It's a fitting beginning to J.J. Abrams' bizarre, macabre new series, Fringe—Fox's latest walk on the weird side.

In Fringe, Abrams (creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost) essentially stitches together The X-Files and CSI, then zaps it with high-voltage grotesqueries, hoping this improbable invention—a sci-fi cop procedural at its core—can shamble through the TV season. The results are interesting, outlandish and more than a wee bit monstrous.

Weird Science
The folks on the plane mentioned above are dead, killed by a bioterrorist weapon stemming from so-called fringe science—a collection of disciplines your high school chemistry teacher likely skipped over. And with good reason: The sciences we're talking about here make most real scientists chortle in their Cheerios, and includes everything from parapsychology to reanimation and lots of other oddities one would more expect to find in a 1950s horror flick than in any university laboratory.

But the Department of Homeland Security knows better. These fringe sciences are real, and it has the corpses to prove it. Officials have noticed that some worldwide terrorists are eschewing suitcase bombs for far more improbable weaponry, and these officials, apparently, need to get to the bottom of it all.

They recruit Olivia Dunham, a comely FBI agent, to help track the connected cases. (Olivia's new boss calls them, somewhat unimaginatively, the "Pattern.") She, in turn, tracks down her very own mad scientist—a guy named Walter Bishop who dabbled in every possible fringe science before being locked away in an insane asylum for 17 years.

"They have horrible pudding in here," he says.

Ewww, Gross!
Of all the completely preposterous leaps Fringe forces viewers to make, perhaps the biggest is why Homeland Security would entrust the nation's future to a nutty professor who can't remember names, is confused by cell phones and, sometimes, wets himself.

But I digress. The point is, Olivia, Walter and Peter (Walter's reluctant-to-help son) take up residence in a basement on the campus of Harvard University, where they work to solve these crimes by dissecting dead bodies, conducting bizarre experiments and occasionally drilling holes into subjects' craniums. In one episode, Walter tries to lift a visual imprint from a victim's eye, and to do so, he plucks the eyeball out of her skull.

It all makes for pretty gory episodic television. Characters don't just die on Fringe. They melt. They get smothered by translucent gel—like grapes in a Jell-O salad. They're ripped open from the inside by freakish fetuses. They're dissected alive by serial killers with a hankering for pituitary glands.

Anna Torv, the actress who plays Olivia, knows all the gore can be hard to stomach.

"I want her [Olivia] to vomit one time when she sees one of these things," Torv told The Los Angeles Times, "because I think she would legitimately feel that way."

The show has other issues. Language can be a bit blue, and the camera doesn't shy away from showing the occasional character cavorting in her underwear. But those are ancillary to Fringe's fixation on the grotesque. It's not just the blood and guts that get to you: It's the aura of terror and torture that permeates everything as we see victims strapped to tables or chairs, wide-eyed and scared out of their wits, unable to save themselves.

It's Alive!
Fringe is, at least in part, written to illustrate the corrupting nature of power—in this case, the power of science. Every episode contains an unwritten moral: Just because science can do something doesn't mean scientists should.

"One of the inherent pitfalls of being a scientist is trying to maintain that distinction between God's domain and our own," Walter solemnly intones.

Easy for Walter to say now, since most of his long-ago experimentations apparently gave rise to the fringe-based terrorism viewers see every week. And even modern-day Walter seems to struggle with the finer points of these distinctions. He may love SpongeBob SquarePants and have a fondness for playing the piano, but he sometimes seems all too eager to drill into someone else's head.