New Feature: Entertainment of the Month
Starting this year I have started a new column. Instead of doing plain old movie reviews, each month I will take what I feel is a worthy movie, book, or game, and as the name suggests, give it the Entertainment of the Month Award. These items can be a current favorite or from a time before you were born. I give this award based on the creativity and the awesomeness of it.
I had a hard time choosing just one item, so this month we have a tie. Just this month we had the return of Fox’s two best shows (in my own opinion of course). These shows that piqued my interest were House and the newest show, Fringe. These shows are definitely Fox’s hardest hitters. I have nothing nice to say about 24, so I will not say anything about it at all.
House is about the rather crazy, yet, insanely brilliant, Dr. Gregory House who is an anti-social medical genius who heads a team of diagnosticians at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Most episodes start with a cold open; somewhere outside the hospital, showing the events leading to the onset of symptoms for that episode’s main patient. The episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient’s illness, but most of the time they do not succeed until the patient is critical. House’s world-renowned department typically only sees patients who have failed to receive a correct diagnosis, making the patient cases more complex. Furthermore, House resists cases that he does not find interesting. Dr. House solves cases with a simple epiphany.
Fringe is produced by J.J. Abrams, the genius behind Lost and Cloverfield. His new show is a masterpiece. Fringe follows the exploits of FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, scientist Walter Bishop, and his son, Peter, as they investigate aspects of fringe science (telepathy, levitation, invisibility, reanimation, genetic mutation, etc). All over the world, a series of apparent experiments collectively referred to as “the Pattern” (e.g., a newborn baby who rapidly ages and dies within a few hours, a bus full of passengers trapped in a strange substance like mosquitoes in amber) are occurring for reasons unknown. Olivia, Peter, and Walter are in charge of investigating these strange events to determine their source. Connected to the Pattern is a company called Massive Dynamic, which is a leading global research company that holds the patents for a number of new and important technologies. Throughout the first half of the first season, Mitchell Loeb, a rogue FBI agent, orchestrates some of these events as part of a larger plan to break a man out of prison and kidnap Olivia. Unlike Lost, Abrams promises that the arc of the show will be easier to follow and more accessible for those who skip the show. This is excellent because for the life of me, I have no idea what is going on in that show.
