Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

FRINGE – 2008

This series is centered on six actors that play six characters: 1- Anna Torv plays Olivia Dunham; 2- Joshua Jackson plays Peter Bishop; 3- Jasika Nicole plays Astrid Farnsworth; 4- John Noble plays Dr. Walter Bishop; 5- Lance Reddick plays Phillip Broyles; 6- Blair Brown plays Nina Sharp. It is a number attached to wisdom, the wisdom of Solomon. This series is in five seasons, a pentacle in other words, hence slightly diabolical. And diabolical, devilish and other satanic creatures and worlds will be discovered, explored and suffered over and over again.

This series is a real trip in insanity in the name of science fiction and pure science. Insanity and schizophrenia, both are seen as normal, standard, basic. You have to be insane to accept to live in a world of absolute manipulation and domination. Even the end is the absolute success of this manipulation-domination even if it presents itself as a rebirth, renaissance, renascence. It is not since it is the result of the ultimate but with no reason to be final episode of this subservient acceptance of scientific ranting and raving whose slaves we are.

This series is fascinatingly obsessive and compulsive.

It is schizophrenic but it avoids any simple binary reduction. It is based on the binary existence of our world and a parallel universe that is nothing but our own world blocked so to say before the Twin Towers were brought down, hence before September 11. This other world has the same basic six characters but they are different because they live in a different system. Our world is supposed to be rational and democratic. So crazy scientists are put in some psychiatric institution or used in the wings behind the public scene and hidden away from public attention and view working for some marginal clandestine though absolutely official branch of the FBI. In the parallel world the crazy scientist is the Minister of Defense. Both of course are two versions of Dr Walter Bishop. This parallel world blocked in an ancient state of development is undemocratic. It is typically some kind of East German police industrial world with an ever present super security unit called FRINGE. But in this other world this security agency is visible, hyper visible and even overwhelmingly dominant.

If it were only these two universes it would be banal. But systematically the series is based on triads of characters and situations. The scientific pole of this utopia/dystopia is ternary: Dr Walter Bishop, Nina Sharp and Dr William Bell. The two scientists are in love with Nina who is the industrialist of this triad of crazy minds. She builds, constructs and realizes all the most undreamable fancies and plans of the other two. Then there is a third universe systematically referred to and never actually described in which David Robert Jones who escapes from his German prison by using some technology invented by the other two, Dr Walter Bishop and Dr William Bell. The first one is a thief for sure but without the other two he is nothing. He will even become the associate of Dr William Bell, when this one will have to leave the alternate universe of ours where he had taken refuge away from Dr Walter Bishop when he was institutionalized.

Such triads are quite common and basic. The two essential universe are under the observation and then finally under the colonization of another parallel world that is not specified. This world, a fourth world, the world of the Observers, is a world of utter genetic manipulation, artificial for plain humans who are implanted some enhancing device in the brain, and purely genetic afterwards with the child, Michael, who is produced without any sexual intercourse. In fact the world of the observers is a purely and entirely male universe and it will have to be defeated in a way or another because it is a dictatorship. This destruction is centered on another triad: Dr Bishop, Michael and Michael’s father known as September when he was an observer and now Donald since he has been deprived of his cerebral enhancing unit. This triad is essential since one adult man has to take Michael to some point in the future where he will be able to change the past and reset the world to before the invasion of observers and at the same time get rid of them altogether.

This is the central theme in this series: the role, power and sacrifice of fathers. Michael’s father, Peter’s fathers (there are two Peters originally: the one in our universe who dies as a child and the one in the parallel universe who is dying but our universe’s Dr Walter Bishop crosses the frontier and steals the second Peter from his parallel parents, bringing the other Dr Walter Bishop into his vengeful mood that will turn the other universe into a hostile fiend.) and even Peter when he becomes a father with the Olivia Dunham of the parallel universe (in fact his original universe) and even when he becomes a father with Olivia Dunham in our universe: and yet the first child (a boy) just vanishes from the series, sacrificed to Peter choice to remain in our universe, and the sacrifice of the second child (a girl) fighting against the observers will have to be reversed, and the girl saved. But a father has to be sacrificed (not a son: inversion of the Christian myth), one for the opening of a bridge between the two universes, one to accompany Michael to the future. There are always two fathers or father figures and only one will live the moment through, though in the end, in the final end, the survivor of the first pair will be sacrificed in his turn. No hope, dear fathers: you have to die.

And yet the last episode turns this dystopia into the most enlightened happy utopian ending. But this is a last scene or sequence and we know it is pure closing up time, last drink gentlemen and this last drink is heavily diluted in syrup: If time is brought back and the observers are gotten rid of, then at this happy moment somewhere in 2015 or so Dr Walter Bishop in our world should be alive and kicking. So his selfless sacrifice is in fact an extremely selfish nice little trip to the future to be healthy and happy when back to the present. We knew from the start that there is no possible trip back to the future if it is not aiming at blissfully surviving in the present. Never ever believe a mad scientist: crazy for sure but egotistically umbilical.

A series for people who really want to believe in phenomenal X-files and the existence of innumerable parallel universes. But be careful: it is hypnotic, hence habit forming

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU