Life of Jesus Vid Questions

My Mum and I like watching vids of the "Holy Land" since visiting there in 2000. Many of them take you through the life of Jesus and point out the various locations of miracles etc. Even those that are trying to be terribly edgy and revisionist and accurate to the text/history and not tradition still stumble into saying "the three Magi" and so forth.

Anyway, two questions arose in my mind from this latest one whose title I've forgotten and whose title I am not interested in going downstairs to find.

1) What was the point of Pilate's wife's dream? Did God send it? Was God trying to prevent Christ's being condemned by Pilate? Wasn't it all God's plan anyway?

2) This may be more a critique of interpretation than the text itself:

The video says (as many of us do) that, when Christ was tested by the Pharisees re. the adulterous woman, He could not say "let her go" without undermining the Law and He couldn't say "stone her" without undermining His message of compassion on sinners (assuming that was His message).

So He comes up with His clever answer and disperses the crowd. Then *in private* He, though the only one in fact qualified to throw the first stone, fails to do His duty according to the Law, does not throw the stone, says "Neither do I condemn you" and lets her go!

Someone reading the story for the first time and with no prior commitment to regarding Christ as honourable in all He did might suspect that He was afraid to say what He really thought in front of His enemies and came up with a way to do it that was --- cowardly(?!)

He did on other occasions (when people didn't have stones in their hands) say that mercy triumphs over justice. Isn't this what happened here? Why not say so from the start?

What do you think?