The fall show that inspires the highest hopes of all is Fox's sci-fi extravaganza Fringe, by auteur J.J. Abrams of Alias and Lost fame. Hopes are higher than Dean Martin on New Year's Eve, because the nerd in each of us yearns for another X-Files and we want to believe this is it at last.

Fringe also stars a guy, a girl, and the uncanny in all its shape-shifting forms. Joshua Jackson, who's been uncannily unfamous since Dawson's Creek, may bounce back as Peter Bishop, the reluctant caretaker son of his mad scientist dad Walter Bishop (John Noble), who's sort of like a bizarre-world version of the Unabomber, who tries to stop people from getting killed by technology. Peter babysits his alternatingly nuttily incontinent and brilliantly insightful pop and chases shivery mysteries with FBI occultist gumshoe Olivia Dunham (Ann Torv, an Aussie blonde unknown whose beauty is interestingly compromised by a funny little nasal groove under her septum, an eccentric feature fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman also has).

Fringe boasts two great tastes that taste great together. It's a woo-woo weirdfest a la X-Files blended with a police procedural like CSI. As one of Abrams' writers explains in an illuminating interview, "When nine of the top ten shows on TV is called Law and Order and CSI, you have to study them a little bit to see what they're doing."

They study them a lot. In the first episode, something unearthly horrible happens to a jet full of people -- oh, it's not too much of a spoiler to say that they start melting, and not in an affectionate way. Walter the pants-wetting genius knows just how to save them, if only certain elaborate scientific procedures can be effected, along with much arch-expository dialogue.

The opening scene is great, the special effects are pricey for TV, and the finale of the first episode is pleasingly chilling. You've got to love some of the dialogue: when the FBI Blonde tells the mad scientist that the victims' skin is translucent, he mutters, "It's not good to see through the skin. It's tricky."

Fringe has all kinds of great stuff, but I have a couple of big reservations about how well it justifies the hype. It's one thing to wear your influences on your sleeve; we live in an era of recombinant entertainment, a mash-up universe riddled with wormholes of the imagination, each feeding into the other. But so very many things from Fringe are undigested elements of more famous predecessors.

The first scene pointedly echoes the William Shatner Twilight Zone episode about the guy who's the only one to see a gremlin on the jet's wing. The melty-flesh victims look like Laura Palmer wrapped in cellophane on Twin Peaks. When a bad guy gets discovered with illicit lab animals at a storage unit, it echoes the storage-unit scene of Red Dragon. When the FBI Blonde goes into a tank of water to trip out and contact somebody in a trance, it echoes Altered States. Blair Brown, a star of that film, wonderfully plays a scary lady not unlike Lois Smith in Minority Report. Many scenes do tribute to David Cronenberg. Fringe is an explosion in an homage factory.

The big bad-guy corporation in the show is called Massive Dynamic, a Microsoftian monolith whose billboard looks like a Devo album cover and whose totalitarian motto is "What do we do? What don't we do?" Fringe's opening credits feature many evocative words zooming across the screen: "Science. Psychokinesis. Transmogrification. Teleportation. Precognition. Dark matter. Nanotechnology. Genetic Engineering." What doesn't this show try to do?

Abrams and company vow never to get lost in the proliferating kudzu of plot, as his hits have done before. He's got a firm storyline in mind, and each episode is shot so that you won't feel lost if you don't know the whole mythology. It looks like Fringe will give some of the pleasure of a procedural without the horrible repetitive sameness and cardboard characters, and some of the addictiveness of the ongoing-mythology style shows.

My worry is that there's not enough that's entirely original here. Abrams' other hits had their flaws, but each offered something strikingly new. Yet, despite its derivativeness, there are some very scintillant moments in the show. If you hear Blair Brown utter the resonant last line of the pilot episode and don't feel compelled to tune in for the next one, you can't be human.

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