"Fringe:" "I want to take a shower from the inside out"

Episode two of "Fringe" makes it pretty clear from the outset that it's not going to be like "Lost" or "Alias" - it's dead set on taking viewers by the hand and guiding them through the bumpier passages of the show's mythology. There are several scenes of bald exposition recapping what happened in last week's premiere; relationships between the characters are re-explained and then hammered home; the show's central theme - science has run amok and we're merely treading water instead of keeping up with it - is explained several times, with and without big words.

Not that this is a bad thing - it's a well-known trope in TV that when starting a new show, you essentially make the pilot five times in a row to get viewers up to speed. But it's a clear departure for series co-creator J.J. Abrams, who likes his viewers to pay attention, rabid attention.

Tuesday's episode opens in typically attention-grabbing fashion, with a chatty hooker getting pregnant immediately after a tryst in a dumpy motel and giving birth and the baby aging and dying - all in the matter of less than an hour. (They grow up so fast these days. And fruit flies think they have to live for the moment!) A nurse shrieks melodramatically, because I guess that's what nurses do.

So FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is called in, because growing old in an accelerated fashion is apparently a violation of some Federal statute I wasn't aware of. But this incident conveniently has echoes of a case Dunham never solved, of a ghastly serial killer who removed women's pituitary glands from their brains, and it also taps into a secret project that mad scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble) was working on during his tenure with the U.S. government before he went bonkers, involving creating adult soldiers in a matter of three years.

(Can this page from Fox's website help you unlock the mysteries surrounding "The Pattern?" No, it turns out.)

Turns out there's a product of those experiments running around out there, and he needs those pituitary glands to curb his aging process. (How does this guy score so many women in the first place? He's a pretty creepy, uncommunicative guy.)

So J.J. Abrams is showing his influences: This is essentially the plot of the TV flick "The Night Strangler," which starred Darren McGavin as intrepid and wisecracking reporter Carl Kolchak, only with a layer of science drizzled over it to coax viewers to buy into it more.

It's OK stuff, but I sense "Fringe" lapsing into a conventionality that "Lost" assiduously avoided. I'd like a little more out of Torv's acting, to be honest, and a whole lot less from Noble, whose performance threatens to devolve into camp if it hasn't already. His sonorous voice and melodramatic, vaguely pompous line readings seem to come from '50s potboilers, and the writers aren't helping with the sort of dialogue they stuff into his mouth: Introduced to the concept of auto seat warmers, he fairly purrs, "It warms your ass - wonderful!"

(Dial it back, old man. Certainly you have a contraption in your laboratory that can manage that, don't you?)

You find yourself agreeing with his exasperated son Peter (Joshua Jackson), who asks, "Would you just talk like a person?" Peter's default setting seems to be cynical exasperation, but Jackson's exuding the most charisma here so far, reminiscent of early (and grumpier) George Clooney.

But there's a little game you can play while watching "Fringe." As it's part of Fox's clever "Remote-Free TV" strategy, each episode is about 9 or so minutes longer than the average primetime show these days. So you can try to figure out what scenes will get cut when the show airs on cable or in syndication, when it'll have to run with the normal battery of commercial interruptions. I'll start by saying the whole last scene can go, and the interactions between Olivia and Massive Dynamic's Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) can be trimmed down significantly, as well.

- "Fringe:" 9 p.m. Tuesday, Fox (Channel 11).