Great timing for this show! It's 4/27/20, the year of Corona virus-Covid 19. Only difference is we have a buffoon for a president who only approves money for his rich buddies and doesn't know how to prepare for a national emergency. (Oh well, don't listen to me. I've only been staying at home in isolation for the last 5 weeks with no end in sight!)
5 Reviews
This was 1 of the best
mbond-281362 February 2021
Warning: Spoilers
I have seen all Seven Seasons and this is one of the best ones. Kinda reminds you of our own Pandemic ( smaller scale) but the Lab that produced this deadly virus (not airborne) planned to gain by evil & making a profitable $$$ anti-virus. ' Best laid plans'
Life imitates art
dsarosi7 February 2022
Warning: Spoilers
Imagine someone paying for gain of function research to create a virus that "gets loose" only to then do everything possible to suppress, ban, and lie about therapies to fight the virus all so that the only "solution" to the problem is a vaccine whose sales directly benefit you and your government agency and even cause serious, even deadly side effects. Life imitates art. Seeing this show in year 3 of the plannedemic is quite creepy. Even Hollywood sees how easily a pharmaceutical company can justify murder for profits but can't fathom it happening anywhere but on television or in the movies. A great episode that gets even better the more the truth comes out.
Totally Lacking a Trace of Morality
EvolBob8 February 2013
Warning: Spoilers
I am a fan of Medium, well at least the first 2 series, and I'll always love Patricia Arquette :) Now there was a bit of a problem around this time with the Writers Guild of America going on strike a few years before this episode. There was a noticeable change in mood and a drastic swing to the Right when the new writers took up the slack. It wasn't just Medium but in most American shows from 2008, the right wing propaganda machine would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. Lets look at this horrendous episode and of course there are SPOILERS. First up the people we expect to know who to trust are going to be part of a conspiracy. The problem with this is we've had thousands of nuclear warheads, and god-damn-it managed to find operators we can trust with firing them for over 50 years: Yet when it comes to finding scientist we can trust in developing a deadly virus - we fail. The story involves the release of this virus to kill thousands just so the government will pass legislation to fund the making of an antivirus (cure) to their deadly virus. Who makes this crap up? You can't use a virus without the cure, what would be the point of infecting an enemy when they could then return the favour? And with that in mind, who's going to buy it? The virus is far more valuable with the only cure in the possession of the user. Secondly when one gets infected by the evil scientist, he goes out in a car loaded with flammables and drives onto a motorway to crash and kill himself. WTF?? Why not call the appropriate medical authorities while isolated, and explain what happened? He can only infect by making physical contact, the virus is not contagious air-born. Amazingly there is only one dose of antivirus, and guess who drinks that. Well for Christ sake if someone has the antibodies for the virus his blood would work as a cure for those infected - something the writers overlooked. No. 3: Although Allison Dubois dreams all this and confronts the evil scientist on what he had done, she manages to overlook his trashing of the victims life when she dreams of his imminent death due to an allergic reaction to the antivirus he 'Drinks'. Really! Imagine if it was her daughter that gone and killed her self to save others from being infected, but instead she would be known as the woman that had tried to sell a deadly virus to terrorist? Fat chance she'd go to sleep with a cheesy grin on her face! I think the writers must realize the viewers of their programs are as brainless as they are. And lastly, it doesn't take $60 million to make sufficient antiviral for one disease, imagine the cost it would be for all the diseases we do have cures for? Anyway any cure would be useless once the disease mutates, and as you know virus mutates all the time. This show was so right-wing the only meaning it seems to be making is if someone you don't know comes to your door, you better shoot them - just in case...
Too much already.
lor_1 March 2010
WARNING: Contains Spoilers
I watch MEDIUM frequently, not a fan (=fanatic) but do enjoy the occasional episode. This one, however, magnified the faults not only of the show's basic premise but also its increasingly outlandish elaborations by the staff writers, and deserves a special place in TV hell.
The story was basically fun, a variation on the Wolfgang Petersen movie OUTBREAK where Dustin Hoffman unconvincingly dons the outer space gear of an epidemiologist in the field and even less convincingly saves the world for conspiracy theorists. Here our coincidence-prone heroine played to the hilt by a now hefty Patricia Arquette gets sick and inadvertently gets herself (and her family) briefly in trouble by giving the authorities info that might link it to a potential spread (by terrorists) of a deadly virus.
