However, If They Go Undercover On a LARP That Descends Into Horror, We’re Suing
On the grounds that there is too much good stuff on television these days, it took me until the holidays and a binge on the first-season box set to acquaint myself with Fringe
. Though you are no doubt already hip to it, I nonetheless award it a late-breaking medal of awesomeness. What I like most about this science-horror conspiracy police procedural is the way it melds the structures of The X-Files and Alias, while learning lessons from the scripting pitfalls of those earlier shows. Also the cast is great, from the obvious genius of John Noble as mad scientist Walter Bishop to the subtler anchoring duties of Anna Torv as the FBI agent protagonist Olivia Dunham.
I hope the show continues to build momentum not only because I loved the first season, but because it will make my job of explaining GUMSHOE easier whenever I’m weaseling at the Pelgrane booth at a con. If you set out to make a GUMSHOE TV series, you’d be lucky to arrive at a result so utterly GUMSHOE as Fringe. Plus, its position on the geek spectrum will make it a more accessible example to our crowd than CSI, which is what I’ve been using so far.
It was so GUMSHOE in its use of the procedural structure that there are scenes where I swear I could see the names of the investigative abilities appearing as those nifty 3D chyrons over the relevant dialogue scenes. I’m thinking of the moment where Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) explains why he, as a reader of poker tells, has the Bullshit Detector ability. I half expected him to pull out his character sheet. Throughout early episodes characters provide quick backstory justifications for their investigative abilities before going on to use them. This is a device worth stealing in introductory GUMSHOE sessions, as it helps to connect character histories to the actions they’re taking. The characters are smart, always get the information they need, but sometimes go through multiple theories before they arrive at the weird truth. As in GUMSHOE, the suspense revolves around the dangers they face in the course of their investigations, not whether they’ll gather the clues they need.
And that’s not even mentioning the bit late in the season...
...where the characters start explaining how there’s a membrane between realities which gets thinner in places where weird events transpire.
Now, I’m in no way insinuating that J. J. Abrams had a copy of The Esoterrorists on his bedside table when he and his Trek writers and Alias alums Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were developing this. GUMSHOE is based on the procedural structure, which predates both game and show. They simply employ it in an exemplary fashion, making it an ideal source of inspiration for any GUMSHOE game. And the membrane bit is also a fun coincidence, drawn in both cases from the general store of pop culture concepts floating out there in the genre ether. The fact that I keep seeing this weird bald dude in a fedora going through my recycling has got to be a coincidence.
Check it out, if you haven’t already. Like Lost, it definitely rewards consumption in box-set sized chunks.