Fringe - SPOILERS

A few quick thoughts...

Overall, I liked it. It had all the usual trappings of a pilot - lots of exposition and time devoted to putting all the pieces in place, very little character development - but there was stuff that I really liked.

First, the bad:

There was a lot of implausibility in the plot - like how she managed to do her Altered States thing and recover from the LSD trip, get a composite sketch of the guy, go to Massive Dynamics (cool company!), locate the bad guy's apartment and form an assault team, catch and interrogate the guy and formulate the cure, all in under 24 hours - but for now I'm going to suspend my disbelief. Maybe they needed to consolidate for the pilot, I don't know. I'll swallow whatever outlandish "fringe" science they can dream up, just don't continue with crazy timelines like that and I'll be happy. If you're going to deal with really "out there" concepts like teleportation, re-animation and mind-reading, you need to base that in some kind of real premise to make it work.

The good:

I loved Massive Dynamics, the crazy bionic arm, the bad boyfriend, the "questioning" after death, and of course the XF vibe and the vast corporate conspiracy, a la the Dharma Initiative.

I thought John Noble was really good as Walter and Joshua Jackson is pretty darn cute. The two of them work well together. Anna Torv is good, but there's not much personality there yet.

I think my favorite scene was when Walter, Peter, the assistant and Gene the cow were all watching SpongeBob and the phone rang and Peter answered, "Crazy house!" (I paraphrase).

There is a lot of room for improvement, but there is is also a lot to like. I'll definitely watch at least a few more episodes.

One more note: This will be no surprise to LOST viewers - Massive Dynamics has a website.