Guest Review: The Dark Knight (2008)

By: T-Rav

The Dark Knight is my favorite superhero movie ever. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s as close to perfect as any of the big players in this genre, and in many ways transcends the superhero format altogether. And, of course, it’s often thought of as a deeply conservative movie. I agree, but for somewhat different reasons than the oft-cited ones.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

Hopefully the basics are known to most people here. In the second part of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) is waging his battle to clean up Gotham and its criminal underbelly, with the help of Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) and D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). In retaliation, the mob enlists the maniacal Joker (Heath Ledger) to take our hero out (read: the plot of every ‘90s Batman movie). What seems like a straightforward conflict, however, quickly takes on much larger stakes as the Joker takes control of events, overthrows the mobsters, and wages war on Gotham, with an agenda that only gradually becomes clear. Batman and his allies are pushed to—and beyond—the limits of their endurance to prevent Gotham from descending into total chaos.

Why It’s a Great Movie

I was blown away by this movie the first time I saw it, and that impression hasn’t changed. The cinematography and well-paced musical score were many people’s first introduction to Nolan’s technical genius as a director, which Inception subsequently confirmed. An interesting point made before is that for a Batman movie, most of the action takes place in the daytime; yet there is a certain quality to it that makes it feel like night, all the time. A clever element in this is the way in which the film closely mirrors the post-9/11 world, given its terrorism allegory. We have warnings of mayhem broadcast, a suicide bomber of sorts, and even a shot of the aftermath of an explosion that resembles the World Trade Center rubble. The subtext is clear without being ham-fisted.

The acting is similarly great. Heath Ledger’s show-stopping performance as the Joker has been exhaustively discussed on five hundred other sites, so I won’t say anything more about it here; rather, I want to point out the ensemble work you see here with the actors. In addition to those already mentioned, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are great as always, and Maggie Gyllenhaal—well, I thought she was a step or two up from Katie Holmes as the love interest, for whatever that’s worth. Even the minor supporting characters are surprisingly well drawn. Also, given that this is a Nolan film, it goes without saying that The Dark Knight is about as far from the campiness of the Schumacher era as you can get. This is gritty, grim realism all the way through (though not entirely without humor—the scene where the Joker destroys a hospital is chilling and laugh-provoking all at once), yet nonetheless ends on a ray of hope.

The only flaw of sorts is the plotline involving Dent/Two-Face, whose character was not fleshed out as well. I would have suggested saving him for the third movie, except the way things played out in the movie there’s no other obvious way he could have gone. (If you have thoughts on this, by all means suggest alternatives in the comments.)

The Dark Knight and Conservatism

After the movie came out in 2008, there were a lot of commentators at National Review and elsewhere who argued that it was clearly conservative, mainly because Batman’s struggle against the Joker mirrored the military/law enforcement’s fight against terrorism; ergo those who want to stop terrorism are the good guys. One guy—I forget who—went so far as to call Batman a stand-in for George W. Bush. Before Andrew’s head explodes, I want to say that while there’s some truth to this, it’s a bit superficial and needs some digging into.

Obviously, much of this movie revolves around the clash between Batman and the Joker, who represent two ways of looking at the world. The Joker is a nihilist. He informs Batman that morality is a social convention, “a bad joke—to be dropped at the first hint of trouble.” Push people hard enough, he claims, and they’ll forget all about ethics and fight like animals for survival. Batman, on the other hand, stands for the idea that people can stand up for something good outside of themselves, rather than act selfishly. True, the men and women of Gotham haven’t been very encouraging in this regard, but that’s why he’s doing what he’s doing—to awaken them to the better angels of their nature. Seen in this light, the fight between Batman and the Joker is not a matter of one person beating the other, but a struggle of opposing philosophies.

This complicates Batman’s task because he can’t simply dispense vigilante justice and kill the Joker. He’s never been a fan of that method anyway, but it becomes awfully tempting given this anarchist’s crimes and the fact that he’s constantly daring Batman to “break your one rule” and kill him in cold blood. Arguably, this would save a lot of lives, but it would also be an affirmation of situational ethics and the notion that the ends justify the means, which is what the Joker is claiming—and which is also, incidentally, a very liberal belief. In order to defeat the Joker and what he stands for, Batman must therefore fight within a constrained morality. The constant debate over the extraordinary measures he takes is evidence of this; for example, he creates a machine that conducts surveillance of the whole city and then hands it over to Freeman’s character, the one man who expresses misgivings about it, destroying it after the Joker is located and put away. Nolan doesn’t come down squarely on either side of the “security vs. civil rights” debate; what he does clearly say is that power must be handled carefully and sparingly; the lengths to which Batman goes are a case of extreme circumstances, not day-to-day affairs. This is all very conservative.

