TVSquad

That last episode of Fringe just will not let go of me. Tapping into parallel worlds, and then hearing from Walter that they're real... The impending conflict that he and Bell were preparing Olivia and the other children test subjects for in Florida... The Observer coming to collect Walter because it's time... You can feel it. Things are coming to a head and it reminds me of that feeling I had toward the end of the first season of Lost.

Back then it was just a show about bizarrely connected people on a weird island who somehow survived a plane crash. We certainly didn't know 90 percent of what we do now, but we could feel all that story percolating. Mid-2008 Fringe was just a little show about weird happenings and I kept waiting to get more into the big conspiracy, the "what's this show really all about?." Now Nina Sharp of Massive Dynamics is scared, and The Observer is telling Walter that it's time. Oh the pot is stirring my friends. Fringe is one of the best hours on television right now, and it could well be poised to be one of the all-time greats!

You could make a case for Fringe being the biggest premiere of the fall season. Through the involvement of J.J. Abrams, and a boatload of promotion from the network, the show has generated an incredible amount of buzz. The thing about buzz though, is that it's often fleeting. At some point the show will have to back it up. There are still many weeks to go before we'll have a good idea of the result of the Fringe experiment, but where's the fun in waiting for the numbers? I ask you, TV Squad readers, to put on your ratings analysis caps and make the call. How will Fringe fare?

It's a complicated question. The biggest sticking point for me is the "serialized drama" question. The producers seem to be going out of their way to make sure everyone knows that this isn't like Lost. The LA Times quotes Abrams as saying that Fringe will be "a show that people can watch as frequently and as infrequently as they want to." That's all well and good to say, but in the same article he refers to "a larger mythology." In addition, lead actress Anna Torv says that what she loves about the show is the conspiracy. That's not the stuff of easily accessible procedurals.