(Season 4, Episode 11 – “Life on the Line”)
We’ve been at this “new Jim” thing for awhile now and I’m just not all that into it. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t think the show needed a dramatic change in the dynamics of its two leads anyway. I’ll admit, when I heard Jim was going to die, I kind of liked the idea of him being dead and an earthbound spirit. We could learn so much about the other side that Melinda only gets to glimpse.
They even teased us with a hint of some of that with Jim seeing his brother and the light and everything, but then they came up with this Jim/Sam Quantum Leap ripoff idea, and here we are. They’ve turned Melinda into a kind of weird stalker and Jim into something that isn’t quite Jim. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I think I’m going to have to declare the Jim/Sam tangent as a fail. While I’m at it, I’m going to categorize this week’s ghost story a fail as well.
I guess after more than 70 hauntings in one small town, the barrel starts to look pretty lean. Yes, I know children die every year in horrible lawn mower accidents, and I know that some of our readers may have lost someone dear to them in a lawn mower accident. I get that these are incredibly dangerous machines that shouldn’t be operated by children. Ask my mother why I was mowing the lawn at ten years old! But it still made for a pretty lame story.
Even throwing in the cliche of the parent taking the fall for their kid, and it didn’t get any better. Did dad really think the kids’ mother was going to hate her son for the accidental death of her other son? What kind of a woman does he think she is? Prisoners on death row for rape and murder have mothers who still love them. Maybe he was just flummoxed and confused because Nora Walker just told him that one of his kid’s was fathered by her late husband and now he has to figure out if its the dead one or the living one.
Ghost Whisperer has done a pretty good job with the waterworks factory these past few seasons, but I can certify that all eyes were dry (except for Melinda’s) upon this viewing. I can only hope that next week’s trip cross country with Sam/Jim will prove a little more eventful, or at least interesting. If nothing else, we can watch how creepy and stalker-like Melinda is toward him.
Clacked by Jason Hughes 
on Jan 10, 2009 @ 15:00 EST5EDT
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What sucks the most about the story is there was no need for Melinda to confront death. If the story had gone that she didn’t see Jim go into Sam, and somehow came together after that, it might have been more effective. Ah well, I still enjoy the stories and was freaked when what’s her name was walking into the ghosty house during the thunderstorm. I was in a dark bedroom all alone…scary! ;-)