Seems to me that one of the writers may have drawn some inspiration from Deathnote.
2 Reviews
Pushing the envelope of absurdity
lor_22 February 2010
I liked this episode, because the MEDIUM filmmakers dared to try out an absurd premise and milk it for all it's worth. In a medium (TV) where a new show has just debuted based on solving people's mysterious problems by checking out their past lives (!!), I guess anything goes.
The Lina Wertmuller-styled white rimmed sun glasses that Arquette dons in a very flimsy early plot twist (resolved convincingly in the final reel as to their source) let her see white digits superimposed on people's foreheads, not unlike the way place names and building names are super-ed in each episode of FRINGE. Younger people have numbers like 20100 or 15500, but when she sees both suspects and colleagues with a big 1 or 2 on their noggins, it becomes obvious that she can perceive how many days each person has left to live.
That's a fun comic-book gimmick, reminding me of similar sci-fi gimmicks of yore, particularly the "wristwatch that can stop time" ploy I recall from some Action comic read when I was a kid. It leads Arquette into the usual complications, e.g., should I look at my husband to see when his number is up, or look at myself in the mirror. As usual with dumbed-down television, the logical consequences of this premise are papered over, causing some idiotic twists near the end of the show, in particular the assumption that every day your number CAN change. I'm used to a spread of rampant I'll-believe-anything-ism among pop culture TV viewers, what keeps shows like LOST, FRINGE and especially FLASHFORWARD popular.
The attitude on the part of the producers and writers of MEDIUM is reflected in Arquette's idle tossing of the glasses into the trash at the end of the episode. Yes, it's trash, and yes, the makers of such trash do not even bother to hide anymore their contempt for the watchers of said trash. In our post-Tarantino, post-MST3K world, everything's an in-joke.
The Lina Wertmuller-styled white rimmed sun glasses that Arquette dons in a very flimsy early plot twist (resolved convincingly in the final reel as to their source) let her see white digits superimposed on people's foreheads, not unlike the way place names and building names are super-ed in each episode of FRINGE. Younger people have numbers like 20100 or 15500, but when she sees both suspects and colleagues with a big 1 or 2 on their noggins, it becomes obvious that she can perceive how many days each person has left to live.
That's a fun comic-book gimmick, reminding me of similar sci-fi gimmicks of yore, particularly the "wristwatch that can stop time" ploy I recall from some Action comic read when I was a kid. It leads Arquette into the usual complications, e.g., should I look at my husband to see when his number is up, or look at myself in the mirror. As usual with dumbed-down television, the logical consequences of this premise are papered over, causing some idiotic twists near the end of the show, in particular the assumption that every day your number CAN change. I'm used to a spread of rampant I'll-believe-anything-ism among pop culture TV viewers, what keeps shows like LOST, FRINGE and especially FLASHFORWARD popular.
The attitude on the part of the producers and writers of MEDIUM is reflected in Arquette's idle tossing of the glasses into the trash at the end of the episode. Yes, it's trash, and yes, the makers of such trash do not even bother to hide anymore their contempt for the watchers of said trash. In our post-Tarantino, post-MST3K world, everything's an in-joke.
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