So much of horror, particularly psychological horror, deals in the realm of the unseen. This is because the human brain is an incomparable house of horrors, versatile and hyper-specialized to individual interpretation. If a show suggests a threat, rather than shows it, then nine times out of 10, what a person’s brain creates to fill in the blanks will not only be more effective, but more specific to whatever that individual would find the most frightening. This, similarly, is why adapting well-loved books is always a tricky proposition, as people’s own visualizations of a text are rarely a 1:1 match for whatever manifests itself onscreen, often making for a lackluster endeavor for all involved.
It’s no surprise, then, that Fortitude invested nearly half of its first season in building a world in which the terror was real, but existed mostly unseen. In the pilot, we see Billy Pettigrew seemingly attacked by a bear. We see the aftermath of Charlie Stoddart’s murder. But it was only last week that the series began to dig into the gorey reality of the situation at hand, showing the start of Liam’s attack on Charlie, but even that isn’t fully revealed. No, it’s not until this week’s episode that Fortitude finally pulls back the curtain and reveals that whatever the audience had been imagining, was nowhere near the house of horrors at work in reality.
That said, the show doesn’t entirely abandon its “suggest, but not show” methods entirely. One of the most unsettling scenes, not just of the episode, but of the season as a whole, comes when Markus (aka Creepy McUnsettling) visits his increasingly ill girlfriend Shirley. Undaunted by Shirley’s repeated insistence that she’s too sick to eat, Markus assures her that he has a new method to keep up her strength (i.e. weight): a DIY feeding tube. His suggestion of force-feeding his love condensed milk moves past the discomfort that we’re prepared for, in dealing with supernatural elements beyond our control, and conjures another level of fear that correlates directly to the evil that others are capable of inflicting on each other.
But the true thrust of the episode belonged to the openly macabre and as tempting as it is to jump to that scene, let’s first look at another way the episode addressed the unthinkable. In the midst of Henry and resident taxidermist/secret shaman Tavrani’s DIY murder blood drive (the people of Fortitude are nothing if not resourceful), Henry uncovers a repressed memory of sorts, that leads him back to his dark room, anxiously developing his photos from the day of Billy Pettigrew’s murder. What he finds, is what his mind knew all along: Billy Pettigrew was handcuffed on that beach, like so much bear bait. But Fortitude doesn’t just tell us as much, they show us, by revealing not just handcuffs but Pettigrew’s detached arm dangling in the wind. Again, we knew that something terrible had befallen Pettigrew, outside of bear attack or simple murder, but how many can say that they had imagined such a gruesome fate had actually befallen him?
Though Pettigrew’s arm, grim as it may be, won’t be what people remember about “Episode 7” of Fortitude. No, they’ll remember disease-ridden Shirley straddling her mother Margaret, stabbing her with a fork until able to pull her abdomen open and vomit inside. They’ll remember her gently pushing the skin back together and resting her mother’s hands on top. And they’ll remember, almost certainly, the fact that Margaret is still breathing as it happens. As unnerving as Fortitude has been from the start, nothing could have prepared one for the visceral gore the scene portrayed, which was a huge part of what made it so effective. Fortitude taught us to watch it as a slow-burn thriller, a tease that would not pay off until the finale, if then. It taught us that if we were patient, it would scare us silly, but it never once hinted that those scares would start as early as episode seven, making the gut punch of explicit violence all the more effective.
And yet, perhaps the most meaningful turn “Episode 7” takes is its definitive, undeniable commitment to the genre elements flirted with from the pilot. Fortitude has no interest in being mixed up with the run-of-the-mill detective stories populating the current television landscape and has gone all-in with regards to mysterious mammoth-based illnesses and regardless of what the ultimate explanation is, you’ll never take that commitment to elaborate psychological horror away from it.