"I'm just a girl who wants to be a lawyer. Who wants to do her job. Be a good wife, a good mother. Be like everybody else." - Patricia Arquette as Allison DuBois
Medium: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jude Clement
Allison DuBois (Patricia Arquette) wants to be a lawyer. She even manages to get a job as an intern in the office of Phoenix District Attorney Manuel Devalos (Miguel Sandavol) while waiting to take her law school entrance exams. Allison does have a few things working against her, though. First off, at over thirty, she's downright elderly to be starting a new career. Plus, she has a growing family to look after: aerospace engineer husband Joe (Jake Weber, American Gothic) and three not-quite-angelic little girls, including preteen Ariel (Sofia Vassilieva) and precocious Bridgette (Maria Lark). Her biggest problem, though, is that she's a psychic (she can sometimes read minds and predict the future) and a medium (she can speak to the dead). Needless to say, this might give her an unfair advantage when trying cases.even if the evidence and testimony she conjures up is inadmissible.
Then Allison figures out her true calling. Joe has been keeping a detailed notebook of all her visions and nightmares. Some of them were clearly associated with other areas of the country, so he types up the information she has divined and faxes it off to the cities and towns with which she associated the crimes. After helping a skeptical Texas Ranger (Arliss Howard) solve a case, she realizes that while her abilities may prevent her from becoming a lawyer, she can still use them to help law enforcement officials. When Allison looks at a set of crime scene photos and predicts exactly what happened (the culprit later confesses, corroborating her story), D.A. Devalos hires her as a special consultant to his office.
Throughout season one, Allison uses her gifts to work on several cases for the D.A.'s office. She helps to choose a jury that is more likely to vote for the death penalty in a heinous murder/rape case ("Suspicions and Certainties"). She realizes that a murder witness is giving a totally inaccurate description of the assailant ("Night of the Wolf"). A dream leads Allison and the D.A. to evidence in a murder case, but using it in court could lead Allison to perjure herself ("In Sickness and Adultery"). A Good Samaritan gives off vibes that he is actually a serial killer ("Coming Soon"). Killers, rapists, evil spirits - she battles them all.
Allison becomes obsessed with using her powers to help bring criminals to justice, often working long hours to track down obscure references that came to her in her dreams. Yet she also tries to balance this with her family life. One concern that Joe and Allison share is that their kids may have her gift. Bridget can grab the correct colors she needs for her coloring book without even looking at them ("Pilot"). She also announces that she has become friends with a new kid at school, but when Allison tries to schedule a play date, she realizes that the boy has been dead for five years ("Night of the Wolf"). Ariel has a recurring nightmare about a young girl captured in a castle, a dream that seems to have some basis in fact ("Coded"). Joe becomes thrilled when his tutoring of Ariel proves that she has near genius math skills, but it soon becomes apparent that she is simply reading his mind for the answers ("Coming Soon"). Allison even discovers that her half-brother Michael (Ryan Hurst) can also communicate with the dead ("Lucky").
One of the series' flaws is that Allison is often a pill. Sure, her special abilities are both a blessing and a curse, but she is often rude and obnoxious to her husband. In the bonus features, the series' writers indicate that they intended the relationship between Allison and Joe to be as realistic as possible - marital spats and all. Realism is one thing, but overkill is another. The result is that Allison is often unsympathetic while Joe seems comparatively saintly.
Medium was created by Glenn Gordon Caron, who was also responsible for Moonlighting. The two series don't have much in common, of course, except for Caron's unique voice. Right from the first scene in the pilot, it becomes clear that Caron's technique of having characters tell stories through large chunks of hypnotically-written dialogue remains intact. Moonlighting often ventured into special episodes that plopped its characters into the center of elaborate flashbacks, Shakespeare-inspired situations, and more. That tradition continues here with "I Married a Mind Reader," an episode guest-starring Frances Fisher in which a sick Allison goes back in time and discovers the truth about a tragedy that happened behind-the-scenes of her favorite 1960s sitcom.
Medium is actually based on the true story of the real-life Allison DuBois. The cases, however, are completely made up so as not to further take advantage of crime victims and their families.
Familiar faces popping up in season one include Wallace Langham (Veronica's Closet), Khrystyne Haje (Head of the Class), Reed Diamond (Homicide: Life on the Street), Ryan Hurst (Taken), Jay R. Ferguson (Evening Shade), Grace Zabriskie (Twin Peaks), Chad Lowe (Life Goes On), and Kathy Baker (Picket Fences).
The packaging is simple. The sixteen episodes that make up season one are divided onto five discs. The discs are housed in three slim, clear keepcases. Two of the keepcases hold two discs apiece. The front covers feature images of Arquette as well as smaller production photos. The back covers include episode titles and plot synopses. The double-sided coversheets show through to the insides of the cases and are decorated with a green, ghostly pattern. The keepcases are housed in a cardboard sleeve.
The full motion DVD menus mimic the opening credits, are superimposed with clips from the series, and are easy to navigate. Viewers can play all episodes or choose them individually. The episodes are divided into chapter stops, but there are no scene selection menus.
