Fringe Remains Fantastic

The Friday night return of Fox's Fringe (season three continued on January 21) came back with a bang.  We learned more about the problem with traveling between universes, and actor Christopher Lloyd was on hand to help explain these consequences.  This show gets better with each episode (and each repeat viewing).  In addition to the weekly mysteries, the very back story is mind-boggling as we need to remember that two alternate universes are battling for their very survival.  SyFy's Blastr had a recent story on 83 differences between these two universes that reminded me how the series treats every detail with a level of attention that is hard to find on television these days.  For instance, here are some interesting differences between the two worlds:

-- Airships are commonplace over NYC by 1985 and through 2010, and the Empire State Building continued the use of observation deck as docking platform, as originally intended.  The show does a great job portraying this alternate version of NYC.

-- The White House and the Pentagon were destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks. The White House was built with a glass dome in 2009, and the Pentagon was being rebuilt by 2010. In fact, in the series a polished bronze version of the Statue of Liberty serves as the new headquarters for the Department of Defense.

-- The American Flag has only 48 stars, not 50, designating that the geography of the United States is different.  We just don't know exactly what is missing, but we learn

• Texas is two states (North and South Texas), 
• Kansas and Oklahoma are a combined state (Midland). 
• North and South Carolina are a single state (Carolina).
• North and South Dakota are a single state (Dakota).
• Washington is known as Southern British Columbia.
• Michigan is two states, Michigan and Upper Peninsula.
• Virginia and West Virginia are not states, but are called the District of Virginia. 
• Louisiana is not a state, but a territory. 
• Nevada is not a state--in its place is Independent Nevada.
• The U.S. border seemed to extend into our Canada.

This is intelligent television and, luckily, the move to Friday night did not hurt the ratings.  I hope Fringe will be around for some time.

Update:  Fortunately, Fringe will be around for at least another season.   Entertainment Weekly had a good piece on the renewal and the uniqueness of the program: 

We each like Fringe for different reasons. You might be invested in the Peter-Olivia relationship, while others are happy just to tune in and see how eccentrically amusing Walter is going to be this week. Some fans want their Fringe more hardcore sci-fi, and to place it in the context of the history of speculative fiction, both literary and pop-culturally. (There are, for sure, papers to be written about Fringe as the inverse of the Robert Heinlein approach to sci-fi, or the layering of its Philip K. Dick/Samuel R. Delany/Cyberpunk synthesis.)