Only a writer on par with William Shakespeare could express the pain and sorrow and rage that I still feel about The X-Files. I loved that show. It was must-watch TV for me. I endured the laughter and mockery of my peers to watch that show. Mulder and Scully were like friends of mine. It was so, so sad, but I even giggled at their little inside jokes. I grieved when one of them was kidnapped by aliens. And like a dumbbell, I believed that the truth was out there.
And then I wait like 34,000 years for a new X-Files movie. Not only does it not tie up loose ends, but it isn’t even about aliens. I get enraged just thinking about it. Never again, I said, would a show do that to me. And since then, I’ve rejected all serial shows (i.e., Lost), shows with cryptic storylines and cliffhangers. I put myself on a diet of procedurals instead: CSI, CSI Miami, and all the Law & Orders—basically anything with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And for the record, David Duchovny and Gillian Andersen are dead to me. If they were starring in the biopic of my own life, I wouldn’t watch it. Californication? Not in this life.
So it’s a little weird for me to be so in love with Fringe, the sci-fi show that features a branch of the FBI that investigates strange phenomenon but not aliens. My mother begged me to give it a try, and she finally tricked me into watching it by telling me it was America’s Next Top Model. Season 2 premieres tonight at 9 p.m. and I feel like a kid having her first crush. I know, I may be setting myself up for another heartbreak (and maybe I still am), but already Fringe is 10 million times better than The X-Files. Why? Let me count the ways:
1. No aliens. OK, there’s an alternative universe, but at least everybody’s human.
2. The mysteries seem more solvable. Of course, there are unanswered questions at the end of every episode. But they’re not too stupid to beggar belief.
3. The characters don’t take themselves too seriously. There’s Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), who heads up the investigations. Peter Bishop (Dawson Creek’s Joshua Jackson), the wise-cracking slack genius who helps her by taking care of his father, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who is completely insane. I mean really, Mulder did all that pouting and screaming and what did it get him? Nothing.
4. The pseudoscience is at least theoretically possible and doesn’t require great leaps of the imagination. There’s a running storyline in which computer geniuses are trying to download information from a dead man’s brain.
5. Every episode has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
6. There are no love affairs—yet.
7. Leonard Nimoy is in it. He is the shadowy head of Massive Dynamic, a huge multinational corporation that is a combination of GE, Microsoft, and Blackwater.
8. There’s a lot more racial diversity in Fringe. Yeah, X-Files had a few black people, but it really was this weird world where people of other hues were mostly used as plot devices.
9. Because Fringe actually knows where it’s storylines are going, it doesn’t rely on filler episodes to distract you from the fact that you’re being sold a bag of nothing.
10. Fringe is worth watching just for Noble. His characterization of Bishop, the mad scientist at the heart of the show, is at turns brilliant, exasperating, hysterical and tragic. It’s the best of The X-Files in one man.
