Fringe: Season Five

This review is very long overdue, so here are the links to the story so far:

Season One
Season Two
Season Three
Season Four

Warning: here be spoilers.

Season 4 of Fringe almost ended on the perfect note for a series finale, with the world saved, Olivia brought back to life, and the Bishop family tighter than ever, with a baby on the way. Happily ever after… but for the glimpse we had in a late episode of a very bad future indeed. It is this future we are plunged into from the start of season five, following straight on from that oddball future-episode, and the backstory unfolds gradually. We learn that Peter and Olivia married and had a baby daughter, called Henrietta, or Etta. But when Etta was only a few years old, the Observers came from the future, and at some point in the chaos, Etta went missing. Not long after this, the main team of the Fringe series: Walter and Peter Bishop, Olivia Dunham and Astrid Farnsworth, have been frozen in Amber for twenty years, allowing their story to carry on as if no time has passed, but in a terrifyingly changed world around them.

Once again, I had to applaud Anna Torv’s portrayal of Olivia. Although only a few years have passed in-universe, and she does not appear to have been aged-up, she plays a much older, sadder, wiser version of the character, one who has loved and lost and had her heart broken. The scene in which she is reunited with Etta and shows simultaneous joy to see her daughter again, and horror that she has missed twenty years of her growing up, are utterly heartbreaking. Similarly, Peter is no longer the carefree man-boy of the early seasons, but a responsible adult. Their relationship is strained to breaking-point by the loss of their daughter, the guilt and the relentless search.

The format of Fringe has evolved far away from its original weirdness-of-the-week episodes, and now that our heroes are fugitives, wanted by the Observers, there are no more official investigations into “fringe” events. Now this is war, a dirty war, and Walter and the team are driven to desperate measures in order to survive. This is not their world any more, but Etta’s, and they must play by Etta’s rules.

The first few episodes did not feel like the old Fringe again – although it’s difficult to say which version was the definitive Fringe, as it has changed so many times over the five seasons. And then, a shocking event happens, and just a few episodes after her introduction, Etta was killed. This seemed very unsatisfying, rushed, perhaps because of season 5’s shorter length, and Peter and Olivia deserved better. It felt as though Etta existed only to establish a personal link between the 2010s Fringe team and the dark 2030s world, and afterwards she had no place, so the writers gave her a heroic sacrifice, taking a few Observers with her.

That being said, I’m sorry to say it, but I think after Etta’s death, Fringe returned to its former quality, with the original team dynamics, although those regular characters who took the slow path to the future – Colonel Broyles and Nina Sharp – were relegated to playing multiple characters. The female characters take more of a back seat in the later episodes of this final season. The attention shifts more onto Peter for a significant fascinating (but rather too quickly solved) plotline, instead of former protagonist Olivia, and poor beloved Astrid is almost forgotten. Season four saw the closure of the bridge between worlds, and this shorter season just focuses on the original universe, original cast, but of course we get one more hop across the divide for the finale, getting to see how the second world has fared in the missing twenty one years.

Fringe is a demanding show for its actors, each playing many different versions of the same character. John Noble takes this to an extreme when Walter starts being recognisable as two different versions in the same man, as he struggles not to return to the same cold, ruthless scientist who got them into the mess in the first place, while trying to decipher his own, forgotten, coded messages (recorded on Betamax tapes and frozen in the amber).  By the time the plan is revealed, it did not come as a surprise that, despite the amount of time set in this bad future, there is once more a reset button, and that the future can be rewritten. Again, this is one possible future of many. For once, this trope did not feel like too much of a cop-out.

This season was all about parental love and sacrifice, and much as I longed for an easier happy ending, it was always going to be Walter’s sacrifice that saved the world, as he was ultimately responsible for nearly everything in the series (although, unless I missed something, he had nothing to do with the Observers’ invasion.)


Fringe has morphed and evolved significantly since I started watching it as a weird X-Files type show with science even I could see was nonsense. I’ve come a long way with its characters. It is a show that will stick with me a long time, one that I am very glad to have invested in the box sets, although it would be impossible to go straight back to the start after finishing the series, as it’s become almost unrecognisable. I did not expect to love it as much as I did.

