Product Description
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Fringe: The Complete First Season (Blu-Ray)
Teleportation. Mind control. Invisibility. Astral projection.
Mutation. Reanimation. Phenomena that exist on the Fringe of
science unleash their strange powers in this thrilling series,
co-created by J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias), combining the grit of
the procedural with the excitement of the unknown. The
story revolves around three unlikely colleagues – a beautiful
young FBI agent, a brilliant scientist who’s spent the last 17
years in a mental institution and the scientist’s sardonic son –
who investigate a series of bizarre deaths and disasters known as
“the pattern.” Someone is using our world as an experimental lab.
And all clues lead to Massive Dynamic, a shadowy global
corporation that may be more powerful than any nation.
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Teleportation, mind control, astral projection, invisibility,
pre, spontaneous combustion, reanimation: these are
among the peripheral sciences--or "pseudo-sciences," as one
skeptic puts it--examined during the first season of Fringe, a
Fox network TV drama debuting on Blu-ray with the full first
season (twenty episodes) offered on five extras-laden discs. The
notion that those phenomena could have a genuine scientific basis
is intriguing enough. But co-creator J.J. Abrams (whose bulging
resume as a director, writer, and producer includes Lost, Alias,
and the 2009 Star Trek feature film) has even more on his mind.
Along with the weird science, the series features a multi-agency
task force investigating related acts of terrorism that may very
well add up to a threat of unimaginable global proportions;
people who are exactly what they appear to be (i.e., insane) and
others who are anything but; plot twists galore; family drama,
interpersonal relationships, corporate evil, cop chases...
There's a lot in play here, and while it doesn't always hold
together (and like any new series, it takes a while to hit its
stride), Fringe is rarely boring, and never less than
impressively ambitious.
The pilot introduces us to the main characters, principally FBI
agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv, good but not great in the show's
central role) and others on the task force brought in to
investigate some gross goings-on aboard a jumbo jet (a
"self-eradicating, airborne toxin" reduced everyone to blood and
s). Seems this is but one part of "The Pattern," a series of
synchronous, similarly shocking events that unfold as the show
progresses; in subsequent episodes, lots of people are killed in
graphic fashion by all manner of horrors, including y
monsters (slugs as big as a football, teethed parasites that can
crush your heart), a that freezes a busload of passengers
"like insects trapped in amber," people so radioactive they can
literally make your brain boil... it goes on. Helping Dunham and
the rest of the force figure it all out are scientist Dr. Walter
Bishop (an appealing John Noble), who's spent the past 17 years
locked up in the loony bin and whose research may be responsible
for some of the crimes we witness, and his son-babysitter Peter
(Joshua Jackson). As for the "fringe" element, Dr. Bishop and
other, less benign geniuses jump-start a dead man's brain,
photograph another victim's cornea in order to access the last
thing she saw before death, connect Dunham to her boyfriend so
she can experience his memories of the incident that left him
, use high-frequency vibrations to enable bank robbers to
pass through a solid vault wall, and much, much more. As for
where and how all of this ends up, let's just that enquiring
minds will have to hang in for the long, complicated run.
High-definition bonus features are many and varied; among the
best are "Deciphering the Scene" (brief explications of key
scenes in every episode) and "The Massive Undertaking" (detailing
how certain special effects sequences were pulled off).
Exclusively on Blu-ray are expert scene analysis and BD-Live
writer-producer commentary. --Sam Graham