Marianne Episode VIII Recap
We have now reached the final episode of the first season of Marianne, and it continues right where episode seven left off: when the priest starts attacking Emma.
The priest continues his exorcism, while Emma tries to get away from him. She is hurt, and he keeps hurting her as she crawls away. They then reach Emma’s room and the priest notices that Emma has written a new story, and laments that she did exactly what Marianne wanted.
While the priest is distracted, Emma takes out her gun and points it at him, asking him why he hurt and hit her. The priest drops the shocking revelation that he never actually hit her, and that what’s hurting Emma is the holy water he poured on her. Emma checks her bleeding nose and realizes that she wasn’t bleeding at all, and the priest was telling the truth. The priest continues explaining to her that now Emma and Marianne are one and the same, but Emma doesn’t believe him, and she threatens to shoot him to avoid him attacking her again. The priest encourages her to do so if she wants to, but first, he asks her if she is Marianne, and Emma replies that she is, following the rule that, whatever happens, Marianne cannot lie about her name.
After this opening sequence, we see Aurore at the wrecked boat where the group of friends used to hang out. The boat has the words “help me” scratched on it, and as she sits there, Aurore remembers that Emma told her not to take off the amulet she took from Ronan.
Back at Emma’s home, the priest tells her that burning the witch’s grave was the only way to beat the witch, and when he asks Marianne where her grave is, Emma shoots him but claims that it wasn’t her who wanted to do it. The priest acknowledges that Emma is not in full control anymore and continues telling Emma that Marianne wants to be her, and that by writing about her, she gave Marianne what she wanted, which was for people to dream about her so they would give her power. He also mentions that it is Tuesday, which, according to the nursery rhyme about Marianne, is both the day when she was born, and the day when she was buried.
We then see a flashback of how the hole that Emma has been seeing in the woods came to be. We see Emma as a kid playing next to the hole, and Marianne reaching out to her from within it, asking for her help and telling her that she’ll dream about her all the time from that point on until the day she wakes Marianne up.
The flashback ends, and the priest tells Emma that, in the end, everyone in Elden is related to the people who killed Marianne in the past, and that what she is doing is keeping her promise to hurt them all. After this, Emma sees Marianne’s hands creeping out of a closet pointing at something, and she leaves the room.
A silent Marianne guides Emma to a shed near her house, and she pushes it out of the way to uncover the hole in the woods we’ve been seeing, which is Marianne’s grave, and from within it, Marianne’s voice asks Emma for help. Emma reaches into the hole and digs Marianne out of it, and we see her for the first time in full view, wearing her dressing gown, and when Emma takes off the shroud that covers her face, we see that Marianne’s face is that of a young girl, not a demonic creature. Emma apologizes for taking so long to get her out, and they hug each other as if they were two friends reuniting after a long time apart.
Marianne and Emma walk together holding hands at a strange place by the water. Marianne guides her somewhere, but Emma resists it and tells her that she is doing it because she kills people, but Marianne tells her that, where they are, there’s no death, and that they shouldn’t concern themselves with it. Marianne then keeps guiding Emma, telling her they’ll go see the dark man, who’s her husband, but that there are many other entities that Emma will discover once they arrive at their destination.
Back at Emma’s house, the priest stares out the window at Marianne’s grave, and Emma comes into view with a twisted look in her eyes. The priest tries to escape as Emma drops her gun and picks a knife instead to attack him with it. During this scene, the shadow of Emma shows the shape of Marianne in her mourning gown, but what we see is Emma holding the knife, and when she reaches the priest, we see her with the same devilish look in her eyes that we’ve seen in all those previously possessed by Marianne.
Emma stabs the priest, and while that scene is playing out, we see Marianne and Emma walking holding hands. As the priest dies, Marianne looks back with a sharp and evil look in her eye back at the writer.
Immediately after this, we see that Aurore is standing near the overturned shed, looking at Emma’s house, which she approaches cautiously. She sees one of Marianne’s bags wrapped around the doorknob on the open door and calls out for Emma, but receives no response, so she goes in to investigate.
She finds the gun that Emma left on the table, and hears Emma’s voice, telling her to go find her. Aurore takes the gun and carefully starts to look for Emma, who guides with her voice in a creepy game of hide and seek. When Aurore finally finds her, she sees that Emma’s hands are bloody, and notices that she’s been possessed by Marianne.
