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I was watching the show The Inside this week, and thinking about it, and it made me think about how
A friend of mine watches Medium, a show I had little interest in, but I tried to watch it once. This is one of those shows where the main character is a psychic who solves crime. It’s not that I have a problem with psychic characters across the board, and while I’ve never seen The Dead Zone, I didn’t mind that conceit in the book, probably because Johnny’s power was so clearly defined, and also because it more gave him a mystery to solve rather than solved a mystery.
Medium is no such show, based on what I saw. It’s just that typical “I have a vision now” thing, which annoys me for a few reasons. First, this show as billed as being based on a “real” psychic detective. Afaik, psychic detectives have a track record of zero when it comes to actually solving crimes, so I really don’t like seeing it suggested that how it works on the show is real. To me they seem a lot like any other phony medium-they profit from other peoples’ pain. Because when your loved one’s been killed or abducted it’s hard to say no to any offer of help, so psychics get an opportunity to grab attention for themselves with their powers. Their visions work on TV because they're fictional.
Secondly, just from a suspension of disbelief standpoint, if you can talk to the ghost of the murdered guy why doesn’t he just friggin’ tell you who killed him and how and be done with it? Why the random visions just obscure enough that you can go off in the wrong direction?
Thirdly, fictionally speaking, it seems like such a cheat. Instead of having the mystery follow logical steps we viewers can follow, you get to the next point by sticking in a new vision that you made up.
For me, this kind of thing is just so much less satisfying than the many shows on the air that don’t cheat, like CSI and Numb3rs, where even if I don’t understand everything it’s explained to me so I can follow the concept. I sometimes wonder if I’ve gotten less patient with the psychic stuff because I’m currently living in a country where so many people seem to consider logic a dirty word, where people are honestly voting that their public school should teach nonsense next to scientific fact and call it a “fair” way of letting students “decide what they want to believe.” Because, apparently, truth always depends simply on what you decide to believe-there’s no such thing as a fact, certainly not as the basis for any scientific idea. Unless you’re talking about God, of course. God is true and if you don’t believe in him you’re lying or you hate him.
That’s what I think of when these shows invariably dumb down the people trying to solve the case scientifically while having them pooh-pooh the psychic’s ideas, only to be proved wrong in the end. Everybody's just helpless waiting for the messages from beyond. I remember in the episode I watched, for instance, Patricia Arquette goes into this whole monologue about the crime from looking at a crime photo while all the other agents gape, open-mouthed, and insist it looks like it happened a completely different way. I’m thinking, okay, I’ve watched many episodes of CSI and I think those guys would have been able to come up with all this stuff without Patricia Arquette. Why aren't there any where the psychic's completely wrong and the other guys solve it? This is supposed to be the real world, after all.
So that leads me to The Inside…a friend of mine really likes the main character of this show, but I have a hard time with her (the main character, not my friend). She was abducted as a kid and held prisoner for however long before escaping. Unfortunately it seems like this has then given her magical powers to solve crime. She doesn’t literally have magical powers, it’s just it always seems like she comes to her conclusions because she’s special. The serial killers all know it; they all find out she was abducted as a kid. She’s supposed to be a profiler but the subtext, imo, is always just that she has this awesome ability because of her experience, like a magical gift. The other agents are just there to be other agents, and either agree with her or be wrong. Whichever they do, it's clear that so far she's more important...which is probably why she's so often abducted and has to be saved. That and that she's pretty.
For instance, in the most recent ep the killer was a young girl, and for some reason this chick was the only one to figure that out. (Ironically, this exact story was done on Law & Order years ago and the police and lawyers did not need any special intuition to figure it out.) She said when she looks into the girls eyes she “sees the man who abducted me.” There were some logical reasons for not suspecting the handyman, but iirc, she had to come up with those too, after already thinking it was the girl. It's just all about that inner evil detector.
Because she’s special, she naturally therefore winds up going her own way a lot of the time. Like in this ep she stupidly decides to confront the girl on her own, in a treehouse. Yes, a treehouse-anybody shocked somebody wound up falling out of it? She tells the girl she knows she did it, and the girl flings herself out and accuses the agent of pushing her. It’s very hard for me as a viewer feeling this was just a stupid thing for her to do-isn’t it smarter to not tell her you suspect her as opposed to say, giving her a heads-up and time to hide evidence? Are you really supposed to do stuff like that on your own?
Leaving aside the fact that it’s a little troubling the way her abduction often seems like a combination lucky career break and proof of her innate specialness, it just makes her less interesting to me. It could be cool seeing how her experience makes her who she is and effects her if she was just a regular profiler and investigator (it could also be the source of endless hand-writing, of course). Fox Mulder, for instance, did not have any special powers. His sister’s abduction made him look at things differently, but he was still just a person good at his job, not a psychic. He really needed the sceptic.
So I guess in the end that’s the thing that keeps me, personally, from really liking this show, beyond maybe that it’s just not all that great. I just don’t look forward to watching her get the right answer the way I like watching, say, Charlie get an idea and explain it to Don, while Larry and Alan give intelligent advice. I guess part of it for me is that while I'm fine with stories where there are no answers, if there are answers I'd rather have them arrived at in some way that doesn't rely on someone's psychic gift. Sure math might seem like magic to me, but I know it's not. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Charlie spends more time learning all the things his skills *can't* control than what they can. Give me William Peterson looking into a microscope or David Krumholtz frowning at a blackboard over Patricia Arquette or Rachel Nichols staring at the camera any day.
