The Medium – ReCap – Season 5, Episode 2 – Things To Do In Phoenix When You Are Dead – air date 7/28/09. This weeks episode starts out with Allison dreaming about an encounter gone wrong between a man and a woman, where he unintentionally strangles her. He then tosses her body over an embankment, and throws a large stone down on her when he realizes that she is still alive. This is all observed by a dead man.
Allison goes to the scene of the murder, where she verifies that the victim is the same person that she saw in her dream. She looks into the crowd and see a man – the same man that was observing the killing. She goes over to talk to him, but he does not respond – and then he disappears! Something else is strange – all of the victim’s fingernails have been torn off!
After checking on the Internet, and not being able to find who the dead man at the crime scene was, Allison goes to the hospital and talks a nurse into looking it up for her. As she leaves the hospital, she sees the man sitting on a bench, watching a woman and children play. She tries to talk to him, and he ignores her. Finally he starts talking – he is alive, not dead! He tells Allison to leave him and his family alone.
Allison has another dream, where the person who committed the crime receives a blackmail call at work. He is instructed to open an envelope on his deck, which contains one of the missing fingernails! Allison sees the woman making the call clearly – and see the man from the crime scene – the doctor – in the background. To top it off, the man appears in Allison’s home at night, and is seen by her oldest daughter, Ariel.
She goes to the hospital to talk to him. He admits that he has a fatal illness, and that he found out about it by leaving his body, and then returning. To pay off his school loans, so that his wife is not burdened, he and another doctor (the woman who placed t he blackmail call) have been killing him, allowing him to wander around and look for people to blackmail, and then bringing him back to life.
He gives Allison the remaining fingernails, which have enough evidence on them to convict the real murderer (the woman scratched his face as he was strangling her). The female doctor talks him into doing one more “out of body” experience, where she decides not to bring him back. As a spirit, he can see her and what she does. He can also talk to Allison. Between them, they manage to have his wife retrieve $500,000 that the female doctor is holding.
There was an interesting sub-theme to this episode- Ariel is very excited that her health class is handing out pseudo babies, and teaming up the boys and the girls to raise them as parents. However, every time she is near the baby, she can barely move. Her father finds out in a very unique way that the “father” of the baby was doing drugs when it was his turn to watch the baby. Very fatherly warning to shape up, or answer to father! Umm – There was a pseudo divorce here, also, which means that the pseudo baby’s pseudo father has full responsibility of the child for the entire semester!