And then there’s the movie’s finale, which needs explaining in some detail.
The Joker sets up one last conundrum for the defenders of Gotham: Two ferries are rigged with explosives, and the people on each are given the detonator for the other boat. One is filled with criminals, the other with ordinary citizens. The people on each ferry are told if they blow up the other boat, they will be allowed to live; if nobody on either boat has pressed the button by midnight, they all die.

Now, what we don’t get here is a deus ex machina of any kind. Batman can’t come in the last minute to save everyone; he’s tied up fighting the Joker. The cops are too far away. The choice comes down to the people on the ferries. In each case, we see them come to the very brink of blowing each other up. The convicts, as might be suspected, nearly stage a riot, wanting to take the detonator from their guards by force; but what happens on the civilian boat is even more telling. The impulse is to kill the criminals, who after all “deserve it” because of their crimes, and they hold a vote which overwhelmingly decides to do so. Here we see the democratic process put to perverse ends: under direct pressure, the people have voted to commit murder.

But in each case, something happens. One of the criminals steps up and tells the guards to give him the detonator; he then promptly throws it into the water, and he and others gather to pray. Meanwhile, none of the civilians want to be the one to actually press the button. A man who was pressing for the decision finally takes the detonator, prepares to trigger it—and after a long moment, can’t bring himself to do it. It’s at this point that Batman is finally able to beat the Joker and prevent him from blowing up the ferries himself, but really, he’s already won. Faced with the prospect of certain death, unless they chose to blow up other people—a literal “kill or be killed” situation—the people of Gotham, after a moment of desperation and readiness to do the deed, made the choice to sacrifice themselves in the name of what’s right.

This is an obvious rejoinder to the Joker’s version of morality, and the fulfillment of what Batman has been seeking all along. His goal, as he explained as far back as Batman Begins, was never to just beat up criminals, but to inspire the people he protected to believe that they, too, could make the right decisions. Batman isn’t a vigilante; he’s a symbol for good and people’s capacity to choose it. Seen in this light, this scene is the climax of The Dark Knight and indeed the whole trilogy. It also makes a deeply conservative point: Our institutions, as excellent as they might be, can only carry us so far. Ultimately, a society depends on the behavior of its citizens, not the structures we’ve put in place, and on the recognition of an objective morality, whether it derives from religion or natural law.

Conservatism sees human nature as fixed and flawed, and I generally have an especially dark view of it. People will be selfish a great deal of the time, as we see over and over. But that’s not the same as saying that human nature is irredeemably evil. Equally fundamental to our beliefs is the existence of an objective good, one people can aspire to, however short they may fall. That’s the broader argument The Dark Knight makes about the human condition, and that's why this is not only a great film but a great conservative film.

Thoughts?

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Guest Review: Kill Bill (2003)

By T-Rav

In discussing Pulp Fiction last year, several of us remarked that Inglourious Basterds was our least favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s movies (as opposed to Pulp Fiction being perhaps our favorite), for several reasons but mainly having to do with its glorification of mindless violence. The two Kill Bill movies, which I shall treat here as a single entity, fall somewhere between those other works of his. They’re fascinating films and a lot of fun, but there’s a certain emptiness to them, and I’m not sure if this was intentional or unintentional.

** spoiler alert **

Kill Bill is the story of Beatrix Kiddo, aka “The Bride” (Uma Thurman). Kiddo is an assassin for a man we only know as Bill (David Carradine), a powerful and vicious crime lord. Upon learning she is pregnant with Bill’s daughter, Kiddo tries to flee, but he puts a bullet in her head and leaves her in a coma. Upon awakening from that coma four years later, and believing she has lost the baby, Kiddo embarks on a path of vengeance against Bill’s henchmen (or rather, his henchpersons), and finally against Bill himself. But there’s a small wrinkle: Their daughter, B.B., did in fact survive, and is now being raised by Bill, who seems to be a very doting father. This twist radically alters the way in which we view the movie.

