Marionette (S03E09)
Airdate: 9 December 2010
Written by: Monica Owusu-Breen & Alice Schapker Directed by: Joe Chappelle
Running Time: 44 minutes
Following the temporary resolution of the clashing universes storyline, Fringe returned to what might generously be termed "normalcy," and the result was, for many viewers, a palpable disappointment. Part of this stemmed from the sudden absence of apocalyptic stakes — after weeks of interdimensional conflict threatening the very fabric of reality, a return to the familiar procedural formula felt deflating by comparison. Yet the disappointment ran deeper than mere tonal whiplash. There was a distinct impression, difficult to shake, that the production team had simply exhausted its creative reserves, at least for a while. Marionette, the last episode aired before the month-long winter hiatus of Season 3, does little to dispel that impression, offering an piece of television that oscillates between the genuinely compelling and the frustratingly derivative.
The plot picks up the main storyline from Olivia's perspective. She has been released from hospital, her body having largely recovered from the physical ordeal she endured during her involuntary stay in the parallel universe. Her psychological recovery, however, promises to be a far more arduous journey — and it is complicated immeasurably when Peter confesses that he had slept with her doppelgänger, Fauxlivia, genuinely believing her to be the real Olivia. The revelation sends Olivia into a spiral in which she begins to struggle with the unsettling notion that her own life — her apartment, her possessions, her relationships, and most significantly, her romantic partner — had been stolen out from under her. The sense of violation is profound, and the episode is at its strongest when it allows that sense to breathe.
The procedural storyline, meanwhile, begins with a commuter named Grant Russo (Michael Bean), who is seemingly accidentally poked by an umbrella wielded by a mysterious, dapper man (Mark Ivanir) on a train platform. On his journey back to his home in Rye, New York, Russo begins to feel unwell before collapsing. He wakes on a makeshift operating table, where the dapper man apologises for what he has done before calling 911 and vanishing. When EMTs arrive, they discover that Russo's heart has been removed, and, more astonishingly, that he survived for three minutes without it. The Fringe Division is summoned, and Walter immediately recognises scarring from previous heart surgery, deducing that Russo had been the recipient of a heart transplant. He had briefly survived the ordeal thanks to a serum that slows cellular degeneration and decomposition. Walter identifies the serum as one similar to a formula he and William Bell had experimented with in the 1970s, in an attempt to reanimate a deceased family pet dog — a detail that, given Walter's history, carries a weight the episode does not fully exploit.
The investigation soon uncovers a second victim: a restaurant owner named Ben Killenburg (Michael Robert Coleman), who survived an attack in which his eyes were extracted by a man who apologised and claimed that "the eyes aren't his own." It gradually emerges that both victims, along with others, are connected by having received organ transplants, all traced back to a single donor: Amanda Walsh (Anja Savcic), a ballerina who had taken her own life during a bout of depression. Further investigation reveals that Walsh's remains, destined for cremation, had been stolen. After determining that Amanda had been a member of a depression support group, the team identifies another member — a wealthy heir with medical training, Roland David Barrett — as the perpetrator. Barrett, infatuated with Amanda and devastated by her death, had resolved to bring her back by literally restoring her body piece by piece, using the serum to preserve the stolen organs and sustain the reanimation process.
When the Fringe Division raids Barrett's home, he surrenders without resistance. Shortly before the raid, he had succeeded in reanimating Amanda's body — but, upon looking into her eyes, he is struck by the devastating realisation that "she wasn't Amanda." The Fringe Division finds her dead once more, the reanimation having failed to truly restore the person Barrett had loved. The incident serves as a catalyst for Olivia, who breaks down in front of Peter, telling him that she cannot reconcile herself with the fact that he failed to recognise that Fauxlivia was not her — that the woman he was intimate with was an impostor, and that he could not tell the difference. It is a raw, painful scene, and one of the episode's highlights.
The episode closes with another ominous semi-cliffhanger: the Observer known as September, watching Walter and Peter, quietly remarks that "he is still alive" — a line that, while intriguing, feels somewhat disconnected from the emotional weight of the preceding hour.
By this point in its run, Fringe had demonstrated a willingness to play with different genres, but Marionette represents the closest the series came to resembling — and, to a certain degree, succeeding as — old-school Gothic horror. It does so by unashamedly drawing from Frankenstein: the mad scientist, the tragic romance, the collection of body parts from corpses in pursuit of reanimating the dead. Scriptwriters Monica Owusu-Breen and Alison Schapker are honest enough to acknowledge the debt through Walter's dialogue, in which he references the centuries-old practice of corpse-snatching for medical research as the source of inspiration for Mary Shelley's famous novel. The episode does not stop at narrative parallels, however; it borrows visual cues as well. Barrett's mansion is dark, imposing, and Gothic in its menace, while his fashion, manners, and choice of music are weirdly anachronistic, lending him the air of a man out of time — a detail that works more effectively than it perhaps should.
Yet few things in the episode are as simultaneously striking and misguided as the scene in which Barrett uses a series of mechanically powered contraptions to make the still-unreanimated corpse of Amanda dance a ballet sequence. While clearly intended to illustrate the depths of Barrett's madness and obsession, the scene plays as a rather cheap attempt to match the goriness of the shocking opening sequence — a trick that, by this point in the series' run, had become something Fringe fans were well accustomed to. The result is nothing more than a morbid detail, albeit one that is likely to be remembered by audiences rather longer than they might have wished.
And therein lies the central problem. That marionette scene, and the broader horror subplot it belongs to, ultimately drowns out what could have been a far more rewarding storyline: Olivia's attempts to readjust to her old life and the psychological aftermath of her ordeal. The scenes between Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson, in which the characters are forced to confront the elephants in the room — the betrayal, the violation, the impossibility of simply resuming where things left off — are genuinely valuable and compelling. Torv, in particular, conveys the fragility and simmering anger of a woman whose identity has been usurped with a quiet intensity that deserves more space than the episode affords it. But the writers apparently lacked either the talent or the time to build an entire episode around that material. Instead, they injected a cheap, almost parodical horror subplot, attempting to tie it to Olivia's emotional arc in the closing moments with a thematic connection — the reanimation of a body that is no longer truly the person it was, mirroring Olivia's fear that her life has been similarly hollowed out — that is not entirely successful. The parallel is there, but it feels strained, as though the writers recognised the need for a bridge between the two storylines but could not quite construct one sturdy enough to bear the weight.
In the end, Marionette is an episode of frustrating near-misses. Its Gothic ambitions are admirable, and its central performances — particularly Torv's — are strong enough to suggest a better episode lurking beneath the surface. But the horror elements, while intermittently effective, too often feel like a distraction rather than an enhancement, and the result is an piece of television that entertains in fits and starts but never quite coheres into the sum of its parts.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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