I’m Finally Ready To Forgive You For Armageddon, JJ…

We’ll call Armageddon a lapse in judgment, Mr. Abrams. That’s the best I can give you, considering the grudge I’ve held for the last decade over that steaming pile of film cells. You succumbed to the pressure of building a Hollywood spectacle and created…well, it was a bunch of space cowboys in a disaster flick with an asteroid. Oh yeah, and you turned Steve Buscemi into a howling madman straddling a nuke like it was his…y’know…”missile”. Ah, and let’s not forget the blame we should all place on JJ for single-handedly turning Aerosmith into a bunch of neutered, whining schlock peddlers!

But Mr. Abrams has been repaying his debt to his audience ever since. Starting with Alias, he was able to transform Jennifer garner into a dimpled, ass-kicking beauty of the small screen. Adding a touch of the mystical to that show made it even more enjoyable, and after five seasons I was ready to forget Bruce Willis in the cheesy astronaut costume. And then came Lost - ah, the plane crash that launched a thousand questions. You brought us such mystery and excitement! Is it a dinosaur out in the jungle? What the hell is in that hatch? How does Evangeline Lilly manage to stay drenched like she'd been in a wet t-shirt contest in every scene? Suddenly, I was able to erase Ben Affleck’s pseudo tough guy routine from my memory.

And 2009 clinched it – his penance can be at an end! You see, JJ started this fantastic little show called Fringe in 2008. The basics: FBI agent Olivia Dunham (played by Anna Torv) is assisted by Peter Bishop (played by Joshua Jackson), a “civilian consultant” with a usefully shady past, and his father Walter Bishop (played by John Noble), who is a genius level scientist who spent a large chunk of time in the loony bin after his experiments – both in human testing and his own ingestion of mounds of pschotropic drugs – made him a bit cuckoo. The trio, along with some help from the FBI and sketchy corporate giant Massive Dynamic, investigate “fringe” science and its consequences. To boil it down: if there’s an unexplainable boogeyman living under your bed, or if you happen to be growing extra organs, chances are good that these will be your heroes.

So, if this show started in ’08, why is ’09 the year of final forgiveness, you ask? Well, while it’s true that the show was a fun ride, it didn’t seem to have a clear sense of direction at first. It could’ve just as easily been X-Files Part Deux, between the mystery atrocity of the week and Olivia’s constantly melancholy “Woe is me” delivery. But in ’09, we started to see all the pieces come together. People were watching the team – if they were people at all. There was the revelation that there is a creepy parallel universe. Olivia’s bum unclenched when they added her sister and niece to the show. Leonard Nimoy returned to TV as science officer Spock...oh wait, no, he's Dr. Bishop’s former partner, Dr. Bell. And of course, there's the whole “Wait, who stole who from another universe to replace their dead WHAT now?!”

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the acting - John Noble’s portrayal of Dr. Bishop is Emmy-worthy at very least. At first, he merely seemed to fill the role of comic relief – feeding drug cocktails to himself and any lab animal that hadn’t already been dissected. But as we start to see that most all of the weekly abominations point back to Walter, he begins to remember why he might’ve been locked away in the first place. His reactions turn from comical to grief-stricken in an instant, and the result is perfection.

The fact that I’ve begun to take Dawson’s Creek alum Joshua Jackson so seriously…well, that’s just another testament to the show’s brilliance. And the masterful storytelling just gets better in season 2 – the conspiracy grows larger, the shape shifters are shiftier, and we say a
permanent goodbye to at least one cast member. I’m finally excited for each new episode of a TV show again. So yes, JJ, I can even forgive you for Buscemi’s phallic breakdown. With the added bonus of your Star Trek reboot being, as my friend Cheryl put it so succinctly on Facebook, “made of awesome”…I think we’re going to be okay. I can respect your work again.

But you might still want to give Aerosmith a call to say you’re sorry – they never quite recovered from being turned into giant pussies.