Especially if you wanted to see panels on such phenomenon as “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” or “Battlestar Galictica,” getting into Comic-Con’s 4000 seat Ballroom 20 required fans to arrive significantly early, with some guests sitting through hours of events they cared little about to see the event they came to see in the first place. Such was not the case, however, if you wanted to check out the J.J. Abrams-led panel on “Fringe.”
The new show from super-creator Abrams (“Lost,” “Alias,” “Felicity”) and the co-screenwriters of Transformers as well as Abrams upcoming theatrical “Star Trek” reboot, has been the beneficiary of viral marketing and a significant amount of buzz, while also being the victim of an unauthorized Internet leak of an incomplete version of the show’s pilot. On Wednesday night, a complete version of the episode was screened as part of the Comic-Con’s preview night.
Though the pilot received good reviews from online critics for Time and MovieWeb, yours truly found those opinions fairly inexplicable. The eighty minute production slowly drains the energy from a fun and intriguing premise (what if most of what we now call pseudoscience was real science?). Though the cliche-ridden, often campy, dialogue was one problem, far worse was a dead-in-the-water performance by Anna Torv as an FBI agent racing to discover what mysterious force killed all of a plane’s passengers and is now severely endangering her coworker/lover (John Valley). “Fringe” also features Joshua Jackson (“Dawson’s Creek,” “The Skulls”) as a cynical adventurer/scientist and John Noble (ultimate bad dad Denethor in LOTR) as his father — an actual mad scientist…or possibly merely an eccentric one. Not surprisingly, Noble steals all his scenes.
Still, who cares what I think? It’s the judgment of fans that counts for team Abrams. But, with Comic-Con attendees apparently voting with their feet, it was the job of the panel, moderated by Television Week‘s Joe Adalian, to make that half-empty auditorium feel half-full. All the principles were on hand, including the three stars, Abrams, and writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (“Transformers,” “Star Trek”). Abrams did most of the talking and, while the mood was upbeat on the surface, damage control was under way. Later on, when an audience member praised the pilot, declaring it “awesome,” two or three audience pairs of hands out of some two thousand applauded.
