Episode: Fringe 2.05 – “Dream Logic”
Original Air Date: October 16, 2009
This was another good episode, despite it being more one-shot than mytharc. I was expecting an episode that dealt a little more heavily with The Pattern and alternate realities than this one did since it was the last episode before a decent-sized hiatus. They always keep you guessing with this show.
The episode starts off with Olivia returning her bowling shoes to Sam. She thinks she’s done with his Bowling Zen, but he wouldn’t be a Zen Master if he didn’t know that was a load of BS the size of Russia. He asks, “Who died?” and she explains about Charlie/Faux Charlie (which still chaps my ass they killed him off and is still in the credits — he better come back somehow). So Sam assigns her a new project that will help her make sense of everything that’s happened to her recently because “[her] life is something of a nightmare.”
Next morning, a guy walks into his office and sees everyone looking like they all got out of a Buffy convention early. He walks into a meeting room (where, presumably, he’s about to get his ass chewed), and proceeds to wail on his boss’s face with his briefcase. His coworkers pull him off the guy and his eyes are bugging out, going side-to-side super fast.
Back in Boston, Peter and Walter finally found a place to live! Except, Walter wants his bedroom in the living room (it’s got a fireplace and is only 13 steps from the kitchen). Peter reminds him he has a bedroom upstairs, and Walter’s reply is that he’ll be sure to wear his shorts to bed in case Peter brings any ladies home with him to entertain. This guy entertains the hell out of me. Astrid shows up just then with housewarming gifts: Italian ciabatta bread for Walter (who’s not sure if he should eat it or keep it) and a case file for Peter.
They leave Astrid behind (again), and head out to Seattle (because weird crap doesn’t just happen on the East Coast anymore) to check out the disgruntled office dude. Immediately, you can tell Walter is not comfortable to be there, and Olivia asks the taxi driver for a business card (he’s wearing red). They walk into the hospital that Office Dude is at, and the Seattle FBI agent assigned to the case tells them that the dude’s been asleep for 16 hours straight. However, the doctors were just able to wake him up in time for the team to talk to him. He’s strapped down to his bed, and Walter (his anxiety increasing) tells Peter he’d rather not go into the room. Peter and Olivia go in and start asking questions, mainly what happened at his office. He eventually tells them he was seeing everyone as demons, but in the middle of his explanation he starts to seize up, stops breathing, and Office Dude is now Dead Dude. His hair grows out a little and turns white before, and that would have freaked my crap out if I had seen something like that in real life.
Walter’s officially freaking out, too, but it has to do with being away from Boston and the Lab. Too bad Peter is pretty dense about it and isn’t picking up the serious signals his dad is dropping. They check out Dead Dude’s body (which is still warm and covered in scaly sores). From the looks of it, even though the Seattle M.E. says it’s not possible, Dead Dude died from acute exhaustion. Walter says he needs the body to be taken back to the Lab, the M.E. is like “Wha?” and Peter assures Walter they have everything he needs here. Walter breaks down and tells Peter flat out that Seattle smells and is wet and reminds him of St. Claire’s. He wants to go back home, and I thought Walter might actually squirt a few, he was so panicked. They get the Seattle FBI agent, Kashner, to fly Walter the the body back to Boston. Hilarity ensues as Peter goes through the “Keep Yourself Safe by Distracting Walter” checklist. Kashner is so in way over his head with this one. Before the body leaves, Olivia asks the M.E. for a business card because he’s wearing red too. I’m picking up on what Sam wants her to do, but for what purpose?
At Dead Dude’s house, his wife tells Peter and Olivia that he was more tired than usual but nothing to indicate he’d go off his rocker and kill someone caveman style. Further questioning reveals that he used to be a sleepwalker, but had been “cured” 6 months ago. They get his sleep journal before they leave.
The flight back to Boston was way more eventful that Kashner planned it would be, and their bags were detained because Walter had a bottle of raw milk in one of them. Despite it being midnight, Astrid’s in the Lab looking as bright as ever. Walter discovers that Dead Dude has a surgical incision on the back of his neck. He and Astrid rope Kashner into helping them remove the scalp. It’s a “hands on” kind of lab for everyone who walks through!
Back in Seattle, Peter and Olivia are coordinating their sleepwear (on purpose, we can only speculate). While reading the sleep journal, Peter discovers the Dead Dude was averaging between 8-10 hours of sleep a night and that his nightmares were about demons. A couple of months ago, the nightmares stopped. Because Peter knows something about everything, he knows about dreams and the behaviors of sleepwalkers. He used to have reccurring nightmares as a child, and Walter taught him how to condition himself to not have them anymore. From the age of 8 to 19, he never remembered a single dream. Just when the awkward silence between them was about to get weird, Olivia gets a call that another “incident” happened. A lady killed a motorcyclist with her car because she saw him as a monster. She ended up dying at the scene just like Dead Dude.
