Dream Logic
Updated 2009-10-16 09:33:39
That jaunty neon "Bowling 16 Lanes" sign over the bowling alley sure clashes with the businesslike floaty letters next to it reading, "BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS." Inside, Sam Weiss doesn't look up from the book he's reading at the shoe rental counter to tell a visitor, "We're closed." Who else does he think it is other than Olivia? For of course it is she, returning her bowling shoes and thanking him for helping her get her memories back. Even though he wasn't in the episode when that happened. He just looks at her a long time before asking, "Who died?" Whoa, he's better than I thought.
A bit later, they're over by the lanes and she's apparently told him at least part of the story about Charlie and Gnarlie. "I guess getting your memory back wasn't your only problem," he observes, although he conspicuously declines to argue with her claim that she can handle her other issues. He prescribes "something to help you with everything you've been going through. Something to help you make sense of it all." Olivia figures he means bowling, but instead he starts to write something down on a sheet of spiral notepaper and says, "Whether you admit it or not, your life is something of a nightmare." For one thing, he's calling her by her first name now. He rips off the sheet and folds it over, sliding it across the table to her and saying, "I hope you don't have anything against the color red." No, just color in general, going by her wardrobe and makeup palette. We can't see what's written on the paper. All we can see is the bottom edge, folded up so that it doesn't quite cover the sheet's torn-off fringe. FRINGE! OMG A FRINGE!!!1!!
A pair of wingtipped feet step off an elevator into a floor-level lobby, which would be a lot more spacious if not for the big floaty letters reading "SEATTLE, WASHINGTON" taking up so much room. The mystery man is carrying a silver briefcase. Well, at least we know it's not one of the Observer's couriers; they carry black ones . This guy, though, looks like he has some dark intent of his own as he makes his way through a cube farm. A coworker warns that the boss is pretty pissed at him, and he continues walking. Though he doesn't fail to notice that the mailroom guy has turned into a vampire-toothed beastie, that another office guy has apparently been into the facial prosthetics from Angel , and a blonde woman's highlights can't draw attention from her fangs and green face. Finally our guy makes it into the conference room, where the boss (you can tell he's the boss because he's the one wearing suspenders) snaps at him, "Leeder, do you know how much trouble you've caused me? I am gong to destroy you!" And of all the monsters in the office, he's the scariest one of all, looking like Demon Giles , ram's horns and all. Our guy clubs him across the face with his briefcase, sending him sprawling across the conference table, and decks the coworker who tries to intervene before continuing to bring the case down on top of his boss's face, which is alternating between the demon-face and the boss-face (which is often confused for a demon-face by those who have undergone long-term exposure), although both versions are equally bloody and soon inert. Finally a couple of guys pull him away and pin him to the wall, where the camera focuses in on his eyes. They're shuttling from side to side like he's watching a tennis match in fast-forward mode. Fringey!
This must be Walter and Peter's new apartment. It's a nice place, plus they apparently have a whole crew of movers helping them bring their stuff in. Of course, even in this standard domestic setting, Walter can't help being eccentric, setting up his bed in the living room's fold-out couch. Peter reminds Walter that he's got a bedroom upstairs, but Walter assures him, "I promise to wear my shorts to bed so that if you bring any young ladies home there won't be any embarrassing moments." I think it's going to take more than shorts. And who's to say that Walter would be the author of all of Peter's embarrassing moments, anyway?
Just then Astrid enters with a jaunty "knock-knock" on the door frame. Walter is overwhelmed with joy to see her, or maybe it's just amazement that she can exist outside the lab and is not simply a holographic projection confined within its walls. She presents him with a housewarming present in the form of a takeout gift box, one whiff of which tells Walter that it's "Italian ciabatti bread." She says it's for good luck, and presents Peter with a gift of his own. "You shouldn't have," Peter says, because it's a case file sent over by Olivia. Astrid recaps the teaser for Peter, including the part about "This really crazy thing with his eyes." Astrid assures Peter that what she saw of the video surveillance footage told her this isn't normal, and that's enough for Peter to tell Walter to pack a bag. Which shouldn't be hard, since they're already moving. "We're going to Seattle," he announces. Not Astrid, though. She needs to get back to the lab to hold the beakers in place in case there's an earthquake.