A friend of mine watches Medium, a show I had little interest in, but I tried to watch it once. This is one of those shows where the main character is a psychic who solves crime. It’s not that I have a problem with psychic characters across the board, and while I’ve never seen The Dead Zone, I didn’t mind that conceit in the book, probably because Johnny’s power was so clearly defined, and also because it more gave him a mystery to solve rather than solved a mystery.
Medium is no such show, based on what I saw. It’s just that typical “I have a vision now” thing, which annoys me for a few reasons. First, this show as billed as being based on a “real” psychic detective. Afaik, psychic detectives have a track record of zero when it comes to actually solving crimes, so I really don’t like seeing it suggested that how it works on the show is real. To me they seem a lot like any other phony medium-they profit from other peoples’ pain. Because when your loved one’s been killed or abducted it’s hard to say no to any offer of help, so psychics get an opportunity to grab attention for themselves with their powers. Their visions work on TV because they're fictional.
Secondly, just from a suspension of disbelief standpoint, if you can talk to the ghost of the murdered guy why doesn’t he just friggin’ tell you who killed him and how and be done with it? Why the random visions just obscure enough that you can go off in the wrong direction?
Thirdly, fictionally speaking, it seems like such a cheat. Instead of having the mystery follow logical steps we viewers can follow, you get to the next point by sticking in a new vision that you made up.
For me, this kind of thing is just so much less satisfying than the many shows on the air that don’t cheat, like CSI and Numb3rs, where even if I don’t understand everything it’s explained to me so I can follow the concept. I sometimes wonder if I’ve gotten less patient with the psychic stuff because I’m currently living in a country where so many people seem to consider logic a dirty word, where people are honestly voting that their public school should teach nonsense next to scientific fact and call it a “fair” way of letting students “decide what they want to believe.” Because, apparently, truth always depends simply on what you decide to believe-there’s no such thing as a fact, certainly not as the basis for any scientific idea. Unless you’re talking about God, of course. God is true and if you don’t believe in him you’re lying or you hate him.
That’s what I think of when these shows invariably dumb down the people trying to solve the case scientifically while having them pooh-pooh the psychic’s ideas, only to be proved wrong in the end. Everybody's just helpless waiting for the messages from beyond. I remember in the episode I watched, for instance, Patricia Arquette goes into this whole monologue about the crime from looking at a crime photo while all the other agents gape, open-mouthed, and insist it looks like it happened a completely different way. I’m thinking, okay, I’ve watched many episodes of CSI and I think those guys would have been able to come up with all this stuff without Patricia Arquette. Why aren't there any where the psychic's completely wrong and the other guys solve it? This is supposed to be the real world, after all.
So that leads me to The Inside…a friend of mine really likes the main character of this show, but I have a hard time with her (the main character, not my friend). She was abducted as a kid and held prisoner for however long before escaping. Unfortunately it seems like this has then given her magical powers to solve crime. She doesn’t literally have magical powers, it’s just it always seems like she comes to her conclusions because she’s special. The serial killers all know it; they all find out she was abducted as a kid. She’s supposed to be a profiler but the subtext, imo, is always just that she has this awesome ability because of her experience, like a magical gift. The other agents are just there to be other agents, and either agree with her or be wrong. Whichever they do, it's clear that so far she's more important...which is probably why she's so often abducted and has to be saved. That and that she's pretty.
For instance, in the most recent ep the killer was a young girl, and for some reason this chick was the only one to figure that out. (Ironically, this exact story was done on Law & Order years ago and the police and lawyers did not need any special intuition to figure it out.) She said when she looks into the girls eyes she “sees the man who abducted me.” There were some logical reasons for not suspecting the handyman, but iirc, she had to come up with those too, after already thinking it was the girl. It's just all about that inner evil detector.
Because she’s special, she naturally therefore winds up going her own way a lot of the time. Like in this ep she stupidly decides to confront the girl on her own, in a treehouse. Yes, a treehouse-anybody shocked somebody wound up falling out of it? She tells the girl she knows she did it, and the girl flings herself out and accuses the agent of pushing her. It’s very hard for me as a viewer feeling this was just a stupid thing for her to do-isn’t it smarter to not tell her you suspect her as opposed to say, giving her a heads-up and time to hide evidence? Are you really supposed to do stuff like that on your own?
Leaving aside the fact that it’s a little troubling the way her abduction often seems like a combination lucky career break and proof of her innate specialness, it just makes her less interesting to me. It could be cool seeing how her experience makes her who she is and effects her if she was just a regular profiler and investigator (it could also be the source of endless hand-writing, of course). Fox Mulder, for instance, did not have any special powers. His sister’s abduction made him look at things differently, but he was still just a person good at his job, not a psychic. He really needed the sceptic.
So I guess in the end that’s the thing that keeps me, personally, from really liking this show, beyond maybe that it’s just not all that great. I just don’t look forward to watching her get the right answer the way I like watching, say, Charlie get an idea and explain it to Don, while Larry and Alan give intelligent advice. I guess part of it for me is that while I'm fine with stories where there are no answers, if there are answers I'd rather have them arrived at in some way that doesn't rely on someone's psychic gift. Sure math might seem like magic to me, but I know it's not. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Charlie spends more time learning all the things his skills *can't* control than what they can. Give me William Peterson looking into a microscope or David Krumholtz frowning at a blackboard over Patricia Arquette or Rachel Nichols staring at the camera any day.
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However, my vote for a new show that looks even more ridiculous is David Boreantz's "Bones." The one with the anthropologist. Oh dear.