Is anyone excited for Fringe?  I've been anticipating the new FOX sci-fi series from the moment I heard about it, but I'm not sensing much buzz out there for the latest mind-bender from Lost creator J.J. Abrams.  FOX has been promoting it heavily and sunk $10 million into tonight's pilot episode, so let's hope the risk pays off for them.  Fringe plays like a cross between Alias and The X-Files, which is a mixture that sci-fi fans are sure to go crazy for.

Read on for our recap of the first episode, and find out if you're part of The Pattern.

Just like Lost, Fringe starts out on a plane.  This one is flying from Germany instead of Australia, and it also shows no signs of crashing as it flies through an electrical storm.  A man on the plane injects himself with a strange substance, gets out of his seat, and then experiences the worst altitude sickness ever as his skin starts peeling off and he vomits everywhere.  It doesn't take long for everyone on the plane to start melting, which suddenly makes a ride on Oceanic 815 look like a barrel of laughs.

FBI agents Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and John Scott (Mark Valley) are sleeping together, obviously paying no mind that their boss frowns upon interoffice romance.  They're also in love, which makes me think that Mark Valley is destined to die by the end of the pilot.  The sexiness is put on hold when Olivia gets a call to investigate the incident with the plane.  It managed to land right on time, but all 147 people aboard are dead.

Special Agent Broyles (Lance Reddick) works for Homeland Security, and he comes in to take charge of the investigation.  Olivia immediately clashes with him, but who cares about that when we can look inside the plane instead?  Everyone inside has been reduced to a melted, smoldering skeleton, which is quite nasty and awesome.

Broyles instructs Olivia to go check out a witness who claims to have seen two Middle Eastern men handing a white guy a briefcase before getting on the plane.  She knows it's a useless task, but Broyles loathes her because she helped put his best friend in prison for sexually assaulting some Marines.  They were female Marines, FYI.  At the storage facility where the witness works, Olivia and John find some ammonia, hairless rats, and an intricate computer setup.  They also find the witness, who immediately makes a run for it.  It's time for our first action sequence!

After a short chase sequence, the creepy witness takes out a detonator and blows up the facility.  Olivia is injured and John is infected with contaminates, which just proves why you should never fall in love on a J.J. Abrams show.  The doctors have no idea what he's infected with, but he looks like a melted snow cone.

Olivia wants to see Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who is an expert at identifying strange infections.  She thinks that he'll have information about the plane and John's infection, but the fact that he's been in a mental institution for years makes him seem less than reliable.  Instead of rushing to see Dr. Crazy Pants, she instead tracks down his son, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), in Iraq.  Peter is a genius misfit who can't keep a job, and he also enjoys falsifying college degrees every now and then.

Olivia asks Peter to help her get access to his father, but he just calls her "honey" and "sweetheart" a lot and refuses to lend a hand.  Luckily for Olivia, she has a secret file all about Peter that he can't afford to have leaked to the wrong people.  Ah, good old fashioned blackmail.  Peter agrees to go with her, and also mentions that his father was arrested after one of his lab assistants died.  Unbeknownst to Peter, his father was actually working in the field of fringe science.  He specialized in studying things like mind control, reanimation, teleportation, and other seemingly impossible phenomena.

Let's take a trip to the nut house!  Dr. Bishop has the type of giant beard that no sane person has, but he's actually somewhat helpful.  He knows all about John's nasty infection, including the fact that it's reversible.  However, he wants to see his son before he doles out any information.  Peter has an awkward reunion with his crazy dad, and soon Olivia convinces him to sign out his nutty pops and take guardianship of him.  It's amazing what you can accomplish with blackmail.

Dr. Bishop shaves his beard before leaving the institution, making him appear 60 percent more sane.  He mentions that his old lab partner was William Bell, founder of a company called Massive Dynamic, which seems to be the Fringe version of the Hanso Foundation.  Olivia needs to question him, but first it's time to go visit John's half-melted body.  Bishop scrapes off a sample of his skin, then demands to go to his old lab at Harvard, though it hasn't been in use since the '70s.