Much of what made Tarantino’s early work so captivating is repeated to great effect here. As with Pulp Fiction, the story is told out of order, with extended flashbacks throughout and jumping from the middle of Kiddo’s rampage back to the beginning. In this case, it’s not so clear whether this was done to make a point or to have a dramatic fight when necessary, but either way, it works. Another critical strength is the amount of time devoted to character development.

The people we meet in Kill Bill are not your typical gangsters or hit men. They all give the appearance of being well-educated, can be frequently found philosophizing about various matters, and while they’re frequently in fights to the death, there’s no sense that they and their opponents hate each other. We see a lot of superficial courtesy and even respect. For instance, Bill allows Kiddo to find him at his hacienda, not only so she can meet their daughter, but because it’s nobler to have a face-to-face confrontation than to try to pick her off with a sniper or a car bomb. The use of flashbacks also allows us to see how these characters began and matured over time, and as the story is revealed piece by piece, we get drawn to these people. In fact, I would venture to say that these are some of the best-drawn characters in any work by Tarantino.

Another feature repeated and made into a great strength is the unexpected quality of the showdowns. We get some mesmerizing swordfights and brutal martial-arts violence, but we also get some surprise endings to these battles. For instance, in her fight with fellow assassin Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), everything suggests Kiddo will have to chop off her head or run her through with her sword to stop her. Instead, she suddenly plucks out Driver’s eye and crushes it. As her other eye was plucked out in the past, this leaves Driver blind and helpless; Kiddo leaves her to thrash about in a rage. And in her final confrontation with Bill, she kills him not with a weapon but by poking the pressure points on his heart, causing it to explode—but only after he’s had time to button his coat and walk out onto his lawn, thus allowing the father of her child a dignified, “clean” death.

These are all positive qualities. But there’s something wrong with the movie nonetheless, which I attribute to the lack of a moral center.

Now, it might seem that Kiddo is the logical moral center/protagonist, since the movie revolves around her, and she’s seeking revenge against the people who left her for dead and (so she believes) caused her baby to die. While this does inspire a lot of sympathy, consider some of her actions along the way. The very first person we see Kiddo in battle with is another of her would-be killers, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), who she manages to kill—in front of Green’s young daughter. This, after Green expressed remorse for her actions and in vain asked Kiddo’s forgiveness. It doesn’t seem to matter to Beatrix whether or not her attackers are sorry or trying to turn over a new leaf (and not all of them are); they deserve to be punished, and she’ll carry that punishment out regardless. In the finale, she doesn’t hesitate to kill Bill even after finding out her daughter is alive and that Bill, whatever his crimes, has been a loving father to her.

To be fair, this story would probably end the same if everyone’s roles were reversed. But that’s precisely the problem—the “hero” and the “villains” have virtually identical moral traits. Theoretically, Kiddo could easily have been involved in someone else’s cold-blooded assassination and become the object of someone else’s revenge. To be fair, the whole point of her leaving “the life” is to give her daughter something better; otherwise, though, there’s nothing about her that sets her apart from her enemies, and when you don’t have that kind of clear-cut difference, it’s hard to root for the protagonist.

Moreover, consider how the movie ends, and what Kiddo’s wrath has left in its wake. She has her daughter back, sure, but she’s also deprived poor B.B. (who doesn’t really know her) of her father, and killed others left and right. Nor does she show any regret for her actions, telling Green’s now-motherless daughter, “I’m not sorry. . . Grow up, and if you still feel like killing me for what I’ve done, I guess I’ll see you then.” Pretty callous, not to mention nihilistic. I suppose it’s possible that Tarantino was trying to subtly criticizing this sort of behavior; early on, one of Kiddo’s trainers warns her that “Revenge is not a straight line—it’s a forest,” one it can become impossible to find your way out of. But given the movie’s efforts to make her the heroine, it’s hard to tell what he was going for here.

Kill Bill is a fun movie to watch, and in its details it’s very well made. But thematically, it’s definitely weaker than Tarantino’s early films, thanks to its lack of a clear protagonist and its glorification of violence for violence’s sake. And anarchy is hard to celebrate.

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TV Review: The Killing (2011- )

By T-Rav

The Killing is an interesting show, though not a great one. It started strong and I give it credit for breaking with the typical format of today’s crime procedurals. But it does have serious flaws, which can be attributed partly to sloppy writing and partly to the limitations of reflecting reality too closely in TV programming.

