Notes for Fringe season 1, episode 9, “The Dreamscape“
0:50 “Wall Street’s recent financial difficulties.” I think this is the only direct reference in the season to the background reality of the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a bit like watching the shows set in the early 2020s that don’t acknowledge the pandemic.
3:48 For all of the achievements of Massive Dynamic, developing exterior windows strong enough that you can’t just run through them, is elusive. The fact that they have semi-opaque stickers on the interior glass walls suggest they’ve already had OSHA warnings.
08:36 Reoccurring fake airline Oceanic Air offers flights between NY and Nebraska – a route presumably crossing zero oceans.
11:41 Event though this exists in a Wikipedia age, Olivia’s searches always produce ’90s-looking book-report-style html pages.
11:49 Olivia shuts down her laptop running “Syb_OS v9.3.1” with a dialog box clearly based on Windows 2000 Professional.
15:18 “Have you spoken to Dr Katz?” Charlie asks Olivia, in the context of a psyche evaluation. I’m guessing this was a reference to the cartoon “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” (and was maybe a placeholder?)
15:33 Olivia has a transparent spindle of blank CD-ROMs (50x) on her desk
18:39 One of the lab’s posable surgery lamps can be seen in background of Walter’s film, which is maybe from the 70s (1989 at the latest) but I suspect the lamp was made later. (I’ve failed to identify any model of the portable scialytic surgical lights in Walter’s lab. There are several different ones. They’re probably halogen lamps, rather than an LED arrays, and those have limited lifespans and unlikely to turn up on eBay.)
33:45 Astrid uses an interface that looks similar to the “Faces” facial composite software.
38:00 Olivia speculatively calls a number, and the voice that answers reminds her of someone she met in a dream. I guess that’s enough to justify a trace and location check.
38:10 The phone trace interface is trash, it’s a bunch of green numbers next to what looks like hotel management software.
38:15 Charlie’s phone is a BlackBerry Curve 8310. I suspect the BlackBerrys are product placement.
41:36 Morales mentions “The Northwoods Group”, something that doesn’t ever come up again
43:14 Olivia confronts Nina Sharp about how every answer she provides is the illusion of progression and just a means to deliver more questions. Hanging a lampshade on every J.J. Abrams TV show.