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| Tuesday, December 14, 2010 03:52 PM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Season 3, Episode 9 - "Marionette") |
 by Fëanor |
Beware spoilers, many of which appear below!
A guy stabs another guy with an umbrella to drug him. I'm pretty sure that's based on a true story. Didn't some spy get poisoned that way a few years back?
Umbrella guy follows his victim back home, waits for him to collapse from the drug, then cuts his heart out and takes it with him in a cooler. But the victim is somehow still alive?? Always an interesting opening on Fringe!
Olivia is being debriefed by Broyles on her trip to the other side. Broyles asks her if she thinks Walternate is close to being able to use Cortexiphan to develop a safe way to travel between universes. Um... okay, this continues to make no sense to me. Alt-Olivia just traveled safely between universes last episode!!! Does no one remember this? It just happened! It was really quite easy! She got an injection, waited a few minutes, and then bang! No ill effects! Admittedly, she needed to be swapped with something on the other side, but as far as I can tell that could have just been a pile of rocks. The point is, they can already do this! Someone crosses between universes like every episode now! Jesus! I wish they would just give up on this whole plotline about how hard it is to travel between universes and move on. It doesn't make any damn sense. They're constantly contradicting themselves.
I can't quite work out whether Olivia knows that alt-Broyles is dead yet. Did anybody tell her? Regardless, it's interesting watching Broyles react as Olivia tells him details about the personal life of his alternate self. That's got to be quite a mind-bending experience, learning about the person you could have been.
Walter: "And by intimate I mean sexual."
Peter: "Yeah, I got that."
Heartless dude died three minutes after waking up. Still, pretty impressive that he lasted that long. What with not having a heart and all.
Hoo boy. Things are super awkward between Peter and Olivia! He really has to tell her about having sex with her parallel universe double sooner rather than later. Wasn't there an episode of Friends like this?
And the super awkward conversation finally occurs! Olivia claims she's totally okay with it and totally understands. Riiiiight. One of these days, and it will be very soon now, she's going to snap big time.
Heartless dude had had a heart transplant. Meanwhile, umbrella guy seems to be putting together a young woman, Frankenstein style. Is he taking back organs that were removed from this woman before, perhaps when she died? Or taking organs that he thinks she deserved to have, but which went to other recipients?
Turns out our organ thief kept his victim alive by injecting him with a preservative serum. Walter guesses he did it to ease his conscience, and was really hoping the EMTs would get there in time to save his victim.
Peter talks to Walter about telling Olivia what happened.
Walter: "How did she react?"
Peter: "Surprisingly well."
Walter: "Do you think possibly they replaced her with a robot?"
Olivia notices alt-Olivia's tattoo still on the back of her neck, and realizes how much her life has been invaded - her mail opened, her clothes worn, her bed slept in. She breaks down. It's a very intense moment. The next day, she's still trying to pretend everything's okay, but it's clearly not. She asks Astrid if Peter seemed happier with the other Olivia. Oh, man. This is brutal. How can she live with this?
Looks like my first guess about these organ thefts was correct: all the organs he's stealing back were from the same donor. He's trying to piece her back together.
Ugh! I really didn't need the scene of the guy walking around without eyes.
Walter has come up with a practical application for the decay-arresting serum: milk and cheese that don't go bad! He wants to give the stuff to the cow. Oh, Walter. Never change.
Walter is able to determine exactly what's in the young woman's urn purely by taste - thankfully, although also disturbingly, it's not the remains of a human body.
Now the title of the episode becomes clear. Our organ thief is making the dead woman dance with a complicated harness and a series of cables. Wow. Twisted. Maybe he was her dance instructor?
Astrid: "You don't really believe it's possible to bring a dead body back to life, do you?"
Uh, didn't they already do that in an earlier episode?
The meaning behind the enigmatic name of Walter and Bell's work on the preservative serum is revealed: it was the name of a beloved cocker spaniel they were trying to revive.
Didn't this guy ever consider that this young woman who killed herself might not take kindly to being brought back to life?
Wow, he did it. That was quick!
Well, he sort of did it. She's alive, but it doesn't look like anyone's home.
I hate it in TV shows when security personnel say "clear" even when it's obvious they have not yet thoroughly searched the room. You don't know it's clear!
Guy: "Her eyes. When I looked into her eyes, it wasn't Amanda. I don't know what I brought back, but I know it wasn't her."
That hits Olivia hard. If this guy knows just by looking into this girl's eyes that it's not the girl he knew, why didn't Peter know alt-Olivia wasn't her? If he really loves her, why couldn't he tell?
Amanda only came back briefly. She's dead again now. That's just as well.
In a really amazing and devastating scene, Olivia finally reveals her real feelings, to herself and to Peter. Why couldn't Peter see Alt-Olivia wasn't her? "I don't want to wear my clothes anymore and I don't want to live in my apartment anymore and I don't want to be with you. She's taken everything."
The Observer returns! While looking at Peter and Walter, he tells someone on the phone, "I'm looking at him as we speak. He is still alive." Hoo boy. So one of the Bishops is supposed to die?
This episode went over some of the same logically-shaky ground as previous episodes, but thankfully mostly dealt with a new and moving story, and with the personal relationships between our main characters. As far as the latter were concerned, it moved things forward in a very effective and believable manner, and Anna Torv had possibly one of her best episodes in terms of acting in the show's history.
Now, if Fringe could make a New Year's Resolution to stop pretending that it's hard to move between universes, and to stop coming up with yet other ways of doing it, I would really appreciate that. |
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