Bishop requires plenty of supplies for his dusty old lab, including a cow.  Cows are genetically close to humans, so they're great for doing wacky experiments on.  While Walter gets down to business, Olivia reveals to Peter that she never had a file about him.  She totally pulled it out of her ass, and it just so happens that Peter owes money to the mob and freaked out.  Walter soon figures out that someone let a contagion loose aboard the plane, but John can still be saved if Olivia can locate the man from the storage facility and find out what chemicals he used to make the poison.  Only John saw the man's face, so it's time for some wacky Alias science!  Walter wants to mentally link Olivia's brain to John's brain so they can share a dream state.  She'll be able to walk through his memories and get the information.

Despite Peter's protestations, Olivia agrees to let Dr. Crazy Pants drug her and fiddle with her brain.  Meanwhile, fellow agent Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) will try to track down William Bell.  Olivia strips down to her underwear, injects the mystery drug and sinks into a pool of water to start the experiment.  She's soon walking around in John's mind, though for some reason it looks like the auto junkyard from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4.  After drifting through some memories, she finds John and sees his memory of the shady bomber.

Olivia soon discovers that the mystery bomber's twin brother was the man who injected himself on the flight, and her first order of business is to visit Massive Dynamic.  The bomber, also known as Richard Steeg, worked there, stole some supplies to make the deadly compound, then convinced his twin to sacrifice himself for the greater good.  While visiting the creepy company, she has a run in with Nina Sharp (Blair Brown), who we know is awesome because she has a robotic arm.  Her arm was given to her by Massive Dynamic after they discovered she had cancer, so she's quite the loyal employee.  Nina mentions something called The Pattern, but because this is a J.J. Abrams show she refuses to explain what the hell that is.

The Feds raid Steeg's residence and find more lab rats and complicated computer setups.  He sneaks out while they're inside, which is a chance for Peter and Olivia to burst into action.  They chase the scumbag through the streets of Boston, and after some high-flying stunts they tackle him and take him into custody.  Olivia needs to know which chemicals he was working with at the storage facility, but he refuses to talk.  Peter decides to interrogate him Jack Bauer-style, which quickly gets Steeg to talk.  Torture is so handy.

After discovering what the compound is made of, the gang is able to cure the now see-through John Scott.  Broyles is impressed with Olivia's accomplishments, so he fills her in on some other strange events that have happened around the world recently.  The outbreak on the plane is hardly an isolated incident, because if it were this show would only have a pilot episode.  This string of worldwide bizarre occurrences is known as The Pattern.  Broyles wants Olivia's help to investigate these X-Files, but she's not up for the task.  At least not until the end of the episode, by which point she's bound to turn from a Scully into a Mulder.

John Scott is no longer see-through and once again looks like Mark Valley.  Huzzah!  After a short celebration, Olivia talks with Steeg, who tells her that someone from her office was giving him orders.  Scandal!  She finds a recording that acts as evidence, only to discover that John is the bad guy responsible for the entire thing.  Wow, I didn't see that one coming.  John gets up from his hospital bed and smothers Steeg to death with a pillow.

Olivia arrives at the hospital and soon ends up in a car chase with John.  The millions that FOX poured into the Fringe pilot are now on display as cars zoom and crash around the streets of Boston.  John ends up flipping his SUV multiple times, then crawls out and dies in Olivia's arms.  "Ask yourself why Broyles sent you to the storage facility," he tells her before he kicks the bucket.

I would be really pissed if my significant other got infected with strange chemicals in a huge explosion, became see-through, nearly died, and then I busted my ass to save his life for an entire episode only for him to wake up, be evil, smother my witness and die in a car crash.  What a terrible way to end a relationship.  Anyway, Olivia handles all this trauma fairly well.  She visits Peter and convinces him to stick around to look after his father, which is a task he's up for since he too knows about The Pattern.

As the pilot for Fringe comes to an end, Olivia and Peter agree to work together to investigate some X-Files. . .er, The Pattern.  John's dead body gets wheeled to Massive Dynamic, where Nina demands he be questioned even though he's been deceased for five hours.  Ooh, spooky!


- Don Williams, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of FOX)