Fringe: Dream Logic

By Rhea Dee
I love Sam Weiss. He’s just so cool–he helped Olivia ditch her shakes and cane! So I was happy to see his return even though Olivia is cured and has all her memories back.

Olivia visits Sam to return the bowling shoes and thank him for all he’s done, but Sam knows better, he immediately senses something more to Olivia’s visit.

“Who died?” he asks.

Olivia comes clean and admits that she’s grieving about Charlie, her BFF turned monster turned dead guy. Sam gives Olivia a piece of paper (we don’t see what’s on it) to help her through her grief.

Meanwhile, our case of the week is in Seattle, and he’s having a horrible day. When he goes into work he sees demons instead of his coworkers, and eventually he snaps, beating his boss down with his suitcase. When two of his coworkers hold him down, his eyes are spinning rapidly. Err…creepy.

Team Fringe heads out to Seattle to investigate. While they’re interviewing the man, he seizes up–his skin dries out and his hair goes white–and then dies. Walter does a quick study of the body and discovers that the man died of acute exhaustion.

Walter pressures Peter to allow him to return home to Boston. During the entire trip, Walter’s been acting more wonky than usual–he refuses to go into Acute Exhaustion Man’s hospital room at first, and he keeps asking Peter if they left the toaster on, or the oven, etc. Walter finally admits that he doesn’t like Seattle–it has a smell like St. Claire’s, the institution Walter was in–and he begs Peter to let him go home and finish the investigation there. Peter, being the amazingly hot and good son that he is, lets him. But not without a little worrying over his safety (aww).

Back in Boston, Walter discovers a chip implanted in Acute Exhaustion Man’s brain. Olivia and Peter trace the chip back to Doctor Nayak. Dr. Nayak comes clean about implanting the chip, but he says it was part of a treatment for insomnia. He is genuinely shocked at Acute Exhaustion Man’s death and tells Olivia and Peter that he had numerous other patients. However, when they head back to his office to get the names of the other patients, his office has been vandalized. Nayak and his assistant jot down all the names they can remember and Nayak tells them he’ll take all the remaining patients into surgery so he can remove the chip.

Olivia and Peter continue their investigation, and Peter notices that she holding onto picture of her and Charlie. Peter tries to console Olivia, telling her that the thing she killed wasn’t Charlie–she says she knows. Her grief isn’t rooted in the fact that she shot a creature wearing her friend’s face; instead she’s sad simply because he’s gone. She tells Peter a story of her first sting as an FBI Agent. She was very green, having only worked as a Military Prosecutor before (and hey a quick snippet of what Olivia used to do before the FBI!). Charlie walked over to her and said this: “You’re gonna be fine.” And she was.

During all this investigating, Olivia has been asking certain people if she could have their business cards. Turns out that’s what Sam told her to do: collect business cards from everyone she saw wearing the color red. Sam calls to check on her progress and she tells him she’s collected eight cards. He tells her to circle one letter in every name, both first and last. He then tells her to write the letters down and play word jumble until she finds the phrase. He tells her it will give the answer she needs. She puts it away for now, to continue investigating the case.

Two more people that had the Nayak chip implanted kill people and then die of exhaustion. Team Fringe speculates that the chip is being used as a mind control device to make these people kill. But Walter figures out through some experiments on the poor FBI Agent sent to escort him back to Boston that the chips aren’t being used as a mind control device, but rather as a transmitter to hijack their dreams into the controller’s head. So our killer is a dream addict, addicted on the pleasure of people’s dreams.

And on top of all that, Olivia figures out that the dream addict is none other than Dr. Nayak, in a very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde twist. Nayak has no control over his addict alter ego, so in an attempt to stop his dream hijacking he plugged into a brain full tilt, which killed him (with some help from Olivia shooting out his equipment in her patented style of dealing with problems).
Back in Boston, we see Olivia visiting Charlie’s grave. She goes back to her car, and decides to figure out the word jumble Sam gave her. And it spells out: “You’re gonna be fine.”

At the end of the episode we then flash to a dream Peter’s having: he’s still a kid and Walter comes into his room. “Daddy?” Little Peter asks before he screams as Walter snatches him out of bed. Peter wakes up and Walter’s looking at him sadly. He tells Peter he was talking in his sleep. Peter tells him he had a nightmare, but that he can’t really remember it now. And Walter just watches him, with that sad expression.

Do you all remember Olivia’s double-crossing-sweetie-pie from last season? The one that betrayed her, then died, but then wasn’t really dead, and then got this touching sendoff mid-season? Yeah, I hated all that. I found it a bit ridiculous that his character got such a touching sendoff when he was such a minor part of the series. I mean, he got his own LSD hallucination! I know that all of that was done to reflect Olivia’s compassion for him, but it was a bit hollow for me, since we didn’t know him at all. We only saw them interact in the pilot.

Charlie’s goodbye was handled much more eloquently. Olivia’s grief wasn’t as bizarre and off-putting this time because we as an audience got to know Charlie over the course of Season One. The final goodbye was simple and effective, with Olivia crying in her car over the word jumble that finally led her to the phrase that would help her deal with her grief: “You’re gonna be fine.”

Now let’s talk about alt Peter! So far this season, Fringe has been dropping huge reminders that our Peter is not the Peter of our universe. Earlier in this episode, Peter told Olivia that he suffered from horrible nightmares until he was 19. And at the end of this episode we got a glimpse into that nightmare: it was Walter snatching alt Peter right out of his bed! To confirm that this was indeed the case, take a look at the poster on Peter’s wall. It says: Challenger Mission 11, June 28th, 1984. Firstly, the Challenger only had 10 missions before it exploded. Secondly, that explosion happened on January 28, 1986. So obviously…alternate universe! The tension about Walter’s secret about Peter is mounting. Will Walter tell Peter? Or will Peter find out in some other way?

Next Time On Fringe: Oh, boo, Fringe isn’t back until November.

Rhea Dee spends her time collecting vintage junk, daydreaming about Eli Roth, and pondering the genius of John Carpenter soundtracks.  She really likes horror films.

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