Whatever the case, I'm glad to see that now that we know there's an interdimensional antichrist on the loose, the Fringe team is unflagging in their search for him. Oh, wait.
The floaty letters over an aerial shot of virtually the whole city, from Queen Anne to Georgetown, read "SEATTLE, WASHINGTON!" That is, if you imagine that the Space Needle is an exclamation point, which isn't hard to do given how the letters are positioned. Those letters do get playful, don't they? A yellow cab drops the Fringe Three off outside a hospital, and Walter looks around nervously as though expecting to be attacked at any moment. Or worse, as we'll soon discover. Olivia tips the cabbie as he unloads their bags from the trunk, then asks for his business card in case they need another ride while they're in town. I'm sure it's a coincidence that Sam Weiss mentioned the color red, and the cabbie is wearing a bright red sweater.
Olivia and the Bishops are led down the hospital hallway by a local cop named Detective Green. I can kind of see the source of Walter's distress: he's laden down with two heavy suitcases and a backpack, while his travel companions are empty-handed. Apparently he's not only a brilliant scientist, but a gifted porter as well. They learn from Det. Green that Leeder has just now been woken up. "He's been asleep for sixteen hours?" Peter asks, either surprised or jealous. "Like he was drugged," the agent confirms. By now they have reached the end of the hallway, and a window to Leeder's room. He's strapped down to his bed, of course, hooked up to all manner of monitors. Walter nervously tells Peter he doesn't want to enter the room. Peter agrees, his light tone belying the concerned look in his eyes. Or maybe he just thinks this is another opportunity to do a tough-guy squint.
Inside the room, Olivia asks Leeder what happened. He claims that all he remembers is coming back from lunch and then finding himself being held down. Olivia asks if there was anything else abnormal. Well, what else does she want? After the obligatory "You're gonna think I'm crazy"-slash-"Try me" exchange, he confesses, "It was like the office was infiltrated by these creatures. And [the boss], he was their leader. He had horns, like some demon." He's still admitting that it sounds crazy, like a dream, when he stops talking and starts convulsing. The monitors beep faster and faster, as Olivia says his name and Peter calls Walter into the room. He and Green rush to the bedside, and somehow Leeder's wife has picked this moment to appear in the doorway, freaking out as Leeder freezes and his hair goes white before our eyes. It's actually a pretty cool effect. She forces her way into the room, horrified that by the time she gets here, her husband is not only dead, but suddenly wearing a really terrible white wig. Now there's just no excuse for that; we've already seen what the digital hair-whitener can do. Making him look like Peter Lynch after the fact just cheapens the whole thing.
After the ads, Walter is doing a preliminary post-mortem. He observes that Leeder's body is warmer than it should be, which seems to remind him that they left the oven on in their apartment. This is clearly not the first time Walter has made claims like this since they arrived, as Peter assures him, rather impatiently, that everything's under control back home. He asks why Walter's been acting weird since they arrived. Before Walter can answer, the coroner walks in with the bloodwork. Which Walter correctly predicts the contents of, because he can tell from the hair and the dehydration lesions on the body that Leeder died of "acute exhaustion." The M.E. says humans can't die of that (let's see him recap four episodes of 24 in a week sometime, then), but Walter insists that just because it hasn't, that doesn't mean it couldn't. In fact, it's happened in rats before. Walter asks for the body to be shipped back to his lab in Boston, which Peter tries to shut right down. "Whatever you need, I'm sure they have it here," he insists. So then Walter has a little sidebar with Peter, telling him he needs to go home. "This city has a smell. It's wet. It reminds me of St. Clare's. The mental institution where I live." And Fringe would like to thank the City of Seattle, the entirety of which it just accused of smelling like a loony bin. Walter pathetically begs to go home, telling Peter to stay and help Olivia. Peter takes pity on his dad and says, "We'll find someone to take you home." How hard could that be? We haven't seen Agent Jessup in a few episodes, have we?
Later, Walter's leaving the hospital with the body about to be loaded in the ambulance. Peter watches as he briefs the fresh-faced young agent who's apparently been assigned to accompany Walter back to Boston. "Buddy, I've been with the Bureau for three years," the rookie boasts. "Flying your father home shouldn't be a problem." Peter pretends to agree, and gives him a few tips. "You want to keep his Sudoku pad handy. There's also a copy of Max Planck's book on entropy in his backpack that should keep him busy for a couple hours. And whatever you do, under no circumstances let him drink." Because, you know, of the psychotropic drugs that are in Walter's system at any given time. The agent looks like he's starting to take this seriously for the first time. And since he's being played by Keith from Scrubs , you just know there's a thorough screwing-over in his future.
