At last, an episode which lets us into the Nathan/Gail relationship a little bit more, and features the absolutely final appearance of Harry Groener as the Smiling Man. Darn. :)
This episode is one of those with a title that has been disagreed on. Titled variously Passed Perfection, Passed Imperfect, and Past both of those, I'm going with Passed Pefection simply because the Bruce Greenwood page called it so. The guest stars for this one were: Paul Dooley as Joel Cahill, our Harry Groener as Smiley, Suki Kaiser, and Gillian Barber. This one was written by Jonathan Robert Kaplan, and directed by Lee Bonner.
In this episode, Gail's absentee father Joel Cahill surfaces, after years of being out of Gail's life. He doesn't even know she has been in a coma for the past two years. He left his family on the day his wife died after a long battle with cancer, and has been guilt stricken ever since. When she was awake, Gail had long since disowned her father, but now Joel pleads for Nathan to allow him to enter Gail's comatose dreams, to apologize, and see her one last time. Nathan asks Gail if it's all right, and with much reluctance the pair agrees to grant Joel's request.
What the team does not know, however, is that one reason Joel is so desperate to see his daughter is because he himself is dying of brain cancer. This of course has serious ramifications on his ability to maintain a dream sequence, much less keep any of them safe. Sure enough-- after Gail angrily rebukes him for abandoning her, after a series of frightening images, Joel wakes up in a panic, rushes out of the Institute, hallucinating that's he's in a nightmarish dream world. And worse-- he's taken Nathan's subconscious with him. Nathan's body lies in the pod, not dead, but seemingly vacant of Nathan's soul, or anything resembling it.
Now Nathan is trapped inside the dying man's mind. He tries fiercely to reason with the hallucinating Joel, to get him to go back to the Institute and let the team help him. Meanwhile, Kate enters Gail's coma, for what might be the first time, to ask if she knows where Joel might have run off to. Gail, after some thought, realizes that he may have gone to her mother's grave, to die.
The team rushes to the cemetery, where they find Joel, unconscious and near death. They quickly load him into an ambulance, but Vince insists that it's not the hospital that they need-- they have to get the man back to the sleep institute so they can rescue Nathan. After some argument, they finally do.
Inside Joel's mind, Nathan pleads with Joel to stay alive. He tries, but he's powerless to stay when the train finally comes to take him away. Nathan is left alone on a rapidly darkening platform, wondering whether he's about to die himself. He sees a light at the end of the tunnel-- and a figure calling his name. Nathan wonders whether this is his father, a preacher, who told Nathan as a boy that he'd come meet him in heaven. However, the figure holds a lantern up to its face-- and it's definitely not his father. "I told you I'd be waiting for you," the Smiling Man tells him menacingly.... and then breaks into that grin again....
At that moment, Nathan wakes up. Safe in his own body; the team has pulled him out of Joel's dead mind and returned him to his own. When Nathan has recovered from his near death experience, Kate tells him he was clinically dead for six minutes. "What did you see?" she asks him. Nathan, after thinking about it... shudders... and tells her he doesn't remember. It's clear that he does.
Later, as he visits Gail in her coma, they place flowers on her concept of her parents' graves. She feels guilty, that she wasn't there for her father in his final days, even though she was angry at him for so many years. Nathan gently shows her something: a memory from Joel's mind, that of the day Gail was born. Gail hadn't known he was there; her mother had always said he wasn't. But now she sees that they were both present to see her birth, both very happy to have their daughter. It's a beautiful memory. And when Nathan wakes up from his visit, Vince has startling news: from the MEG printout that the computer was keeping during the dream, it shows that for a few seconds, Gail was actually waking up from her coma. Nathan is left to digest this incredible event-- he almost got her back that time.
Links
In 2002, several Sleepwalkers episode were released on Region 1 DVD in Germany. If you have a player that takes that region's DVDs, check out our links page for places to buy them.
All the Sleepwalkers images were very graciously provided by Anthony Larme-- thanks much, guy! :) Please go visit Anthony's homepage; he has a beautiful tribute to Naomi Watts, who portrayed Kate on the series.
Back to Episode Guide E-mail >^..^<
This site is a non-profit fan site for entertainment purposes. Sleepwalkers and The Sleepwalker Project are the property of NBC and Columbia TriStar. No copyright infringement is intended by this site.
