Boston.  Sam Weiss’s bowling alley.  Agent Olivia Dunham arrives after hours to return the bowling shoes and to thank Sam for helping her get her memories back.  He gives her a long look, then asks who died.  They talk about her problems and he suggests finding something that will help her make sense of it all.  He gives her another project to help her, hopes she doesn’t have anything against the color red.

Seattle, Washington.  A man arrives late at work.  He seems to be in bad shape.  From his perspective, everyone looks like a monster.  He makes his way into a conference room where his boss starts yelling at him.  The man sees his boss as a goat headed devil and he starts beating the stuffing out of him with his briefcase.  When he’s finally pulled away, we see his eyes and they are moving at a highly increased rate.

Opening credits.

Walter is unpacking at the Bishop’s place.  He is setting up his bed in the dining room.  Astrid shows up with a house warming present and a the case info about the man in Seattle.  Dunham and the Bishops arrive at the hospital via taxi and in an odd moment, Olivia asks the driver for a card in case they need a ride while in town.  Walter looks unhappy.  The agent or doctor says the man has been asleep for 16 hours, seems highly drugged, only just now woke up.  Walter doesn’t want to go in the room.  The man recalls going home for lunch and pulling into the garage then waking up on the floor being held down.  He recounts what seems to be a waking dream.  He then starts having a seizure and his heart rate increases, then he’s very still but with a contorted look on his face.  With his wife coming in and screaming, the man collapses back into his restraints and begins aging before our eyes and then dies.

Examining the body, Walter panics a little about the new house.  Peter tries to reassure him and find out why he’s so skittish when a doctor comes in with some blood results.  The man died of acute exhaustion.  Walter asks for the body to be taken back to his lab and he and Peter argue over it until we find out the city smells wrong to Walter and it reminds him of the mental institution in which he was housed.  Peter agrees to send him home.  He tells the agent in charge (Kieth from Scrubs) to be careful and mindful.  The agent sees an old professor, Peter informs him he’s probably full of psychotropic drugs so not to let him drink.  Olivia says goodbye to the doctor, then asks for his card so she can send him the results.  She seems to have an odd plastic good cheer look stapled to her face.  Walter gets on the EMTs for putting the body in feet first.

Olivia and Peter question the wife.  No odd behavior other than being tired and sleep walk.  But he was okay for six months.  They get the medical reports and Peter asks for the sleep journal.  Back at the lab, Agent Kashner is on the phone trying to release their bags from airline security, seems there were some items of interest.  Astrid and Walter discover a surgical incision around the back of the neck.  Walter gets Agent Kashner to help remove the scalp.

Peter drops in on Olivia and they talk about Greg Leiter’s sleep journal.  He was getting a good amount of sleep but it doubled as a dream diary.  He dreamed about demons.  Peter knows that sleep walkers aren’t dangerous.  He talks about his own nightmares as a kid as Olivia gets a call about another incident.  A woman hit a guy on a bike after telling her husband on the phone she’d seen a monster.  The crash didn’t kill her.  Back at the lab, Walter and Agent Kashner (or Casper as Walter calls him, plus the earlier Asterisk) are pulling the body’s head apart.  They find some kind of filament or chip in the thalamus.  Walter calls Peter and they confer.  The thalamus regulates sleep.  The lady from the wreck has the same incision.

At Massive Dynamic, Nina tells Broyles the chip was a wireless pacemaker in charge of sleep.  A one Dr. Lakshmi Nayak in Seattle was working on a project like this so Olivia and Peter go to talk to him.  (Of note, “lakshmi” is a Sanskrit derivative meaning “observe.”  Just thought I’d throw that in there.)  The doctor is well aware of the two people as they were part of a large scale study.  They visit his office to get more information but it’s been ransacked.  The main server drives were taken but the data was backed up to a remote location.  He tells his assistant (who looks shifty) to contact all the nurses to get patient information.  Olivia asks him if anyone would want the data and he confirms that the chip is valuable as it helps people with all kinds of disorders finally get some rest.  She asks him for a business card.  Peter tells her the other thing this chip could do is mind control.  He and Walter converse about a similar project Walter tried with drugs in the 70′s and Peter asks him if he could reproduce it without student subjects.  That’s when Agent Kashner comes in with their bags.

Olivia has a list of 26 patients and they’re all being brought in to get their chips out, which leaves 50 more.  Olivia has a picture of Charlie and Peter reminds her she didn’t kill Charlie.  She relays a story about Charlie and how he said to her after a troublesome training mission, “You’re gonna be fine “.  She starts getting upset and hastily grabs her coat and leaves.

