We start the episode seeing the behind-the-scenes before the house Taka was looking at had blown up. Someone is taking down dozens of the flyers with the sketch of Tess’ sons face. They escape out the back as they blow it up.
Burton sits at a restaurant, drinking. A drink is waiting across from him. The waiter wants to clear it away, but he says he’s with someone. The waiter tells him he’s alone, and it’s a dream. Water starts streaming across the floor. Again, with the water. It’s featured in all the dreams, but it seems like it’s mostly always on the floor?
Previously, Bill had given Tess information that a bill had been generated for an epidural at a hospital in her name. She goes to the hospital to get her patient file, but they say she doesn’t have one. She still owes $10 for the epidural. Obviously, someone has scrubbed her record.
Taka is still investigating the deaths of the 12 people in the ‘akepoT’ house. There’s not a lot to go on, except some green sneakers and the personal effects of Ann Marie Bowen. Since this person has so specific a name, I wonder if we should remember it.
Burton, awake and back at the office, is getting a little paranoid. They’re giving the dead guy’s files to someone else. Burton has got most things taken care of, but he wants to see the dead guy’s stuff at his home.
Tess is a little bummed with Bill that the epidural is a dead end, but he’s still willing to keep searching. He wants Tess deeper into the dreaming program. She’s intrigued enough to stay, despite all the intrusive questions and technology they want to fit her with. They know she’s been institutionalized (interesting).
Taka gets the ambassador’s assistant to pull his itinerary, and he sees one of the sketches of Tess’ weird kid on the wall. She says a musician drew it decades ago. Even though we’ve seen Tess draw him? Maybe he’s not exactly her son. Hrm. File that away for later. She tells him where she got the sketch, it’s a record store called Topeka City Blues. Topeka again.
Burton has a talk with the insider trading guy’s widow. There’s some sexting he asks her about, after quoting an excessively creepy bible passage. Jeebus, Burton.
Tess starts into the dream study. There’s a lot about the ‘purity of the data’. She’s not to talk to or interact with others in the study. She dreams of a creepy abandoned looking building, where the sketch of the boy is posted everywhere. More water, running down the walls this time, as well as all over the floor. I know water is very symbolic of dreams, but maybe there’s something more to it? The other dreamers are arranged in a circle, heads pointing in. This is eerily like the circle of dead people that Taka found.
She meets up with some of the study participants, all sitting around not talking to each other. One guy seems to want to talk, though. He says hipster guy isn’t there anymore, there’s a rumor he had a stroke and ended up catatonic. I kinda wonder if that digging he did got him…somewhere else? She goes off chasing the sound of her baby crying, and finds the little blond kid again. There’s eyeless men ominously chasing them down the hall.
When she wakes up, the guy she talked to in the dream is waiting for her.
Taka finds out the guy who did the sketch was a musician who did a record called Somnambulism. Hmm, sleepwalking. Not exactly subtle, but hey. Another clue.
Tess does a lot of talking to the dream guy, he gives her some drugs (!) and they go off together. Tess is a bit impulsive. They dream together (I’m assuming it’s a dream) where they’re running through a sprinkler. Hmm, more water.
Burton finds insider trading dead guy’s Topeka file…and it’s empty.
Taka puts on the green sneakers and falls asleep to the Somnambulism record. Sleepwalking in a dead woman’s shoes? He ends up in the weird empty building. The blond boy runs to him, away from the eyeless men. The boy ends up calmly going with the eyeless men. Taka sees his mother (younger) ranting over a sculpture she made. He wakes up, and looking in the album’s liner, he sees a picture of the musician at a party, and his mother is in the picture. Everyone is connected at a weird level here.
Burton is at the dead guy’s wake, making the widow uncomfortable. She’s self harming by putting cigarettes out on her arm. When she leaves the room, he tries it. He seems kind of surprised it hurts. Burton is kind of messed up.
Tess and the dream guy wake up. Yep, they were definitely dreaming. She sees one of the flyers with the sketch of the boy in dream guy’s bathroom and freaks out. Bill shows up, kind of pissed that she’s ruining the ‘purity of the data’ by interacting with dream guy (we discover his name is Levon). She’s pissed enough to walk away. He begs her to stay, he’s going to find her son. He also tells her that the hipster guy just quit, he didn’t have a stroke. Methinks that’s a lie.
Burton has one of the other security guys look for footage of when his dream girl was with him, and he finds footage with only Burton in it.
Taka plays Somnambulism for his mother, and talks about the photograph. It seems he doesn’t really know a lot about who his mother actually was. Maybe this is the meaning behind his dream in the first episode, where her face was so rapidly changing.
Levon comes banging at Tess’ door, mad because he’s probably getting kicked out of the experiment. It gets kind of scary, but when she finally opens the door, no one’s there.
Burton is back in the dream restaurant, and dream girl is waiting for him.
Previous Episode: Don’t Tell Bill
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.