'The Dreamscape' - Fringe, Season One

Fringe

Season One

Episode Nine

'The Dreamscape' - 7.5

Fringe is a show that will force you to make a choice between sense and enjoyment. You can't have both. 

Now that Fringe is moving towards the halfway point of the season, the last few episodes have all been relevant and important to the overarching storyline. 'The Dreamscape', though it starts with an unknown character being murdered by butterflies, eventually becomes a story that focuses on what Olivia does and doesn't know about former lover/partner John Scott.

The cold open of this episode may not be the most action packed of sequences, but I believe that is was incredibly beautiful. The very thought of killer butterflies is intriguing, but they were handled so majestically here, with the show making them still as pretty and harmless-looking and - acting as we believe them to be. Those insects manage to tear the poor Massive Dynamic employee apart with their razor-sharp wings whilst looking absolutely innocent and elegant. Just as I thought it couldn't get any more gorgeous, the shot of our victim falling from god-knows-how-many-storeys-above-the-ground with the shattered glass floating down beside him was almost poetic - although that was probably the idea there. I guess the gist is, it may have started with a board meeting but it ended with a man sliced up by butterfly wings and falling onto the roof of a New York taxicab.

Later the episode continues the stylish approach, with an entire sequence devoted to Olivia kind of re-entering the mind of John Scott, but without the floating kayak-alignment portion. You see, after she begins investigating the death of the scientist from before, Olivia is led to a vital clue by an email from none other than her deceased lover. I loved the brief moment she was walking down the basement hallway with the soft sound of movement around her (which turned out to be toads), it was wonderfully suspenseful and visceral.

Anyhow, the 'dreamscape' I assume the episode is named for was typically eye-catching. Presented with atmospheric camera-angles, an abundance of lens flare and arrangements of blurring and shadow, I found it engaging and much more subtle than the Pilot's dreamscape, which was too in-your-face and computer animated. There was a sense of reality in this episode, they were real-world settings we were looking at through the eyes of memory and the show wanted us to be sure of it. At the same time as being attractive, the sequences also managed to impart a lot about John Scott, and that perhaps he was as evil as we thought. Clearly he is capable of murder - he sort of murders two people over the course of the episode - but we don't know who he was working for, why he did what he did, or really what his connection to the victim was. What we are told is that they had met and made a deal, and it can be assumed that that deal is what got him murdered by the pretty.

I should just mention quickly that it wasn't actually butterflies; turns out he had been slipped a drug that caused him to envision the insect barrage, which was so frighteningly real to him that he actually suffered the injuries he was imagining he was receiving. Eek. The same thing happens towards the end to another member of the four-man deal, who instead had his throat opened by an apparition of John Scott, who was also a part of the deal.

It's all confusing to me, we don't learn much in regards to anything. Massive Dynamic is evil, maybe, John Scott is evil, maybe, MD murders two people, maybe, the deal was against MD, maybe, Scott worked for MD, maybe. I don't know, so I assume that this will be clearer by the end of the season.

So yes, 'The Dreamscape' is beautiful and packed with information, though it fails to really answer any questions, rather posing us more and more to work with, while also presenting us with extended periods of the insufferable John Scott. You're dead, man, you shouldn't be important anymore.