Once again, Fortitude pulls back the curtain, and reveals in explicit detail some of its biggest mysteries. Much in the way that earlier in the season we got an extended flashback to what happened on the night Stoddart died, here we're shown exactly what transpired at Christmas when Pettigrew met his end.
The results are somewhat mixed, though. We see Andersen murdering Pettigrew by proxy, chaining him up on the ice and letting a polar bear do what polar bears do. It's a crime of passion after finding that Pettigrew had assaulted and raped Elena, and making Dan's actions somewhat justified is a good move, painting him as a far more conflicted and compelling character than he might be if he were simply a corrupt cop. Sheriff Andersen is flawed, but he's not evil.
Unfortunately, the same can't really be said of Pettigrew, who is depicted as entirely reprehensible. Tam Dean Burn's snarling, feral performance just doesn't feel believable. While the show generally does a great job of affording enough shading to its characters to make them interesting, Pettigrew is just a vile, evil man. And that takes something away from the superb horror-imagery of the handcuffed arm, the dismembered body lying bloody on the ice, etc. Knowing that Pettigrew was a monster and a rapist, all that follows loses something; some element of shock and empathy that the plot had when Pettigrew might have been an innocent.
With only Michael Gambon's Henry departing last week, you could be forgiven for thinking that Stanley Tucci's Morton would survive his ordeal on the mountaintop, but he too succumbs to a bullet-wound out on the ice, as another of the show's MVPs bows out. Tucci was fantastic throughout as DCI Morton, but he was occasionally in danger of becoming a superhuman detective, who always found what he was looking for and always seemed to get his way.
Having his demise come at the hands of an old man's gunshot is, somewhat perversely, pleasingly simple. It's a reminder that everyone on this show is eminently fallible, and that no actor is protected by their status. And that awful little detail - Andersen finding a photograph of Morton's children in his wallet - adds an extra little gut-punch to compound the loss of Morton and Tucci.
So, with the Pettigrew mystery solved and Morton sadly departed, that more-or-less brings a close to the detective aspect of Fortitude. Morton promises another investigator will come, but for now, with the island on lockdown, it's the virus/parasite/contagion that's going to be front and centre in the series' final episode.
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Vincent and Natalie turn up new evidence, as a hunch leads them to give Stoddart's dog an autopsy, where they discover some form of larvae in the gut… and as Vincent steps into a hospital room to see if Dr Allardyce shows any evidence of the larvae after Shirley's attack, it's not long before we see exactly what form that larvae will take. And once again, Fortitude presents us with a scene that's - all-too-literally - skin-crawlingly difficult to watch.
Having developed pustules all over her body, Vincent watches in horror and amazement as insects begin crawling and burrowing their way out of poor Dr Allardyce, slowly at first, and then in a great and terrible torrent from out of her mouth. Vincent slams the door shut to keep the swarm contained, and one must fear that with that action Luke Treadaway's Vincent might have sealed his own fate, too.
Of all the ghastly images that Fortitude has presented, the sight of a swarm of ancient insects crawling out of a still-living human being has to be the most nightmarish yet. Let's all just hope that Allardyce wasn't still conscious as she became a living incubation centre and was eaten from the inside out…
What's interesting here is the way that the episode draws parallels between the parasite and love. Liam, Shirley and now Jason have all had something inside them that made them - forced them - to do terrible things. But Dan Andersen has that in him too. Except in this case it's not a parasite, but his fanatical love for Elena that's overpowered and corrupted him. Both are all-consuming, behaviour-altering forces residing inside these characters, and equating love with this nightmare parasite is a dark and interesting path to explore.
Andersen takes Morton's dying words to heart, and confesses to Elena so that he might know peace. It's a dynamite scene, as Elena senses a kindred spirit of sorts, speaking frankly to another unrepentant murderer. Both had their reasons for what they've done, but both are killers now, and there's no getting away from that. It's a highly-charged scene, and brilliantly framed by director Sam Miller, with just the two faces staring at each other from opposite ends of the frame.
In the rest of the hour, Jason has succumbed to the psychosis and is rampaging through town potentially looking to perform an attack that will spread the parasite; Morgan remains locked in a room and is presumably about to suffer the same fate as Allardyce; and Yuri the Russian steals the industrial drill in order to dig up the mammoth graveyard. If those other corpses contain the same disease that the one in that shed does - and an honourable mention to Jason sleeping on the festering corpse of the mammoth as the hour's second most troubling image - then he'd be better off leaving them buried.
With one episode left, the big crimes have been solved, even if justice hasn't necessarily been served, and the parasite is now out in the open. Will the town be able to contain it? Cure it? Or, perhaps more pressingly… will any of them be able to escape it?
