Fringe returns to its roots. Or does it...?

"Marionette"

Having Fringe back in some semblance of its old ways again after the horribly uneven 8-episode CSI:Fringe experiment is so welcome a sight that it's hard to aim critical faculties at it; I've got so used to roasting season three of a show that I love that it's almost hard to put the knife back in the holster - even after the brilliance of last week's 'Entrada'.

Struggling to see through this fog of post-masochistic rationalisation, I can just about guess that 'Marionette' is an episode that I would have considered 'pretty good' back before before J.J. Abrams & Co. started seriously dicking around with Fringe (and my love of it).

Pick a theme, any (reasonably creepy) theme; this week it's Frankenstein, as a gifted but warped genetic genius leaves a Dexter-style trail of blood and plastic tarpaulins in his determination to recover the organs donated by his suicide-victim ex-girlfriend, in an effort to 'get her together' again. He's not all bad, giving those from whom he recovers his beloved's vital organs a drug that might let them live long enough to be rescued by emergency services, even though they no longer have a heart, liver, and other trivial visceral necessities.

Truth is that the 'prolonging' of life and the retardation of decay among his victims is largely a red-herring in terms of the plot, and seems primarily there to give us a suitably creepy pre-credits sequence in which a man whose heart has just been removed proves strangely resilient when the paramedics arrive. Ultimately, 'Marionette' is actually a love-story of sorts, with significant parallel themes to the season three Fringe story arc.

But I can't deny that the scene where our ambulatory Dr. Frankenstein causes his still-dead girlfriend to perform ballet via a series of elaborate pulleys is one of the creepiest I've ever come across on TV, whether in Fringe, The X-Files or... well, anywhere. Watching the corpse dance strikes at some deep note within regarding freedom of choice; and if you want to read some feminist sub-text into it, it's got to be worth chapter four of any graduation thesis. Ghoulish, and truly disturbing, even if it is gilding the lily a bit as regards the core behaviour of the mad scientist - after all, he's only days away from supposedly having 'the real thing' back again. What would she think upon awaking, to know how he had been placating his need of her in the meantime...?

...and here, of course, the freak-of-the-week theme cleverly dovetails into the long-awaited and heart-stopping moment when Peter has to confess to Our Olivia that he was having an affair with Not Olivia. Naturally, thinking it was His Olivia all along.

"In a way, 'Marionette' is a slightly faux return to freak-of-the-week territory, since its underlying 'main story' seems to have been written to continue season three's focus on Fringe's longer story-arc"

I've been saying for two months that no matter how lovestruck Peter was, the clues were all there, and some sneaking suspicion at the back of my mind wondered if Peter didn't realise about 'the switch' on a subconscious level and think 'What the hell' anyway. After all, Not Olivia was an easier conquest than the one he had been working with for three years. I'm not saying that his character actually had those motivations, just that he was awful quick to eat a free lunch before asking why he was getting it.

Of course Olivia takes the news hard, and her initial display of diffidence soon crumbles to tears in her apartment as she realises that everything she had or wanted has been taken, invaded, worn, abused, controlled or slept with by her alter ego while she was away.

If 'Marionette' poses a question, it's whether or not Peter should have been able to recognise Not Olivia for what she was. My own argument remains that, knowing what he knew about the fact that there were two Olivias, and having recently been on a mission where both were occupying the same city in the same universe (and combating each other), a man supposedly as intelligent as Peter might have paid more respect to any later doubts that might have cropped up regarding the identity of his new girlfriend. For the rest of us guys, the nadir of our paranoia in new relationships is that phrase we never want to hear, 'I was born a man!"; but Peter had better information to support his doubts, and when a tearful Olivia finally expressed a wish to remove herself from him and start over again in her own life at the end of this episode, Peter's characteristic look of resignation was blended with a guilt that it's hard to describe as unwarranted.

In a way, 'Marionette' is a slightly faux return to freak-of-the-week territory, since its underlying 'main story' seems to have been written to continue season three's focus on Fringe's longer story-arc. It's as if the writers really just can't bear to go back to the X-Files foundation from which Fringe was conceived and launched.

So they're giving us fans of the 'old' show a lot of what we want, such as more great repartee between Walter and Peter, the return of Walter's inability to remember Astrid's name - hell, even the cow showed her face again this week. Plus we have a 'monster' story for our heroes to investigate. And even if it's cold comfort to watch Lance Reddick go back into exposition-mode after one last delve into his character's feelings about how his alter-ego's life was in the Other Universe... well, it's some comfort.

But I don't think the S3 Fringe experiment is over by a damn sight. Nor, I maintain, do I think that the powers behind the show are at all sure of where it is heading. Little or nothing has yet been made of Walter suddenly becoming one of the most powerful industrialists in North America, and in a way the show's creators have cheated the Moonlighting factor by getting Peter and Not Olivia together without having to live with the results.

There's nothing that can be written from this point that will ever entirely make sense out of season three, which is starting to show signs of the same neurotic wish-to-please and lack of commitment that Saving Grace did before the absurdly off-hand and patched-together final episode of that show.

I liked 'Marionette'. I laughed and was shocked; the acting was good; many of the lines and scenes were good or excellent; and the pay-off to the long tension over Peter's inevitable 'confession' was plausibly written and handled. But I'm beginning to think that the minds behind Fringe now have the feeling that they can never really go home again. It looks the same, but are we convinced enough to want to get into bed with it yet?

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