TMNT – “In Dreams” Review

“Nothing’s impossible for the Dream Beavers!” – Dark Beaver

Donatello is on the run from some sort of horrific creature in New York City.  But he’s alone, doesn’t know how he got there, and can’t get away.  As it turns out, he’s still at the farmhouse, but lost in sleep.  Meanwhile, the others are training and trying to get Leonardo back up to speed.  But his injuries are still lingering, and keeping him from reaching his full potential.  Fed up, Leo goes for a walk and encounters a meteorite with a strange healing energy.  However, something isn’t quite right about this, either, and Leonardo too is trapped in his dream.

While the boys are at the farmhouse, April and Casey go to get supplies.  They encounter a strange man who is very protective of a certain book.  Back at the house, Donnie and Leo are under attack in their dreams from creatures called Dark Beaver and Dire Beaver.  Raphael and Michelangelo dozed off as well, and now they’re all trapped.  Raph is being terrorized by Dread Beaver, while Mikey is playing with Dave Beaver.  In reality, April senses something amiss, so she tries to dive into their dreams while Casey goes to figure out just what the general store man is keeping in that dream book.

April manages to get through to the boys, forcing the Dream Beavers to unite them in a single dreamscape.  The Dream Beavers are beings from another dimension that drain human life force.  However, the general store owner was once a scientist, and trapped the beavers in the dream dimension 40 years prior.  He guards the device that keeps them from entering the turtles’ dimension.

The turtles try to take on the Dream Beavers, but their power is too great in the dream dimension.  In a last ditch effort, Casey breaks the device keeping the beavers at bay, allowing the turtles to wake up and the beavers to come to their dimension.  However, the Dream Beavers are nothing more than the size of an average beaver, and certainly not threatening in reality.  They too know it, and without any hesitation head off to a different dimension, leaving everyone in peace.

It’s becoming clear that this season is progressing at the speed it actually takes a broken bone to heal.  While this was a fun episode, and the Dream Beavers could be very interesting characters to see again in the future (especially with these voice actors), it’s obvious now that the turtles will not be going back to NYC any time soon.  With the amount of time they’re spending in the woods, the Kraang have probably conquered the whole world.  (Although, if they haven’t made it to these woods in upstate New York, then they’re probably not hurrying their plans along in any way.)  At this point it would even be nice to see an episode without the turtles, where we can catch up on Splinter and Karai and Shredder, just to put these goofier episodes into a larger perspective.

This season is, however, raising a major problem with television series as a whole.  The first two seasons went so big with this particular turtle incarnation that now viewers have come to expect the action to be amped up most of the time.  There can be occasional episodes where things take a break, but if every season raises the stakes, then moving forward the series has to rise to that level.  If they go too big, then there’s no way that the average episode can keep up.  String a few of them together (like the first five of season three), and you run into a problem with the show moving at a snail’s pace and not delivering what it’s set itself up as capable of delivering.

Overall, the episode wasn’t bad.  It was certainly fun to watch, but the dragging out of things at the farmhouse just to the plot from being resolved too quickly is starting to wear thin.  Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight to the exile, and with more mutants already advertised, it doesn’t look like they’ll be headed home to deal with the real problem anytime soon.

Rating: 7.5/10