Friday, February 5, 2010

The worst episode of Medium ever?

Medium usually follows the same formula: Allison dreams about someone who is dead or about to die, doesn't have all the information, and the district attorney doesn't believe her, but her premonitions are always right in the end. The writers find some way to make all of this seem interesting and new every time. In Friday's episode, her visions in dreams and real life were both clouded by continually seeing the same man as many people around her, including women and her husband, Joe. There was still a death involved, but she could not figure out why this one guy kept appearing. The secondary story involved Ariel, Allison's daughter, seeing a dead man in a beaver mascot costume.

Somehow, this week, Medium managed to be exceedingly boring, as the stories dragged along. There were a few laughs, but no suspense because there were no crimes to investigate until very late. Allison's psychic ability was pretty much paralyzed while having to deal with this mysterious man's image. Ariel was babysitting for a boy that had an imaginary friend beaver, which, it turns out, he could also see; apparently these psychic abilities are becoming widespread. Ariel had to get the beaver out of the child's life to stop him from being badly influenced by the man in the beaver suit. With the aid of more information, Allison had the breakthrough that the man she was seeing had been stealing identities to be able to steal money from those people, and she saw him in the image of his victims, which makes almost zero sense in the premise of this show. Ariel and the beaver mascot only had conversations about him being a bad influence and how he needed to leave the boy alone. How exciting!

This episode was more about comedy than action, as evidenced by Allison threatening Joe when he appeared in the image of the identity theft and, conversely, when the identity theft appeared as Joe inside the bank as he tried to steal Joe's money and Allison confronted him. The stolen money was going towards paying off a juror in his co-conspirator's trial, enabling her to receive a mistrial in the death of her husband, which was Allison's original dream to kick off the episode. Somehow the identity theft got away without anyone stopping him, at which point he was able to call the freed murderer and tell her that he had stolen her identity as well, enabling him to take her inheritance from her late husband, repay the original identity theft victims, and leave her with nothing. At this point, we had the last and greatest laugh of them all, as her bikini clad body turned into the same man who stole her money.

It all sounds very complicated, but, over the course of an hour, it just left me with a "so what?" feeling at each commercial break. This surely wasn't why CBS brought the show on board after it was canceled by NBC.