I had a moment, at the commercial break with Walter and Ray the shapeshifter in the elevator together, when I realized that absolutely anything is possible on this show. (It was a horrifying revelation at the time. Walter could have died!) As Walter himself says, there are no limits except what we impose on ourselves. Such is the beauty and power of "Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?" an hour of television that is essentially indescribable because to do so would be imposing limits on a show that believes in the endless impossibility.
More than "The Box", this episode convinced me of the awesome factor of the myth-alone as it functions within the Blue Universe. The teaser begins with a couple of nice, early-Fringe-esque scenes, particularly the lemonade stand sequence, but by the end we know three things: Broyles has a semi-personal connection to this person, Newton has been called in to interfere with this guy, and, oh yeah, the senator's a SHAPESHIFTER. Of these three things, only the Broyles connection gets short-changed, but at this point I'm so used to it happening that I didn't even notice. So Senator Van Horn gets transported to the new Massive Dynamic labs, where a self-medicated Walter attempts to find his brain. He and Astrid finally figure out that having fake emotions eventually leads to real emotions replacing them, thus the senator's wife is the quickest way to locate the data center. They find it at the base of the spine -- his ass -- but Walter thinks that's impossible until he remembers the stegosaurus (through conversation with Astrid).
The rest of the episode's stories connect at about this point in the show. Newton is the mastermind of the episode; he is quick to point out how Fauxlivia is becoming attached to our team, and he discovers the reason Ray the shapeshifter is so reluctant to perform his duty of recovering the data center from Van Horn at Massive Dynamic. Ray manages to slip in and out of Massive Dynamic with the data center, but only just (and I won't lie, I was scared stiff when he and Walter were in close proximity to each other)... only to be shot by Newton outside of his house. Fauxlivia, of course, wants to have her cake and eat it too; after a harrowing car chase, she recovers the data center and doesn't tell Peter about it... and then she calls him over to have sex. (A clear and present danger, or the best spy ever?)
There was definitely a meta-fictional vibe to this episode. I've always loved J. J. Abrams' TED Talk, particularly the way he describes the function of mystery in storytelling. Mechanical plot business is just that: mechanical. "It's a machine!" declares Walter at one point. But in order for a machine to complete its mission -- at least, for our shapeshifters to do so -- it must learn how to emulate emotions. And for shapeshifters, who are part organic, this can lead to real emotions. The mystery, the science, the mythology all fall by the wayside when Walter's life is threatened by an emotionally compromised shapeshifter.
This is televised storytelling at its finest: a show with an overarching mythology crafts an episode that plays to the hardcore audience while providing easy-access emotional through-lines to help guide them through the myriad of twists and turns. I feel like a little kid again when I'm watching this show -- and I mean that in the best way possible.
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