Olivia and the M.E. join them outside, Olivia thanking the coroner for his cooperation. Olivia also asks him for his business card, and I didn't notice until now that he's wearing a red tie. Olivia turns to see Walter berating the morgue attendants for loading the body feet-first. "Think he'll be alright?" Peter asks Olivia. "Walter? Or Agent Kashner?" Olivia asks. She thinks she's joking.
Olivia and Peter head over to the widow's house for the widow interview. Olivia establishes that he hadn't had any illnesses or hallucinations. What's a Big Wheel doing in the living room, then? Peter, who has been fiddling with the four or five books on the living room mantel, asks if Leeder had sleep issues. That's a good clue, but you'd think a guy with sleep problems would be a little more of a reader. The giveaway for Peter was the fact that all of Leeder's books are about sleep and sleep disorders. She says her husband used to sleepwalk, and although he was never violent, he saw some specialists and hadn't had any episodes in six months. Olivia asks for the names of the doctors, and Peter continues on his sleep-related line of questioning, asking if the dead man kept a sleep journal. The wife offers to let Peter see it. Where would the Fringe team be without cooperative widows? And without Olivia's ability to conceal from interview subjects (if not from us) her surprise at Peter's investigative acumen?
At the lab, Walter gets Astrid to help him with Leeder's body bag while she complains about the time (almost midnight) and Agent Kashner yells at someone over his cell phone. Walter excitedly tells Astrid about the flight. "The turbulence over Ohio was like being in the belly of a seizing whale. I screamed like a little girl." She asks what Kashner is bitching about, and Walter explains, "They detained our bags." Kashner argues, "No, I'm pretty sure Dr. Bishop wouldn't have packed a bottle of raw--" Then Gene moos before he can say "milk." The obligatory Gene joke now dispensed with (and really, Agent Kashner, it could have been so much worse), Walter has made a discovery on the back of Greg's neck: a small surgical scar. "Asterix, my small bone saw, please," he calls. She corrects him on her name as she goes to fetch it and Agent Kashner, having finished his call, apologizes that they can't have the bags until morning. Walter's fine with that, since it allows him to draft the young agent into helping them scalp the body. Astrid hands Kashner the bone saw. "Once you get used to the smell, it's really quite something," Walter promises. Kashner just stands there, instead of casting about desperately for some Sudoku puzzles to distract Walter with.
Back in Seattle, Peter knocks on the door of Olivia's hotel room. No, not like that; it's about as unromantic as possible, what with them each wearing the t-shirts of their respective alma maters. "Cute," she says, indicating his MIT shirt and her Northwestern shirt with a quick gesture. "Except in my case I actually graduated. I'm guessing you bought yours to impress the girls." Peter admits as much, which, he's either kidding, or we just learned an awful lot about Peter's skills at impressing girls. They sit down so Peter can tell her what he found in Leeder's sleep journal, which is a lot of nothing. More specifically, plenty of sleep every night for the last few months, and a sudden end to his weekly demon-themed nightmares at about the same time. She asks if his attack was some kind of extreme sleepwalking, and he corrects her that sleepwalkers generally don't get violent, or remember their experiences. "Where'd you learn that? MIT?" she mocks gently. Peter breezily says that he used to get nightmares almost every night as a kid, so he knows his shit. Olivia apologizes, and Peter says, "Actually, it was one of the rare occasions in my childhood that Walter was helpful." Apparently Walter taught Peter to condition himself with a nightly mantra before bed: "Please don't dream tonight." Nice. Catchy, yet desperate. "From the age of eight to almost nineteen, I don't remember a single dream. No more nightmares." Hmm, I'm sure the timeline is just a coincidence. Just then Olivia's phone goes off. "There's been another incident," she says. Time to put on real clothes.
