In reading this interview with Eliza Dushku, I found an interesting tidbit of information.  It looks like Fox tried to have their way again, but Joss talked them around, and as of episode six, it’ll be more his choice in the direction it goes.

I think some people are hanging on despite their dislike in hopes that it’ll be watchable then.  Me, I’m happy that I’ve been watching and am looking forward to it getting even better.

The show was never the most believable, the best written, or otherwise fabulous beyond other shows.  What it was, though, was entertaining.  It was like sitting down with a good comforting book that you’ve read before.  It was formulaic, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  You knew that there was going to be a feel-good moment at the end when Melinda would make everything all better.  And I like Jennifer Love Hewitt.  And I loved the relationship between Melinda and her husband.  With all the angst in most of the relationships on TV, it was something sweet and constant.

When they killed off Melinda’s best friend, I didn’t complain.  It was sad, but it was well done.  When they suddenly aged Ned (i.e. changed actors), I didn’t complain.  When Professor Payne, who I loved as a character, left the show, I didn’t complain.

And then they had to go and kill off her husband, Jim.  I almost almost could have rolled with that as well.  If we had a season of Melinda working to get over it before his ghost moved on, that would have been fine.  But they had to have his soul jump into another man’s body, and now they have this angsty unrequited love crap going on between Melinda and sorta-but-not-completely-Jim.  It’s annoying.  It’s frustrating.  I found myself just cringing while watching the show instead of enjoying it.  I don’t have enough time to watch something that I get little pleasure from, so it’s out.

The balance of science (or fringe science, actually, hence the title) with the investigative elements (Everyone knows how much I love crime and legal shows, right?) is a good mix.  Really, I keep thinking that it’s going to play out much like X-Files, which, while excellent, I never really got all that into.  I do like that it’s supposedly not supernatural stuff going on — just science that’s so advanced that it’s beyond what we think is possible.

The characters are okay — nothing too new.  The female protagonist, Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv who has done plenty of things but nothing I’ve seen before), is not yet far out of the typical female detective/FBI agent mold.  You find out early on that she’s not much for sentiment, doesn’t have any close bonds with much of anyone aside from her love interest, and so on.  Her male counterpart, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek "fame"), is, at this point, equally cookie cutter.  He has daddy issues, is too smart for school (never finished, but is a genius), and can’t stick to any one thing in his life prior to the events in the show.  The acting was solid, however.  After the initial scene with him, I forgot all about the Dawson’s Creek days, which is a good thing generally.  It would seem to imply that he’s not the same character again, though there are some shared elements.

I found the scientist/father, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble — yes, the guy that played Denethor in RotK) the most interesting, both as a character and from an acting standpoint.  He’s not really all that far off the absent-minded professor archetype, but he does it so well that I found myself drawn in.  His character felt more fully fleshed, not just a cardboard cutout.  I did find it a little disconcerting, however, that his symptoms from his long loony bin stay seemed to come and go depending on the need.  It is somewhat explained in the story, however, as he refers to "waking up" after all his time away from the world.  We’ll see how that goes.

As they pointed out on "Best Week Ever", some elements of the pilot are almost amusingly reminiscent of Lost.  It starts with a plane incident; the bad guys (maybe) are a big corporation, and there’s some grand mystery out there.  I’m half-inclined to believe that this is intentional on the part of J.J. Abrams, but who can say for sure.  Considering how much I loved the first two or three seasons of Felicity, Alias, and Lost, I’m okay with a little bit of formula, intentional or not, tongue-in-cheek or seriously meant.  It all works for me.

Overall, I liked it.  I’ll watch it again and we’ll see where it goes.

(That takes care of my sci-fi quotient for the season.  Now, if someone would just make another great sitcom, I’d be happy.)

So, dead.  Not dead.  Dead.

…

As I said, I’m screaming at and praising the writers, in the same breath.

The premise is thus: Ethan (Jason Ritter, who I adore since Joan of Arcadia) really likes his girlfriend, Kate. It’s been twenty years since the first day they met, on the first day of third grade. He gets this idea to host a party for her and invite as many people as he can from their third grade class. Comedy ensues.

We’ve got a number of archetypes covered: There’s the gay guy, the slacker, the hot chick turned trophy wife married to the older guy (a sports star), the overachieving business woman (who named her little blonde daughter “Oprah”), the oddball, the failure, and the crazy mean artistic type.

It was entertaining. Some of the scenes felt a little forced (like overachiever chick calling out the gay guy for her prom night debacle), but the stuff between failure and oddball was priceless. Actually, my favorite part with the failure was when he received the phone call for the party. He had a glass of water and a pile of pills in his hand. He’s bringing the pills to his mouth and the phone rings. He hesitates. He starts to bring the pills to his mouth again and the phone rings again. He answers the phone and then says, “What time is it,” as he sets down the pills and picks up a pen to write down the particulars.

So, overall, it was a little weak but it shows potential. If you watch the early Friends episodes after seeing the later stuff, you’ll notice that even those seem forced. Here’s hoping that “The Class” takes off and does well and becomes more solid. More laughter is always good.

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Anyway, what I found interesting is where the show focused. I thought the show would be primarily about the difficulties in socializing these children. We’ve all heard stories of disattached children — children who received no nurturing at all and therefore are little mini sociopaths, with no ability to relate to the people around them. I thought these feral children would be the same way and I thought that’s where the show would focus. No such thing, however. The children all seemed to learn, when put into a normal social environment, how to empathize, how to be part of a social unit. They were damaged in various ways, but that ability to empathize appears to be learned, and not to be age-critical.

Instead, the show ended up being primarily about how language develops in our brain, and about how missing that critical time when language can develop truly is critical. If you aren’t exposed to language at an early enough age, you don’t learn it apparently. You may learn words, but the ability to string them together into sentences will only occur if you learn it at the right time.

As I think about it more, the primary reason I’m so fascinated with this story is that it seems like kin to one of my favorite concepts in science fiction/fantasy literature — what it means to be human. At what point do we stop being animals and start being people? One of the first scientists mentioned in the program, Abbe Sicard, believed that the two requirements for a human to be considered a person were language and empathy. And though the boy developed empathy, he never developed language. And one of my favorite science fiction books, Halfway Human, examines this from a cultural perspective — if you’re told that you’re not human, and you believe that you are less than human, does that make you so? It’s thought provoking and even a little discomfiting.

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