Bad Dreams opens innocently enough--a young mother is taking her daughter home from the circus through the New York City subway. The mother’s singing to her child as she navigates the nook and crannies of the subway station. When she finally arrives at the platform, it is empty, and she had just missed the train. The tension is building up quite nicely already, because--at this point in the game--you just know that something bad is going to happen. And when it finally does, it’s a shocker that comes right out of left field: Olivia abruptly shows up and shoves the woman in front of an oncoming train, killing her. Olivia then suddenly wakes up, and is relieved that it was just a weird dream. Yet as she’s watching the news over breakfast later, Olivia’s horrified to see a news report concerning the exact same woman whom she saw in her dream, who died in the exact same way.

Written and directed by Akiva Goldsman, who won an Oscar for his script A Beautiful Mind (and who also wrote the abysmally bad Batman Forever and Batman & Robin--but we’ll cut him some slack for that), Bad Dreams is an enthralling story that grabs you by the collar from the opening moment. At first, you begin to wonder if Olivia really could have done something like this--and Anna Torv’s tortured performance in this episode is marvelous, as Olivia soon wonders the same thing about herself. If Bound showed that Olivia can be a bad-ass, then Bad Dreams shows a more vulnerable side of the tough FBI agent, who’s not above accepting a comforting hug from Peter during a particularly dark personal moment. These characters have come a long way from the pilot, when Olivia had to resort to blackmail to get Peter to work with her.

The writing is crisp, oftentimes funny and overall very well done, with a gripping confrontation on top of a building that’s almost Hitchcockian in its striking setting and execution. Goldsman, a fan of Fringe himself, gives each cast member a great character moment, and John Noble’s Walter winds up getting the best, hilariously deadpan line of the episode: "I do hope Agent Dunham meant to do that…." The first season of Fringe was shot in New York City, whose streets and surrounding areas substituted for Boston. But by setting this story in the Big Apple itself, Goldsman the director gives this episode of sense of scope and place that’s a rare thing to see in today’s television. Bad Dreams is more than just another episode that advances the series’ fascinating mythology, it stands alone as a great, classic episode in its own right.