REVIEW: Fringe “Marionette”

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Fortuna has indeed smiled upon Fringe fans this week. Last night’s episode “Marionette” was one of the best this season. They managed to give us one of the creepiest and most riveting case episodes while at the same time exploring Olivia’s difficult transition back into her former life after two months on the other side.

The case this week focused on a series of strange deaths involving stolen organs. What makes them strange is that not only were all the stolen organs from the same donor, the victims remained alive much longer than they should have, and after death they did not decompose. Olivia (Anna Torv) is back on duty after convincing Broyles (Lance Reddick) that working was the best thing for her. Plus she had promised AlternaBroyles she would put a stop to Walternate’s evil plan. Our Broyles seemed very interested in his alternate’s life though, which makes me wonder what’s going on in his Candyman brain.

Peter (Joshua Jackson) and Walter (John Noble) had a brief discussion about whether or not Peter should disclose his sexual relations with Bolivia to Olivia. Of course he should! And Peter did not disappoint, telling Olivia at the first opportunity. Once again I will state that Anna Torv is simply amazing in this role. She continues to blow me away with her performance. Her reaction to Peter’s explanation of why he accepted Bolivia as the real thing was heartbreaking. His remark that Bolivia was “much quicker was a smile” just sliced right through Olivia’s heart. She tries to cover for it, telling Peter that it would have been easy for her to slip into Bolivia’s relationships as well but it was clear she was hurt.

As attention shifts back to the case we find out that all of them had a chemical in their bloodstream that slows the decomposition process down to near zero. Naturally Walter remembers that he and William Bell worked on such a chemical back in the 1970s but didn’t get very far. It was called The Yatsco Project (named after Peter’s dead Cocker Spaniel) and he sends Astrid (Jasika Nicole) to Massive Dynamic to retrieve the files. Peter tells Walter that Olivia seemed to take the news of his sexing of Bolivia rather well, which means either he is blind or he was trying to convince himself that was true. Walter wonders if Walternate sent a robot back in Olivia’s place which made me giggle.

In the privacy of her apartment it becomes very clear that Olivia is not taking the news well at all, nor is she handling her transition at all. She freaks out and starts washing everything in the apartment to rid her home of Bolivia’s stank. The next morning she talks to Astrid about it who responds with the most comforting words of the episode.

“Whatever feelings Peter had were not about her, they were about you, and they were real.”

Olivia seems to feel better but before she can linger on Astrid’s kind words they get called off to try and save the next potential victim who had received the dead girl’s eyes. They are too late though, and they find an eyeless man wandering around. This prompts Peter and Olivia to talk to the dead girl’s mother. Through her they discover she was a ballet dancer who suffered from depression and she was cremated, which would appear to make this a dead end. Stuck in the middle of this is what seemed to be an ad for the latest cell phone from Sprint which features an app similar to Apple’s Facetime. It was quick but it really took me out of the moment. Product placement doesn’t bother me usually but this felt more like that scene from Wayne’s World where the product is in your face. I was shocked that Astrid didn’t say “Hello this is Astrid calling via Sprint mobile on the new Droid Max 5000 to tell you that we are out of milk.”

Walter deduces fairly quickly that the ashes in the vase are not human and that the girl’s body was stolen from the funeral home and the crime was covered up. Whoever is stealing these organs is trying to put the girl back together again. While Peter and Olivia search through case files of the patients who attended the same support groups as the dead girl Olivia gets bitchy and short with Peter. She claims to be frustrated with him because profiling is her specialty and he is just guessing, but he knows what is really going on. Wisely he chooses to drop it for now.

Meanwhile in a musty basement we see the killer as he completes his masterpiece. The dead girl, Amanda has been hooked up to an elaborate puppeteering system which he operates to have her corpse act out one of her ballet routines. The whole scene made my skin crawl and was superbly shot and acted. After the death dance he succeeds in reanimating her, but when he looks into her eyes he begins to cry. Whoever the girl was playing Amanda deserves honorable mention here. She was only “alive” on screen for a few moments but her performance was truly heartbreaking to watch and made ballet that much creepier for me. I suspect after I see Black Swan I will develop an irrational fear of ballerinas.

By the time the Fringe team arrives the girl is dead again. Whether it was by the killer’s hand or just naturally is unclear. But as Olivia questions him he says something that really resonates with her and spells trouble for Peter.

“When I looked into her eyes it wasn’t Amanda.”

Outside Olivia breaks down and when Peter asks her what is wrong she lays it out for him. She could accept that Bolivia acted like her and knew about her family and her work and her past, and while she was on the other side she held onto him completely to help her get through it. But if Peter really loved her he would have known when he looked into her eyes that it wasn’t Olivia. Because of that she didn’t want to wear her clothes or live in her apartment or be with Peter.

“She has taken everything.”

Peter has no answer, and Olivia leaves. It is only after she is gone that he whispers “I’m sorry.”

This episode blew me away. It was near perfect in every respect. I think it was an outstanding mid-season finale. What will Olivia do now? She made a promise to AlternaBroyles, which reminds me about the questions Broyles asked about his counterpart early in the episode. He seemed very interested in the fact that AlternaBroyles was married with kids. There was a case a long time ago that our Broyles became obsessed until it eventually broke up his marriage, and he has kids but we never see them. Makes me wonder if he is considering taking AlternaBroyles place on the other side. He has always been so even keeled but I get the sense that he teeters on the edge of crazy. Should be interesting.

As the episode closes we see one of the Observers watching Peter and Walter get ice cream. He speaks to someone on the phone and tells them that “he is still alive”. Was he talking about Walter? Did they do something to him while he was on the other side? Or was he talking about Peter? We’ll have to wait till January to find out.

Fringe returns on Friday January 21st. Hopefully the move won’t spell doom for the ratings because I think there is still a great deal of compelling story to tell.