The Killing’s debut was promising. Rather than being a crime-of-the-week show, its first season focused on a single homicide—the murder of Rosie Larsen, a Seattle teen—and how it affects the people caught up in her death. This was an effective choice as it made the show stand out from other crime dramas, such as CIS, which I think have grown tired.

I actually liked CSI for a long time; it had interesting stories and a good cast. But there were always a few things that troubled me, such as the tendency to elevate these glorified lab rats to detective status, or the increasingly predictable murder-of-the-week plots. My main problem, though, is how glib the CSIs are about their line of work. Now I realize that given the line of work, you might need some gallows humor to avoid a mental breakdown, but the characters exude too much hip trendiness for the subject matter of these shows -- especially when the show is heartrending. I surely don’t need to reference David Caruso’s witticisms-while-playing-with-his-sunglasses to make this point. It just seems like they treat murder and suffering too lightly sometimes. The Killing doesn’t do that and, in many ways, seem to offer itself as the anti-CSI.

The Killing gave us the chance to meet characters you normally don’t meet. The central characters are still the law enforcement people, such as lead investigator Detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), who is simultaneously training her new partner, Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), so she can hand the case off to him and leave for a new life in California. But we also meet the girl’s grieving parents, Stan (Brent Sexton) and Mitch (Michelle Forbes), and a candidate for Seattle mayor, Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), who gets sucked into the case after Rosie’s body is discovered in one of his campaign’s vehicles. This worked really well.

The show works in other ways too. First, there is some really great acting by pretty much everybody. Enos does a good job of portraying how Detective Linden begins to lose control of her life and her future as she becomes obsessed with the case. Kinnaman is excellent as a cop with a question mark over his morality. Sexton and Forbes wonderfully convey not only the shattering sense of loss that comes from having a child murdered but also the feeling of being lost, of not knowing how — or even whether — to move on. Secondly, the story is much broader than just the investigation. We see the Larsens struggling to break the news to their other children, the Richmond campaign running for cover from the political fallout of the discovery, and several other threads from the event. I like how these subplots are constructed, and the fact they receive their fair share of attention. It’s actually very fitting this show is called “The Killing,” and not something like “Seattle P.D.” as it goes far beyond being just another tiresome crime-of-the-week story.

That said, there are several aspects of this show which are problematic. One is the writing. It may not be fair to describe the writing as “sloppy,” but “overextended” would be a good way to describe it. The Killing has too many unexplored avenues, especially where its characters’ backstories are concerned. For example, we learn that Linden has had problems obsessing over past cases; she even did time in a psych ward once. But we’re never given the full story — we don’t know why this matters, or what bearing it has on the present case. In fact, we mostly learn about her past in a single episode that ignores the current investigation entirely. Similarly, we find out that Stan Larsen, Rosie’s father, used to work for the mob. Does this have anything to do with her death? Don’t know that either. Once the information is thrown out, it’s ignored for several episodes and thereafter brought up only briefly. This is true of several other subplots, and it makes the overall story feel uneven. In fact, this may be partly a function of not having a clear central character(s). The downside of looking at all aspects of the murder is that attention gets dispersed among too many people. We don’t have a main character we feel we can or should root for.

In the same way, The Killing’s attempt to maintain a strictly realistic portrayal of crime and law enforcement has its weaknesses as well as its strengths. When reviewing The Walking Dead, I argued that one of its key strengths was its ability to tell a realistic story more accurately and convincingly than most members of the zombie genre had been able to do. AMC has really stood out in this respect with its foray into TV programming; Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and TWD have all earned reputations for gritty, no-frills storylines and multi-dimensional characters, things the networks have regularly failed to deliver. As much as I like this approach, though, when telling a story, you have to strike a balance between plausible material and necessary artistic license, and this series has occasionally neglected the latter for the sake of the former.

There are a few examples of this, but one which was frequently commented on by critics was the position of the Larsen parents. The Killing moves at roughly one day per episode, so that the season finale is set about two weeks after the murder. During this two-week period, Stan and Mitch Larsen are generally in shock over their daughter’s death: especially the mother, who shows the classic stages of grief, such as undirected anger, social withdrawal, suicidal thoughts, etc. Now, if I had a daughter who’d just been murdered, this is probably what I’d be going through, so you can’t say there’s anything really wrong with this depiction. But the truth is, her character’s not really interesting while she’s going through this; she’s too withdrawn and bitter for the audience to feel invested in her. It’s not pretty, but there you go. Viewers get bored when they see you in the same grieving mood all season.

