First Fringe review: Very positive!

Check it out! Very positive!

Every once in a while a pilot comes along that is so perfect, such a shining indication of what the final series will be, so perfectly cast and directed, that it's impossible to look away.

That pilot, ladies and gentlemen, is definitely FOX's phenomenal science-tinged drama Fringe.

In a nutshell, Fringe is The X-Files for the new millennium: eerie, gripping, and still haunting even after the final credits have rolled, albeit containing a humor that never existed in that series. In this case, the aliens aren't from outer space: they're the mega-corporations that dot the American landscape, pushing science and technology past their limits and exploiting that for their own gain. It poses several ethical questions: when does the pursuit of scientific discovery go too far? Who is monitoring the rapid advances in technology in today's day and age? And what happens when a scientist--or a group of scientists--decides that the world is their laboratory?

Longtime readers of this site know my longstanding love for the pilot script, from Transformers scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman... who previously worked with executive producer J.J. Abrams on his seminal ABC series Alias and on the feature films Mission Impossible III and Star Trek. My original review of Fringe's pilot script from last October can be found here.