Recap / Fringe S02 E11 "Unearthed"

Season 2, Episode 11:

Unearthed

A seventeen-year-old girl, Lisa Donovan, is declared brain dead at a hospital and is pulled off life support. While the doctors harvest her organs for donation, she suddenly comes back to life, yelling highly classified naval missile codes. The Fringe team arrives to investigate, along with a naval officer; he tells them the codes are tied to a missing sailor called Andrew Rusk. Lisa is unaware of the numbers or Rusk, but suddenly starts speaking Russian while Olivia, Peter, and Walter question her. The naval officer informs them that Rusk is fluent in the language.

Olivia asks Lisa's mother Maureen for permission to run more tests on the girl as a means to find Rusk, but Maureen refuses. Meanwhile, Lisa has a vision of Rusk standing behind her, which leads Maureen to conclude they should end the investigation, as it is causing Lisa to experience these strange occurrences. Walter posits that Lisa's aneurysm tied her to Rusk and gave them a psychic bond. Having continued to suffer visions, Lisa soon calls Olivia and leads her to Rusk's body. It is determined that at the same time Lisa was taken off life support, Rusk was murdered. Walter believes that part of Rusk's consciousness transferred over to Lisa. Walter clashes with the family's priest over her resurrection. Olivia learns that Rusk had recently experienced high levels of radiation; Walter suggest that, due to this heavy radiation exposure, Rusk's energy is not completely "expended".

Lisa is transferred to Walter's lab, where he gives her special drugs to extract Rusk's thoughts from her mind. Instead, Rusk gains full control of Lisa's body and demands to know where he is. His description of the murderer leads them another naval officer, who tells them Rusk's physically abused wife Teresa hired him for the killing. Believing that he has left her mind, they learn too late that Rusk is still in control of Lisa; he goes to exact revenge on Teresa, but is stopped by Peter before he can go through with the murder. Lisa is eventually able to purge Rusk from her consciousness. The final scene shows an unrelated car crash victim suddenly waking up, mumbling in Russian: "My Star", the pet name Rusk called his wife.

Tropes found in this episode:

• Artistic License – Medicine
  • Seizures occur in up to 26% of individual who experience a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and it would be logical to assume this was the cause of Lisa's seizure, but the doctor dismisses this cause out of hand.
  • Hospitals do not keep wards full of coma patients. If someone is no longer requiring acute care, they will be transferred to a skilled nursing facility.
• Convenient Coma:
  • Walter compares Lisa's state to those of the other patients in a coma, confounding brain death and coma. People in a coma are alive, but unresponsive. People who are brain dead are dead with no brain function, though a machine is breathing for them and the heart is beating.
  • The coma patients are unrealistically portrayed, and appear to be sleeping peacefully without any contractures, feeding tubes, or trachs.
• Continuity Snarl: Episode was filmed during Season 1, but didn't air until midway through Season 2. When streaming on HBO Max, it runs as Season 1 Episode 21 in according with the post-finale production code noted below - which is still confusing to viewers who just saw Olivia meet William Bell.

• Gratuitous Russian:
  • Почему я не могу говорить? = Why can I not speak?
• Missing Episode: The network press release announces this episode as "A Special Unearthed Episode from Season 1 Airing for the First Time", but then a few lines lower in the press release, the network questions it's own announcement by saying "And here’s another mystery: is it an unaired episode from Season 1, or is it from an Alternate Universe?".
• Out of Order: The production code for this episode, #3T7670, places it after the season 1 finale (#3T7669), but before the season 2 premiere (#3X5101). This is why Charlie is still alive, well and on the job.