"I don't think it is you. I think it's him."
"The truth is a cleansing fire which burns away the lies we've told each other and the lies we've told ourselves. So that love and hate, pleasure and pain, can all be expressed without shame. Where there is no good or bad... there is only the truth."
— John Dee
John sits in a diner and watches the staff and customers, observing the ways they lie to each other and themselves. He uses the ruby to force them to Brutal Honesty, with horrifying results.
Morpheus comes to confront John and take back the ruby. John uses the ruby to drain Morpheus' power and then destroys the ruby, thinking that in doing so he will destroy Morpheus. Instead, this allows Morpheus to reclaim all the power contained in the ruby, making him more powerful than before and instantly ending the contest. Morpheus returns John to the mental hospital, and then sets out to begin the work of rebuilding.
This episode contains examples of:
- Actually, That's My Assistant: When Bette tells Mark that the CEO of the company he's applying to is in the diner, indicating the booth where Garry and Kate are sitting, Mark's immediate assumption is that she means Garry. Judy sets him straight: Kate is the CEO, Garry is just the trophy husband.
- Adaptational Attractiveness:
- In the comic, Bette was a frumpy, heavyset middle-aged woman with a round face and large jaw. Here, she's played by Emma Duncan, a slim young woman who is far more conventionally attractive.
- Garry in the comic was a rather large and not particularly attractive guy, but in the show he's played by James Udom, who's definitely very easy on the eyes.
- Adaptational Context Change: In the comic, it's Bette (or the narration, expressing Bette's viewpoint) that says the line about how the secret of happy endings is knowing when to stop because every story ends in death if you keep going long enough. In the episode, John says it to Bette, who finds the idea new and troubling.
- Adaptational Jerkass: In the comic, while waiting in the diner, Judy starts to write a letter to Donna apologising for abusing her. She doesn't do so in the episode and even claims that she would rather Donna get into a car accident than deliberately ignore her.
- Adaptational Job Change: In the episode, Marsh is the diner's cook. In the comic, the diner doesn't have a cook on shift, and Marsh is one of the customers, a trucker.
- Adaptational Nice Guy:
- In the comics, Bette imagined Judy would be better off with a husband out of homophobia. Here, Bette tries pairing up Judy with Mark because she thinks Judy and Donna fight too much and Judy could do better, and she and Judy wind up having sex when John removes their inhibitions. Furthermore, Bette's writing in the comics is implied to be nothing more than an escape from her crappy life and she believes she'll eventually become a famous novelist. Here, Bette's goals are more humanized with Dream explaining that she genuinely wants to make the world a better place through her storytelling.
- In the comics Bette and Marsh had an affair back when Marsh was married to another woman, who wound up becoming an alcoholic and dying as a result. In this show there's no sign that Marsh was ever married.
- Adaptational Sexuality:
- Bette was straight in the comic and secretly expresses disgust at Judy's sexuality as an affront to God, but pines over Judy here and is spurred into confessing and making out with her by the ruby's influence.
- Garry also ends up getting a blowjob from Marsh in the series.
- Adaptational Sympathy: John's actions, while still awful, at least proceed from a genuine if misguided urge to make the world better. In the comic, John is only interested in the ruby for power over others, and what he does to the people in the diner (which includes everything in the episode and more) is just toying with them to test out its powers and pass the time.
- Adaptation Distillation: This episode adapts two issues of the comic, "24 Hours" (the diner sequence) and "Sound and Fury" (the confrontation between John and Morpheus). The latter is more abbreviated; in the comic, the battle in the Dreaming was longer and more complicated, and John's return to the mental institution was a full scene including a conversation with another inmate. The episode is also more focussed on the events immediately surrounding John, leaving out the bits where the comic issues cut away to show events in the outside world as the effect of the ruby spread.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
- In the comics, Marsh and Bette were having an affair that went back to when Marsh's wife was still alive. In the show he ignores her obvious attempts at flirtation and is implied to be gay.
- Marsh's relationship with Bette's son was occasional and very transactional (Bernard would trade sex for cigarettes when they were both in prison). From Marsh's comments here, they have a casual but far more on-the-level relationship.
- Ambiguously Bi: While Bette and Garry end up making out with Judy and Marsh respectively, whether their sexuality was influenced by the ruby is unknown. Bette does seem hesitant and confused after her kiss with Judy. For Garry, whether he is even interested in women or only married Kate for money is unclear.
- Armoured Closet Gay: Bette the waitress is strongly implied to be a bisexual variant. She has feelings for Marsh and disapproves of Judy's relationship with Donna, but during a personal talk with Judy while under John Dee's influence to be completely honest, she confesses that she was actually jealous of Donna and was likely secretly crushing on Judy without being aware of it.
