Mulder & Scully and the Rapidly Aging Serial Killer

1.02 "The Same Old Story"

Well, I think I've got a little bit of a case of Bionic Woman. Not quite, but similar. Basically, even though this show definitely has it's faults, I am absolutely not going to be able to stop watching it. And now it's a combination of the opportunity to look at Josh Jackson, and the desire to know what the secret about Peter's health is.

I did notice a couple of interesting things in this episode. The plot was not one of them, but that's not so important. For one thing, it looked like Anna Torv was wearing a wig in about half of her scenes. No telling what that's about. For another, the cutaway shots of Harvard weren't really Yale this time. But I'm not sure they were Harvard either. Another thing is that Olivia and Peter have very quickly fallen into the roles of Mulder and Scully. Olivia is quick to accept any random crazy thing they encounter and Peter is just as quick to start going on about how that thing is "insane." Unfortunately they don't really have the Mulder/Scully sexual tension down just yet, and they're a little bit more bland. On a related note, as soon as they walked into that warehouse thing to catch the bad guy and Olivia pulled out her gun, I started worrying about the fact that Peter didn't have one. I knew that couldn't go on for very long, so I was glad when she handed him her spare. I wonder if he'll just get to have one from now on since he's become her default back up, or if they're going to have to go through elaborate FBI red tape about it for a while.

A quick side note about the plot. I really didn't enjoy seeing things from the bad guy's perspective. It made me feel like I was watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And nothing should make me feel that way. That also reminds me, this team does the absolute worst CSI I've ever seen. I guess they make up for it by making everything else really gory. And just one more thing about the plot. It seems that everyone that Walter has ever worked with is involved in some kind of wrongdoing. At this rate, there won't be a single law abiding science professor left in the Boston area.

The words "myopic" and "highly theoretical" and phrases including the words "experiments I did thirty years ago" have already been used way too frequently for two episodes. I'm really hoping they'll tone that down. Also, there's a tremendous amount of seriousness that I feel is doing the show a disservice. I know they're supposed to be dealing with all kinds of horrific things, but a little bit of humor (other than just Peter's exasperatedly repeating whatever Walter says) would go a long way. Lost is definitely at it's best when the episodes have some humor. That's obviously half the point of Sawyer and the whole point of Hurley. Plus Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are EPing this thing, and they can definitely mix humor with action. They did a fine job of it with Transformers. Granted Transformers did have some substantial plot issues that seem to be present in Fringe as well, but humorous elements make it much easier to overlook that.

Basically this show has a somewhat interesting premise, relatively engaging characters, and very high production value (including kickass intertitles), so if it would just take itself a little bit less seriously it would probably be quite enjoyable.