Now I certainly won’t tell the show’s writers how to do their job, but it seems to me that when you’re trying to revolutionize the crime drama genre as The Killing is doing, you have a delicate balancing act on your hands. Providing an extensive look at one murder is daring, but you also need to provide the audience with some central characters if you have long-term plans in mind. So is conveying the acute sense of loss, but the characters must show some emotional or character development to keep viewers interested in them. Balancing these tensions properly can result in a truly great television series. But this one hasn’t figured the trick out yet, and they’ve only got so much time to pull it off.

So what to make of The Killing? Personally, I like it in spite of its problems; I watched every episode this season, and I’ll at least start the second season whenever it premieres. But I don’t think this show knows exactly what kind of drama it wants to be yet. I would recommend watching it, but you might find it frustrating.

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TV Review: The Walking Dead (2010-)

By T-Rav

AMC’s The Walking Dead was a breakout hit last fall, which might not surprise you at first glance. I mean, come on. It’s ZOMBIES, people! Zombies which have to be killed using violence; lots and lots of violence! And the network gave it a Halloween premiere date, perhaps the most obvious marketing ploy in the history of television. What could go wrong? Actually, a lot could have, and the fact that it didn’t speaks to the ways in which it was designed as something more than your standard gorefest.

As many of you probably know, TWD began several years ago as a graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, before being adapted for television by Frank Darabont (The Mist). There are over a dozen installments in the series, but don’t just run out and grab some to read if you want to know what the next TV season will bring; TWD has already diverged from its written predecessor in certain ways, and the producers have indicated it will do so again. The main protagonist is Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who has a typical small-town life in the South before getting badly injured in a shootout and spending quite some time in a coma-like state. When he emerges—in a very 28 Days Later-esque fashion—the zombie apocalypse has struck, and he must do all he can to find his family and keep them alive. In following this plotline, the story deviates from the rest of the zombie genre in several important ways.

Most zombie movies have pretty shallow content; plus, they’re a very paint-by-numbers affair, with the same subplots and conflicts recycled over and over again. You have the living dead striking out of nowhere, people freaking out and then quickly rallying to exterminate their foes in lots of inventive ways. Often you’ll see our “heroes” make a game out of it, seeing how many corpses they can destroy at once, preferably with a few comedic touches as well. There’s one or two people trying to enrich themselves in the middle of the crisis (how much sense does this make…oh forget it, it’s not like logic is a big element in these stories). Minorities are well represented, and of course they’re all strong, wise, born leaders, all those other positive connotations. And you’ll usually have a few identifiably bad guys, representing every negative stereotype Hollywood can think of—especially cold, manipulative corporate types—who you’re happy to see wind up as a fresh meal in short order. If the script is in the hands of a talented director, these villains may also serve to turn the film into some kind of broader social commentary. But it’s still made very clear who you should be rooting for and against.

Up to a point, this is okay, because most of the time, you’re watching precisely because this is such lightweight, superficial entertainment, and not social commentary. (Come on, you know you are!) But this doesn’t really work for a long-term television series, which depends on character development and so forth. What TWD has done to stand out is create interesting, realistic characters, characters we’re interested in watching even when there are no ghouls around. Also, they react to the events around them in more believable ways -- if a zombie apocalypse were to actually occur, people would not be imitating Dawn of the Dead, because that’s not realistic.

First, the realism. There are a lot of good examples of this, but there’s a couple in the pilot episode which I thought really set the tone for the show. The more shocking instance is in the opening scene: The very first zombie we see killed is a child, an eight- or nine-year-old girl with blond hair, wearing pajamas and clutching the remains of a teddy bear. This in itself indicates a more somber tone than is often the case in the genre. Those semi-comedic killing games I mentioned earlier? Yeah, not really comedic when a kid is the target. But the more stirring incident, in my opinion, occurs later. In it, Rick Grimes has been rescued by father-and-son team Morgan and Duane, had the crisis explained to him, and is setting off to find his family. But first, he sees a legless, decomposing zombie crawling through the grass. Instead of whooping it up and seeing if he can get the creature with one casual shot, Rick walks up to it, says “I’m sorry this happened to you,” and only then blows its brains out. Coupled with simultaneous shots of Morgan’s internal struggle as he tries to shoot his dead-and-turned wife, this scene made it clear the show was not to be a festival of guns and gore.