Fringe: Season 4

Spoilers, of course. It would be impossible to discuss this show without them.

Season three of Fringe ended with a nice note of happily-ever-after. The two universes were brought together to create a new world and prevent all-out apocalypse. But then - Peter Bishop, who brought about the unification, popped out of existence. Oops.

The credits sequences of Fringe in season three were colour-coded in order to quickly establish which universe each episode would take place in: blue-green for the original world, and red for the alternative universe. Season four's credits were coloured in yellow. Or amber, if you prefer... ominous in itself when you consider that amber is used in the second universe as a preservative to prevent any holes in the world from growing and spreading. And this new season's setting and characters are different. Despite the lack of Peter, there has still been a "bridge" built between the universes, and the two Fringe teams are working together to repair the damage rather than to destroy each other. But the characters are subtly altered. Our Olivia is harder, having killed her abusive stepfather without Peter there to save her as a child. She was brought up by Massive Dynamic's Nina Sharp, and wears pale pink lipstick. Her redheaded counterpart from the other universe is no longer a mother (has never been a mother - Peter never existed and so neither did their son Henry.) Walter is more broken, and never leaves his lab in the Harvard basement. Other characters are still alive who should have been dead, and vice-versa. It would be interesting to watch the entire first three seasons through and pay attention to every event influenced by Peter in one way or another.

Despite what the observers (the creepy pale bald men who keep showing up whenever anything big is about to happen, and who know too much) have said, it is not that Peter never existed, but that both versions of him really did die as a child. Except, whoops, he doesn't seem to have got the memo, and materialises in the river to find himself in a terrifying It's A Wonderful Life world where no one knows him. His memories are intact, but the world around him is not quite the same - everything and everyone that had been impacted by coming into contact with Peter now is as if he had never been there. The big question is: is this yet another alternative universe, or an altered version of his own world? Can he go home, or is he there already, finding it changed out of recognition?

In this version of reality, poor Olivia is suffering from dreadful migraines - which turn out to have been induced by mysterious figures breaking into her house and secretly dosing her with Cortexifan, the mind-enhancing drug developed by William Bell and Walter Bishop to give her psychic powers. And then we discover that Massive Dynamic's Nina Sharp - in this version, her own foster-mother - is behind it all. As a migraine-sufferer, I hated her for this. Clearly Nina is up to something nefarious - but never mind that; inflicting migraines on a person is pure evil.

But as it happens, it is the other Nina Sharp behind the migraines - the one from the other universe and it turns out she is working for someone else: David Robert Jones, the Big Bad of season one. We last saw him gruesomely killed by being trapped in a door between universes - but in the Peterless universe, Jones survived and is as magnificently evil as ever. His purposes are not made clear, but they are full of havoc and destruction, the end of the world.

Episode nineteen takes a break from the main season's plotline and flashes forward to a very bad future. It begins with scrolling text: "They came from the future." The title credit sequence, traditionally covered in words of science just outside possibility, is changed to include words such as "Joy" "Individuality" "Community." I wibbled and screamed a bit watching this new sequence. If the future Peter had witnessed from the doomsday machine at the end of season three was grim, it is nothing compared with this future. The observers are revealed to have come from a future Earth - perhaps a later stage of human evolution - and we already knew that they can see all points in time, all the different things that might happen. But now it seems they are not just disinterested observers, dispassionately committed to ensuring that events take their rightful course. Now we see another side to them - time travellers from an uninhabitable future earth, who come to 2036 and enslave humanity.

We are introduced to a new team of resistance fighters, and find Walter, Peter and Astrid (who I have unjustly neglected in my reviews. She is a brilliant scientist, a valuable member of the Fringe team, and just lovely) frozen a la Han Solo in amber. Olivia is nowhere to be seen, which is ominous. Earlier in the season (in her own time) she was warned by an Observer that there is no version of the future in which she will not die. Well... surely that goes without saying of anyone? But Olivia has taken his message to heart, and expects this death to be imminent. One young woman from the future resistence (Etta) at one point claims Walter as her grandfather, which set my mind going. If she's, say, 24, she could have been born not long after the current season takes place. Her name - Etta - short for Henrietta - and what was the other Olivia's short-lived son's name, again? Yes, she really is Peter and Olivia's daughter, Walter's granddaughter. Which means that Olivia has a little longer to live, anyway.

