Fringe

A large commercial plane is flying through an electric storm at night. One sweating, panicked passenger pulls out what looks like an insulin pen, lifts his shirt, and injects it in his belly. The next thing you know, his face starts to bleed and melt, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark. The man lurches into the aisle, freaking out the passengers, and within minutes, everyone's skin melts off.

This is the opening scene of the premiere episode of Fringe, the latest series from J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias. You can tell this is an Abrams project right away from of the "shock and awe" method of the premiere, and if not from that, then from those Michael Giacchino string crescendos with which Lost fans are so familiar. The episode starts out feeling like a hybrid of Outbreak and Silence of the Lambs (you'll understand when you watch it), and by the end, it sets the groundwork for what looks to be 21st century rehash of the X-Files with the episodic structure of House and the mythos-building of Alias and Lost.

Now to the characters. We meet a trio of federal agents: Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), her secret boyfriend and fellow agent, John Scott (Mark Valley), and their unnecessarily mean boss (or captain, or whatever FBI agent team leaders are called) Phillip Broyles, played by the steely Lance Reddick. They learn that the plane landed, autopilot style, on the tarmac at Logan Int'l airport, and that no one has entered it -- probably due to the fact that all they can see of the inside is blood splattered on the passenger windows. Agents Scott and Dunham enter the plane in hazmat suits and discover no survivors -- just skeletons with pools of melted flesh around them.

Their investigation leads to a self-storage space where Agent Scott finds a laboratory filled with computers, chemicals and caged animals. A man emerges from a storage unit and Scott chases him. The chase ends where it started, and the bad guy blows up the unit, allowing him to escape and badly injuring Scott and Dunham. Later, Dunham wakes up in the hospital to find that Agent Scott survived the explosion, but that he was exposed to the chemicals in the storage unit -- something similar to the stuff that turned the flesh of the plane passengers to goo.

So Dunham takes it upon herself to try and find a cure for this "infection," despite attempted obstructions by major-asswipe Agent Broyles, who apparently has something against her because she was part of some internal affairs investigation that brought down one of his friends. She discovers that there was a scientist, Walter Bishop (John Noble), who experimented with, um, stuff that turns your skin translucent, and that he's been locked up in a mental hospital for seventeen years because someone got killed in one of his experiments. Presumably, he can help figure out how to save Agent Scott, but only if she can get to him -- apparently, as part of his sentence, he can have no visitors except for family members. So Dunham tracks down his estranged son, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) in Iraq, where it looks like he's trying to con some people, and asks him to help her. Because he refuses to help, she tells him that she's seen his "file" and threatens to let certain people know where he is unless he comes with her. He relents.

They both arrive at the hospital, and Dr. Bishop, batty and chock full of non sequiturs, tells her that he can help if he can see the patient. She manages to get him out, though Peter warns her that he's crazy and not to be trusted. They arrive in Boston (we know because they introduce each new setting with gigantic floating 3D lettering that hovers over the location as if it were part of the landscape), and examines Agent Scott. He takes a sample of skin gunk, and then says that he needs to get into his old lab -- somewhere beneath Harvard's Kresge building -- to figure out what it is.

Of course, the lab's been shut-down, but somehow, with her boyfriend's life at stake, Dunham gets it re-opened. There at Harvard, Dr. Bishop acquires an elaborate list of necessary supplies (including a cow), and runs his tests. Unfortunately, he can't create a cure unless he knows the exact chemicals Scott was exposed to. So they're pretty much screwed, unless of course they could identify the man Scott was chasing, and then find that man, and then get him to talk. But they only have 24 hours! No problem:

Dr. Bishop tells Dunham that there's only one way to do it -- she must read Agent Scott's mind by sticking a metal rod into the base of her skull, drinking a cocktail of LSD and other drugs, and lying in a vat of water while Bishop hooks her up via wires to Scott's brain. Bishop assures her that it's been done successfully in the past (and can even be done to the dead -- up to 6 hours after they've died!). In this scene, I believe we see the model for how this show is going to work. After every time that Dr. Bishop makes some outlandish scientific assertion, Pacey -- I mean, Peter -- makes some witty Kevin-Williamson-esque wisecrack. It happens like six times in a row.

Anyway, blinded by her love for Scott, and despite Peter's protestations, Dunham accepts the whole package. What follows is kind of like The Cell, and Dunham searches Scott's mind for a face. She sees it, and immediately runs down to headquarters to create a computer model of it. Immediately, we see a result from the search -- but I won't tell you who it is. I don't want to give away everything.

I will tell you that the remainder of the episode lays the foundation for another conspiratorial mythos in the vein of the Dharma Initiative or SD6, and that the climax includes a pretty awesome twist, and that even if you missed the pilot, what you read here is enough exposition to know what's going on. From the season-preview they showed at the end of the episode, it looks like Dunham, with the quirky assistance of the Bishops, is going to tackle some aspect of fringe science (paranormal stuff, psychic phenomena, reanimation, etc.) every week. If the pilot is any indication, we could have a pretty decent, but perhaps not astoundingly good, new show on our hands. I guess that's what you could call tentative endorsement?