I love what this show does with found family (one of my bullet proof kinks as well)
Our timing is most fortuitous – Katie and I were just watching the pilot with the commentary (by J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtman FTW; the commentary was actually SO GOOD that we had to take a break halfway through because my brain was getting too stuffed. Plus, they make some outstandingly geeky references; our favorite was when one throws out "The needs of the many..." and lets the rest hang, and then the second picks up with "Outweighs!" Third: "The needs!" First: "Of the few!" ♥___♥), and to my delight, they actually bring up the found-family aspect in almost exactly those words. It's right after John Scott's betrayal and death, when Charlie's talking to Olivia in the car, and they're talking about how Olivia loses John, who she thought was family, only to find it unexpectedly in this ragtag team she builds. One of them said something like "The means to the end becomes the end itself," which I rather liked. :) I am always so thrilled when it turns out that showrunners know what they're doing.
So all this playing with alt-universes is tied into things about love and family and loss and grief, add into that what our Walter did to save Peter.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how interesting I find the use of personal history in this show. I mean, sci-fi is so much about the future, both traditionally and intrinsically. But the human story they tell alongside the sci-fi is IMO even more important on Fringe, and that is all about the weight of history.
I was just writing about this recently, dammit. (I just did a clean OS reinstall, and I've been using Gmail for note-taking, so I can't find ANYTHING anymore.) Hmm, where did I put that...ah! Here we are. I was trying to figure out some thoughts about Patrick Jane on The Mentalist, and it turned into a three-way meta between TM, Life (which you also watched, iirc), and Fringe:
"Jane reminds me at different times of, weirdly enough, Charlie Crews and Walter Bishop. It's Charlie because they've both been been betrayed and broken all to hell by the world and other people, and then pieced back together again to stagger on, with a shiny paint job but a whole slew of things still wrong under the hood. They smile the same way -- all the time, like it's one of the only things holding them together (which it probably is), and showy, but it only sometimes stretches up to meet their eyes.
As for Walter...here are two men who have sinned, and paid dearly for it. Granted, Walter's sin is on a far more epic scale than Jane's pride/avarice, but they've both paid for it (/continue to pay for it) with their sanity and their families. Their pasts won't let them go, either; Jane moreso won't let go of his any more than it(/Red John) will let go of him – which I suppose is like Charlie, again. Fringe often feels like a ghost story to me; they don't have ghosts, per se, but there's always this tangible, inescapable presence of history, from the machinery in Walter's lab to the look in Olivia's eyes. That's what I call a haunting. Jane instead wears his ghosts on his ring finger, and painted on the wall above his bed in his wife's blood. No wonder he sleeps on the couch in the bullpen instead."
The tone, cinematography, and New England location all really add to the ghost story feel, IMO.
They can and do change the future with what they do, but they can't escape the way the past has shaped them, and scarred them. It makes me really want them to use the Observers more, because the whole time-and-causality thing goes straight to the show's core.
Heavens. I'm on quite a roll with Fringe meta today...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-06 01:52 am (UTC)Our timing is most fortuitous – Katie and I were just watching the pilot with the commentary (by J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtman FTW; the commentary was actually SO GOOD that we had to take a break halfway through because my brain was getting too stuffed. Plus, they make some outstandingly geeky references; our favorite was when one throws out "The needs of the many..." and lets the rest hang, and then the second picks up with "Outweighs!" Third: "The needs!" First: "Of the few!" ♥___♥), and to my delight, they actually bring up the found-family aspect in almost exactly those words. It's right after John Scott's betrayal and death, when Charlie's talking to Olivia in the car, and they're talking about how Olivia loses John, who she thought was family, only to find it unexpectedly in this ragtag team she builds. One of them said something like "The means to the end becomes the end itself," which I rather liked. :) I am always so thrilled when it turns out that showrunners know what they're doing.
So all this playing with alt-universes is tied into things about love and family and loss and grief, add into that what our Walter did to save Peter.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how interesting I find the use of personal history in this show. I mean, sci-fi is so much about the future, both traditionally and intrinsically. But the human story they tell alongside the sci-fi is IMO even more important on Fringe, and that is all about the weight of history.
I was just writing about this recently, dammit. (I just did a clean OS reinstall, and I've been using Gmail for note-taking, so I can't find ANYTHING anymore.) Hmm, where did I put that...ah! Here we are. I was trying to figure out some thoughts about Patrick Jane on The Mentalist, and it turned into a three-way meta between TM, Life (which you also watched, iirc), and Fringe:
"Jane reminds me at different times of, weirdly enough, Charlie Crews and Walter Bishop. It's Charlie because they've both been been betrayed and broken all to hell by the world and other people, and then pieced back together again to stagger on, with a shiny paint job but a whole slew of things still wrong under the hood. They smile the same way -- all the time, like it's one of the only things holding them together (which it probably is), and showy, but it only sometimes stretches up to meet their eyes.
As for Walter...here are two men who have sinned, and paid dearly for it. Granted, Walter's sin is on a far more epic scale than Jane's pride/avarice, but they've both paid for it (/continue to pay for it) with their sanity and their families. Their pasts won't let them go, either; Jane moreso won't let go of his any more than it(/Red John) will let go of him – which I suppose is like Charlie, again. Fringe often feels like a ghost story to me; they don't have ghosts, per se, but there's always this tangible, inescapable presence of history, from the machinery in Walter's lab to the look in Olivia's eyes. That's what I call a haunting. Jane instead wears his ghosts on his ring finger, and painted on the wall above his bed in his wife's blood. No wonder he sleeps on the couch in the bullpen instead."
The tone, cinematography, and New England location all really add to the ghost story feel, IMO.
They can and do change the future with what they do, but they can't escape the way the past has shaped them, and scarred them. It makes me really want them to use the Observers more, because the whole time-and-causality thing goes straight to the show's core.
Heavens. I'm on quite a roll with Fringe meta today...