Episode twenty takes us right back to the present day, as if we had not seen the future, and we meet the real - real - Big Bad. Now, I'd accidentally been spoiled on this by reading the box blurb. I had thought before that we had not finished the William Bell story. His attempt at immortality in season three had gone nowhere. But after all the shenanigans involved in getting the character into season three without showing Leonard Nimoy - Anna Torv's uncanny impersonation, the animated episode - I had not expected to actually see him in the role again. But it seems that he just cannot stay in retirement. I'd never been quite sure where to place Dr Bell on the scale of good and evil. Certainly his methods were morally dubious, but he was pretty likeable in person. But in this altered universe in which Peter died young, Dr Bell had heard his science partner's rage against the universe and decided to do something about it: to destroy the world and create a new one for just him and Walter, a universe with no place for the human race.

Of course, the season finale ends with the Fringe team saving the day again, but not without great cost. Bell needed Olivia's psychic powers to bring about his new universe, so Walter shoots not his old friend, but Olivia herself. (It's all right - she gets better.) Apocalypse is averted once more, Olivia is expecting a baby, so Peter, Olivia and Walter can look forward to a bright new future...

Future, you say? Remember episode nineteen...

Best episodes: 

2. One Night In October: The Fringe team recruit the other-world counterpart of a serial killer to help solve their case.
6. And Those We've Left Behind: Time loops can be traced back to a husband's desperation to keep hold of his wife.
10. Forced Perspective: A teenage girl has the power to predict death.
11. Making Angels: A beautiful episode bringing together the Astrids of both worlds.
14. The End of All Things: Olivia is held captive. David Robert Jones wants her powers.
18. The Consultant: Events in one universe have effects on the other.
19. Letters of Transit: The terrifying future, in which the Observers have enslaved mankind.
20. Worlds Apart: After spending a season working together, the two Fringe teams must say goodbye and close the door between their worlds.
21 and 22: Brave New World: In which we discover a bigger, badder Big Bad planning a bigger, badder apocalypse than ever before.

Just one more season to go now, and it's a short one - only 13 episodes compared with the other seasons' 22. I'm expecting this final season to take place mostly or entirely in the bad future of episode 19, which is a chilling thought. I wonder if it might not have been better to finish the series here - but then that would leave season 19 as an unfinished plotline. Besides, I thought that last season and look how season 4 turned out!

Fringe - Season 3

Contains spoilers and complicated plot details.

Though the first two seasons of Fringe, I have said that the show is far more interesting when the episodes focus on part of a series-long plot arc than when it is merely weirdness-of-the-week. By season three, the weird-of-the-week format has almost gone. Yes, the Fringe teams in both universes have their strange events to investigate, but these are secondary to the main plot which is getting bigger and stranger with every episode. For one thing, the series has expanded to focus on two universes, and two versions of the cast. And the two Olivias are in the wrong worlds. "Our" Olivia is trapped in the universe with zeppelins, while the "other" Olivia has taken her place in "our" world - and in Peter's affections. Meanwhile, the sinister alternative Walter Bishop duplicate - "Walternate" - has tampered with "our" Olivia's mind so that she soon comes to believe that she is the other Olivia in the other world. Ah, my favourite kind of mind-trickery: making a person question their own identity and sanity!*

