Castle - Kill the Messenger

Castle - Season 2, Episode 8: "Kill the Messenger". Original Air Date: 9 November, 2009.

The episode begins with a bike courier; a masked man crashes a car into him and steals the package the man was set to deliver. The team tries to figure out what was in that package, so they track down the sender, an old woman, hooked up to oxygen in her own home. She says that she had no idea what was in the package she'd sent that morning, and that it was from her nephew, Brady. He had sent it to her years ago, and told her to keep it safe and to never look at it when he went to prison, and now, he wanted her to send it to whom it was addressed. That person? The captain. But when they want to talk to Brady, they find out that he's been murdered that morning in prison. Talking to others involved with Brady's case, in which he pleaded guilty to murder, they learn that he may not have been the murderer. A lot of digging around in Brady's victim's case brings them to one of the wealthiest families in the city: the Wellesleys. In the end, they discover that the Wellesleys' attendant / butler / everything man, Frank Davis, was not only responsible for the biker's death, but also Brady's [I think?] and the young woman from all those years ago. In the previous episode, Castle said, "I'm going to go with the butler," and tells Beckett it's who the mystery writers always go with when they're out of ideas. It's a cute bit of foreshadowing into the end of this episode.
The minor plot in this episode is very minor; Grams gets a 'MyFace' as she calls it, and she has to deal with multitudes of friend requests. And then she has a date!

Like last week's Fringe, I like that we got to learn about a higher-up that we don't normally get much character development. Unfortunately, I thought it was too similar to Fringe's story, with the captain having to close up an old case and all that. I do not like weird TV coincidences like those.

The plot was quite gripping, however, I did not love this episode. Maybe I just wasn't into it, who knows, and I can't really say why, but I just didn't feel myself being drawn in the same way as I normally do.

Fringe - Dream Logic

Fringe - Season 2, Episode 5: "Dream Logic". Original Air Date: 15 Oct 09.

This is a long summary lol.

The episode starts with Olivia visiting Sam Weiss in the bowling alley and saying "Thank you". It's obvious that she's still very sad about Charlie. I remember a line that Peter said in the first season, and it's true: Olivia doesn't let anyone help her :(
But Sam says he wants to help her: "Hope you like red."

In Seattle, a man is heading to work, but he's freaking out because he sees everybody as zombies! Or something equally as scary. He gets to a meeting room [which reminds me of a meeting room in the first season, with the killer butterflies] to talk to his boss, who is apparently really angry. His eyes are moving super fast after he beats his boss's head in with his briefcase: REM.

Peter and Walter finally move into their own place, and Walter starts setting up his bed in the middle of the living room, which Peter thinks is weird. "Don't worry son, I know what you're thinking. I promise to wear my shorts to bed so that if you bring any young ladies home there won't be any embarrassing moments." LOL! Astrid comes over with some food for Walter, and also a case file for Peter. "Pack a bag, Walter, we're going to Seattle."

The team gets to the hospital where they're keeping the guy, Greg Leder, and the man who met them there informs them that they've "only just managed to wake him up," and that he's been sleeping heavily for several hours, "as if he was drugged." Walter informs Peter that he doesn't want to go in there. Olivia starts to question Greg: apparently he doesn't remember anything between parking his car after lunch and being restrained by coworkers on the meeting room floor. But he did think the office was infiltrated with demons. Suddenly, he starts seizing, or, what looks like seizing, and his heart rate is going through the roof; his hair starts turning silver, but he doesn't look old, and then he dies. What?

Walter starts to examine the body, but he notices that it's still warm - it should be considerably cooler by now. Walter tells a doctor that it appears the man died of acute exhaustion, which pretty much makes no sense, because, as far as we're aware, human beings can't die of that ["But it has been documented in rats," says Walter]. He fears that they've left the oven on at home, which Peter says is nonsense because they never even turned it on in the first place. Apparently this weird behaviour's been happening all day. The hospital and the city remind Walter of St. Clair's, so he wants to go home ASAP. Peter arranges it for him.
"No, at any given time there's a good chance that there's about a half a dozen psychotrophic drugs in his system, so drinking? It's not a good idea."

As they're sending Walter off, Olivia asks the doctor for a business card, which isn't weird, but she also asked a cab driver for one, too.

