TV review: Descent into madness won't make you lose the plot

The new series stars (from left) Joshua Jackson, John Noble and Anna Torv. Photo / Supplied

The new drama from Lost creator J.J. Abrams opens on a plane. This is very scary. There is an electrical storm, which is quite scary but not half as frightening as the sinking feeling that we might have seen all of this before. And not understood a thing about it.

But Fringe (funny name, it makes you think it might be set in a hair salon) is not Lost. It will get weirder but the pilot (last night, TV2) was pretty easy to follow - in Abram's scheme of things. We've been promised "some of the most insane stuff you've ever seen". What happened on that plane was pretty insane: the passengers' faces started falling off, which was supposed to be really horrible and freaky. But scary? Only if you are the sort who thinks zombie films are scary, not funny.

The really wacky thing was that the plane, full of dead, oozing people, managed to land itself at Boston airport, on time.

But what had caused the oozing death? The Homeland Security agent/bastard said: "We don't think what happened on that plane was a result of the in-flight movie." Oh, I don't know. Some of those in-flight movies are really bad.

Some of them have scenes like this one: Two FBI agents are in the sack. That old illicit agent sex trick. Her cellphone rings. That old phonus interruptus trick. I'm sure I've seen that in a bad in-flight movie. Later, there is a scene where the female FBI agent (played sturdily, if not with any degree of whoah, by Anna Torv) reminds male FBI agent (played sturdily, if not smoulderingly, by Mark Valley) that he said he loved her. She tells him she loves him too. In the middle of an investigation?

As a plot device it was ridiculous, but necessary. You knew that he was going to get something nasty. He did, but was saved (until he was killed off again, possibly for good, but probably not) by the weird duo of the mad scientist and his shady son.

The mad scientist (his science was the fringe stuff of the title: mind control, invisibility, reanimation) had been in the loony bin for 17 years but his Harvard lab still exists. It is in the lab where Olivia, the female FBI agent, strips to her underwear, another essential plot device for sci-fi stuff.

We know the scientist is mad because he requests - and gets - a cow, which watches telly with him. He says crazy things like: "Excellent. Let's make some LSD."

Oddly, the female agent, the madman and the shady son are left alone to carry out their strange experiments even as a major investigation of very strange world events is being carried out. You'd think someone might have wanted to supervise.

Still, other than the glaring holes in the plot - in a world where it is possible to make super duper robotic arms for humans, the FBI agent doesn't yet have a digital recorder - Fringe is easy enough to make sense of. It's old-fashioned storytelling with old-fashioned car chases and action scenes and the odd quirky character. It doesn't yet "rip open your consciousness", but some of us are more than happy not to get Lost all over again.