Welcome to our rewatch for episode 17 of Fringe season 1 – “Bad Dreams”. Join us as we enter minds and gather new perspectives on our journey back to the other side.
We have renamed this episode: Perspective.
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1.17 Bad Dreams
Synopsis: As a suicide incident occurs at New York’s iconic Grand Central station, Agent Dunham simultaneously witnesses the event while asleep and dreaming in Boston. Rattled by the extraordinary and coincidental circumstances, Olivia, Peter and Walter investigate further, but keep coming up empty-handed. As these violent occurrences continue and worsen, Olivia is sent into an unthinkable direction and shocking details emerge about the ZFT manuscript, the highly experimental drug Cortexiphan and Olivia’s childhood.
Below the jump I share my new observations and perspectives, and take a quick look at the unresolved and closed mysteries from “Bad Dreams”.
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Congratulations to Olivia Dunham (and Anna Torv) for winning the 1.17 “Bad Dreams” Fringie of the Week! Olivia kept alive her chance of winning the Fringe Season 1 best character award by obtaining an impressive 60% of the fans votes.
Can Olivia do the unthinkable and storm back to snatch victory away from either of the Bishop Boys? With only 3 episodes of the season remaining (voting for 1.18 coming up soon), it’s an open race between the three of them – anything can happen, only you can decide who takes ultimate glory!
Here are the standings after 17 episodes:
- Peter Bishop / Walter Bishop (6 wins each)
- Olivia Dunham (5 wins)
- The Observer/Meegar’s Mom/ The Child (1 win each)
1.18 Fringie of the Week voting coming up soon.
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Right, just in time for the next episode, here’s our 1.17 “Bad Dreams” – Clues and Eastereggs round-up!
This Is Not Ballooney
Episode 1.16 could be argued to have contained 3 ‘next episode clues’ for “Bad Dreams”. One of them can be seen in the picture above. The main picture shows a keg with a “Red Balloon Lager ” sticker. “Bad Dreams” featured an actual ‘red balloon’ (inset) – the evidence that should have been enough to prove to Peter that Olivia wasn’t ‘just dreaming’.
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“Heal the world, make it a better place” [Michael Jackson]
This episode really got me thinking about emotions and the idea that all of us are interconnected. That really seemed to be the linguring message from Nick Lane’s infectious emo-ability and the “buddy system” employed by William Bell (and Walter’s) Cortexiphan programme. Imagine that, each of our actions, thoughts, feelings..every independent aspect of our being, part of a collective whole. Like a collective consciousness.
I can see the thinking behind Belly’s decision to Cortexifunk Nick Lane – presumably a child with the natural ability to ‘light up a room’, or, ‘suck the life out of one’, depending on his mood. Dose him with the yellow pills and this ability becomes heightened. He’s literally a human weapon. Sure, if he’s happy he could heal the world, make it a better place. But if he’s sad, angry or frustrated..you really don’t want to be around him. The odd thing is though, if the ‘Observers’ are the denizen’s from the other world, how is this hyper-emotive power supposed to work on them? Clearly their emotions don’t function in the same way as ours. This also makes me wonder two things:
- Did Belly (and Walter) intend for the Cortexiphan kids to be soldiers in this war against the parallel world, or was that someone else’s idea?
- What IS Olivia’s ability?
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In this episode the folks from The Fringe Podcast review episode 17, “Bad Dreams.” They feature an extended feedback section and discuss the ZFT, the presence of red, the VHS tape Walter watched, cortexiphan, William Bell, and lots of other Fringey Stuff.
Go listen or download the episode here!
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The writers really dragged me into this week’s installment of Fringe, right from the get go. The song Nellie the Elephant was sickeningly sweet and gave me a horrible feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, in a matter of seconds. Especially after seeing the poor little girl in the stroller and the balloons tied to the back.
In the beginning of the episode, Olivia has a mysterious dream, in which she kills a young woman by pushing her in front of a subway car, while she was reaching for a red balloon that had come untied from the little girl’s stroller. She wakes up to see that her dream has come true, and the woman is dead after an apparent “suicide.”
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It’s time once again to vote for your Fringie of the Week! Who was your favourite character performer for 1.17 “Bad Dreams”?
Click the jump to vote:
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Each week FringeBloggers invite some of the most interesting personalities from the Fringe community into FB Towers, to review aspects from the most recent episode. Joining the panel this week to review “Bad Dreams” are fringeling, mucca, and yvaine!
The opening scene – creepy or sleepy?
fringeling: A little of both, so I’ll say creepy and sleepy. I knew the mom-with-child was on borrowed time the moment they appeared. The attempt to build suspense was weak (the nervous singing, the stranger who passed them, the balloon getting loose, etc) considering one of them was bound for demise before the opening credits. However I still kind of winced when Olivia appeared and with due purpose “threw momma TO the train” 
mucca: SUPER creepy! Maybe it’s because I’ve been in a relatively deserted subway station alone at night, but the tension in the scene created by the isolation, the song she was singing, the ominous music towards the end and the sound of the oncoming train made the opening spine-chilling. I also appreciated the fake-out in the beginning when the man was walking towards her.
yvaine: It wasn’t as explosive as… say, The Transformation, or maybe The Cure (I did say explosive), but it wasn’t a sleeper at all. It wasn’t entirely creepy either, but suddenly seeing Olivia show up that way was certainly a surprise.
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Popular Mecahnics are back with another microscopic look at the science portrayed in the latest episode of Fringe. As usual they take ask a group of ‘experts’ whether or not the events in “Bad Dreams” are currently possible in the real world:
In [Tuesday] night’s episode of Fringe, “Bad Dreams,” FBI agent Olivia Dunham visits crime scenes in her dreams as the crimes are occurring. Even worse, it appears she is the one committing the murders—but she’s actually watching the work of Nick Lane, a former mental patient and current serial killer. Lane, a reverse empath, infects people with his emotions, causing them to take their own lives.
As it turns out, Lane was part of an illegal drug trial run in the 1980s by Massive Dynamic CEO William Bell and, of course, Walter Bishop. The scientists tested the drug cortexiphan on children predisposed to having special abilities; Bishop explains that he and Bell put the children in pairs during the experiments to keep them calm. Dunham, though she can’t remember it, was part of the same trial—and Lane was her partner, which Bishop says explains their intense psychic connection.
To stop Lane from killing again, Bishop puts Dunham under a machine that “hypnotically [induces] REM state,” he explains. “It’s enhancing the psychic connection to Lane. Tuning her antenna, if you will.”
According to Doug Kirsch, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and Regional Director of Sleep Health Centers in Boston, REM, or Rapid-Eye Movements, is a normal part of our sleep architecture. “REM is the stage of sleep during which we have the most vivid dreams and during which our brain is quite active,” he says. “It is also a time in which we are generally unable to voluntarily move any part of our body, other than our breathing muscles and our eyes—so we don’t act out our dreams.”
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