Because then we're on some narrow, rain-soaked brick street, where the cops and EMTs are cleaning up after a car vs. motorcycle collision. The car seems to have hit the bike hard enough to not only kill its rider instantly but also get its own front end bashed in. As for the driver, she's just as dead as Leeder, and apparently in the same way. Olivia and Peter are talking to the dead woman's husband, who was on the phone with her at the time. "She said she saw a monster," the husband says. Despite the corpse's white hair, Peter and Olivia are not insensitive enough to comment on their age difference.
Agent Kashner's got two problems. One, he is an unwilling assistant in a brain autopsy, and two, Walter keeps calling him "Agent Casper." Astrid plays it cool as Walter lifts away a wedge-shaped section of Leeder's skull, and tells Astrid to call Peter before he's even finished extracting what he's found inside: a little rectangular computer chip with a long wire trailing from it. "Urg, I'm out," Kashner gags. And this isn't even the low point of the episode for him.
Peter gets Walter's call just in time for him to ask for a look at the body before it's loaded into the ambulance. Walter's telling him what he found embedded in the midbrain. "The thalamus," Peter guesses. Walter congratulates him on a sensible guess, and Peter calls Olivia over while Walter tells Astrid that the thalamus is the part of the brain that regulates sleep. Olivia arrives where Peter is groping the newest body, asking what he's looking for. "That," Peter says, showing Olivia the late woman's incision to match Greg's. I think the show kind of missed an opportunity here: a USB port in the back of the neck would be so much more Fringey, don't you think?
And after the ads, we're at Massive Dynamic, where Agent Broyles is having a meeting with Nina Sharp. This seems a little low-level for them, but I guess they needed something to do in this episode. Specifically, Nina is telling Broyles that the chip is a "brain-computer interface, or BCI." Well, of course it is. Furthermore, this one has a wireless transmitter. An unnecessarily freaky long-range shot from a camera that's slowly tipping over in the far corner of the room is used to show Nina confirming that it works on the brain like a pacemaker does on the heart, monitoring the sleep cycle and stimulating the thalamus to induce deeper sleep when necessary. She also gives Broyles the Massive Dynamic dossier on a Dr. Laxmeesh Nayak, a researcher in Seattle who's been working on stuff like this. "The man's a genius. We've been tracking him for years." Broyles thanks her and promised to inform the team. And that's it for Nina and Massive Dynamic this week.
Next thing you know, Olivia and Peter are at the good doctor's house, showing him photos of the two victims. He immediately recognizes them as his patients and asks what it's about. "Both of them recently committed homicidal attack and then...died," Olivia says with a weird smile. "As a result of what appears to be extreme exhaustion." Nayak is shocked, but not to hear about the chips found in their heads. That's because the two dead people were part of a study, 82 people strong. Olivia urgently asks for the names of the other subjects. What's the hurry? I'm sure they'll reveal themselves soon enough.
But they apparently go right to the Nayak Sleep Clinic, which features a big, glass-bricked atrium with the words "NAYAK SLEEP CLINIC" hanging in the middle of the space, presumably for subjects who wake up and stumble out of their cubicles wondering where they are. As Nayak leads them up to his mezzanine office, he assures them that the chip couldn't have caused this. And when they get there, they discover the place ransacked. Even the venetian blinds have been mangled, as though the invaders were searching for something between the slats. Olivia draws her weapon and Peter follows her inside, telling Nayak to hang back. There's no one in the office, but Nayak sees that one of the servers is gone. The one with the patient files, of course.
Shortly thereafter, the office has been converted to a crime scene, with cops milling around and Nayak giving Olivia the password to the offsite backup server. Nayak's research assistant, a shaggy dude named Zach, wanders in wondering what's going on, and Nayak dispatches him to pull together as many subject names as he can. Olivia watches as he leaves rather shiftily, then accepts the password from Nayak. She asks him the standard question about who might want to do this, and he says the chip has been working so well that it might have become the target of some corporate espionage types. Not Massive Dynamic, I'm sure; now they have one of their own. Yes, Nina gave the original back to Broyles, but I'm sure Nina's lab techs spent about five minutes figuring out what it was and two hours getting their own version into mass production. "These people just wanted some rest," Nayak says. "And my chip was helping them." Yes, clearly. But Olivia has already tuned him out, because she's noticed a tiny red logo on the breast of his jacket, which means she has to ask him for a business card. As he goes to get her one, Olivia steps over to Peter to say that since Nayak is too upset about all this to be a suspect, she's got no theories. Peter, however, does. He explains how the chip is connected to the thalamus, the thalamus is connected to the cerebral cortex, the cerebral cortex is connected to motor function, now hear the word of the evil megalomaniac controlling your movements.
