Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Review

Is it just me, or have there been an unusually high number of spooky episodes already this season? The show with April’s mom had its share of scares, and tonight’s appearance of the Dream Beavers with guest voice work by Robert Englund and John Kassir promises to be one that could be a little too intense for the youngest TMNT fans. Just something to keep in mind.

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Provided you’re up for it, let’s check out what awaits “In Dreams.”

Not So Quick Summary: 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.

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.

Favorite Moment: In Mikey’s strangely non-threatening dream world, April appears in the form of a lollipop. Mikey remarks that he knows better than to listen to a talking lollipop, having learned that the hard way. There’s a story there, for sure.

Final Thought: An interesting premise and a fun tribute to Englund and Kassir can’t make up for an anticlimactic ending. I suppose that helped make it not as frightening for the young ones in the audience, but it was a bit of a letdown. On the positive side, it was nice to take a break from the “mutagen monster of the week” pattern this season had begun to fall into. We’ll probably get back to that soon enough, though I hope I’m wrong.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Review – Season 3, Episode 5: In Dreams

By Nick Tylwalk | Nov 14, 2014