In an undisclosed location, monitors show a woman and some bio info.  The woman is a waitress and she’s in the kitchen talking to the chefs.  A man in the dark room asks, “Are you sure you want to increase the dosage?” and a shadow with what looks like an electrode helmet nods.  Dials are turned and sliders pushed up and the woman grabs the back of her neck.  She looks around to see a chef frying up some hands and arms.  The dark shadow figure writhes around.  The waitress picks up a knife.

Walter is mixing something in a beaker when Agent Kashner comes by to tell him goodbye.  Walter asks him to smell something and then passes out.  At Doctor Nayak’s office, the doctor is finishing up taking out a chip.  Olivia is helping the nurses.  Sam calls her and asks if she’s got a card from everyone she’s talked to that wore red.  She did and he tells her to circle any letter in both first and last names.  Write all those letters down and jumble and that’s what she needs to hear.  Then he says goodbye.  Broyles calls and says the remote data location was wiped out and it could have only been someone with inside access.  Dr. Nayak says it couldn’t have been anyone.  Peter tells Olivia another attack has come in.

At the restaurant, the head chef recaps the story of the waitress’s rampage.  Dr. Nayak says to check with his assistant Zach who skipped work that day.  Peter and Olivia break into Zach’s apartment and search a bit.  Dr. Nayak reads a note left near his office saying, “Stop talking to the Feds or you’ll end up like Zach.”  Peter finds Zach dead with blood on his head.

Astrid asks what’s wrong with Kashner.  Walter didn’t put the chip in his head, but he wired it to an electrode net and has it wired up to allow mind control.  Walter puts on the other cap and starts reacting in what appears to be a pleasurable way.  Thinks he knows what’s causing it.  Olivia talks to Dr. Nayak about protection.  He makes a call and leaves a message saying he showed them the note so stop.

Walter talks to Peter and Olivia on the phone about the mind control theory being wrong.  The chips are set to broadcast data about sleeping but from where they are, they can also collect huge amounts of sensory information.  During dreaming, that data is siphoned off before reaching the cortex and sent down the radio signal.  It robs people of dreams which means they aren’t getting repairing sleep so they die of exhaustion.  But also that the broadcast dreams are highly addictive as they contain intense emotions.  Someone is using stolen dreams as a drug.

Olivia goes back to the notes they were looking at.  One is the patient list Dr. Nayak wrote out, the other is the death threat.  She talks about severe addiction changing people, creating distinct personalities.  The notes were written by the same person.  At Dr. Nayak’s house, Lakshmi listens to his own message, goes into the basement and fires up his computers, picks a man and cranks up the sliders.  The man is a pilot about to take off.

The small water pontoon plane is getting ready to take off when the pilot looks around all shifty, he sees his copilot without a face.  The pilot starts driving the plane, on the water, into a bridge.  Olivia and Peter arrive and try to shut the machines down.  He can’t so Olivia shoots it.  The pilot, who’s already conked out the copilot, snaps to and is able to pull the plane up in time before it hits the bridge.  Dr. Nayak isn’t so lucky and dies.  Local authorities tell them of the near calamity with the plane.  Peter posits that Nayak did this to end the nightmare.

Olivia brings flowers to Charlie’s grave.  In the car she goes through the jumble and unscrambles the phrase, “You’re gonna be fine.”  At the Bishop’s house, Peter awakes from a dream in which he sees his father and then something grabs him.  When Walter asks him about it, Peter says he can’t remember the dream.  Walter looks despondent.

BETRAY

The only bit of science really is the use of the thalamus.  With the exception of stealing dreams off some sort of piggy back signaled, the actual description of what the thalamus is and does really isn’t up for debate.  It was general enough that there’s no dispute.

But that’s the kicker of this episode.  There’s no talk about William Bell, ZFT, The Observer, Olivia’s nascent powers or the other dimension.  What we’re left with is a monster of the week about a small piece of flesh we all have tucked away in the folds of our brains.  The larger story threads are all plucked ever so lightly, just enough to keep us thinking about them.  This was early Fringe.  Walter being deviously charming but a little hard to manage, Astrid having her name mispronounced, Olivia and Peter investigating a troublesome paranormal event and Broyles in it long enough to be kept appraised.  It wasn’t glitzy or gruesome or shocking, nor was it pedestrian or banal.  It kept a good pace, dealt with speculative science, provided work for some decent actors in guest starring roles and left us with a little emotional nugget.

When season 6 of the DVD comes out, I want everyone to look back to this episode as an example of a GOOD episode in the most general definition possible.  It was a baseline for Fringe and a rather enjoyable one at that.

Four out of five randomly chosen glyphs.