Nothing wrong with all that, but the writers stumble repeatedly. Whenever there is pertinent, no VITAL, information about the bad guys or the progression of the plot, Arquette dreams about it. The convenience of this lazy writing ploy is so obvious I don't know how even loyal viewers of the show can stand for it, week in, week out. Enemies of political correctness will no doubt be thrilled at the revelation that the villain of the piece turns out to be gay (or at least AC/DC), but that is also a ridiculous plot twist, meant to amplify his comeuppance after he gives his co-conspirator the familiar mafia style "kiss of death" in one of Arquette's dreams. The dead guy is even allowed to get a bit of sweet revenge in a completely absurd "wish it would happen" finale, typical of the series' anything-goes approach to psychic phenomena.
I date back TV's use of simple-minded "reveals" roughly 35 years or so to the somewhat forgotten "Petrocelli" lawyer series, where Barry Newman would explain the entire plot & secrets at the end of the episode in a nearly 10-minute block of flashbacks. This type of spoonfeeding has latterly given way to an endless sequence of rather idiotic forensic shows, where we get cheapo animation and microscopic closeups purporting to show us how crimes resulted in the various corpses avid TV addicts have come to expect as a regular part of their gruesome diet. Yes, B-movie schlockmeister H.G. Lewis of BLOOD FEAST infamy would be quite amused to see how the boob tube had adopted his once-shocking (47 years ago!) gore emphasis whole hog.
MEDIUM eschews this approach in favor of the constant DIRECT dissemination of crucial facts to the viewer via Arquette's dreams. Even her offspring are getting into the act via inheriting her psychic powers. It's all a fake "fly on the wall" approach that would make Conan Doyle turn over in his grave. Instead of dogged detective work, the protagonists are handed all the secret doings of the ne'er-do-wells on a silver platter each week and we get the vicarious thrill of seeing exactly what happened, by psychic methods. I'm willing to suspend disbelief enough to let Arquette "see" things, but frankly balk at her dreaming up exactly the right incriminating scenes, both before they happen and also in traditional flashback form. It's too easy, and ultimately a turnoff.
I watch MEDIUM frequently, not a fan (=fanatic) but do enjoy the occasional episode. This one, however, magnified the faults not only of the show's basic premise but also its increasingly outlandish elaborations by the staff writers, and deserves a special place in TV hell.
The story was basically fun, a variation on the Wolfgang Petersen movie OUTBREAK where Dustin Hoffman unconvincingly dons the outer space gear of an epidemiologist in the field and even less convincingly saves the world for conspiracy theorists. Here our coincidence-prone heroine played to the hilt by a now hefty Patricia Arquette gets sick and inadvertently gets herself (and her family) briefly in trouble by giving the authorities info that might link it to a potential spread (by terrorists) of a deadly virus.
Nothing wrong with all that, but the writers stumble repeatedly. Whenever there is pertinent, no VITAL, information about the bad guys or the progression of the plot, Arquette dreams about it. The convenience of this lazy writing ploy is so obvious I don't know how even loyal viewers of the show can stand for it, week in, week out. Enemies of political correctness will no doubt be thrilled at the revelation that the villain of the piece turns out to be gay (or at least AC/DC), but that is also a ridiculous plot twist, meant to amplify his comeuppance after he gives his co-conspirator the familiar mafia style "kiss of death" in one of Arquette's dreams. The dead guy is even allowed to get a bit of sweet revenge in a completely absurd "wish it would happen" finale, typical of the series' anything-goes approach to psychic phenomena.
I date back TV's use of simple-minded "reveals" roughly 35 years or so to the somewhat forgotten "Petrocelli" lawyer series, where Barry Newman would explain the entire plot & secrets at the end of the episode in a nearly 10-minute block of flashbacks. This type of spoonfeeding has latterly given way to an endless sequence of rather idiotic forensic shows, where we get cheapo animation and microscopic closeups purporting to show us how crimes resulted in the various corpses avid TV addicts have come to expect as a regular part of their gruesome diet. Yes, B-movie schlockmeister H.G. Lewis of BLOOD FEAST infamy would be quite amused to see how the boob tube had adopted his once-shocking (47 years ago!) gore emphasis whole hog.
MEDIUM eschews this approach in favor of the constant DIRECT dissemination of crucial facts to the viewer via Arquette's dreams. Even her offspring are getting into the act via inheriting her psychic powers. It's all a fake "fly on the wall" approach that would make Conan Doyle turn over in his grave. Instead of dogged detective work, the protagonists are handed all the secret doings of the ne'er-do-wells on a silver platter each week and we get the vicarious thrill of seeing exactly what happened, by psychic methods. I'm willing to suspend disbelief enough to let Arquette "see" things, but frankly balk at her dreaming up exactly the right incriminating scenes, both before they happen and also in traditional flashback form. It's too easy, and ultimately a turnoff.
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