Fringe suffers from the JJ Abrams problem of “create all this sci-fi lore to hook you, then hope the audience forgets the rules to tell a relationship story.” That’s a really hard sell when you do stuff like encode glyphs in the commercial break bumpers, it kind if points to them expecting the audience to be sitting there with a pad and paper taking notes.

For example…you find people with mystery little discs in their hands. Why do we not scan everyone connected to the pattern with those? Ok, so then Loeb. We find out he’s secretly with ZFT, oh no! Let’s arrest him, then ask him questions. Wait he won’t answer? End of the wiki entry, he’s not important anymore. Hold on, in Season 1 episode 1, don’t you have mind-connecting tech that can literally interrogate someone to give information even after death? Maybe we could, I dunno, pull him out of jail and super-question him? Or are we just gonna forget that detail?

I dunno, many times in that show I felt like it had so much potential but just kind of forgot a lot of its own lore to keep looping the story back to the family/relationship stuff. JJ does this with SO much that he makes…Alias when the Rambaldi device is made and the red orb is floating over Russia…then the sisters connect, and we just kind of move on from the world-ending uberweapon. Or Lost. Or Trek, how he made a world where if you have a whole bunch of Khan’s on ice making blood, you kind of cure death, but then that’s never referenced again.