At other times, of course, we do see zombies dispatched in a more lackadaisical manner, but rarely if ever does it come across as sadistic. To me, this also seems truer to life. It couldn’t be easy, even knowing a zombie had to be killed, to put a gun to what was once somebody’s parent or child or spouse, an innocent human being, and pull the trigger. Maybe you’d get more jaded about it over time, but then TWD isn’t far along, either. It just seems to reflect more accurately how real people would behave when placed in that situation.

This realism is reinforced by how the characters themselves are developed and deepened. While there are several people we think we can describe as “good guys,” there really isn’t anyone so far that can be described as a clear-cut villain. Take the character of Merle Dixon (Michael Rooker), who appears in the second episode. When we first meet him, he appears to be another mindless racist Southern redneck, hoisting his gun and making slurs against a black member of the group. This, incidentally, became Commentarama Reason #389 To Bash Big HollywoodTM, which BH earned for running an atrocious piece bashing this episode. According to BH, this was a classic example of left-wing Hollywood perpetuating Southern stereotypes. That happens, of course, but it almost certainly was not the case here. Had the author given the episode more than a superficial viewing, he would have noticed that Dixon had no problem teaming up with said black member as long as it served “our common interests,” and beyond that, the man displays a wide range of genuine emotions, from fear to anger to regret to determination and so on. The character is not a stereotype, but a unique individual—a deeply flawed one, to be sure, but a unique one nonetheless. Again, this contributes to TWD’s simulation of reality, because we can feel like these are real people we’re watching. In fact, the episode generally seen as the weakest of the season, “Vatos,” includes a tough-talking Hispanic gang, which we quickly find out have hearts of gold and are charitable and so on. This feels formulaic and predictable—aka, not real.

Finally, I must mention the metaphorical meaning of the show’s title. The Walking Dead does not refer, primarily, to the zombies. Remember in The Terminator, when Kyle Reese stressed the need to “stay alive—in here [the head] and in here [the heart]”? (Did he say that? Ah, screw it, work with me here.) That’s really the struggle the characters in this series face; traveling through some of the most brutalizing, dehumanizing conditions imaginable, they face a daily struggle to hold on to their reason and their compassion, and to avoid becoming as cold and soulless as the corpses they flee from. It is they who are, or at least are in danger of becoming, “The Walking Dead.” Their efforts to avoid this fate are at the heart of the graphic novels, and will surely continue to be at the heart of the TV show, too.

TWD hasn’t been perfect. Some of its characters need fleshing out, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the writers can continue to keep the audience so engaged in the show in upcoming seasons. But so far, it’s off to a good start, thanks to rising above mindless gore and giving us realistic characters and plot lines and making us feel connected to the drama on the screen. Hollywood, please take note.

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TV Review: Fringe (2008-)

By T-Rav

Fringe is, in my opinion, the best show running on network television (an important qualification, as I don’t wish to offend cable viewers; yes, there is some truly great stuff on AMC.). This FOX series does what only the best sci-fi shows can do; it has character-driven plots rather than a string of simple “freak-of-the-week” episodes, and not only makes viewers use their noodles but invests them emotionally in the events on the screen. As Andrew has alluded to in reviews of past programs such as The Twilight Zone, this simultaneous appeal to the brain and the heart is critical for the genre, and Fringe pulls it off in style.

For those who are unfamiliar with it -- which based on the Nielsen ratings, is probably a lot of people -- the show takes its title from a clandestine FBI division of the same name, established to investigate a series of bizarre incidents around the country that test the known laws of physics. Headquartered in Boston -- specifically in the basement of a Harvard laboratory -- the organization's three core members (and the show's three core actors) form a dysfunctional, humorous, and often touching team as they investigate the weirdest of the weird. I would say that it's like "The X-Files," only good, but then I might get smacked. So I'm not saying that.

To briefly recap: FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), a conventional law enforcement official, is investigating a mysterious pathogen that killed everyone on a passenger jet when her partner and lover is struck down by the disease. Desperate to find the perpetrators, Dunham seeks out two unusual civilian specialists: Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), a roguish but gifted tech contractor, and his -- "eccentric" would be putting it mildly -- father, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), a brilliant scientist who has spent most of the past two decades in the loony bin. Together, the trio begin cracking not only this but a string of other cases normal sleuth work is hard put to understand, much less solve: mind control, instantly lethal bacteria, teleportation, shapeshifters -- and that's just the first season.

