Fringe "Bad Dreams" review

Fringe, which is already a show about wacked-out disturbing things going bump in the night, took a turn toward the even-darker side in last night’s new episode. “Bad Dreams” may or may not have been the best show of the series’ first season, but there’s no question it was the most disturbing, as the crazy events and phenomenon that the Fringe Team investigates came home to them big time in the form of unsettling revelations into Olivia’s past and Walter’s role in it.

Throughout the first part of the show we are invited into Olivia’s dreams, visions that would seem like nightmares were it not for the look of satisfaction on her face in them. It seems she is dreaming of killing folks and…you guessed it…people are actually dying in the ways she is imagining. At first the team explores the possibility that Olivia is murdering people with her mind as some kind of “reverse empath” killing machine—able to transfer her thoughts into others’ actions. It’s a theory Peter refuses to embrace but that Walter, more stern and blunt than usual, tells him is a distinct possibility.

From the beginning, even as Olivia is popping caffeine pills and begging Broyles for permission to investigate these unrelated deaths, it’s clear Walter knows more than he’s letting on. We already know that Olivia may have been a lab subject back home in good old Jacksonville, and may have been treated with the drug Cortexipahn, although she has no memory of it. We know the drug was given to children by the mysterious Dr. William Bell, possibly to create “soldiers” for the upcoming war described in the ZFT manifesto. And we know the manifesto was written on Walter’s typewriter. By the show’s end we find out for sure that Bell wasn’t the only bad man in the bad lab when Cortexipahn was being dosed out to kids.

Olivia is jolted out of her living nightmare when the team finds a common link (other than her) to the crimes in the form of a recently released mental patient named Nick Lang. Nick has a new scar on his head, a history of obsession with the idea that he was experimented on as a child, and the ability to infect people with his own emotions—which are unfortunately often self-loathing and suicidal, leading people to kill themselves or others.

Nick also is able to transfer his thoughts to Olivia, so we get some truly disturbing scenes of her committing murder, as well as one intense (although far less disturbing and far more distracting) kissing scene between Olivia and a stripper Nick encounters. Olivia feels her way through Nick’s interactions with the stripper under Walter’s hypnosis in an embarrassing and hilarious scene in the lab—after Peter and Astrid have quickly picked up on it, Walter is the last one to go “ohhh” when it’s clear that Olivia is having a virtual reality experience of the sexual variety.

Unfortunately the stripper ends up dead too, but Olivia now has enough information to track down Nick. This climaxes in an amazingly dark visual sequence where Olivia confronts him on the roof of a building, along with a bunch of other folks standing out on the ledge waiting to jump at Nick’s emotional command. Nick calls Olivia “Olive” and tells her the little he remembers about their past together as children in the lab.

Olivia remembers nothing, but Nick has expected that. “I think they wanted us to forget,” he says. At least until they were “woken up” for the coming war, a war Walter has already inadvertently hinted could be fought between parallel universes. “What did you just say?” Peter asks. Walter never answers.

Nick has always remembered some of the past, but now he has been “woken up” for good. Exactly by whom and for what we’re not sure—what we get is "the man in the glasses". He wants “Olive” to kill him. “You were always the strong one,” he says. Certainly fits, doesn’t it?

Olivia does her best in a no-win situation, and we don’t escape without casualties. But the worst casualty in this episode is the bond of trust between Olivia and Walter. I fear it will only become more fragile, or break entirely. At the end, we see Walter alone, finding an old VHS tape, and viewing “Olive” as a child after an incident where it appears she has burnt or blown up her lab room.

There are three distinct voices on the tape talking about the what happened, in a clinical nature, while we get the disturbing visual of a small girl huddled back against the wall. One voice is clearly Walter’s, the other is the lab assistant (who we know died under strange circumstances which led to Walter’s long internship in the mental hospital), and the last voice is that of Bell (and what a wonderfully familiar voice it is Star Trek fans!).

What’s clear is that the earth is about to ripped out from under the alliances in the Fringe Team. Olivia obviously possesses strange powers and abilities, as a result of the drug treatment she received as a child from Bell…and Walter. How will Olivia react to the revelation that Walter treated her as a lab rat (or cow, in this show) as a child? For that matter how will Peter react, since he already has dim views of his father’s morality and obvious affection for Olivia?

The biggest question of all, however, will probably only be answered by the appearance of Bell himself in the season finale. When Olivia is “woken up” and her powers are revealed, what is it exactly that she’s supposed to do?