Concerning "Fringe," Kalefa Sanneh describes the "mad scientist" of the show as such: "He is a godless mystic, convinced that every freak phenomenon has a materialist explanation, that there are no coincidences." This sentence is perplexing on several accounts. A "godless mystic" is fairly coherent; we might understand this character as a secular believer in the powers of palpable 'spirit' or traceable energy fields. In a word, this person might be a Hegel of the present moment. But "every freak phenomenon has a materialist explanation"—does Sanneh mean material explanation? Materialism would not exactly leave much room for mysticism; to see the world in terms of material processes would be to suspend the leap to mystical perception—rather, any materialist wonder would be grounded in the realm of the physical (finite but unbounded, as we understand the surface of a sphere). Furthermore, materialism certainly allows for coincidences. The world is wide; two things can coincide without necessarily being causally connected. Thus, I don't see how the godless mystic's materialism refuses coincidental phenomena. The freak in this sentence is the referential vacuity by which the "mad scientist" is (un)known.
Second note: In Sanneh's discussion of "The Mentalist," one of the main characters is defined in terms of her brusque castigations: "At the Palm Springs airport, she learns that a colleague needs to stop by the baggage carrousel, and she is not amused: “You checked luggage? What are you, on vacation?”" This scene description intrigues me for its reliance on what I elsewhere call "the poetics of no-man's land," or the ambiance of the airport baggage claim that becomes a spatial cipher for distinct personae, allowing travelers a reading of their fates in piles of bags. The baggage claim consolidates a number of social tropes, all situated in the indefinite time of waiting for one's belongings, which, as we know, may not arrive in the present moment. (The dialectic of the traveler and baggage handler is far more elliptical than that of Hegel's Master and Slave.) Here, the iconic and aloof vacationer is dropped out-of-context into what Sanneh calls a "quasi-scientific investigative drama." How does the airport come to function as a fortune teller? Recall the opening credit scenes of Mike Nichols's The Graduate: the entire film is anticipated in LAX by a mystical cut from Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock to the baggage carousel. Some coincidences are understood to be plainly material and proleptically visionary, at once.
