Bodies of Evidence
By James Poniewozik
Show me a human fear, and i'll show you a monster. Our ancestors populated dark forests with dragons and uncharted seas with krakens. Sci-fi transmuted commies and nukes into body snatchers and Godzilla. In the 1990s, The X-Files turned post-Vietnam paranoia into an elaborate government-alien conspiracy.
This fall, the tense, compelling Fringe (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is a 21st century X-Files, with a difference. The conspiracy this time is called The Pattern: someone or something is performing experiments, using humans as guinea pigs. The passengers and crew of a transatlantic flight are skeletonized by flesh-eating bacteria; a prostitute is impregnated with a fetus that gestates, painfully, to term within hours.
FBI investigator Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv)--a geek-gorgeous half-Mulder, half-Scully figure--tracks down a case a week, assisted by recently de-institutionalized genius Walter Bishop (John Noble), whose Cold War research may be connected to The Pattern, and his sarcastic son Peter (Joshua Jackson). The common thread in most of the cases: bioscience gone evil.
With Fringe (from Lost's creator, J.J. Abrams), sci-fi has come full circle back to Frankenstein: we have gained too much power over life and made the body into a mere machine. Plots turn on how bodies can be used as recording devices: corpses are psychically "interrogated"; people's memories are stolen by a villain jamming wires up their noses; a murder victim's optic nerve is hooked up to a TV screen to show the last thing she saw before she died. The humans involved have no more volition than a hard drive being reformatted in the shop.
Why should we be so afraid of our own bodies? Scientists, wondrously, are mapping the genome and learning how life works at the microscopic, tweezers-of-God level. But this knowledge can make people feel more powerless than empowered. Gene-testing can tell us we're disposed to diseases we can't cure. Medical science can promise amazing treatments while rendering health care unaffordable. Bioengineered agriculture can splice a bouillabaisse's worth of fish DNA into a tomato. Fringe taps into this unease: If we are what we eat--well, what the hell are we?
The same anxiety powers CBS's new science-driven cop show Eleventh Hour, in which a government biophysicist (Rufus Sewell) investigates cases of bioscience run amok. In the pilot, a wealthy man coerces a needy woman to risk her life by bearing a clone of his dead son. On FX, buddy comedy Testees, about down-and-out dudes who sell their bodies for experiments, plays the same discomfort for gross-out laughs. (One gets a treatment that apparently leaves him pregnant--and lactating.)
All these scenarios involve an element largely missing from The X-Files: money. That show quaintly imagined a U.S. government big and competent enough to mastermind global plots. Now the feds are scrambling to keep up with them. In Fringe, the villain is unknown but appears to be connected to a shadowy supercorporation, Massive Dynamic. Working in a decades-old lab, Walter is a link to an era of government hubris, but in the 17 years since he was first locked up, conspiracy has been privatized. He's also a kind of devil's advocate, with the eccentric glee he takes in the investigations, bringing a cow into his lab (its DNA is similar to a human's) and proposing risky experiments with Strangelovian brio. Mad science never looked so fun.
This is what keeps Fringe from being more than grim spatter sci-fi: it gets that the very things that make science terrifying also make it cool. (See also CSI.) This is especially true when it comes to the bioscience conundrums that make Fringe's sci-fi so literally intimate. On this new X-Files, the truth is not just out there. It's in here--encrypted in our bodies, under our skin, in our very DNA. If only we could figure out what we are trying to tell ourselves.