"Mind control, Peter?" Walter asks over the phone. "Wouldn't be the first time someone's attempted it." And of course by "someone" he means "Walter Bishop." Have I told you about my work with the MK Ultra Project? Of course, at that time, we supposed we could do it with LSD and hypnotic suggestion." Is there anything Walter won't try with LSD and hypnotic suggestion? It's like his version of duct tape. Peter, carrying some coffee and stealing an apple from a sidewalk market as he walks through a sunny Seattle morning (they do exist, I've seen them), asks if Walter has a way to test the chip they recovered from Leeder. Walter says he'd need a live subject for best results. "Walter, no! No student volunteers, "Peter orders, just as Agent Kashner proudly presents himself in front of Walter with a full set of bags recovered from their flight. Peter makes Walter say it. "No students." Yeah, Agent Kashner is going to wish Peter had been a little less specific.
Peter returns to Olivia's hotel room, where she's got a whole chaotic workspace spread out on the coffee table in front of her. After some discussion of the mind-control theory, Olivia shows Peter the list of names Nayak could remember: only 26. Plus he writes like a girl. Those people have already been rounded up by the Seattle police to have their chips removed, but as Peter points out, there are some fifty still out there. Fifty-four, by my count, soon to be fifty-three. Suddenly Olivia goes into a mood as a result of having looked down at one of the items on her work space: a photo of herself with Charlie. Peter catches the snap, and reminds Olivia that what she killed last week wasn't Charlie. She knows that, but of course he's still dead. Not that she's that blunt. Instead, she tells Peter about her first week on the job, trying to bust a gun-and drug-running operation. Her first week? There wasn't any filing she could have done? "I had been a military prosecutor, so I hadn't handled a gun since basic training. And suddenly I'm underground in this garage wearing a bulletproof vest and wondering how the hell I got there. So I did what any rookie would do and started looking for an exit." And then Charlie came up to her, "this man that I didn't know, this gruff guy, and he said, 'You're gonna be fine.' And I have to face it. That he...he's gone. That he's not coming back." So to face it, she's heading to the clinic. She leaves Peter sitting there in her room. He could totally order anything he wants on pay-per-view and it'll be on her bill.
Somewhere, somebody is logging into Nayak's patient servers and connecting to the bio-chip of a young woman. Right now, that young woman is hard at work in the kitchen of a restaurant, where she's apparently a server. And a popular one, to boot, because it wouldn't be as tragic if these people were assholes. "Do you really want to increase the dose?" asks Zach, Nayak's research assistant whom we are totally not surprised to see mixed up in this. His question is directed to a figure we see only from the back, wearing a Darth Vader cowl over its head without the helmet. The head nods, and on one of the many computer monitors, the intensity scale goes to four on a scale of seven. As the hand grips the arm of the chair, the restaurant server looks up from cutting her steak with a giant knife. She puts a hand to the back of her head and winces, as if she can hear the same feedback sound effect we're hearing, and when she "recovers," she looks over a the grill chef. He looks back at her with dead eyes, and returns to his work, which is grilling dismembered human hands. What is this, Top Chef ? She picks up a fresh butcher knife and heads over to the grill station, raising it high with an Oh, boy, are you gonna get it look in her eye.
Here's a question that's never addressed in this episode: all these people see these horrors, and their first reaction is to attack, not run away? Maybe the real problem with Nayak's study is that all the people who took part in it aren't cowardly enough.Walter fiddles with his chemistry set in the lab, whistling innocently. Agent Kashner walks in, carrying his own suitcase. Apparently he stopped by just to say goodbye, bringing his suitcase in rather than leaving it in the car so we would know he's heading back to Seattle. He asks Walter to say goodbye to Astrid for him, since Astrid doesn't seem to be in the lab. Now that's weird. It must be a day that doesn't end in a Y. Walter agrees, and asks Kashner to smell the contents of a flask for him, claiming that the French roast coffee he had this morning has messed with his own sense of smell. The credulous agent takes a whiff and asks, "Raspberry?" Then his eyes roll back in his head and he crumples to the lab floor. Walter? Resumes his whistling.