Walternate's purpose for putting other-Olivia into our world is to send her to find the pieces of a machine glimpsed at the end of season 2, a creepy-looking machine buried in pieces before the dawn of time, apparently prophesied by a pre-human civilisation to destroy one of the worlds, and whose fate is bound up with Peter Bishop's (and later, it emerges, with Olivia's.) The actions of Walter, 25 years ago, in crossing from one universe to the other and bringing back Peter, set in motion all the weird-science catastrophes that threaten the other universe's existence, and Walternate believes that only destroying our world can restore the balance. Meanwhile, our universe, too, is starting not to make sense. When I started watching Fringe I was not entirely convinced by the pseudo-science at the heart of the "pattern" (which, come to think of it, is a word that hasn't been used for a while.) By now, I've kind of got used to it, suspending my disbelief and just going along with it. But in the second half of season 3, even Fringe pseudo-science can't explain why the two heaviest metals in the world are making people able to fly. The reason is: the universe is broken. Science doesn't work any more. Anything goes. I wasn't sure if that was appalling laziness or brilliance, but it worked for me.

There is some interesting character exploration for the two Walters in this season - though I don't really see them as separate characters so much as separate possibilities for the character's development. "Walternate" is a sinister, ruthless character, and yet he has moral lines which he will not cross, morals not shared by "our" Walter, the lovable, bumbling eccentric, at least not in his past. "Our" Walter amuses and evokes pathos, so perhaps we forget for a while that he and William Bell have committed some pretty horrific acts in the name of science. The Walters do not sit comfortably in a pigeonhole of good or evil. Perhaps that is why Walter Bishop is such a brilliant character. Fringe doesn't have simple good guys and bad guys. I spent the first two seasons trying to decide what to make of William Bell and am still not sure. He seemed to be behind so much of the bad stuff, but then he helped Olivia, Walter and Peter in the season 2 finale, and sacrificed his life. Or did he? This is Fringe, after all, and Bell had taken some steps towards achieving immortality, which come about in one of the weirdest and most unsettling ways imaginable. Not that he spent some episodes possessing Olivia - that is pretty much part of a day's work for this show. But actress Anna Torv's impersonations of Leonard Nimoy had me wondering if there was some dark magic at work off-camera as well as on it. The voice, the manner, the eyebrows - I found myself forgetting that I was watching a young actress and just accepted that I was watching a charming but creepy mad scientist of about eighty, who happened to look exactly like Agent Dunham.

As if that's not weird enough, this is followed by Walter, Peter and Bell taking LSD in order to rescue Olivia's consciousness, which has lain dormant since Bell took over her body. The episode switches to an animation, and the characters are aware of the change in genre. Perhaps becoming a cartoon is a side-effect of drugs, or maybe just when taken in the name of science. I'm not an expert on these matters. But ultimately, Bell's plans for immortality don't seem to work as they fail to upload him onto a computer. (I don't think he would have liked being a computer anyway.) Though this immortality storyline was most entertaining, ultimately it seemed to be a bit of a shaggy-dog story that led nowhere. But there are two more seasons to go. Of course I can't say for sure at this point, but Fringe seems to be tightly-plotted enough not to have straggling story threads.

The grand finale comes as the hole in "our" universe starts to get out of control, and the doomsday machine apparently switches itself on. Peter makes an attempt to switch it off... and finds himself in a grim future in which "our" universe has destroyed the other, and is now slowly destroying itself. I was very much reminded of the Epitaph episodes of Dollhouse, which I watched last year.  What is this machine? I wondered. Was it a time machine - and was this future set in stone? Has Peter skipped fifteen years along time as a straight line - a one-way journey? Or is it just one possible future, a journey through the "big ball of wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey... stuff?" My money was on the latter, even before Walternate (a survivor from the other universe) killed Olivia right out of the blue. Surely not. 

Fringe is a series that tends to answer one question but ask three more, but the season 3 finale would have made a pretty satisfying conclusion, if the show hadn't been renewed for fourth and fifth seasons. Yes, this was a vision of the future, of sorts: Peter didn't physically travel in time, but (to cut a long story short) was contacted across time by future-Walter and given the information he needed to change the worlds' fate. If you think of time as the aforementioned wibbly-wobbly ball, all existing at once, it almost makes sense. Way back in season one, the season's Big Bad mentioned, offhand, that not only could he teleport through space, but he could travel in time. Now, Walter built the machine in the future, buried it in the prehistoric past and assembled it in the present, in order to speak to Peter and bridge the gap between the universes.

