Fringe

Just finished watching season one of the US series Fringe (2008) (Yes, I'm slow, but we don't have Sky and I had to borrow the box-set from Blockbusters, Okay?) This show, by Lost producer JJ Abrams, is not about hairdressers but concerns an FBI agent investigating 'fringe' science events. The 'fringe science' events include plane passengers turning into goo, computer viruses that turn people's brain's to goo, giant parasites that wrap themselves around your heart, scientists who turn into or are eaten by monsters, women who get pregnant in the space of a few minutes, lots of vomiting goo.... Well you get the idea. Goo is important in this show.

Actually, I quite enjoyed it. Many people have pointed out how much it owes to the X-Files, and this includes an executive producer by the name of Darin Morgan. Morgan wrote some of the best episodes of the older show, including one of my favorite's, Clyde Bruckman's Final repose, about a man who is able to 'see' everyone's death. Chantilli Lace, indeed.

Fringe isn't very original, (but what on TV is?), but it's great fun. My favorite character (or cypher; they're all horrible stereotypes) is Walter, the scientist who spent seventeen years in a lunatic asylum. Walter is a stereotypical 'mad' scientist, who is an expert in everything and is totally disconnected from 'real life.' It's what I foolishly thought being a scientist would be like before I found out you have to be narrow, authoritarian and totally uninterested in anything beyond your speciality (sorry, the bitterness is coming through.... Maybe I also spent too long in the asylum....) I also like Gene, the lab cow.

Abrams certainly knows how to write addictive TV. I couldn't stop watching Lost when I got into it properly, and the same is true of Fringe. Some interesting science fiction ideas are mixed in with some ludicrous ones, and, as with most series, some episodes work better with others, but on the whole it's fun.

In thematic terms, the show is clearly post-9/11 in a way the X-Files weren't. Anti-terrorism is a major focus of the FBI, and Homeland security is a major player. Even the FBI offices look like something out of Star Trek; we're truly living in the future, folks. The emphasis is on the biomedical rather than the Extraterrestrial.

Fringe's attitude to science is also interesting, and somewhat ambiguous; it's shown as something that can be terribly threatening and is running out of control, yet we also have Walter, who uses science in our defence. However, Walter has many dark secrets from his past, and is shown at several points to have acted without a thought for the consequences for his actions (as is typical for mad scientists since Frankenstein).

If this were a different sort of blog, I'd start ranting about how 'science and 'reason' are our friends, and are going to save us all, and how Fringe is dangerous propaganda. However, this isn't that sort of blog and my opinions of science as an institution are, like Fringe's, rather more ambiguous. The obviously-named Evil Corporation, 'Massive Dynamics,' looms over our heroes, and is shown to have its fingers in weird, repulsive and unethical science at almost every turn. And he who pays the fiddler calls the tune.

This reflects a common anxiety -- which I share, by and large -- that science and technology represent power that is quite often in the hands of the powerful and amoral. The stereotype of the narrowly-focused scientist who ignores or rationalizes away the dangers of his work also has truth; I knew a number of individuals like this when I practised science at Sussex. But then, and this is what's so terrifying -- we increasingly, totally, rely on science and technology in our lives; this blog wouldn't exist without them! This means that we have to place a lot of trust in the hands of engineers, technical and social. Often this trust is justified, but this is by no means invariable, because we never quite know who's side they are on.