| “In Dreams” | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012 TV series) episode | |||||||
| |||||||
| Season Code: | 305 | ||||||
| Episode: | 57 | ||||||
| Guest stars | Robert Englund John Kassir Bill Moseley | ||||||
| Original airdate | November 14 2014 | ||||||
| Written by | – | ||||||
| Producers: | – | ||||||
| |||||||
"In Dreams" is the 57th episode of the 2012 Series.
Synopsis
When the Turtles are trapped in their dreams by creatures, April and Casey must figure out how to wake them up.
Characters
Major Characters
- April O'Neil (Mae Whitman)
- Casey Jones (Josh Peck)
- Donatello (Rob Paulsen)
- Dream Beavers
- Leonardo (Seth Green)
- Michelangelo (Greg Cipes)
- Raphael (Sean Astin)
- Bernie (Bill Moseley)
Minor Characters
Plot
The episode opens as Donatello is on the run. He appears to be in New York, but he doesn’t remember how he got there. Something monstrous is stalking him, and no matter where he runs or hides, the thing is one step ahead of him.
Meanwhile, outside the farm, the rest of the Turtles are training, with Raphael telling Leonardo he’s looking good. But he pushes himself too hard and injures his right knee, and obviously frustrated, he tries napping in the farmhouse before telling his brothers he’s going for a walk in the woods instead.
April and Casey head for the store, shooting down Michaelangelo’s request for spicy gummy worms. As April puts it, the store is so small that it has peanut butter or jelly. Meanwhile, Leo has a close call with a meteor that lands nearby. It glows when he touches it, and though it releases a pulse of energy that knocks him down, his knee is healed and he feels better than ever.
At the store, April and Casey encounter a scary but friendly store owner. The shopping trip takes a weird turn when Casey notices a book with a Latin title and is warned away from it by the owner. He seems the prying type too, asking if they are buying food for five or six people and if any of them have been feeling real tired as of late. Needless to say, they get the heck out of dodge.
Leo’s enjoyment of his new super powers turns sour when he’s confronted by a super strong giant beaver. We see that he’s actually asleep in the real world, as Raph and Mikey have drawn on him. They also feel tired and decide to catch 40 winks. April and Casey return to find all of them asleep, including Donnie upstairs. His dream has taken a particularly scary turn inside a school with objects flying around and beaver paws coming out of doors everywhere, and even though he knows he needs to wake up, he can’t.
The humans aren’t having any luck waking any of them, and April is worried that their vital signs seems to be weakening. Noting that the Latin book had something to do with sleep or dreams, April sends Casey back to the store to check it out while she tries contacting the Turtles with her psychic powers. She appears in different forms in all four Turtles’ dreams, all of which have taken on the form of their greatest fears — except for Mikey, who is stuck in a weird candyland with a particularly dim-witted beaver.
Meanwhile, Casey gets his own surprise when store owner Bernie comes after him with a chainsaw, ranting about how the book is all that stands between our world and total destruction. He asks if the Dream Beavers sent him, which is convenient, since the Dream Beavers have simultaneously gathered all four brothers in one dream.
Bernie runs out of fuel for his chainsaw, giving Casey the upper hand in their battle. Though he isn’t asked to tell it, Bernie has a whopper of a story: he used to be a physicist with a theory that our dreams take place in a dimension of their own. While testing it out, he discovered four beings of pure evil called the Dream Beavers that can feed off of the life force of people’s dreams. To keep them trapped in the dream dimension, he’s stayed awake with the book (its name means “dream plug”) so the Dream Beavers would stay on the other side. Bernie moved to the middle of nowhere to avoid endangering others, but as Casey points out, it wasn’t far enough.
The Turtles end up stuck in a dream that looks like a comic book, and their fight against the Dream Beavers is going very, very badly. they end up on a conveyor belt headed for a pizza oven and look like they’re going to be beaver food.
Casey brings Bernie back to the farmhouse, where a desperate April has resorted to slapping the Turtles since nothing else is working. She’s really panicked, so despite Bernie’s protests, Casey smashes the dream plug. The Dream Beavers rejoice in the fact that they’re free to enter the real world, and the Turtles immediately wake up. It looks like trouble, but when the smoke clears, the Dream Beavers realize that in our world, they’re only tiny plush animals. They leave before getting their butts kicked, and Bernie, distraught that he’s stayed awake for decades for no good reason, immediately falls asleep.
Leo remarks that even though they’re now awake, his knee still feels better. As Casey and Donnie drag Bernie out of the farmhouse, Donnie wonders if April kissed him when he was fading away. Casey tells him to keep dreaming.
Trivia
- The scene where the Beavers are about to cook the Turtles is similar to what happens in Pizza Face's lair.
- The plot of this episode and the Dream Beavers feeding off their victim's life is similar to Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm both plot wise and how the main villain Freddy Krueger, visits people in their dreams and feeds on their fear
- Robert Englund, who plays Freddy Krueger also voices both Dark and Dire Beaver.
- The Nightmare on Elm Street theme plays during the scenes where Bernie is telling the Dream Beaver's back story.
- The scene where the turtles are in a Black & White comic book setting is a reference to the original 1984 comic books the franchise is based on.
- In Bernie's store there are cans with an image of Ray Fillet and a magazine with an image of the Spy-Roach's second mutant form.
- In Bernie's stores their are cereals who share a large resemblance to the Count Chocula and Boo Berry cereals.
- there's also a poster or Chris Bradford's unmutated form on the wall that says "Got Curd?", this image first appeared in the back of a magazine in The Manhattan Project episode.
- Got Curd? is a reference to the "Got Milk?" slogan
- There are Tales from the Cosmos and It Came from the Sewers horror comics.
- this may be a nod to John Kassir, The voice of the Crypt Keeper in the Televised Tales from the Crypt series who voices both Dave and Dread Beaver.
- Bernie's chainsaw has "This Saw is Family" written on it.