They have a confrontation and end up in a sort of Mexican standoff, where Emma has her knife pointed at Aurore, about to stab her, and Aurore has her gun pointed at Emma, ready to shoot. In the end, before Emma can stab Aurore, she places Ronan’s amulet around Emma’s neck, which paralyzes her and causes her to drop her weapon. Here we see a shot of Marianne wondering how Emma was able to break free of her grasp, back at the place by the water, and Emma shows her Ronan’s amulet. Back with Aurore, we see Emma fighting Marianne’s possession and urging Aurore to escape.
Another flashback plays, this one of the priest back when he was as a child, writing about three questions he has about being a priest, and when the flashback ends, we see him holding his hands to his stab wounds. However, just as he is about to let death take him away, we hear the priest’s voice again, continuing reading the letter he wrote as a kid, where he states that his plan for becoming a priest was not so that he could pray, but because he thought his hands were good for fighting, and he wanted to fight evil with them. This is a powerful scene that’s accompanied by shots of the priest crawling towards Marianne’s grave, out of pure willpower; Emma battling and weakened by the possession; and Aurore running away from the house.
After the priest’s younger self reads his letter of intent, we go back to Marianne in the place by the water telling Emma that they’re close to the big city, their destination, and that all the people she’s lost will be there, but Emma refuses her hand and tells her that she won’t go with her. After this, Aurore is shown fighting her fear and gathering up all her courage, and once she finds it, she runs back to the house to help Emma vanquish Marianne once and for all.
The priest takes a jerry can out of the shed and pours gasoline into the hole where Marianne’s grave is, and Marianne tells Emma that there’s only one way to defeat her for good: for Emma to die. Emma tells her that she already knows that’s a possible solution, and we see her holding the gun and pressing it against her throat. Back at the shed, before the priest can light the grave on fire, a black hand drags him into the grave, and he falls to where both Marianne’s body, and the page that holds her power on Earth are kept safe.
The priest tries to go for the lighter, as the gasoline is still pouring out, but more hands come out of the sides of the grave to keep him in place. All at once, Marianne keeps trying to convince Emma to go with her, but Emma tells her that she doesn’t mind sacrificing herself to save her friends. Marianne tells her that she can’t let her do that and moves the gun away from Emma’s head.
The priest continues to struggle, eventually breaking free and getting his hands on the lighter. Aurore reaches the house and sees a demonic Marianne holding Emma, stopping her from committing suicide. The priest manages to burn Marianne’s body and the page, but he also dies in the process. Emma fights back against Marianne inside the place by the water, but she disappears before she can hit her. At the house, Aurore succeeds in stopping Emma at the last second, getting wounded herself, though not fatally, and Marianne is defeated at last.
With everything back to normal, we go to Aurore watching over Emma at the hospital, and both friends once again confirm that none of them is Marianne. Emma is worried that Marianne took something from her after possessing her, since she never leaves empty-handed, but Aurore tells her that nothing was taken from her because there was no Marianne left to take anything anymore.
Both friends go see Camille, who’s healed but doesn’t speak out of her own accord, and the nurse suggest Emma that, once they return home, she might feel better, so they prepare to leave Elden now that it is no longer threatened by Marianne.
Emma has dinner with her father, and she tells him that she is planning on writing something other than horror for her next project, and she tells him that she is leaving Elden, but that she’ll return often to visit him.
Camille and Emma are on their way out of Elden, but Emma chooses to make two last stops first. One is at the church, where she leaves a white flower at the entrance to honor the hero who saved them from Marianne, and the other one is to Séby.
This one brings a big revelation for the end of the show, because as Emma thanks him for the night they spent together, an enraged Séby tells her that he wouldn’t do that to his wife, and that he doesn’t appreciate whatever game she is playing. He tells her that they never slept together, leaving Emma to wonder who or what visited her that night before their final battle with Marianne.
After Emma and Camille leave Elden, Emma begins to get sick. She pulls over many times to throw up, and when they stop near a store, Camille buys Emma a pregnancy test. Emma refuses to take it at first, but when she agrees to it, and we get the final narration from Emma about Lizzie Larck, talking about the next chapter in her life, and how, even if she is enjoying a moment of peace, she has kept a piece of the darkness with her.
Emma comes out of a bathroom with the pregnancy test, which shows it’s positive, which suggests that Marianne may be gone, but there could be other horrors awaiting in Emma Larsimon’s future. Finally, we see Emma’s reaction to the result of the pregnancy test, and the screen fades to black, ending one of the best horror shows ever.
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Posted by Ingram Draco
on Thursday, October 10th, 2019. Filed under Dark TV.
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Tags: eight, episode 8, horror, Marianne, Netflix, recap, series, show, television, tv
