I've loved Marty like he loved the Giants, but I'm not exactly against the idea of him returning here to wind up in the middle of this catastrophe and the team learning his hands are less than clean.
While I'm not admitting it was done in the best of ways, I think the idea was a good one. I agree with a lot of what's been said; his "laboratory" was a little unnecessarily macabre. Not that I was bothered so much by the gore as it suggested to me that Pino was sloppy in his work. Sure he was doing a pretty evil deed, but he was a talented coroner once. This might seem like a weird observation, but he wasn't throwing blood and organs around in the morgue, I don't see him hacking and slashing like Dr. Frankenstein to harvest narcotics from those corpses. It made him look like he'd savagely enjoyed the process when that wasn't the impression I was getting from the character. He seemed broken and desperate and driven to wits end, not blood lusting.
If they'd kept some focus on Pino's crimes as acts of desperation instead of coming off like he'd descended into grim madness, Kovorkian and Dhalmer rolled into one, they might have had him stealing bodies instead of killing addicts. And, if you can imagine, maybe we'd even get to see Sheldon or Sid pay him a visit while he's serving his sentences. Alas, things are so often black and white with this show lately. *sigh*
Now I might be being lenient because I do love me some good, gritty angst, but I think this story had a lot of potential. The kind that could, and I imagine will, be explored to it's totality in some good character analysis kind of fan fiction. I also feel that it's too bad we hadn't heard from Marty since his stint in season two. If they'd had enough foresight to drop us a few little hints as to Pino's current whereabouts --why he's not in the morgue any more, or just SUBTLY hinted at the idea that he'd slowly fallen on hard times-- we really could have been rewarded in this ep when it came to a devastating climax and they were all really left struggling through the wake, wondering wtf they were paying attention too while a colleagues life went under.