"The turbulence over Ohio was like being in the belly of a seizing whale. I screamed like a little girl!"

Back in the lab in Boston, it's nearly midnight, but Walter wants to get to work right away. Apparently they had no trouble bringing the body bag home, but their luggage was detained. Walter discovers nine surgical stitches on the back of the neck, right by the brain stem, which there should really be no reason for. "That's okay. In fact, you can assist us in removing his scalp!"

Olivia questions the wife of the dead man, and aside from being a little more tired than usual, nothing unusual was going on. But Peter thinks differently: he found a bunch of books about sleep in their living room, and the wife admits that Greg used to sleep walk, sometimes he even cooked entire meals in his sleep, but he was never violent, and he had been cured, having not had an episode in at least six months. Peter asks to see his sleep journal.

Peter brings the sleep journal over to Olivia's hotel room. Apparently the dead man had been averaging eight to ten hours of sleep [so how did he die of exhaustion?]. At least once a week, he dreamed of demons, but a couple of months ago, they stopped. At this point, we learn a little more of Peter's backstory, that he used to suffer from terrible nightmares as a child and that it was one of the only times Walter's presence was ever positive, but then Olivia gets a text, and apparently there's been another incident.

A woman died driving home, on the phone with her husband to let him know she'd be home soon, but she had said that she saw a monster! Walter's looking through Greg's brain and he finds what looks like a computer chip in the thalamus, and calls Peter, who finds the same sort of stitches on the woman's neck!

Nina Sharpe at Massive Dynamic sheds some light on the subject: it's a bio-chip, a BCI, a brain-computer interface, which works a lot like a pace-maker, regulating sleep cycles. Apparently a researcher back in Seattle has been working on similar projects, and he's a 'genius' named Laxmeesh Nayak.

Peter's hypothesis is that someone would want to target Nayak's work for purposes of mind control. Of course, we knew that from the beginning of the episode, and have been waiting patiently for the team to figure it out on their own. Walter says that it's possible, but modifying the chips would take a lot of trial and error - if only he had a live specimen, but he promised Peter no students... oh if only you could have seen the way he eyed that federal agent... As the federal agent is heading out, and Walter gets him to sniff something, and then he passes out. Heh.

Walter doesn't implant the chip into the agent's head, but he's figured out a different way to try the mind control process. He hooks himself up to the agent and starts making silly noises [*ahem*], and says "Either green unicorns just raced across the lab, or I accidentally took some LSD." But then he concludes it's not drugs, it's something else entirely.

Olivia finds Dr. Nayak and tells him about the two dead people. He confirms that they were patients of his and that they were implanted with these chips as part of a clinical trial, along with eighty other people. They head to his office for the names, only to find it ransacked. The main computer server is gone, and that's got all the data on it. Olivia takes his business card, too, by the way.

Nayak could only remember twenty-six patients, and he's going to remove all of their chips, but that still leaves fifty plus people still at risk.

Olivia's still upset about Charlie's death. Peter tells her that it's okay, not her fault, but she gets really upset and starts crying [and then runs away before she can be vulnerable in front of Peter].

We see a guy at a computer, and he looks a lot like Nayak's research assistant. He's working with another person - we don't see this one, but he's sitting in a chair, apparently drugged, and connected to machines. A woman in a restaurant starts hallucinating that a fellow cook is roasting severed limbs. She wields a knife and approaches him, but that is all we see.

Back at the clinic, Nayak is removing chips from many patients' brains, and Olivia gets a call from Sam Weiss. He's the one who asked her to collect business cards of everyone she saw wearing red. He has her circle one letter in every name [first and last], and then write down all those letters on a piece of paper, and unscramble them.
Broyles calls and he says the back-up server's been wiped, but it doesn't look like a hack. It would appear to be someone in the clinic.... hmm... But Nayak is sure that none of his employees would do something like that.

Apparently, there's been another attack: it's the woman in the restaurant. Peter and Olivia decide it's time to put in a public service announcement. That's when Nayak mentions that Zack Miller, the lab assistant, skipped work today and hasn't been answering his phone. The duo goes to his home and finds Zack, dead and seated inside a television cabinet. Dr. Nayak finds a letter at his work that says stop talking to the feds, or the same thing's going to happen to him as to Zack.