At the Lab, Kashner is trying not to blow chunks all over and Walter finds some kind of chip in Dead Dude’s brain. We’ll just ignore the fact that there was miraculously no tissue growth and said chip was so easily removed from the brain after spending months in there. They get Peter and Olivia on the horn, figure that the chip must have been connected to the thalamus (part of the brain that controls sleep), and Peter confirms that the newest corpse also has a surgical scar on the back of her neck.
Massive Dynamic susses out what the chip does (monitors sleep patterns and induces deeper sleep when necessary). They also know who put the chips in because they had been watching his progress for some time. Peter and Olivia find the doctor (Nayak) to question him, and I love how Olivia tells him two of his patients murdered people right before they died with a happy face. That made me giggle. He is the doctor who implanted the chips, and they’ve got a problem since there are 82 people altogether with them in their brains. So they head to Nayak’s office to get the list of patients and it’s ransacked with the main servers stolen. Luckily, all the info is backed up on a server. Nayak explains that the chip is very successful in curing “all major non-REM sleep disorders,” and the first thought is that its a company trying to sabotage his work (he’s also wearing red).
Peter figures out that the chip is also connected to the cerebral cortex, which controls motor function, and this leads to possible MIND CONTROL! Walter isn’t surprised by someone trying to mind-take people since he tried to come up with a way to do it back in the day! Peter asks if Walter can test the chip he has if he got Nayak’s data. Walter says yes, but he’d need a live test subject. Peter tells him no student test subjects, but I think Walter has figured a way around that…
So, mind control is what they decide this whole thing is about. Nayak could only list 26 patients, which leaves about 50 out there for them to try and find. Olivia’s still broke up about the Charlie thing as she shares her first FBI sting (and when she first met Charlie). She wanted to bolt, but Charlie walked up to her and told her “You’re gonna be fine.” She’s not dealing with the fact that Charlie is dead and not coming back, so she runs off to occupy herself with work.
Cut to the people responsible for all the trauma! One of them is jacked into a computer, accessing Nayak’s patient files (choosing a waitress working at her father’s restaurant), and the other is Nayak’s assistant! The assistant ups the levels on the computer, causing the girl to start her freak out in the kitchen right away.
Kashner stops by to tell Walter he’s heading back to Seattle (asking him to say “good-bye” to Astrid for him). Walter casually asks Kashner if he’ll smell something before he leaves, and that causes Kashner to kiss the floor. Walter gets his test subject!
Nayak is pulling chips out of brains left and right, while Olivia hangs out in the clinic. Sam calls her up for the next part of his assignment. She needs to lay out the biz cards, circle one random letter in the first and last name on each card, then anagram them. The phrase it’s going to spell out will be whatever she needs to hear right now. After that, Broyles calls her up to let her know all the data servers from Nayak have been wiped and it was an inside job.
Olivia confronts Nayak with this and he says none of his employees would do this. She takes him to the restaurant scene, and I think he’s the one doing this to his patients because he looks kind of guilty while Olivia is talking to the patient’s dad. He quickly shoves the blame spotlight on his assistant, who turns up to be dead. Soon, there’s a wrinkle in my theory about Nayak being the culprit; he gets a threatening note on his office door to stop talking to Olivia or end up like his assistant.
At the Lab, Astrid finds Kashner drugged and Walter getting ready to try and mind-take him. She’s super unhappy with this, and Walter tells her science should be fun! Once he Vulcan mind-melts with Kashner, Walter realizes it’s not mind control that’s going on here.
Nayak gives the note to Olivia, then leaves a message to the person who left him a note to tell him the jig is up. Walter contacts Peter to let him know that the chip is transmitting the dreams of the patients, causing the patients never to “recharge” while they sleep. It can also cause a dream-like state while the patient is awake. Stealing their dreams is the purpose of this whole game because the dreams are like a drug.
Olivia puts it together and Nayak IS the baddie, pulling the old Jeykll and Hyde storyline. Nayak tries to get one more fix off a pilot, and it almost works, too, if it hadn’t been for that pesky FBI lady and her mangy sidekick! He ends up dying before Olivia can disconnect him from the computers.
Back in Boston, Olivia is still trying to cope. She leaves flowers on his grave, walks back to her car, and starts to arrange the letters like Sam told her to. She ends up with exactly what she needed to hear.
It ends with Peter having that dream he used to have in childhood. Turns out the dream is actually the memory of when Walter snatched him from his reality and brought him into this one. Dude, this is going to be ugly when he finally finds out he’s not the Peter of this reality.
Here’s this episode’s glyphs! Remember, you can use this cypher to decode the message.
Rating: 3 / 5 Stars
