(Season 5, Episode 9 “All in the Family”)
I love Medium; let’s just be clear on that. I think it’s one of the most original and consistently underrated shows on television, and I will be ridiculously depressed if NBC cancels it after this season because they’re giving the 10:00 hour to stupid Jay Leno. So of course the week that I step in for Cate and cover Medium is one of the very few weeks that I didn’t much like the episode.
The episode itself was fine, don’t get me wrong. The Beek was resplendent in his icky creepiness and we had some good DuBois family scenes. What bugged me about this episode is that we’ve basically seen it before. I won’t go into it before the jump just to spare all of you spoilerphobes who haven’t caught the episode yet, but the crux of this week’s case is almost identical to another case that Allison dealt with.
In an episode from a few seasons ago called, “The One Behind the Wheel,” A man killed his wife and gave his mistress plastic surgery to make her into a perfect match so no one suspected that his wife was dead. In this episode, A man’s fiancee gets into a car accident, and she has reconstructive surgery and assumes the identity of the man’s sister whom he has murdered in order to cover up the killing.
The similarities were so striking that they were completely distracting to me. I could barely pay attention to the episode, because that was in the back of my mind the entire time. I barely even paid attention to the B story about Joe’s sister leaving her husband. Granted, it was kind of boring, but still. It would have held my attention better if the A story hadn’t been a complete ripoff of itself.
One thing that did intrigue me was Ariel’s storyline. It’s the kind of thing that would fade into the background, since we’ve seen variations of this play out several times on this show: Ariel wants to do something, her parents say no, they have a discussion about it, Ariel probably still doesn’t get to do it.
Even at the end, when she didn’t come home from school, I wasn’t too surprised: Ariel definitely has a rebellious streak in her, so I was half expecting her to take off on the ski trip anyway. But if that’s all that happened, why make it a To Be Continued? That, to me, is a very ominous sign that indicates Ariel has a little bit more than a weekend on the slopes ahead of her.
What do you think? Am I reading too much into this, or is there something bad in store for Ariel? Medium is a dark show and I wouldn’t be surprised if it went after her family.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Apr 07, 2009 @ 15:00 EST5EDT
I enjoy Medium, watch every episode. I’m looking forward to next week’s episode.
I think there’s something bad headed for Ariel. My mind might be playing tricks on me, but wasn’t that Mark Sheppard aka Dr. Charles Walker recurring bad guy in the promo for next week (IMDB is not helpful)? I think next week should be pretty good.
Yep, Medium’s been recycling story lines and that worries me. Is it possible the writers are out of ideas?
From what I understand this was a setup ep to get us to the next episode, which is Ariel and Joe centric. Can’t complain about that!!
Wow – I didn’t even think of something bad happening to Ariel. I assumed this was a sort of continuation on last week’s ep where Alison’s “lie detector” buzzer kept going off in her head everytime Ariel asked to go to a sleepover at a friend’s house where supposedly her friend’s parents were o.k. with it and there would be no boys. Several people commented on how they were disappointed when that storyline was not followed through so when I saw a variation of it come up in this episode, I assumed they actually were following through. Now I have my doubts….
By the way, I never saw the earlier episode you mentioned, but the minute they said that “The Beek” and the woman playing “Brooke” were brother and sister, I was like – yeah, right! – and assumed either bad casting, a half/step brother/sister thing, or something more suspicious so without even seeing the earlier version of this story, I wasn’t really buying it from the get go. Still love this show though!