In the sleep clinic's operating room, Nayak finishes fishing out what is apparently the latest of many thalamic implants, and asks for the next patient to be sent in. In the lobby atrium, Olivia watches from on high as people try to deal with the upset patients down below and asks one of Nayak's nurses to check with local pharmacies. Then she gets a cell phone call from Sam Weiss. "What's shakin', Bacon?" he asks from somewhere deep in the bowels of the pinsetter equipment at the bowling alley. Rather than object to the clear implication that her law enforcement career makes her a pig, Olivia jokes about all the time she's wasting, then says she got eight business cards. "You asked everyone you saw wearing red? Weiss confirms. Apparently those were her only instructions. She asks what's next, and he tells her to spread them out in front of her, "Like you're playing go fish." Then he tells her to circle one letter in every name, first and last. Then write down all the letters she's circled on a separate piece of paper. When she's done that, he tells her, "Now jumble. Find the phrase." She's like, "What phrase?" "Whatever it is you need to hear," he tells her. So with eight business cards, two letters each, she should have sixteen letters, which should just be enough to spell out "SAM WEISS IS A DICKV." "You'll figure it out," he tells her. "Gotta go." Alas, not because the pinsetter is tearing him into smug, gnomic shreds and scattering him along the lane. When her phone rings again, she grumps at it, "I really don't have any time for this." Which means it's actually Broyles, reporting that the server with Nayak's patient files was wiped. And apparently by someone who had the password. You know, as hard as losing Charlie is for Olivia, it must be even worse for Broyles, who's now stuck doing all the crap that used to be Charlie's job. After she gets off the phone and tells Nayak that it's looking like an inside job, he insists to Olivia that none of his people could have done this. Well, who does that leave then, Doctor? And then Peter tells Olivia they have another one.
A moment later, they're watching that formerly brunette (now white-haired) server being zipped into her body bag, while the bloody restaurant owner is telling them a now-familiar story, and we see the dead grill chef being hauled away from his station. "She was so happy. This doesn't make sense," the owner weeps. Olivia pats his arm awkwardly, while Peter and Nayak watch from the end of the bar. I guess they brought him along so he could see what's going on and maybe motivate him to be a bit more cooperative. Nayak tells Peter that this latest victim had night terrors. "She was just in my office last week." Looks like he can clear the rest of her appointments. Peter and Olivia are just talking about how to get the word out to the local media when Nayak realizes that his assistant Zach hasn't been to work, or indeed reachable, all day. Yeah, Nayak, we know he's in on it. Try to keep up.
Cut to Peter and Olivia busting into Zach's apartment when there's no answer to their knock. At the same time, Nayak is returning to his office, almost missing the note stuck under his nameplate. Peter and Olivia are coming up empty in Zach's place, other than a couple of books about sleep on his neatly made bed. Apparently he reads about it instead of doing it. Nayak opens the handwritten note, which reads, "Stop Talking To The Feds or wind up like zach" So whoever is behind this is also capable of crimes against capitalization and punctuation. By now, Peter has discovered Zach's body, stuffed in his armoire with a tiny bullet hole at its temple. "I guess that's why he wasn't answering his phone," Peter cracks. Yeah, I've had bosses that wouldn't accept that as an excuse.
"Walter? What's wrong with Agent Kashner?" Astrid asks threateningly. Well, Astrid, have you checked his neck for syringe marks? Walter somehow got the limp body up onto the operating table and has placed a kind of electronic hairnet over his skull. Which Walter hasn't bothered to shave, so that's the first break Agent Kashner has caught since he met this madman. Walter confesses to Astrid, "I drugged him." He does deny having put the chip in Kashner's head. "But I wanted to. Then I realized that I could attach the chip to an EEG net and the signal would reach his brain." He's also wired up a frame with electrodes on it called the neurostimulator (Radio Shack, $129.99) to test Peter's mind control theory. Specifically, he's going to try to use it to transmit commands from his own brain to Agent Kashner. He just needs Astrid's help putting it on himself. She protests weakly, and he whispers, "Don't be such a grinch. I told you , science should be fun." Yeah, Agent Kashner looks like he's having a blast.