Unfortunately, this creates a time-paradox, and if you know your Doctor Who, the universe doesn't like time paradoxes and does what it must to clean up after them. And as Peter was the centre of this paradox - whoops! Not only does he fizzle out of existence, but he ceases to have ever existed at all.

And on that note, season three ends...

Best Episodes:

10. The Firefly: In which Walter befriends one of his favourite musicians - and discovers another tragic consequence of bringing Peter to this world 25 years ago.
14. 6B: In which the strange activity in an apartment building comes from the flat of a grieving widow.
15. Subject 13: Another flashback episode (with its wonderful '80s credits sequence) dealing with what happened to Peter and Olivia as children.
16. Os: in which it emerges that Walter broke science.
17. Stowaway: I refuse to believe dark magic was not involved in Anna Torv's William Bell.
19. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: In which the cast take LSD and become bad cartoons.
20. 6:02 AM EST: In which the world really starts to fall to pieces. More than usual, I mean.
21. The Last Sam Weiss: In which the Fringe team have a race against time to save the world. As you do.
22. The Day We Died: Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. Complicated but satisfying season finale - but what a cliffhanger!



*As a fictional device!

Fringe: Season 2

After season one's breathtaking finale, in which Agent Olivia Dunham was whisked into a parallel universe to come face to face with the mysterious William Bell in a still-standing World Trade Center, we return to the original universe where the Fringe team are trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to her. Olivia is little help. Returned unconscious to her own world, her memories are vague and formless, returning gradually over the course of several episodes. The series goes back primarily to its former weirdness-of-the-week format, with a side plot involving shape shifters from the parallel universe, and while in equal measures compelling and ridiculous, I found myself impatiently wanting to know more about the bigger picture.

Season two goes into detail about the characters' backstory to reveal a devastating secret about Peter Bishop, who is not from this world at all! In a poignant and powerful flashback episode (with its credit sequence and other graphics redone '80s-style) we learn what had been previously hinted. Our Walter Bishop's son died from a childhood illness, but our mad scientist discovered belatedly how to save him and stepped into the other world to do for his counterpart's son what he could not do for his own. Only, he could not let this other Peter go back to his old life, but kept him and brought him up as his own child.

Oh dear, I thought. If our Walter has spent seventeen years in a mental institution, what effect would the loss of his son have on the other Walter (which he nicknamed "Walternate." Because of course.) The answer was not what I had expected. This other Walter has risen to a power, possibly taking the Bell role as the authority in this slightly but significantly different reality. (That world's Bell died in a car crash as a young man, a point that strikes me as suspicious.)

The season's grand finale sees Walter joining forces with his old mad-science pal-turned-enemy, Dr Bell, when our heroes cross over to the other side in an attempt to bring Peter back, but ends on another beauty of a cliffhanger when the wrong Olivia Dunham makes the return, leaving our protagonist stranded on the other side.

Best episodes:*

10. Grey Matters. Some of the reason for Walter's madness and loss of memory becomes clear. This episode is not to be compared to a previous time when Leonard Nimoy and ridiculous science-fiction brain surgery were in the same episode.
14. The Bishop Revival. A Nazi serial-killer has links with Walter's family history.
15. Jacksonville. Two buildings from different universes vie to occupy the same space, with gruesome results. Olivia's journey back into the nightmares of her childhood reveal some surprising results.
16. Peter. Fringe, 1985. Backstory galore, best episode yet.
22-23. Over There. The season finale: we meet the Fringe team's other-world counterparts, and discover that despite his dodgy ethics, Dr Bell has been, and always shall be Walter's friend.

Fringe: Season One

Fringe was a TV programme that didn't appear on my radar until very recently. I completely missed it when it was first aired in 2008, and just recently on my voyages through the internet, many conversations with my fellow geeks seemed to end up referring back to this TV programme. I borrowed the first season from my sister's friend Bob, knowing only that Denethor and Pacey team up to investigate weird goings-on and do battle with J.J. Abrams' signature lens flare.

