‘Ghost Whisperer’ takes the leap–five years ahead

This is spoiler central here, so if you want to remain in the dark, I’d suggest you stop reading now.

image from fancast.com

I’d heard rumors. Now it’s official. Ghost Whisperer will be jumping ahead five years next season, just in time to show off her new baby Aiden–and his powers.

According to the article (and their panel at Comic Con), the show will premiere on September 25, the same date Melinda’s baby is due, if you recall from the season finale (guess what? I was right in my prediction.). After the birth, the show then jumps ahead five years. Things to note: Sam’s a doctor, Ned’s in college, Delia’s dating, and Melinda and Eli? Well, they’re just getting their ghost on. With the help of wee Aiden.

So what do we think of that? They’re definitely not the first show to make the jump. The first successful jump was One Tree Hill, skipping over those awkward college years so they could get the group back together with ease. Plus, hey, it added some mystery in the mix, leaving viewers wondering what’s in the mix.

Mystery’s the name of the game for Desperate Housewives, who also made the five-year jump last season. I’d say that show had a little bit of a more rocky start. It was nice to have the question of what happened in the past five years, but it didn’t make for that great of a season. Rather predictable and a little slow moving.

I guess I’d be remissed if I didn’t at least mention Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. I handed the torch of “firsts” to OTH before realizing that Dawson’s Creek and Felicity both jumped ahead for the finale and for part of the final season (respectively, though Felicity really went back and forth). It’s hard to include them in this category, though, since Felicity’s time warp was a little odd, even for the show that it was, and Dawson’s Creek was a one-time thing.

Anyway, I’m not sure how Ghost Whisperer fits in the mix. It’s got the supernatural edge, but it’s sure not a teenage drama. I was actually most interested to see how Melinda juggled new motherhood with her whispering, and it looks like for the most part, we’re missing out. Instead, she’ll be five years in, and while he should be a cutie (please let him be a cutie!), the struggle might not be as prominent.

But hey, ghosts in preschool? That could be a whole episode, right?

It should definitely be a different turn of events for the show, though I’m wondering how successful it will really be. It’s definitely a risky move, but hey, they did kill off Jim, put him in another body, and let him reunite with Melinda, so who’s to say risk is bad?

Doctor Who: Next time, take the Tube

KT has a soft spot for red London busses, but prefers that they not take her to barren desert planets.

DOCTOR WHO:  2009 special, “Planet of the Dead”

Its not every day that your average London bus driver picks up a cat burgler and an alien adventurer.  But then, it’s not every day that this average London bus driver goes into a tunnel and comes out in the middle of a sandy desert.

Like the Christmas romp, this one is nice and fluffy (even more, fluffy, really).  It gets silly at times, but it never gets dark or depressing.

The Doctor and company are dealing with what is essentially a desert-island plot:  Where are we, how did we get here, and how do we get home?  Oh, and are we going to have to defend ourselves from canabalistic natives while we’re here?

I love the shot early on of a screen showing the bus and its passengers from afar, with a non-human hand resting next to the screen.  An audience trained in sci-fi genre conventions knows that that will be our enemy of the week — and that’s exactly what doesn’t happen.  The Doctor and Christina meet a couple of aliens, and while there is some initial suspicion, they turn out to be stuck in pretty much the same mess.  Despite being bug-eyed aliens, they’re allies, and they give our heroes some vital pieces of information and equipment.

The villains of the piece turn out to be a force of nature in the same way that a plague of locusts is.  No malice, no plan other than basic survival — they just happen to be the natural predators of pretty much everything.  I thought the swarm was better handled than the one in season four’s library two-parter, but I did get a little hung up on the mechanics of the swarm.  I couldn’t help wondering how quickly they would be able to take down every life-bearing planet out there (if they did in this planet in about a year) — and how they always manage to tear the wormhole such that it leads to another life-bearing planet — and how many such planets are there in the Whoniverse — and what would happen to them if they transported themselves to a planet with no atmosphere, or to open space, or inside a star. Total extinction, wouldn’t you think?

As for the humans, I was surprised by the guest cast:  I expected to think that Michelle Ryan was dreadful and Lee Evans was hilarious, but was wrong on both counts. Not that I’ve seen a lot of either actor — but Ryan was better here than in Bionic Woman, and while I loved Evans as Leo Bloom in The Producers a few years back, I thought his Malcolm was thoroughly annoying.  (And yes, that’s also Michelle Ryan as Nimueh in Merlin, but I saw this before I started watching Merlin.)

I liked that Christina was eager to take charge and that she seemed to know how to go about it, although I could have done without the constant comments about what a good team she and the Doctor made. (Show, don’t tell, please!)  I wouldn’t say that I liked her, what with the sense of entitlement and the large scale kleptomania, but she was useful, she was witty, and she was cool and collected.  A good one-shot character.

Malcolm, on the other hand, I just thought was over the top.  Maybe all the eight-year-olds loved him.  Although, I did enjoy the way he and the rest of UNIT (an organization that has worked closely with the Doctor in the past but not so much lately) reacted like fangirls in the presence of Robert Pattinson when the Doctor showed up.

The ending felt overwrought, though. For a man who usually prefers to slip away quietly, the Doctor’s been getting an awful lot of accolades recently! I did like the exchange where Captain Magumbo asked if he would stick around to help with the paperwork and he kind of laughed at her. Magumbo appeared in last year’s “Turn Left” and I really liked that they brought her back.  Nice to have a smart, no-nonsense female leader.

Christina, however… How exactly does she think she’s going to escape in a bright red flying bus?  My husband joked that the RAF will probably have an escort on that thing pretty damn quick. I suppose the Doctor didn’t want to turn her into the police, having already admitted to her that he stole the TARDIS all those years ago.  So instead they had him send her off, but then help her get away — I suppose to find further adventure and create more chaos and steal more priceless historical artifacts.  Argh.