Let your brain become knotted with doppelgangers and parallel worlds

We have them in the Moviepilot editorial team 50 best sci-fi series since 2000 chosen. Fringe – FBI Borderline Cases lands on Place 10 and, as a network series that aired weekly from 2008 to 2013, stands out against countless other genre representatives. Why? This doesn’t have to remain one of the mysteries that the series itself was so fond of opening up.

What makes Fringe so special as a sci-fi series?

In Fringe, FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is assigned to work with the mentally unstable scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his skeptical son Peter (Joshua Jackson). The task of her unusual department is to To investigate crimes related to inexplicable phenomena: i.e. events that take place in the fringe of reality.

After 5 seasons with exactly 100 episodes Fringe ended eleven years ago. The series from JJ Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci initially caught fans looking for new mystery entertainment to puzzle over following The X-Files and Lost. But we were kidnapped into a world that was exciting only gradually took on stronger science fiction features. It was precisely this reinvention within the series that made Fringe stand out from the crowd because it further developed its concept instead of standing still and perhaps boring us at some point.

While the first season of Fringe established the tone, the series later began to establish its sci-fi identity more and more. This development only made the long-running narrative all the more exciting because it gently took us by the hand into the unknown. Alongside the characters, we discovered a larger universe and found a well-thought-out mythology.

Experimental sci-fi crime thriller: Fringe impresses with a successful concept and strong characters

There was an overarching narrative in Fringe that cast pale men as “observers” in world history and set up a mysterious company (Massive Dynamic) led by Leonard Nimoy as an antagonist. Still, the sci-fi format mostly stuck to one easily consumable case of the week, in which the series rolled up new exciting crime mysteries from episode to episode. That offered one Anchor in the narrative that made us increasingly doubt reality.

To the strange to eerie discoveries The sci-fi series included human experiments gone wrong as well as spontaneous combustion and dangerously hardening amber gas. In a spirit of experimentation, Fringe also threw in an animated LSD episode every now and then.

The sci-fi escapades were always held together by the strong cast. While John Noble’s scientist skilfully oscillated between the image of forgetful grandpa and megalomaniacal researcher, Anna Torv (Mindhunter, The Last of Us) in particular grounded the sometimes aloof narrative with her down-to-earth manner.

Fringe found his Sci-fi niche between wonderfully pseudo-scientific explanations and successful thought experimentswhich prepared us for parallel dimensions with doppelgangers and broken world walls long before Marvel introduced its multiverse in the cinema.

While you could stream Fringe for free until recently, the sci-fi series is unfortunately only available to rent or buy, for example on Amazon *.

Podcast: The best sci-fi series since 2000

What were the best science fiction series since the beginning of the new millennium? In the podcast we introduce you to 10 unique genre representatives that every sci-fi fan should have seen.

In the first part of our big ranking, we look at places 20 to 11. In addition to fantastic franchise novelties from Star Wars and Star Trek, there are also exciting space adventures, dark sci-fi experiments and crazy cyberpunk.