I figure I need to catch up with recaps on Falling Water, as this is certainly an intriguing show. Completely bizarre, but fascinating.
In the pilot episode, we meet three main characters: Tess, a coolhunter who dreams she has a kid that everyone says doesn’t exist in her waking life. Burton, who is some sort of security-fixer-guy for a huge financial firm that dreams of a woman he is having a relationship with that doesn’t seem to exist in his waking life. Taka, a detective whose mother is catatonic in his waking life, but he dreams of her in days where she was still young and communicative.
Sense a theme here?
This show is real big on presenting odd things where it’s not immediately clear if the character is awake or dreaming, and things that seem to cross over into both states. I’m beginning to think the whole point is to make us question which moments are actually real–or to question the character’s reality entirely.
The pilot opens with Tess having a nightmare about giving birth, and suddenly, her child is gone and no one will acknowledge he ever existed. She wanders down a hallway, and encounters a creepy blond boy smiling at her. It seems perhaps this is her son? She wakes from the ominous dream and sketches him.
Burton has been advised by his employers that one of the employees is likely insider trading–and he needs to confirm if this is the case or not. If it is, he needs dealt with so the firm doesn’t suffer any backlash. He encounters several cryptic clues containing the word ‘Topeka’.
This isn’t the last we’ll see of that.
He has a dream about a woman he’s very involved with, and they’re showering, running into one another at work, and eating dinner at a restaurant. He sees the man he’s investigating there at the restaurant, and he and the woman leave. Outside, she gets snatched off the street, and he gets hit by a car–driving it is the insider trading man. Later, when he encounters insider trading man at work, the dude makes a quip about Burton looking like someone had run him over in his sleep. This is, of course, a big hint that Everything Is Connected and Nothing Is As It Seems. We kinda caught on to that already, but it does at least add an extra note of foreboding.
Taka has a dream where he sees a woman on a wooden bench in the middle of the street. Her face is rapidly moving, changing. Is this his mother? Some sort of abstract statement about her identity?
We see that the the character’s dreams are somehow connected, as slowly, little bits are dropped into the picture. Figures and details of their dreams end up in one another’s, and into their waking lives as well. All three have encounters with a shadowy monster figure creeping up on them.
Taka gets a case where an old lady visiting a foreign embassy just dropped dead. He visits her house to get some kind of clue to what happened, and finds a ring of dead bodies lying in a circle, heads all pointed toward the middle. Um, creepy. The word Topeka is written backwards on the wall. See? Topeka just won’t go away. He runs the old lady’s ID, and finds the picture of a completely different woman, one he’d seen in a house across the street. When he goes back, an old man answers, and denies knowing her. As he leaves, he spots a flyer floating in a fountain in the front yard. It’s the sketch of the boy, with the phrase ‘His name is’ under it. The house explodes.
Back to Burton. He sees insider trading man get a phone call and leave. Suspicious, he follows the man to his apartment, where insider trading man bursts out with things about Topeka and Burton’s girl before shooting himself in the head. Um…ok?
Tess is confronted by an annoyingly persistent rich dude named Bill. He wants to hire Tess for a dream study, and says he’ll help her find her son. Yikes. How does he know about her dream son?
Bill has her lie down for a nap, hooked up to sensors. There’s a hipster looking guy on the table across from her. Bill tells her to dream, wake up, and tell him about it. She first dreams that she’s on a bus with Burton, and Bill is driving. He’s…mowing down pedestrians? He drops her off at a building, where she meets up with the hipster guy from the table over. He’s digging through the floor. This makes one wonder at the symbolism there. Where’s he escaping to? He gets Tess to promise she’ll tell Bill he was playing showtunes on a piano, and not tell him what she actually saw. This makes me think that indeed, Hipster Guy is doing something he probably shouldn’t be. She tells Bill the piano story, and he’s pretty excited. They make plans.
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.