Anna Torv probes dark mysteries in JJ Abrams’ sci-fi Fringe
Pick of the day: Fringe, Streaming on Stan.
Pick of the day: Fringe, Streaming on Stan.
This brilliant sci-fi series was one of the most anticipated of 2008 and in some ways it’s even more pertinent now, with a growing sense that the world is out of balance and that the trippy visions of the sci-fi genre may reveal more about social anxieties than reality cooking shows, endless police procedurals and model talent contests.
The show is from Lost creator JJ Abrams, his trusty screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Alias), and his Bad Robot production company. It’s a startling new slant on scientific activity at the fringes of mainstream academic discipline and on practices associated with the paranormal. The show’s opening titles flash the floating words psychokinesis, precognition, artificial intelligence, transmogrification, dark matter and nanotechnology, among others. The context is set, before any dialogue: of that universe of unexplained phenomena, bizarre experiments and creepy otherworldliness usually considered to be dangerous, impossible or unethical.
Australian Anna Torv stars as FBI agent Olivia Dunham, part of the team called in when an international flight lands in Boston on a newfangled automatic pilot, full of viscous, glutinous corpses, once passengers and crew. “What happened was not the result of the in-flight movie,’’ says an FBI investigator. The search for an explanation nearly kills Dunham’s partner, special agent John Scott (Mark Valley), turning him into a just-alive, acid-scarred zombie.
Olivia searches frantically for someone to help, leading her to Walter Bishop (John Noble). Working under special agent Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), our team discovers that Flight 627’s fate has frightening resonances. Is someone using the world as a laboratory? Have portions of the world’s population become lab rats? And have apparently random events in recent history been the result of testing on a giant scale?
Go big or go home
It’s the largest TV you can buy in Australia, with a screen almost three metres wide. Price: a cool 30 grand.
‘My grandfather was interned in Changi … it affected him for the rest of his life’
A link to Adam Liaw’s past has led the television cook and former MasterChef winner to a new role reporting from behind the bars of notorious Singaporean prison, Changi.