Another TV Show Review

This show I have followed from the beginning. What better storyline to scare us than parallel universes, where we all have doubles only they’re slightly “different”? Everything over there is the same, except, slightly “different”. Oh, yeah, and it appears the people over “there” not only don’t trust us but don’t like us much. I mean, how can you trust someone who looks exactly like you?

The cast are all great—and nothing against the ones I don’t mention—but, two stand out because their doubles are so important to the show. First, Anna Torv, who plays Olivia Dunham, FBI Special Agent: I think that lady is one of the most beautiful women on television. Why do I think she’s beautiful? I think it’s her honest and sincere smile…and boy, can she act. Just watched the last two shows from last season. FOX wants us to remember how we were left hanging, as if we could forget. Nevertheless, I watched both. Turns out, somehow I had missed the very last show.

Back to Anna Torv and why I think she stands out. Either she has a twin sister or she’s playing two parts, and playing them perfectly. In “our” universe she fiercely follows both the rules and goes her own way when she thinks she should. She’s deadly with her fists and deadly with her gun. In “our” universe she has a sister who stays/lives with her and about a nine-year-old niece. She also doesn’t have a boyfriend, not since her lover got killed in I think the very first episode. Although, in the last show it appears she and Peter Bishop, played by Joshua Jackson, might sometime get together. I’ve always thought a possible chemistry existed between these two, but, personally, I think, if they get too much together it could ruin/end the series, so I doubt they will. Just glimpses at their chemistry should be enough for now. I’m pretty sure the show’s producers and directors agree.

(Strange how throughout the television spectrum, major players usually cannot have spouses, and usually even boyfriends and girlfriends can’t last. I guess we just don’t want our heroes and heroines to be distracted: we want all their energy to go for pleasing us, their fans.)

Now for the “other” Olivia Dunham: She has a shade-of-red hair rather than blond and her personality is…somewhat, “different”. She’s more likely to follow orders then to go her own way, which probably is why she is not as much of a leader in the “other” universe. She walks different too, with somewhat of an “eager to please” bounce.

And that’s the amazing thing about this Anna Torv actress: She’s playing two parts and she is totally believable in both. The two Olivias are so different yet they do some things alike, like carrying backup guns in a purse, and that’s how the “other” Olivia got the drop on “our” Olivia, and what a fight those two had, and, luckily, “our” Olivia won, and finally got to Peter, professed “love” to him, and the three leading characters got back to “our” universe.

The other actor who plays both roles fabulously is Walter Bishop, played by John Noble, and he might actually have the edge: In “our” universe he plays very, very , believably, not only a somewhat mentally-slow but brilliant scientist who can create and then build (from his old notes) almost anything. In the “other” universe he is the Secretary of Defense, and the “other” father of Peter. (We never see a different Peter, which I know of.) As Secretary of Defense Walter appears as somewhat a warrior warmonger who thinks “our” universe is out to destroy “theirs”. And that’s what so impresses me: John Noble is “simple” in “our” universe, and cold and hard in “theirs”, and is totally believable in both roles.

Last but not least Mr. Spock….I mean Leonard Nimoy who plays Dr. William Bell, creator of that unbelievably-high tech, and somewhat scary, company, Massive Dynamics. I hope no such company exists and if it does I hope it’s in America, where it can be…controlled …?

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