Quick thoughts on last night's "Fringe" coming up just as soon as I enjoy an egg-and-ear omelet..."Unleashed" was directed by Brad Anderson, and it had elements of two of his previous episodes: like "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones," it had a friendly FBI agent (for real this time) being attacked from within by some monstrous creation of science; and, like "The Transformation", it opened with a scary pre-credits sequence that was effective precisely because of how little we saw the monster, and how abruptly things happened once it emerged.
What differentiated "Unleashed" was the attempt to shine a brighter spotlight on Kirk Acevedo as Charlie, and the return of the tension between Peter and Walter. The former didn't really work; there's too much going on with the show, and Charlie's been an expositional character and little more for so long, that simply showing that he has a wife and mentioning that they want to have kids wasn't enough to make me care about him any more than I did before. And the Peter/Walter tension was interesting largely in how completely out-of-nowhere it felt. I kept waiting for some sort of explanation -- other than the omnipresent, utilitarian "Because Walter's crazy!" -- for why, after weeks of getting on rather well, the two were acting again like it was some great ordeal to have to work together, but it never came. John Noble and Joshua Jackson are both fun to watch, but I'd like a little more consistency with what little characterization "Fringe" has room for each week.
Solid episode. Nothing great, but creepy and engaging enough. Unfortunately, where "X-Files" tended to work equally well on the Monster of the Week episodes and the conspiracy ones early in its run (and where the Monster stories were pretty much the only ones that worked the longer the series hung around), "Fringe" only really feels compelling when it's dealing with the larger mythology. I'd like to get back to that soon.
What did everybody else think?
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