It took me a few episodes to decide whether I was going to enjoy Fringe or not. At first, it is very much a weird-phenomena-of-the-week show, sometimes gruesome, often intriguing, and usually involving very dubious science. I'm really not very scientifically-minded at all, and even I had issues with believing that one could actually discover the last thing a person saw before they died by, essentially, using their eye as a slide projector. I'm not sure one can really classify Fringe as science fiction, though it tries to at least imitate realism. Perhaps it tries too hard. I can accept Doctor Who with phrases such as "wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey," but in Fringe I caught myself saying "I don't think it works like that," several times. Once I'd got used to suspending my disbelief, I found it a "just one more episode" sort of show and blitzed through the entire season in about five days. Obviously it's doing something right.

The viewpoint character, is Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), an FBI agent assigned to the Fringe division, which investigates anything that can't easily be explained. I was surprised and pleased to find a female character in this role. She is the audience viewpoint character, and we see this weird underside to the world through her eyes. She is tough and efficient, with a death glare that could wither iron, holding her own among a male-dominated workplace, and when accused of getting too emotionally involved in her cases by a chauvinistic superior, she points out, yes she does care. That's what makes her so good.

Although Olivia is the protagonist, I think it is clear from early on that the central character is Walter Bishop a brilliant, if unorthodox, scientist who has spent the past seventeen years in a mental institution. Though not FBI, he and his estranged son Peter become the crucial members of Olivia's team, performing the experiments which provide the impossible answers to impossible mysteries. As the "mad scientist," bumbling about in his own world, Walter provides most of the show's humour, with his random fixations and outrageous ponderings, but also its heart. Every so often Walter snaps out of his befuddlement and acknowledge how broken he is, or how he has failed his son. I suspect that the next time I watch The Lord of the Rings, I will view Denethor a lot more sympathetically. John Noble plays both characters, who are mentally unstable and have fraught relationships with their sons.

Fringe Season 1 has two longer-term story arcs on top of the weirdness-of-the-week: one concerning the mystery surrounding Olivia's deceased partner (in both senses of the word) John - was he a traitor or not? - and one about a mysterious cult or possibly terrorist organisation called ZFT, who seem to be behind a lot of the paranormal phenomena. Collectively, all the events that can't be explained by conventional means are referred to as "The Pattern," which seems at first to be a misnomer as there doesn't appear to be much link between, say, someone turning into a kind of were-possum-porcupine on an aeroplane, and a wild boy who can predict when murders are going to be committed, or someone who dies of old age within half an hour of being born. But the investigations keep leading back to ZFT, and the pieces start coming together into the season's main plot, even if it takes a while to figure out what that plot is going to be. And it turns out that Walter's forgotten past lies at the heart of the mystery.

The same name keeps popping up throughout the series: Dr William Bell, Walter's old mad-science partner, who while Walter has been incarcerated, has lived a long and prosperous life,* at the head of a big corporation called Massive Dynamic, with whom Olivia comes into contact again and again. It is unclear whether Bell and Massive Dynamic are to be trusted; clearly they are up to something. And then it emerges that not only are Massive Dynamic and Walter Bishop deeply mixed up in "the Pattern," but so is Olivia - as just a small child, she was the subject of weird psychic experiments performed by Walter and Bell**, and now, 25-30 years later, she is affected by them, catching glimpses into alternative universes, and finally, in the last episode, being transported across the divide into one of these other worlds. Olivia finds herself in an office, and a figure appears, his face hidden in shadow in a slow reveal of who could only be the infamous Dr Bell - but the voice is distinctive, and then Leonard Nimoy steps into the light, and I actually fall off my chair in surprise. (Curiously, before deciding to watch Fringe, my other option of which boxset to watch next was Heroes, which I knew had a Spock actor playing the villain, in that case the pretender Quinto.*** Though I haven't yet figured out whether William Bell is actually the bad guy or a morally squiffy anti-hero type. Or another thing altogether) Olivia demands to know where she is, but Bell says that is a complicated question. The camera slowly pans out of the window, and I think it is impossible not to get the shivers as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are shown to be still standing tall in a time when Barack Obama is President of the United States. Thus ends season one, and I suspect that the weirdness has only just begun!




