It might all have been a dream.

[gremcint]

I'm not talking about Dallas, Newhart or St elsewhere.

But there always seems to be an episode of every science fiction show I watch where the character in question starts hallucinating that they are either crazy and imagined everything or they are living a normal life that slowly falls apart while we know that this is not what is happening.

As it's never the finale of the show that this occurs on then we already know the ending and it almost never does anything to advance the plot, so instead of giving us an episode that advances the plot or even just does blah of the week we have to sit through these hallucinations that we know are fake rather than any actually interesting. The plot is unoriginal and I am sick of it. This week as soon I saw the start of the episode of SGU and realized the plot I got very upset and almost didn't watch.

For the record here's the list of shows I remember seeing this:

Doctor Who, (a couple different variations)
Voyager (with the doctor)
SG1 (the team is firefighters, or actually one or two others)
Charmed (insane asylum)
Buffy (insane asylum)
SG Atlantis (insane asylum)
Smallville (insane asylum)
SGU (just now, wedding)
Andromeda(family man)
and more I don't remember

I hate this plot and I know it's coming in every series I watch, can we just stop using it please.

[AdminAssistant]

Family Guy did a spoof on that (the episodes where Stewie kills Lois and takes over the world, then it's revealed that it's just a virtual reality thing.)

[blas87]

Soap Operas do the day-dream/fake out all the time. It's one of my pet peeves.

[DrFaroohk]

House did that once I think.

Sort of with that movie Next.

[telecom_goddess]

They used that in a book I read once....it was a sequel to a great classic, and the ending had the whole first book and second book a goddamn dream. REALLY?

[anakhouri]

I hate it worse as an ending. What a cop-out!

I remember one episode of SG1 that had someone else hallucinating, and the team was fooled into thinking he was telling the truth (because he also thought he was telling the truth). I don't recall all the details but Dean Stockwell was in it. I thought that was a good episode.

[HYHYBT]

The only one on your list I've seen is the Buffy episode. I liked it... but of course, it *would* get dull seeing it in every series. That it ended as if the asylum-Buffy had been the real one after all may have made all the difference, though.

On the other hand, is it always a filler-type episode? Again, one example isn't enough to go on, but the idea seems a close cousin to something like that episode of Star Trek TNG where Picard lives a whole other life within a long-dead civilization while passed out on the floor, which also was quite a good one. Didn't advance the plot of the series one bit, but then, is that the only purpose an episode is allowed to have?

[Ghel]

They did that on Enterprise, too. Actually, I thought it was a good episode, because it brought out a lot of character development for Phlox, who didn't get much screen time normally, being a minor character.

[telecom_goddess]

They did that on Enterprise, too. Actually, I thought it was a good episode, because it brought out a lot of character development for Phlox, who didn't get much screen time normally, being a minor character.

And which episode of enterprise was that? what season? I'm in the middle of an enterprise run. Just got done with season 2, and some parts of season 4, will be watching season 3 here soon.

Favorite episode was the two parter In A Mirror, Darkly from season 4....LOVED IT!!!!

[KabeRinnaul]

If one of the Doctor Who episodes you're counting is "Turn Left", I actually really liked that one. Showing all the things that would have happened without the Doctor's intervention, the butterfly effect from Donna's simple choice of which road to take, and the fact that it actually had quite a bit of foreshadowing for the finale...

Of course, "Amy's Choice" fits better, but that one had it's own foreshadowing, and played with the theme a bit anyway.

[Ghel]

And which episode of enterprise was that? what season?

Doctor's Orders, season 3. And now that I think about it, it wasn't all a dream. Most of what happens is real (within the setting of the show, of course), but there's enough there to fit into this theme.

[Peppergirl]

I typically hate them too, but I recently found myself *wishing* a specific episode was a dream sequence:

The season finale of Mad Men was SO awful, I kept waiting for Bobby Ewing to pop out of the shower. I was mad when he didn't.

[bhskittykatt]

I haven't seen the latest SGU one, but the one with TJ and her baby was one I liked. It was sort of a mindf***. Did it really happen, or did she hallucinate the whole thing? You don't really know, and it starts to hurts your brain to figure it out, so I enjoyed that one.

[daleduke17]

If one of the Doctor Who episodes you're counting is "Turn Left", I actually really liked that one. Showing all the things that would have happened without the Doctor's intervention, the butterfly effect from Donna's simple choice of which road to take, and the fact that it actually had quite a bit of foreshadowing for the finale...

Of course, "Amy's Choice" fits better, but that one had it's own foreshadowing, and played with the theme a bit anyway.

Would Family of Blood fall into the idea as well?

Amy's Choice, to me, was about the weakest episode of Matt Smith's tenure (so far).

[smileyeagle1021]

Ugh, James Bond has even done this, in Die Another Day we see MI6 being overrun by terrorists and half of the cast is killed off and Pierce Brosnan shoots Judy Dench, and you hear Q in the background "a good marksman is not supposed to shoot his boss" and the screen switches back to the lab and you see it was virtual reality the whole damned time.