IN DREAMS

01PLOT

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 Michelangelo’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 named Bernie. The shopping trip takes a weird turn when Casey notices a book with a Latin title and is warned away from it by Bernie. 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 candy-land with a particularly dim-witted beaver.

Meanwhile, Casey gets his own surprise when 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.

Casey manages to hit Bernie's chainsaw with his baseball bat, making it malfunction and before the latter gets a chance to start the chainsaw again, knocks it out of his hands, ending 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. In a wave of inspiration Casey suddenly realizes that the dream plug is keeping the Turtles trapped and despite Bernie’s protests, 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 the real 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 really kissed him when he woke up. Casey tells him to keep dreaming.

02CAST & APPEARANCES

03SCREEN GRABS

4 frames. Auto-matched screencaps via Fancaps.net.

04MEMORABLE QUOTES

April: Hey guys? We're heading down to the store. Casey: Any requests? Michelangelo: Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I need some spicy gummy worms. Need! Casey: Yeah. He's not going to have that. April: That store is tiny, Mikey. It's the kind of place that has peanut butter _or_ jelly.

Leonardo: Okay let's do this. Aaa!! Michelangelo: Leo you were hurt bad, bro. You gotta give yourself time to heal. Leonardo: Yeah, but how long? This taking forever. I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm just... just gonna take a minute. Raphael: Good. Some rest should help.

Leonardo: I'm a super... hero! Dire Beaver: What does every superhero need? Leonardo: Who's there? Dire Beaver: Dire Beaver. I'm everything you ever feared in one convenient horrifying package. And I'm gonna teach you something about pain!

Dark Beaver: I am Dark Beaver, may I eat you? You look salty. Donatello: It can't be real, I must be dreaming! I just have to wake up, that's it! Wake up! Wake uo! Wake up! No! Dark Beaver: Still here. Still going to eat you, my salty salty friend.

Dread Beaver: I am Dread Beaver and your soul is mine!

Dave Beaver: I'm Dave Beaver, I'mma supposed to scare you.

Dire Beaver: Well, aren't you gonna answer? Leonardo: Okay... April O'Neil: Leo, you have to wake up! Wake up! Leonardo: I am awake, I got super powers from a meteor and now I'm fighting a giant beaver! And... Hey... Am I dreaming you? Dire Beaver: Not a chance!

Michelangelo: Man, this ping pong is really wearing me out... Dave Beaver: That's because I'm draining your life force. Michelangelo: Oh right... Giant Talking Lollipop: Hey Mikey, April says you should wake up. Michelangelo: Please, I know better than to listen to a giant talking lollipop. I learned that one the hard way.

Donatello: This is a dream. Dark Beaver: So, you figured it out, eh? Very clever, clever salty boy. Leonardo: What's going on? Donatello: I'm having the weirdest dream... Leonardo: You can't be dreaming, I'm here. Donatello: 'Cause I'm dreaming you! Leonardo: Maybe I'm dreaming you, but you're not dreaming me!

Dave Beaver: I like chocolate chip cookies. Dark, Dire and Dread Beaver: SHUT UP DAVE!!

Bernie: What? I can't hear you... Over the chainsaw...

Michelangelo: Whew! Back in the real world at last! Donatello: This looks real to you?

05TRIVIA

• This episode was inspired by _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ film series.
• The plot of this episode and the Dream Beavers feeding off their victim's life is similar to the 1984 film in both plot 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.
• Dark Beaver's fur has the same shade of dark red as in Freddy's sweatshirt.
• The beaver's long claws are also a reference to Krueger's famous bladed glove, Dark uses them to menace his victims more than the other Beavers.
• A musical track similar to the film's main theme plays during the scenes where Bernie is telling the Dream Beaver's back story.
• In Donatello's dream, he is menaced in a locker room. This is a nod to the first _Nightmare on Elm Street_ movie in one of Freddy's earlier nightmares of the film.
• The final dream stage is that of a furnace where the Turtles are going to be burned into turtle meat. This is a clear tribute to Freddy Krueger's standard nightmare, where it takes place in a boiler room, furnace, or burning/burned building.
• When the Dream Beavers were released into the real world, they were smaller and no longer had their powers, similar to how Freddy loses his supernatural powers when he is dragged into the real world.
• John Kassir is well-known for providing the voice of The Cryptkeeper in the _Tales from the Crypt_ TV series, and he voices both Dave and Dread Beaver in this episode.
• There are a few references to _The Evil Dead_ and _Army of Darkness_ as well.
• The main characters are secluded in a cabin in the woods being attacked by supernatural creatures, the Dream Plug is similar to the Necronomicon, Bernie uses a chainsaw and is voiced by an actor in _Army of Darkness_ (Bill Moseley) and the scene where Mikey fights Dave Beaver is similar to how Ash Williams fought smaller versions of himself in _The Evil Dead_.
• Bernie himself is a parallel to Ash Williams. They both work/worked in retail, they use chainsaws, defend the Earth from the paranormal and they even wear similar shirts.
• The scene where the Turtles are in a black & white comic book setting is a reference to the original 1984 _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ comic books by Mirage Studios.
• In Bernie's store, there are cans with an image of Ray Fillet and a magazine with an image of the Cockroach Terminator's second mutant form.
• There are also cereals who share a large resemblance to the Count Chocula and Boo Berry cereals.
• There was also a Cereal called Whack Smacks that was similar to Frosted Flakes.
• There's also a poster of 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 Space Heroes, It Came from the Sewers and Tales from the Cosmos horror comics.
• Bernie is voiced by Bill Moseley, whose first big role was in _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2_, coincidentally enough Bernie uses a chainsaw as his primary weapon.
• Bernie's chainsaw has "This Saw is Family" engraved on the blade. Leatherface from _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ also has this engraved on his chainsaw.
• Leonardo's dream may be a reference to _The Meteor Man_, as its protagonist Jefferson Reed touched a meteor to get powers just like Leonardo.
• This episode's ending homages an episode from the TV series _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_, "Fear, Itself", where Gachnar, the fear demon, is revealed to only be a few inches in height in the real world.
• Seth Green, the voice of Leonardo, played one of the main characters in that series, Daniel "Oz" Osborne.
• When Dread Beaver says "Your soul is mine" it's a reference to Shang Tsung's quote from _Mortal Kombat_.

06FAN REVIEW

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