Recap: Fringe "Unearthed"

In movies, January (and formerly February) were months where they dump films that had been sitting around and had no support. It was a wasteland of crap with Oscar-worthy films trickling through from December. In television, it's sort of the same but not quite. February is sweeps month so you expect some of their A-level stories there, but you can't just jump right in after almost two months of reruns, so January becomes the slow dip in the bathtub. (Granted, this isn't true for shows that debut in January. A trend that was started by ABC's NYPD Blue. But for a series that's been on through the season, most likely it is.) What's weird is that a television show as new as Fringe and garnering its slow success would even have an unaired episode from season one to show.

The story itself is something they always planned to air. Something I believe was originally going to tie into Olivia's relationship with her dead partner which was an integral part of season one. They even had a version in their comic book preview except in that one, it was a Russian man in a coma who came to and gave a random series of numbers which happened to be the location of every Navy ship in the world at that moment. Considering how cold war era that is and maybe the fact that this was originally tied to be parallel to Olivia's story, changing it to a young girl in the United States and having it involve the US Navy seemed more appropriate.

These one-off stories are where this show draws the most similarity to its predecessor, The X-Files. The last one they did about the cosmonaut was actually really delightful. This episode though was more...eh. It was fine for the most part but it didn't know where to stand for the most part. They tried to involve some religious questions but they mostly fell flat. Her "resurrection" at the beginning of the show wasn't either exploited or condemned. Sure, there are more ways to look at it, but her own mother expresses deep religious conviction without even being that deep. I don't think the show was neutered mind you. I honestly believe that they always intended it to be ironic where the religious community was more grounded than the world that the Fringe division lives in. The execution though feels so weak sauce that you ask why it's even involved at all.

Having said that, the girl who guest stars in this episode is pretty good in that younger Julia Stiles way and it was nice to see Charlie again. (Kirk Acevedo, I'm so sorry you keep getting killed off decent shows. See: Oz) All in all, it lived up to a back-to-school January warm-up.

Grade: On a scale of a handheld radio with a wire hanger antenna to a Bang + Olufsen BeoSound 5, this show gets an iRiver LPlayer.