*sorry not sorry
** who I've only just realised share the same initials - symbolising two sides to the same character, perhaps?
*** I don't mean it, Zachary! You are largely to blame thank for me getting into this whole Star Trek malarky in the first place.

Sunday Summary: It's been a while

Hello all. Hope you're doing well. I haven't written a Sunday Summary post lately. I've been working a lot recently, which has been (or will be) good for money reasons, but bad for having anything interesting to say about my life. Still, I've managed to fit in a Bout of Books readathon around it, during which I read a not-too-shabby three books, and finished my very belated Buffy the Vampire Slayer catch-up which I started just after the new year.

Now my colleagues are all back at work, I've got three days off, the first time in a while that I've had more than one day off at a time. My reading has slowed right down since the readathon. I've just started The Lies of Locke Lamora on Hanna's recommendation, although she did point out that it takes a while to get going. I haven't got that far into the book yet, and although I am enjoying it when I do read it, it's still in the world-building and introducing-characters section and pretty slow going. The narrative switches between the titular Locke as a child thief who proved to be too light-fingered and troublesome even for the Fagin-esque gang to which he belonged, and an extended sequence of an adult Locke setting up a confidence trick on a rich nobleman. I'm finding Locke's backstory more interesting and easy to read, and suspect that this confidence trick's main purpose is to give the reader an overview of the world's political situation without seeming too much like masses of exposition. But I'm still waiting for the plot to start. (I might be wrong, and all this might be the catalyst for something bigger. Only way to find out is to read on.)

 So, what does one do when one is taking a long time over a book? Why, go out and buy a whole load more! I've been pretty good about letting my to-read pile grow smaller rather than bigger, but when is sank beneath the twenty books line, I took myself and my canvas book bag shopping and came home with some shiny new goodies. After enjoying From A Buick 8 a lot more than I'd expected, I found another Stephen King book in The Works for £1.99: Full Dark, No Stars, which is a collection of either short stories or novellas and which Neil Gaiman reviewed on its release. Also, Doctor Sleep, the long-awaited sequel to The Shining, has finally been released in paperback, and both Waterstone's and WHSmith are selling it for half price at the moment. How could I resist?

Haruki Murakami is another author whose name I keep on finding on my favourite blogs. I read 1Q84 last year or the year before, which was very weird and imaginative, if a bit long. I'm still not entirely sure how much I liked it, but evidently enough to want to see what else he can do, as when I found Sputnik Sweetheart on a recommendations table, the last copy ended up on my book pile. And I enjoyed The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul so much when I read it last year that when I found author Deborah Roderiguez' non-fiction account of her own experiences in Afghanistan, The Kabul Beauty School, re-released with a beautiful new cover, I had to have that too!

This week, Bex persuaded me to join in with the lastest Ninja Book Swap, organised by herself and Hanna. I took place in the Trick or Treat book swap last year, which was brilliant, so I really didn't need to have my arm twisted. If you want to join in, you've only got until the end of today to sign up (details here.)

Now I've finished with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, last night I started a new adventure, the science-fiction show Fringe. I didn't have a lot of foreknowledge of this one, except that Pacey from Dawson's Creek and Denethor from Lord of the Rings investigate weird stuff and battle lens flare (as it is from J.J. Abrams of Lost fame, and also the Star Trek reboot.) It usually takes me about three episodes to make up my mind about a TV show, and so far I've just watched two. I've borrowed the box set from my sister's friend Bob, and am not sure yet whether I'll watch after season one. I'm enjoying it, but haven't yet fallen in love with it. I'm not a scientifically-minded person at all, and even I can tell that the "fringe science" here is ridiculous. Flux capacitors, warp drives, timey-wimey detectors that go ding when there's stuff... no problem. But Walter Bishop's particular brand of mad science is stretching my suspension of disbelief. Still, there's no doubt the writers had a lot of fun with it, and it is pretty entertaining, if gruesome in places. I'll stick with it and see how it goes.