In terms of quality, 2010 was undoubtedly the best year for Fringe thus far; the second half of Season 2 and the first half of Season 3 were together one of the best sequences of episodes you will ever see in any series. To explain why, I need to deviate onto another series for a minute. Fringe is produced by J. J. Abrams, the mind behind Lost. While the latter phases of the show were ripe for ridicule -- I'll have you know I was one of those who teared up at the finale, thank you very much -- it's important to remember how much that show changed the TV landscape. In the past few years, there have been any number of sci-fi shows trying to reproduce the phenomenal success Lost had at the beginning -- Threshold, FlashForward, The Event, a lot of others I’ve already forgotten -- and most have been failures. The reason for this, as I see it, is that they focused too much on the mystery side of the equation, setting up grand head-scratchers and then trying to explain every detail as quickly as possible. While Lost itself certainly had that component, I don't think that was its main element. The main element was the characters and the situation they found themselves in, acting as a metaphor for the human condition. The mysteries were a backdrop for the drama, not the drama itself, which may be why I didn't see the finale as a cop-out (No, I don’t want to rehash this argument, I’m making a point, darn it!).

This is important, because it is in this field of character development that Fringe has established itself as the worthy successor of that other J. J. Abrams production. Turning away from the overly complex and somewhat poorly received freakishness of the early days, the second season focuses more on the often twisted connections between Olivia, Peter, and Walter, and their implications for the fate of the world -- or worlds. We learn that there is a parallel universe, very similar to our own, and that most of the disturbances the Fringe Division investigates are the indirect results of the weakening of the space-time fabric separating the two: a weakening that occurred back in 1985, when Walter found a way to. . . well, without giving too much away, he saved his son’s life, but as a result shattered literally thousands of lives, permanently strained and twisted the relationship between the scientist and his son, and is ultimately responsible for many of the events under investigation. Moreover, Walter also touched and/or scarred Olivia's youth, when he experimented on her and other children with a drug that gave them superhuman abilities. In addition, Olivia and Peter move into a romantic relationship, thus creating a bizarre bond between the three, fraught with emotional land mines. Clear enough?

The revelations of these recent episodes sound muddled the way I've written them, but the show itself pulls them off very well, because of the superb acting of the key players. John Noble, whom those of you of a more geeky persuasion than myself (and I know they're out there) may remember as Denethor in the third LOTR, is simply a delight to watch. His eccentric-minded Walter, tripping acid for inspiration and finding childlike pleasure in practically anything (especially pudding), has also become the heart and soul of the show, as a once-prideful scientist broken and humbled by his own hubris -- more on this in a minute. Joshua Jackson as the clever, wisecracking, and insightful Peter adds another lighthearted touch, and Anna Torv, who was criticized early on for being too cardboard an actress, has given Olivia an increasing amount of depth and emotion over time, resulting in a character as complex as the others. Everyone's acting abilities were tested this year when the show began spending time in the other universe, where different versions of their characters existed and had to be made believable: a test they passed with flying colors and made Fringe that much more mesmerizing.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the various philosophical/psychological themes Fringe visits in its episodes. One borrowed most clearly from Lost would be the conflict of faith and reason. Although a sci-fi show through and through, for which it makes no apologies, Fringe does not neglect the intangible aspects of existence, such as the human psyche and the seeking of the divine. The characters are driven by the idea that there is a right and wrong, a good and evil, however vague or confused their grasp of these concepts might be. Walter says it best in Season 2's "White Tulip," for most fans one of the greatest episodes of the series, when he begs a time traveler not to try to change history, citing his own bitter experiences with Peter as proof of unexpected consequences and the rebuke from one's own conscience: "I never believed in God, but when I looked at my son, I realized that I had broken his laws... I have traveled through madness to figure this out. So will you." Modern television being what it is, of course, the show does not argue from this for a specific religious belief, but it does imply the necessity of a transcendent moral code and respect for the dignity of human life. And frankly, aren't all the great TV shows those which uphold this idea, however abstractly?

But I've rambled on too long. And I haven't even mentioned the importance of The Observers, The Pattern, "Massive Dynamic," or the supporting characters also played superbly by Lance Reddick, Blair Brown, and Jasika Nicole. So I conclude this part-review, part-paean to one of the best shows on television by urging you to check it out for yourself. Having wrapped up its third season (with an ending I still haven’t figured out), Fringe shows every sign of continuing the mix of appeals to head and heart.

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