Fringe (TV Series) Bad Dreams (2009) User Reviews

Nightmares and Reality

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 8 January 2017]

When a mother is pushed by Olivia in front of a train in a subway platform in New York, she awakes and concludes it was a bad dream. However Olivia watches the news and sees that the woman has indeed died and was considered suicidal. Olivia and Peter travel to New York and find details of Olivia's dream. In her next dream, Olivia helps a woman to stab her husband in a restaurant. When she interviews the owner, he describes a blond man with a scar that was sitting Olivia's chair in her dream. Olivia recalls the surveillance video in New York and the FBI identifies the man as Nick Lane. What will be the connection between Olivia and Nick Lane?

"Bad Dreams" is a mysterious episode of "Fringe". The connection of Olivia and Nick Lane is intriguing and the effects of the drug Cortexiphan is promising. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Bad Dreams"

Don't ignore the hot-ness...

[A_Different_Drummer · 9/10 · 9 January 2015]

I see another IMDb reviewer has taken the time to break out the many arcs in this story and show they fit into the overall puzzle.

I prefer to focus on the less obvious.

This series is one of the earlier, and highly successful, works of JJ Abrams, which, taken as a whole, eventually gave him God-like status in Tinseltown. (The high point of his reign was likely when he was, in the same year, handed BOTH the Star Trek and Star Wars features to oversee. But this review is written is written in Jan 2015, Abrams career is young, as is he, and who knows what other records the man will break in his lifetime?) Even by this early point in the first season, word had gotten round that his show was being done as much "for the fans" as it was for the purity of the scripts and story arc.

Nowhere is that more obvious than this episode, where the pursuit of a "reverse empath" gives the naturally stunning Torv a chance to act out visually the fantasies of a male sociopath.

And much hotness ensues.

All I Have to Do Is Dream

[Hitchcoc · 9/10 · 28 October 2023]

When Live dreams that a woman with a small child is pushed in front of a subway train by her, she comes to realize that this event has actually taken place. When she is at a murder in a restaurant, she is the killer. But when she investigates, it seems to have been a woman who killed her husband in the same way. Liv thinks she is going insane. It turns out that both she and another man were both from Jacksonville, Florida, and were part of an experimental drug test. She decides to search out the man who seems to be the actual progenitor of all this stuff. This is a clever bit of plotting. Olivia is the central figure in all the events in this show. Very intriguing.

Nick Lane, Soldier of ZFT

[XweAponX · 10/10 · 1 May 2012]

"What was written will come to Pass"

In "AbilitY" we saw that Walter ironically had discovered who had actually written the text of ZFT. This Episode shows that the manuscript of ZFT was to be used with the Cortexiphan Kids: Who were being "Prepared" and this Arc is played out through the rest of the season and into seasons 2 and 4.

Olivia has a dream where she sees a Mother (Rebecca Naomi Jones) singing to her child, (She is singing "Nellie the Elephant" by Oi Band "The Toy Dolls") who Olivia apparently pushes into a moving Subway Train. Disturbing as this is, Olivia tries to pass this off as simply a Bad Dream. But while she is having breakfast with her sister and niece, she sees on the news that it had actually happened just as she had seen it.

Olivia goes "Off Mission" with Peter to NY, but what started off as an apparent disconnected event, turns out to be a bona-fide Pattern event. Walter has to check Olivia for 'radiation" in case she had "Astral Projected" which becomes the "Astrid" joke of the episode.

Olivia still thinks she had something to do with the grisly death of the woman, so she tries to stay awake by taking caffeine pills. But she soon falls asleep and this time sees herself in a posh Italian restaurant while a woman knifes her husband for no reason. By this time, Olivia is losing it, and when Peter and Olivia are interviewing the Posh Restaurant Owner, she grabs the guy and asks him WAS I HERE? But the owner says that a man wearing drab clothes was sitting close to the couple. Olivia then identifies the man as Nick Lane, who she went to Cortexiphan School with.

Parallels, again: It becomes apparent that Nick Lane is a male version of Olivia, wears the same kind of gray and black clothes, even has the same morning routine. But his Cortexiphan-Power is more insidious than Olivia's ability to "cross over." Walter takes advantage of this connection and puts Olivia under so she can connect to Nick's conscious mind, who at that moment is in the process of getting someone else killed. But in the process, Olivia sees where he lives.

In Lane's Apartment, there are all kinds of news articles relating to Fringe events tacked to the wall, and written on the wall are the words "What was Written will Come to Pass" - Which is a phrase we have heard Mitchell Loeb use before: And we will hear it more in Season 4.

Nick has the ability to project his emotions onto other people, a kind of "Reverse-Empath" - and it seems that he was "activated" by Agents of Jones.

Can Olivia stop him before he affects more people? And why did Jones have him activated? That too becomes apparent later in the series.

The Beginning and End of this episode are "Bookends" - As we came in with Olivia having disturbing dreams, We go out with Olivia's sleeping peacefully with her niece "Ella"

In this episode, we also hear "William Bell's" voice for the first time, in a Video Tape that Walter has. The face attached to that famous voice is revealed in the Season Finale, "There is More than One of Everything"

Nick is brought back in the series as both ally and enemy, so that is another thing to watch out for.

The male gaze

[jamesholverstott-43730 · 5/10 · 12 September 2023]

An episode that never would have considered using Peter instead of Olivia for the same-sex scene. Sad. Not that using Peter would have been better, or worse, but the fact that a great show felt the need to do something so ridiculous and unnecessary is lame. They could have used any other emotion else besides the sexual and the episode loses nothing. Using it gains nothing, and actually makes the episode rather sophomoric and obviously done for male viewership. Not that women can't/don't find Olivia attractive or sexy, but it is unnecessary scenes like this (along the lines of the gratuitous boob shot) that just keep sexism alive.