A bit Later, Walter sits on an exam couch, twiddling his feet and asking Astrid to watch Kashner for similar movement. Nothing's happening. Or rather, nothing's happening to Kashner . However, Walter is making some very strange noises. "Either a green unicorn just raced across the lab or I accidentally took some LSD," he remarks. Then he corrects himself -- must be mescaline. But as his reactions to whatever he's experiencing continue to venture deeper and deeper into "Jizz In My Pants" territory (to Astrid's increasing weirded-outness), he says he thinks he's figured it out. I'd say that's probably Walter's biggest rush of all, but I think we know better.
Back in Seattle, Olivia is holding the threatening note that Nayak must have just given her, and she promises to have it analyzed, while in the meantime there'll be a protective detail on his clinic and Det. Green will keep an eye on his house. They leave the office, Peter promising tough-guy-like that they'll catch whoever it is. "Then you can get back to your work." That sounds like a great plan, except for the part where Nayak gets back to his work. The minute they're gone, Nayak dials his phone and reaches a suspiciously anonymous answering machine. He tells it, "I showed them your damn note, so you might as well stop." Hmm, someone's not being entirely forthcoming.
Peter and Olivia are driving through the Seattle night while on the speakerphone to Walter, who's setting Peter straight on his theory. He says the chips aren't receiving commands, but transmitting data. Not just sleep, but all sensory information that passes through the thalamus. "Are you saying that Dr. Nayak's biochips are stealing dreams?" Olivia asks. Walter confirms it, and Peter remembers that Leeder's sleep journal indicated a lack of dreams. Walter explains that that's because they were being "siphoned off." Thus the brain couldn't recharge, leading to death by exhaustion. It's usually hard trying to determine the purest nugget of scientific bullshit in any given episode of this show, but I think we have a clear winner this week. Walter goes on: "What's more, I believe the chips have the ability to turn on a dreaming state while the patient is awake. Which would lead to paranoia, hallucination, and a complete inability to differentiate between reality and dreams." Peter asks the obvious question: why? Walter gets all dreamy, talking about what just happened to him without saying it happened to him, although Peter and Olivia don't seem to have any difficulty telling from his tone that he's speaking from first-hand experience. "It's really quite something," he says. Olivia realizes they're looking for an addict, and Walter thinks anyone exposed to it would be more like its slave. Good thing he's such an iron-willed guy, then. "We need to go back to the hotel," Olivia says. Peter asks, "What are you thinking?" Which is much smoother than saying, "All right! "
Apparently she doesn't answer his question until they get back, but once there, she gives him a little more backstory of her own. "My stepfather was an addict. He was a drunk." Shuffling through the papers on her counter, she says he seemed to have two different personalities, one drunk, one sober. "The deeper the addiction, the more extreme the rift. Like Jekyll and Hyde." By now she's found Dr. Nayak's handwritten patient list to compare with the threat note. They look pretty different to me, but Olivia compares the Fs and the Gs and confidently says, "These were written by the same person." Well, what does the FBI need a document analysis unit for when they have her?
Meanwhile, Det. Green s walking Nayak up to the front door of his house. Inside, Nayak listens to the message he left for himself on his home answering machine earlier. The brilliant scientist clearly doesn't know how to record his own personalized outgoing greeting, let alone switch to voice mail. Rather than obeying his own pleas to stop, he goes down into his basement, which is the site of the computer lab we saw earlier. Remember, the giant, multiple banks of monitors and servers that can apparently be fully reproduced by Walter's rickety old neurostimulator? Nayak gets everything fired up, apparently not needing Zach's assistance after all. In seconds, he's scrolling through patient photos, and soon lands on a young African-American man in a white shirt. The odd thing is that in some shots, where the photo is in the background, that white shirt clearly has pilot's epaulets on the shoulder. Uh-oh. But those epaulets are gone in the close-ups of the photo, like someone decided not to give it away and digitally erased them from half the shots. Rather than pausing to give this any thought, Nayak cranks everything up to the limit.
And now, we're watching a commercial seaplane about to take off. Fortunately it's still nighttime, making it difficult to see that this isn't being shot in Seattle at all. But we can clearly see that the guy on Nayak's monitor, as a wired-up Nayak goes all O-faced, is none other than the pilot of that very plane. Try to act surprised.
