little at the emotional ending, you're a heartless monster.
Season 3: Episode 8, "Entrada" This is one of showrunners' favorites. As an episode that splits its time equally between the two universes and includes enough subtle relationship markers to sum up what's at stake on Fringe at this moment in the series, "Entrada" is what executive producer and screenwriter Jeff Pinkner called "a great entry point." If you've been shoveling 48 hours' worth of episodes into your eyeholes for the past few days, you don't really need an entry point, but it does offer some very real sci-fi feels: Peter realizes Olivia is actually Fauxlivia masquerading as his OTP, confirmed via a cutely romantic test, and another piece of the world-destroying machine is delivered into the very wrong hands.
Season 3: Episode 19, "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" Coming after a particularly annoying alternate universe detour, this visually and emotionally spectacular episode is in the vein of other cult shows' novelty episodes: Peter and Walter use LSD to enter Olivia's mind to save it from William Bell's still-present consciousness. This includes becoming comic-book versions of themselves—literally, with thought bubbles and everything—to battle her demons, including the memory of her abusive stepfather.
Season 4: Episode 6, "And Those We Left Behind" If you thought this guide had it out for bottle episodes, think again. This relatively autonomous ep follows a husband and wife and their desperate attempts to be together even if it means altering the fabric of time and costing others' lives through aggressive time travel. It's also just the right kind of heartbreaking to lighten up the dragging misery of Season 4. Plus, it involves the divine ratio and a Faraday cage, so this episode is only minorly pseudo-scientific, compared to many of its recent fellows. (Now might be a good time to note that a lot of scientists despise Fringe and the fictional fibs it tells for the sake of plot. This is why we can't have nice things.)
Season 4: Episode 11, "Making Angels" Alternate Universe Astrid is still a genius, but she has a bunch of super-sad issues, so when she comes to visit Astrid Prime and the two get to know one another, it makes for an utterly adorable (and necessary) episode.
Season 4: Episodes 21 and 22, "Brave New World," Parts 1 and 2: Showrunners at this point believed they would be canceled, so these two episodes are the real intended ending to Fringe. What came next, in Season 5, was a total inconsequential stream-of-consciousness hypothetical that really didn't need to happen, because Season 4 wrapped up the show's loose ends so eloquently.
Why You Should Binge:
This show can certainly be enjoyed piecemeal, especially in the first season when a bunch of one-off phenomena play out like chapters in an epic, very disturbing bedtime story. Still, Fringe accelerates to exhilarating speeds very quickly, so gobbling a handful of these suckers every night will prove far more satisfying, not to mention easier to follow.
Best Scene(s)—William Bell in Olivia's Brain:
There are a bunch of great scenes here, but Anna Torv having to essentially pretend to be Leonard Nimoy for an entire episode (Season 3's 17th episode, "Stowaway") is by far the funniest. William Bell's consciousness sets up shop in Olivia's brain, which makes an otherwise very sad episode (about an immortal woman who keeps trying to kill herself but can't) incredibly amusing. Almost as amusing as imagining how much Star Trek: TOS Torv must have watched to prepare for this one. Frankly, it's a crime against humanity that her impression (get a taste here) didn't win her an Emmy.
That said, we should also never forget the Monty Python tribute acid trip from Season 5. (OK, fine. Not everything about Season 5 was bad.)
The Takeaway:
Only you can prevent an interdimensional, universe-ending catastrophe caused by the irresponsible flouncing of the laws of physics and otherwise playing god.
If You Liked Fringe You'll Love:
If you've read this, you already know that The X-Files, Alias, and Lost are all safe bets, but if you want to go deeper into the almost-corny, supernatural-slash-pseudoscientific realm, Roswell and Orphan Black are excellent picks. It also might be worth exploring other older Fringe influences like The Twilight Zone and Ken Russell's 1980 film Altered States.
