Fringe: A Nightmare On Pike Street
October 17, 2009 by Paul Secrest
Filed under Feature, feature overlay, Television
With Frasier long since off the air and Grey’s Anatomy being the maudlin bore that it is, it was a welcome surprise to see Fringe take a cross country field trip to my pop culturally underappreciated backyard, Seattle!
When an office drone’s dreams start invading his waking hours, he mistakes his boss for something out of Pan’s Labyrinth and bludgeons him with a metal briefcase. Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays. Lord knows whenever there’s a case to be cracked involving altered states of mind, Walter’s perpetually stoned self can’t be far behind.
It only seems logical that whatever made the poor dude freak out and subsequently die from shock, exhaustion, and some crazy REM has something to do with a surgical implant in his brain, and if sci-fi has taught me anything, it’s to keep surgical implants the hell out of your brain. A little digging leads to a sleep clinic where patients receiving the experimental probe experience a complete cessation of nightmares which is all fine and good until those nightmares start walking around with you in the daylight. Walt posits that someone must be hacking the chips as an experimental form of mind control so he does what any responsible researcher might, drug his FBI detail and strap him in to a non-invasive version of the probe to try and test drive the poor bastard himself. What he gets is not a new degree of human control, but rather a surprising new variety of drug trip fueled by another’s dreams. Trippy stuff. Where there’s a new drug there must be a new junkie, which leads the investigation right to the door of the clinic’s seemingly innocent head doc who tricks himself into a near-Fight Club level of personality shift, one with bedside manners and another so hooked on the dream high as to mine his patient’s brains until their tortured subconscious selves burst out to play. Liv accidentally kills the good doctor in a successful attempt to break his link to another victim (in the snazzy and very Seattle predicament of being an urban seaplane pilot threatening to go nuts and ram a cruise ship). But all’s well that ends as such, and it’s back to Harvard having put a cork in yet another act of science gone sideways.
On a personal level, this episode featured a fun new wrinkle for each of our three main heroes: Walt gets to play happy homemaker in some fancy new campus digs, Olivia gains closure over Non-Charlie’s demise with a little help from Bowling Alley What’s-his-face and some eerie business cards, and most intriguingly, Peter recalls what he assumes is a nightmare but what we all know is a memory of when Walter kidnapped him from the other side to replace Peter 1.0! Now that Liv’s memories of William Bell and the reality of cross dimensional warfare are all on the table, I can’t wait till November (end of that pesky MLB post-season) for a fresh batch of eps and the inevitable meltdown that’ll come with Peter realizing he’s not quite who he thinks he is…
Season 2, Episode 5: Dream Logic (originally aired October 15, 2009)
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Thursdays at 9/8C, Fox
Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro
