"Fringe" Details Emerge

These are some details on the new J.J. Abrams TV pilot. Note there are some spoilers about the pilot here, but nothing too major.

For those that don't know, J.J. Abrams is a busy man. Not only has he been occupied with movies like Star Trek XI and Cloverfield, but he's also been working on a 10 million dollar pilot (sound familiar Lost fans?) for a show called "Fringe."

The show, it seems, is a sci-fi X-Files rip off (I will ignore all hate mail later) about two FBI agents who explore the super-natural. The Other Girl over at WyvernHawk claims to have read the pilot and had this to say about it:

The feature length pilot opens on board a turbulent plane flying from Germany to the US - the general sense of unease swiftly descends to terror as one of the passengers injects himself with a syringe and shortly after, begins to literally melt, his entire body liquifying. This horrifying condition rapidly spreads throughout the rest of the plane, as both passengers and crew members also start melting away. As the plane flies on auto pilot in the middle of a bad storm, we move to a cheap motel where two FBI agents - Olivia Warren and John Scott - are in the middle of an illicit tryst. They are called to the airport, arriving separately to find a swarm of agents and personnel from various government agencies and the airplane, its windows obscured with blood. Olivia boards the plane for a closer look, and is met with the horrific sight of unidentifiable melted bone and blood.

As the story unfolds, John is involved in an explosion during the course of the investigations - needless to say, the public are unaware of the nature of the incident - and exposed to a chemical which renders his body into a hardened, clarified state - as if he were made of glass. As she frantically searches for a cure, Olivia is compelled to join forces with a brilliant but unhinged scientist whose work in the Seventies explored "fringe science" - paranormal phenomena which cannot be explained by conventional science - and his son, and comes to realise this is but one of many inexplicable incidents that have occurred across the world. The key to them may lie behind the highly closed doors of a huge, cutting edge corporation called Prometheus, whose disciplines seem to cover just about everything...

Penned by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, both ALIAS alumni who have most recently co-written the TRANSFORMERS and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III films, FRINGE has Abrams' stamp all over it - from the jaw dropping plane incident opener, to the supernatural phenomena and conspiracy theories, all encapsulated in plenty of of high octane action. Rumoured to have a budget in the region of $10million, the pilot script for this 13 part series is complex, ambitious, intelligent and, above all, hugely entertaining. This was a thrilling read and I'm really looking forward to seeing it brought to life (especially since hearing that Joshua Jackson is attached to the project!). Huzzah!

To be honest I would almost rather have Fox clean up the all the messy plots of The X-Files in a nice big movie or TV revival as opposed to just starting over with a brand new show with another name.... Since it's JJ, however, they get a pass. Let's see where this one goes.

Source: Audibly Lost