Today, I’m looking to see what dream episode of a TV show is your favorite.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
Dream episodes occur ALL of the time on television shows and they’re almost ALL terrible, but a few good ones have occurred over the years.
My pick for the best one is the classic The Dick Van Dyke Show parody of The Twilight Zone, where a dream episode really was the only way to pull something like this off and the ending, with an adorable Mary Tyler Moore coming out of a closet filled with walnuts? Just perfection.
What’s your pick?
Feel free to suggest future topics via e-mail at brian@popculturereferences.com!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Normal Again”
My Favorite Orkan from Happy Days, before it was edited to not be a dream.
Ed., was “Normal Again” really a dream, though, or was it an alternate reality? I felt the ending made it ambiguous.
From the same series, though, I’d nominate “Restless.” It’s multiple dreams that tie in together, and it was a nice end to season 4 before the mess that was season 5.
The 9th season of Dallas, one big long Dream Season. It starts out normal enough, but you could see the writers having fun as they realized they had made the choice to just render the entire season as Non-Cannon. You get JR becoming a better human being, you evil international oil conspiracies, you get real growth and a sense of happiness for our long suffering characters, and then nope, Bobby’s back in the shower.
Danger Man/Secret Agent “The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove”
the episode starts with the lead character having a car crash. The episode that follows gets stranger as it goes on before the reveal that the whole thing is a concussion induced dream
runner-up
Moonlighting “the Dream sequence always rings twice”
an inventive look into the minds of the lead characters as they dream about an old mystery
second runner-up
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons -“Attack on Cloudbase”
Doing what they couldn’t do except in a dream or final episode – an all-out battle in which many of the cast die
Not a full episode dream, so not a proper answer, but this is my favorite dream sequence in a show. Black Adder the Third’s “Ink and Incapability” had a great dream where Black Adder has fallen asleep trying to rewrite Johnson’s dictionary after Baldrick burned the original. He awakes to Johnson arriving and panics, but Johnson tells Black Adder to not worry about its destruction. This seems like the answer to his prayers, but then he notices his aunt is there and Baldrick has become an Alsatian, and he sighs and laments, “oh God, it’s a dream, isn’t it?” as the others start prancing around. I think that is something I have never seen elsewhere – that frustrated realization that happens when you realize you are dreaming.