As the rather epic title of this post indicates, I'm a little behind, for which I apologize profusely. After this week I'll be dripping with free time and able to resume normal posting activities, but until then please just bear with me. Anyway, for the sake of catching up, I've combined these two posts into one, which kind of works out for me since none of these episodes was especially interesting.
Starting with Fringe, it seems that three weeks in the show has established its formula and is intent in sticking to it. This week, that formula involves gas that solidifies when in contact with the air (leading to the Jurassic Park-mosquito effect) and a person who thinks he's having premonitions of future events. In actuality, his brain is intercepting messages being sent on the ghost network by...somebody.
Ultimately, my two big problems with Fringe are still there. First, I think in trying not to make Lost, the show has overcorrected too far in the other direction. The lack of any sort of big picture is frustrating. Four hours into Lost, we had heard the monster, seen a polar bear, and discovered that the island heals people. Heck, four hours into Alias we knew SD-6 was evil, the CIA was good, and Milo Rambaldi was a crazy inventor. But four hours into Fringe, all we know is that something called The Pattern is happening and that Massive Dynamics is not to be trusted.
Second, and perhaps more important, is the issue of Olivia. Frankly, she is just not interesting and, so far, has contributed very little to the show. Even Peter has managed to get interesting, thanks to the snark and mysterious past, but Olivia remains mopey and bland. Yet the show essentially rests on the shoulders of a character that I couldn't care less about. The show could survive its formuliac nature and lack of any big picture if it had compelling enough characters, but as of right now, it does not.
Meanwhile, Sunny unleashed two more episodes on us last Thursday, one hilarious and one lame. "America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model" featured some truly funny moments, including the return of Green Man. In fact, I loved just about everything about the Sweet Dee/Charlie plotline. Meanwhile in the A-story, Frank and Mac searched for models for the bar's new billboard, in Mac's case it was a search that turned into a Bachelor-esque contest, complete with clover-shaped coasters to hand out to the winners. However, I thought Frank's antics were a little funnier, especially when he threw bleach at Dennis ("anything can happen on the runway") and his takedown of Dennis' photoshoot ("I'm no longer turned on by mules)
The second episode, "Mac's Banging the Waitress" was a rare miss, likely due to the fact that Dee and Frank were completely absent. The resulting episode had some funny ideas (both the "best friend" competition and the idea of Mac banging the Waitress were concepts that seemed solid) but no real laughs. Ultimately, it was an episode that sounded better in concept than in execution.
However, I'd say neither of them were real classics, and I think that so far this season has yet to match the inspired levels of hilarity and outright evilness that the previous seasons of the show have reached. Hopefully that will change with this week's episode (which looks all kinds of promising).
Fringe: B- Sunny - "Next Top Model": B+ Sunny - "Mac's Banging the Waitress": C-
No comments:
Post a Comment