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Show me a human fear, and i'll show you a monster. Our ancestors populated dark forests with dragons and uncharted seas with krakens. Sci-fi transmuted commies and nukes into body snatchers and Godzilla. In the 1990s, The X-Files turned post-Vietnam paranoia into an elaborate government-alien conspiracy...
This fall, the tense, compelling Fringe (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is a 21st century X-Files, with a difference. The conspiracy this time is called The Pattern: someone or something is performing experiments, using humans as guinea pigs. The passengers and crew of a transatlantic flight are skeletonized by flesh-eating bacteria; a prostitute is impregnated with a fetus that gestates, painfully, to term within hours...
...these scenarios involve an element largely missing from The X-Files: money. That show quaintly imagined a U.S. government big and competent enough to mastermind global plots. Now the feds are scrambling to keep up with them. In Fringe, the villain is unknown but appears to be connected to a shadowy supercorporation, Massive Dynamic. Working in a decades-old lab, Walter is a link to an era of government hubris, but in the 17 years since he was first locked up, conspiracy has been privatized. He's also a kind of devil's advocate, with the eccentric glee he takes...
...Fringe from being more than grim spatter sci-fi: it gets that the very things that make science terrifying also make it cool. (See also CSI.) This is especially true when it comes to the bioscience conundrums that make Fringe's sci-fi so literally intimate. On this new X-Files, the truth is not just out there. It's in here--encrypted in our bodies, under our skin, in our very DNA. If only we could figure out what we are trying to tell ourselves...
...Mail Goggles makes me answer "8 x 2" twice. I use this opportunity to tell my cousin that her feet smell...