- Awful Wedded Life: Even before the ruby starts affecting them, Kate and Garry are passive-aggressively sniping at each other. The honesty field reveals that Garry resents Kate for undermining his authority at their company, and Kate suspects Garry of cheating. Then Kate starts blatantly hitting on Mark right in front of Garry.
- Blind Seer: After John has Bette blind herself, he asks the Fates to tell him his future, and they speak to him through the bodies of his victims, including Bette.
- Bittersweet Ending: Dream has the ruby's power returned to him and John is once again confined to the hospital, but John's use of the ruby caused widespread destruction; the news announcer mentions a mass suicide, as well as a chain reaction from an accident that caused an explosion on the highway. While standing on a burning city street, Matthew asks Dream if he is able to undo the damage with his power restored, who can only bitterly reply that the ruby didn't create it, and that mortals will have to rebuild for themselves.
- Bottle Episode: Except for the very end, the entire episode takes place inside the same diner, with the influence of the Ruby on the rest of the world only being hinted at through overheard news reports.
- Brutal Honesty: Having grown up with a mother who was a manipulative liar, John Dee is obsessed with honesty and wants to use Dream's ruby to force everyone in the world to be honest with each other, which in his mind involves them exposing and acting upon their very worst and cruelest impulses. Viciously deconstructed and Played for Horror with the diner's patrons. All of them have secrets they're hiding and lies they tell each other just to maintain face, be polite, or because it's what is expected of them, and John abusing the power of the Ruby causes them all to come apart at the seams, reveal some truly horrifying things about themselves, and eventually resort to killing each other and themselves because John is essentially imprinting his twisted worldview on them. What John calls Brutal Honesty Dream calls Brainwashed and Crazy, especially because his Ruby was never meant to be used in such a fashion.
- Bubbly Waitress: Bette the waitress immediately distinguishes herself with her sweet and amicable personality, to the point that she actually plays matchmaker between customers (though she's older than most examples of this trope, given that she has a son who's just returned from college). She doesn't even appear fazed by John Dee's unusual behavior, exchanging friendly banter with him even as he talks eerily about the better world he hopes to create. Tragically, the events of the episode end up completely shattering Bette's spirit, and her part in the story ends with her being forced to stab her own eyes out with a pair of screwdrivers.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Judy has a brief video call with Rose Walker, who will be important later in the season.
- Coincidental Broadcast: When everyone in the diner starts hooking up, the TV in the background shows a news report about two pandas mating in a zoo.
- Cure Your Gays: Mocked. While talking to Dee and being infected by the Ruby, Judy points out her spite over the rest of the world's heteronormality: "You all think I'd be so much happier if I just fucked a dude!"
- Dies Differently in Adaptation:
- In the comic, Judy is the one who stabs herself through the eyes with metal skewers. Her eyes remain happily untouched in the series (her wrist less so), with Bette taking the skewers in her stead.
- In the comic, Mark loses the fight with Garry, who rips the younger man's throat out with his teeth. For good measure, the reasons for the fight are different as well, with John having mentally regressed the diner patrons to the level of animals and prodded Garry and Mark into fighting for dominance. In the show, Garry loses when Mark stabs him in the neck, and they fight after Garry realised Mark hooked up with Kate.
- Dissonant Serenity: Bette realises John is behind their actions from how he's calmly sitting, eating ice cream, while someone has just been stabbed to death.
- Domestic Abuse: After all of Judy's attempts to find Donna without telling anyone why she went away, she is eventually magically forced to confess: It turns out that the reason Donna fucked off in the middle of the night was because Judy hit her in the face during an argument.
- Empathic Environment: A storm starts outside when John starts using the ruby.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Well, "Godly Power Is Not A Toy" rather. John thinks he can just casually make a perfect world without lies like he wants by using Dream's ruby. What instead happens is that the people affected by the ruby end up killing each other, because they're being forced to act in ways that are "true" to themselves even when they really don't want to, and it screws with their minds so severely that they turn mad and violent. John refuses to accept that this is a bad thing, however.
- Eye Scream: Bette impales herself through both eyes with metal skewers.
- Feet-First Introduction: At the end of the episode, as Morpheus walks off into the distance, a pair of feet step into frame in the foreground. The camera then moves up to give the audience our first introduction to Dream's sibling, Desire.
- Foreshadowing: John tells Bette that if you keep stories going long enough, they all end in death. Sure enough, by the end of this one, everyone in the diner except John is dead.
- Gone Horribly Right: John uses the ruby to compel people to be honest to themselves and others... and it works. Albeit it drives people to attack each other due to the forced honesty, alongside their dreams being taken away, destroying them mentally. It has a ripple effect outside the diner as well, showing John's obsession has disastrous consequences for more than just those in his immediate vicinity.
