The ever-amiable Mr Papaya

I like 'Fringe' a lot. OK, so it's can be a little formulaic, and the actor playing Broyles is really just playing the same character he played in 'The Wire', and maybe the show's open to accusations of being an 'X-Files' ripoff - a similarity I noticed immediately, as someone who never missed an episode of the show at the time. I prefer to think of it as a post-millennial take on paranormal investigation, with J.J. Abrams bringing in the kind of things that make 'Lost' such damn good TV.

I particularly like the way that Dunham possesses fragments of Agent Scott's memories and the way that this is used - emails, phonecalls, meetings with the dead(?) man that only actually happen in her head, her mind's way of translating the shreds of his consciousness. I really like the isolation-tank sequences as well, where Dunham finds herself present within scenes of Scott's memories but can't actually hear everything that is said, for instance, because he wasn't within earshot himself at the time. Great stuff.

This aspect of the show is particularly relevant to me because memory and our relationship to the past are pretty central themes in my own writing. It's nice that I can actually engage with a mainstream US TV show in that way, it restores a little of my faith in big broadcasters.

When looked at in an overview maybe 'Fringe' doesn't seem that impressive, but it's the little things like that, or Walter Bishop's hilarious utterances (every time I watch an episode I end up talking in a "Walter Bishop voice" for a while afterwards - sad, yes, and annoying for others) that keep me watching.