ReS Futurae (Jun 2022)
L’important n’est pas la destination, mais les seuils que l’on franchit. L’exemple des mondes possibles dans Fringe
Abstract
Time travel narratives or stories of travel to parallel worlds have offered countless experiments in narrative innovation and exploration of different temporalities. But beyond the deconstructed time, there is the immediacy and strangeness of the journey between two radically different worlds, which are no longer separated by distance or space, but by simple thresholds that we cross. It is this notion and its use in science fiction series that this article explores. All TV series serialize the thresholds of fiction, since the spectator enters and leaves the fictional universe each week to go back to his empirical world, but science-fiction series stand out in that they thematize and formalize them, using among other devices « mises en abyme ». They did it at first with a certain simplicity, many classic series like Doctor Who, Star Trek or Stargate SG-1 proposing in each episode to enter a new world to explore. In more recent years, complex TV allows series like Fringe to serialize thresholds in a much more interesting way. These thresholds, whether they lead to parallel worlds, alternative temporalities or other consciousness, come to form the very matrix of the series, which offers a complex questioning of identity, its limits, its variations.
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