- Hypocrite:
- John Dee wants to make humans reveal their true selves and thinks that if they murder and maim each other, it's merely because that's what people are. But he also blocks people from escaping the diner with the mind powers the ruby offers and prevents them from killing him when they catch on to his manipulation, showing that his idealistic claims are hardly his true motive. He wants people to do whatever they truly desire... so long as those desires align with his beliefs.
- Despite getting a blowjob from Marsh in the kitchen earlier, Garry is furious when he finds out that Mark made out with Kate and beats the crap out of him.
- Incompatible Orientation:
- Bette attempts to set Judy and Mark up. When Mark tries to chat her up, Judy brusquely remarks that she's lesbian.
- Bette is attracted to Marsh, but the latter is more interested in Bette's 21 year old son (and later Garry).
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: At first it looks like everyone will end up with the person they should be with, with all the various couples having sex, but things turn ugly right afterwards.
- Last-Second Villain Recovery: In the climax, Morpheus brings John Dee into the Dreaming in the hope that a Home Field Advantage will be enough to counter John's use of the Ruby. For a while, it appears to be working, with John being sent into a bewildering procession of dreams that concludes with his own mother trying to throttle him to death. However, just when it looks as if he's going to die right then, John realizes that he's dreaming and uses the Ruby to fight back, sending himself directly to Dream's throne room - where he quickly overwhelms Morpheus.
- Loss of Inhibitions: John Dee intends on using the ruby to change the world into a "more honest one". This translates to him taking away people's inhibitions, starting with people being more open about their feelings to one another, then having sex with each other before eventually devolving into them massacring one another and themselves. Dream explains that this is because he took away their dreams, and thus their reason to live.John: They're lying to themselves. All lies.
Dream: Not lies, John. Dreams. Kate dreams of running away, where no one will find her. Garry dreams of proving his father was wrong about him. Bette dreams of creating something that matters to people. Their dreams inspired them. Their dreams kept them alive. But if you rob them of their dreams, if you take away their hope, then... yes, this is the truth of mankind. - Meaningful Background Event: As the diner patrons slowly succcumb to the ruby's power, the television broadcast echoes their descent into madness as John's manipulations spread across the enture world.
- Never My Fault: Despite John's obsession with truth, he ironically refuses to believe he himself is a hypocritcal villain, preferring to instead believe he's some sort of Dark Messiah.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Lucifer warned Dream not to become too dependent on his tools. John destroys the ruby after he thinks he's defeated Dream, something Dream would never have thought of doing himself. This only enables Dream to take on the totality of his power, much of which had been bound up in the ruby.
- Pædo Hunt: Played With. Bette describes her son (with whom Marsh is sleeping) as "just a kid". Marsh immediately corrects her that he's actually 21, but it is implied that the relationship has been going on for more than three years.
- Pass the Popcorn: When things start getting really interesting in the diner, John wanders into the kitchen and finds a tub of ice cream, which he casually eats while watching the events unfold.
- Prophecy Twist: The Fates warn John that he will end his days back in the madhouse he left, but also that he will steal all of Dream's power and crush his life in his hands. This motivates him to challenge Dream for possession of his realm. He absorbs Dream into the ruby and crushes it but his actions only free Dream, who puts him back in the mental hospital.
- Race Lift: Garry and Kate were white in the original comic, but are respectively African-American and Asian-American here.
- Sanity Slippage: John Dee uses the ruby to take away the "lies" humanity lives under. This eventually devolves into complete anarchy in the world outside of the diner he's held himself up in, Dream explaining that by taking away the dreams people live by, he took away their reason for living.
- Shadow Discretion Shot: Variant; when Bette is made to stab herself through the eyes with a pair of screwdrivers, power in the diner goes out at exactly the moment she pops her eyeballs, meaning that the scene is depicted only as a silhouette against the windows.
- Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: When John Dee talks about wanting to make the world "honest" by exposing the cruelty and selfishness of humans, Dream points out that people are also driven by more positive dreams — for instance, John uses the ruby to make Bette the waitress expose her love for Marsh and burn her book (and herself), but Dream tells him that she was also driven by her desire to write stories which made a difference in other people's lives, which Dee's nihilistic perspective erased.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Dream could kill John, but knows he was a victim of the ruby corrupting him from when he was a baby. So he returns John to the mental hospital he escaped from and leaves him in a permanent sleep, apparently one more peaceful than Dream gave to the other son of Burgess.
- Villain Episode: This episode focuses on John Dee as Morpheus is unconscious for most of the time after being knocked out by the ruby in the last episode.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: John uses the power of the ruby to create a world free of lies, but in doing so he destroys people's hopes, driving them to violence and suicide.
- World Gone Mad: John uses the ruby to create a world without lies. What this does is not only remove the ability of people to lie to each other, but the lies they tell themselves. The world quickly descends into violence as people lose hope for the future.
