TV Verdict

You ever watch an episode of a series that just feels “off”? The pacing is a bit weird or the secondary story feels out of place or maybe you just can’t put your finger on it. That’s how I felt about this week’s episode. Allison starts the episode off with a member of a case she’s about to get helping Allison’s daughter aim a gun at she and Joe. She wakes up and claims she just had a bad dream and that’s all it was because it was something that just couldn’t happen. Joe rolled back over to sleep relieved. These opening dream sequences are always amusing.Sure enough, when Allison heads into the office the woman from her dreams is there in the elevator with her. It turns out that this woman and her brother are family friends of Devalos and they need help finding their mother who has disappeared. Allison’s dreams, of course, appear to be betraying her because they lead her in a direction that doesn’t correspond with the evidence that Devalos and Scanlan are finding. When the reveals start coming, they are actually fairly entertaining. Allison’s reaction to a dream where the woman and her brother are getting intimate is hilarious.

It turns out that the two of them killed off the sister a while ago and the man’s girlfriend was able to slip into the role of the sister, perhaps because the mother had Alzheimer’s or something similar that made it easy to trick her. Eventually, that doesn’t work in their favor and they have to take care of the mother too. The problem is that they don’t count on a psychic figuring things out. The case of the week is actually fairly entertaining but the secondary stories aren’t as successful.

There are almost too many things happening in this episode because none of it seems to have enough depth to matter. Joe’s irritating sister shows up on his doorstep because her husband is cheating on her. Then Allison has to deal with the ghost of Joe’s father paying her visits to tell her that his daughter needs to go back to her husband and Allison has to help make that happen. At the same time, Allison’s oldest daughter is giving her grief over a ski trip with a bunch of 18 year old boys. Oh and there’s still that dream of her daughter with a gun at the beginning of the episode. The dream could have been more of a symbolic thing but when the episode ends with a “to be continued” the thought occurs to me that maybe that dream meant something else altogether. The “to be continued” stinger seems like a bit much for this episode. The case of the week was taken care of so the only lingering story is that of Allison’s oldest daughter slipping off on a ski trip that she was told she couldn’t go on. That story seems so secondary it just doesn’t deserve the sort of cliffhanger ending it was given.

The episode seemed to lack focus due to all of the smaller stories that were happening along with the case of the week. Not the best directed episode of the series, that’s for sure. There were some good moments in the episode but the lack of focus made it a little tough to invest in.