And the “Fringe” formula keeps going strong. While the opening appears to be ripping off The Birds, the episode soon takes an interesting turn. Yes, I just used the term “interesting” to refer to something that happened on “Fringe.” This show might very well be improving.
Essentially, a businessman in his skyscraper office is attacked by a bunch of butterflies with very sharp wings, and eventually they chase him right out the window. Given that he’s fairly high up on the skyscraper, this turns out to be fatal. (Does anybody actually inhabit the offices at the bottom of skyscrapers? You never see them on T.V.) Olivia gets called in to investigate, which interrupts her party plans. What a shame.
The guy has paintings of butterflies on his wall, which Olivia briefly hallucinates as fluttering as if they were alive. It’s a good thing she’s insane, because an email from her dead partner John Scott points her towards a storage facility that is filled with….frogs. Of course. What else would it be?
Walter, with his idiot savant powers, is able to determine that the frogs secrete a powerful hallucinogen. RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES! Of twenty years ago, but still. But this hallucinogen is so powerful that it actually made a guy hallucinate that sharp-winged butterflies were attacking him – and his body confirmed the whole thing by creating sharp cuts all over his skin.
This is, oddly, one of the least “fringe-y” things that “Fringe” has dealt with. Psychosomatic illness is as real as the symptoms it produces, and while they are typically less noticable than skin abrasions, no one disputes that the brain can cause very real changes in the body. It’s also very scary because of how difficult it is to control or treat. This is the sort of thing “Fringe” should do more often, rather than Magnetic Exploding Head Syndrome or whatever.
The biggest revelation of “The Dreamscape” is that – prepare yourself for a big shocker – Massive Dynamic, the painfully sinister multinational corporation, might be behind all of this! I mean, who saw that coming?
They’ve got one more episode to sort this all out, and that better not be the final solution. I swear.
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