Medium (like the brilliant UPN series, Veronica Mars) is one of those TV series I've seen as a "Johnny Come Lately." With Mars, at least, I had the opportunity to catch the entire first season on DVD this holiday season (thus generating a new entertainment addiction for me and my wife...)
With Medium, however, I'm still playing catch-up. NBC has aired a few reruns from early in the first season, so - slowly but surely - I'm picking up on the background detail of the series.
Allison's nemesis this week is one who's apparently been on the show before, but I'm not sure exactly who he is. He's the psychic projection, apparently, of a deceased - and highly malevolent - physician. The character (named Dr. Walker, I think...) is portrayed with chilling creepiness by Mark Sheppard, the fellow who once played firestarter Cecil Lively in an early, first season episode of The X-Files ("Fire"). He also guested as a frontier outlaw on a few episodes of Firefly, if memory serves.
Regardless, this dark spirit goes to susceptible men like doctors and butchers and urges them to kill women, and in "Doctor's Orders," he nearly gets his vicious claws into Joe and Allison's eldest daughter, Ariel. Masquerading as her new school librarian, the vengeful spirit encourages the twelve-year old to attend a weekend party with a fourteen-year old boyfriend named Todd Grimato; over the objections of her parents. This strategy nicely sets up Allison - the only threat to the "good" doctor's killing spree - so that she ends up in jail on charges of assault.
Of course, it's all a decoy. What he's really up to is far darker than encouraging a tween's bad behavior. He's the merciless Iago in the ear of an unstable butcher at the Sunfair Grocery Market, and the doctor tries to get the poor guy to carve up a hottie shopper in the back room. For Allison to stop the murder, she'll have to get released from prison...
I'm fond of Medium because it continues - in episodes like this one - to balance the psychic/horrific with the family domestic scene. That's a delicate tight-rope, but the show always pulls it off. For instance, much of this episode involves Joe and Allison's parenting choices. They form a unified front with Ariel, refusing to let her date a 14-year old boy; or go to the movies with him. Everything they say and dictate with Ariel is precisely what a responsible parent would say. And yet, with Ariel's blossoming teenage rebellion and that psychic Iago working from the side-lines, things get very scary. A child is threatened, and that's serious territory.
It's a testament to the respective talents of writer Rene Echevarria and director Helen Shaver that throughout "Doctor's Orders," I actually suspended disbelief, forgot I was watching a TV show and worried what was going to become of the family. Most episodes of Medium I've enjoyed tremendously, but this one felt darker and more dangerous than the ones I've had the good fortune to see. And it all works, I hasten to add, because the program has so consistently (and without maudlin, saccharine garbage, like Ghost Whisperer...) established the dynamics of the DuBois family.
My initial instinct about Medium was that it's a full-blown "horror series," especially because the first show I think I watched was the 3-D slice-and-dice episode "Still Life" (replete with spurting blood...). "Doctor's Orders" reinforces that notion fully. So "family horror" (also a factor on the missed and much-mourned Millennium) is, I guess, back in vogue
With Medium, however, I'm still playing catch-up. NBC has aired a few reruns from early in the first season, so - slowly but surely - I'm picking up on the background detail of the series.
Allison's nemesis this week is one who's apparently been on the show before, but I'm not sure exactly who he is. He's the psychic projection, apparently, of a deceased - and highly malevolent - physician. The character (named Dr. Walker, I think...) is portrayed with chilling creepiness by Mark Sheppard, the fellow who once played firestarter Cecil Lively in an early, first season episode of The X-Files ("Fire"). He also guested as a frontier outlaw on a few episodes of Firefly, if memory serves.
Regardless, this dark spirit goes to susceptible men like doctors and butchers and urges them to kill women, and in "Doctor's Orders," he nearly gets his vicious claws into Joe and Allison's eldest daughter, Ariel. Masquerading as her new school librarian, the vengeful spirit encourages the twelve-year old to attend a weekend party with a fourteen-year old boyfriend named Todd Grimato; over the objections of her parents. This strategy nicely sets up Allison - the only threat to the "good" doctor's killing spree - so that she ends up in jail on charges of assault.
Of course, it's all a decoy. What he's really up to is far darker than encouraging a tween's bad behavior. He's the merciless Iago in the ear of an unstable butcher at the Sunfair Grocery Market, and the doctor tries to get the poor guy to carve up a hottie shopper in the back room. For Allison to stop the murder, she'll have to get released from prison...
I'm fond of Medium because it continues - in episodes like this one - to balance the psychic/horrific with the family domestic scene. That's a delicate tight-rope, but the show always pulls it off. For instance, much of this episode involves Joe and Allison's parenting choices. They form a unified front with Ariel, refusing to let her date a 14-year old boy; or go to the movies with him. Everything they say and dictate with Ariel is precisely what a responsible parent would say. And yet, with Ariel's blossoming teenage rebellion and that psychic Iago working from the side-lines, things get very scary. A child is threatened, and that's serious territory.
It's a testament to the respective talents of writer Rene Echevarria and director Helen Shaver that throughout "Doctor's Orders," I actually suspended disbelief, forgot I was watching a TV show and worried what was going to become of the family. Most episodes of Medium I've enjoyed tremendously, but this one felt darker and more dangerous than the ones I've had the good fortune to see. And it all works, I hasten to add, because the program has so consistently (and without maudlin, saccharine garbage, like Ghost Whisperer...) established the dynamics of the DuBois family.
My initial instinct about Medium was that it's a full-blown "horror series," especially because the first show I think I watched was the 3-D slice-and-dice episode "Still Life" (replete with spurting blood...). "Doctor's Orders" reinforces that notion fully. So "family horror" (also a factor on the missed and much-mourned Millennium) is, I guess, back in vogue
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