The plane is cleared for takeoff, just as the pilot goes all twitchy. Nice timing, Nayak. Clearly the chip is working, because the pilot is hallucinating a suspension bridge up ahead at the end of the lake, where Gas Works Park is supposed to be. Then he looks over at the copilot, whose face now appears to the pilot as a featureless blob of flesh. The pilot reacts as anyone would, which is to steer the accelerating plane off course and towards a docked oceangoing cruise ship. The copilot asks what's going on with increasing concern. First of all, his captain has gone bazoo, and secondly, what the fuck is a cruise ship doing in Lake Union?
Peter, Olivia, and Det. Green march up to Nayak's front door. Inside, Nayak continues tripping. The plane keeps zooming across the water to certain (if nonsensical) doom. Olivia and Peter enter the basement and find Nayak hooked up, completely out of it. Peter tries to shut stuff down, while the pilot clubs his copilot with the cockpit fire extinguisher. Olivia tells Peter to get away from the computer server, then empties her gun into it. After all the time they spent looking for it, too. Nayak goes limp, like he just got unplugged from the Matrix. In the plane, the flight attendant comes up front to see why the entire crew is unconscious, and brings the pilot around just in time for him to pull up, barely avoiding the cruise ship and buzzing a couple taking a turn around the deck. Happy ending! Nobody else is dead but Nayak, and Seattleites will have a landlocked cruise ship to visit when the mood strikes them.
Later, as they're leaving the house with the corpse and a night-shift coroner, Det. Green tells them about what happened at Lake Union. "Good work," he tells Olivia, clapping her on the shoulder and leaving. Peter tells Olivia that all of Nayak's dials were in the red. Olivia wonders if he was going out in a blaze of glory, but Peter has an alternate theory. "I don't think he was fully aware of what his darker side was up to. Until tonight." Okay, but Zach was. Which one of them ransacked Nayak's office even before the FBI showed up? Olivia wonders if this was how Nayak was putting a stop to it. "I guess that's the irony," Peter says. "His addiction to dreams became his nightmare. One that he couldn't wake up from. Maybe that was his only way of ending the nightmare." That's a pretty sympathetic assessment of someone who killed seven people (counting Zach) and almost tripled that number or more.
Back in Boston, Olivia places flowers on Charlie's grave. The dates, BTW, are 6/22/76-10/8/09, so even if Charlie wasn't Gnarlie, someone seems to have gotten their death dates mixed up. Back in her car, Olivia pulls out her little notepad and works on her jumble some more. She's getting closer: "YOURE GONNA BNEEFI." She is? Sounds painful. She crosses it out, and finds the right answer: "You're gonna be fine." Olivia begins to tear up. That would be an impressive little parlor trick Sam Weiss just pulled, helping her fish that phrase out of the universe and her subconscious, if we didn't know it was already in her conscious. I'd rather not rule out the possibility that the real answer is "Oo unyearning feeb."
A very young Peter -- and damn, did they do a good job of casting a kid with Josh Jackson's round face -- sleeps in his bed. He looks about eight, the age when his nightmares stopped. And maybe some other stuff happened. Suddenly his eyes pop open. He looks around at what is clearly the room of a grade-school science nerd. There's a model plane, some chemistry toys, and a poster on the wall of a Space Shuttle mission dated June 28, 1984, which may or may not be significant, but in our world that was two days after a planned Discovery flight was scrubbed. Oh, how I cried. In more immediate news, Peter sees a reflection of a younger version of Walter in the bureau mirror, so shadowy as to be almost unrecognizable. The planets of a model solar system hover around his head. Young Peter asks, "Dad? What's wrong?" The shadow-Walter lifts his head as though to answer, and suddenly something grabs young Peter and yanks him out of the side of the frame, screaming.
Peter wakes up in the apartment, seeing his dad sitting there watching him sleep. Just like in the dream, although actually there and not in a reflection. It's made slightly less creepy by the fact that this is in the living room rather than in the privacy of Peter's bedroom. He asks Walter what's up. "Nothing," Walter says. "You were talking in your sleep." Peter sits up, describing the dream. "I was a kid, In my room. You were there." "And the rest?" Walter asks. "You don't remember it?" Peter just sleepily says, "Hmm-mmm." Walter looks worried that it's only a matter of time before he does. And when that happens, maybe he should be in a different room.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer , follow him on Twitter , or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com.
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