Nayak gives the note to Peter and Olivia, and they say they'll set him up with a protective detail. But after they leave, he dials a mysterious phone number and says "I told them" and asks to just be left alone.

Walter thinks the chips aren't mind control, they're transmitting data. They're "stealing dreams" - they're being sent before they can processed by the brain, which explains why the first victim stopped having dreams altogether, and then the brain never gets an opportunity to recharge. And these chips can also turn on a dream-like state in the wearer. But why? Well apparently it's quite the rush, so they must be dealing with an addict, or slave, or just general dream junkie.

Olivia's step-father was a drunk and she remembered there were two different personalities within him, like Jekyl & Hyde. She thinks that Nayak is both characters in this case. And it sort of looks like she'd be right. His druggie personality is what's causing all this trouble, and his sober personality seems to be innocent. We seem him lock into a pilot's consciousness at take-off, and the pilot starts freaking out, and prepares to fly them into a boat. The feds show up at Nayak's home, and Peter tries to shut down the programme, but to no avail. Finally, Olivia shoots the computer, and the pilot wakes up, saving the small plane and all its passengers. But when they look at Nayak, he's dead.

Peter thinks Nayak's final move here was his own way of putting a stop to things, because perhaps he wasn't aware of what his 'evil' self was doing, until now.

Olivia visits Charlie's grave and leaves flowers, and then gets back to her little word puzzle. It spells out "You're gonna be fine," the first thing Charlie ever told her. Spooky~

Peter has a dream: he's little, he sees his father and says, "Dad, what's wrong?" and then screams, but wakes up. There was a poster in his room that said "Challenger Mission 11 / June 28, 1984". Enjoy figuring that one out ;D [Hint: alternate universe Peter.]

Why do ALL Indian characters have to have Indian accents? >>;;

This episode had very little to do with the plot of the rest of the show, concering the ZFT and the soldiers and stuff. It was sort of refreshing, and very fun.


And the glyphs spell out: BETRAY

Glee - Throwdown

Glee - Season 1, Episode 7: "Throwdown". Original air date: 14 Oct 09.

In this episode, Sue is still on a war path to destroy Glee Club from the inside out. She separates the group and takes all the minorities under her wing, leaving Shu with the well-adjusted white kids. They're at war. Sue gives her group an R&B song, and, oh yay, Mercedes has a song! She never gets to sing, but she has a great voice.

For retribution, Will flunks Sue's Cheerios. He says that "Most of your Cheerios are functionally illiterate!" [To which she replies "So what?!"]. With them failing Spanish, they can't be on the cheer team. Uh-ohh... Sue's going mad, but the principal shuts her down. He says that he doesn't care about her bribe and that she's being crazy and it's time to stop.

Meanwhile, at home, Teri's baby is *gasp* still not there. Except one little problem: Quinn's baby is a girl, but Teri promised Will a boy. Furthermore, Will really wants to go to Teri's next doctor appointment; he wants to be involved in his kid's life from the start, so he schedules an appointment. What will Teri do? Well, she bribes the doctor to fake an ultrasound and say that he made a mistake in the initial reading, and that the kid is a girl. That scene in the office was funny, and at the end, it was very touching, when Will started crying with joy.

The dorky boy who runs a gossip blog is threatening to run a story about Quinn, Finn, and Rachel, unless Rachel gives him a pair of her panties. To save herself and them, she complies. But, thanks to Sue, he runs it any way. The end was really touching, though. There was a scene in which Rachel told Quinn that, even though they're 'enemies' she's there for her. Then, there was a group number, and it was very sweet.

Gripe? They shouldn't use auto-tune on songs that are supposed to be "live". It makes the lip-sync even more unconvincing. And a cappella and glee groups are supposed to be about the natural, fresh sound. And I hate the way that in a show about high school, if you're a cheerleader, you wear your uniform 24/7. Seriously?

Some fun quotes:
"This meeting doesn't end until I see bodies touching."
"Let me break it down for youuu: NOBODY CARES!"
"...but that's no excuse for treating you like some half-priced hooker in Amsterdam's red light district."


Oh, and hey! You might notice that this doesn't have the "I should be Studying" tag! That's because I actually finished all my homework before dinner and have absolutely nothing to do, yay!

Coming Soon: Two episodes of Fringe, House, Castle, and Heroes!