Guest Author - Dani M. Sanders

Episode 3x17
Original air date: May 9, 2008

With this episode, viewers finally get some insight into Melinda's family situation, which has been hinted at since last season. At the beginning, she isn't even looking to cross over a ghost; she is trying to find out some information about her father Tom. The numbers that the private detective wrote on the folder at the end of the previous episode ("Deadbeat Dads") turned out to be the case number for a murder trial that was the last case Tom worked on before he disappeared. Melinda tracks down the family of the boy who was killed only to find that the boy's ghost had not crossed over.

This episode expands on the idea of ghosts possessing the living. The ghost of the boy that Melinda crosses over, Michael, occasionally takes over the bodies of other family members in order to talk to his mother and get hugs. Whenever Michael does this, however, he pushes the living person's spirit out; they call it spectral displacement. This also explains why Melinda has been seeing her father's spirit. He isn't dead at all, which we see when he shows up halfway through the episode. His spirit is being temporarily displaced by a ghost.

Melinda goes to her half brother Gabriel to ask him about the spectral displacement and whether he knew about it. She finds out that her father just got into town and is staying with Gabriel at a hotel. Tom looks weak and has a limp that he says he got in a car accident. He claims that he returned to Grandview because he heard that Melinda was looking for him and he wants to establish a new relationship with her. However, when Melinda leaves, Tom tells Gabriel that he only showed up to clean up the mess made by Melinda asking about Paul Eastman. Then we see that Tom has a gun in his bag. He seems surprised to see it there and starts yelling at an invisible spirit, leading us to believe that he does indeed know that he is being possessed.

Jim tells Melinda that he doesn't want her to see Tom again because all he will do is hurt her. Rick Payne also tries to dissuade Melinda from trusting her father, who in his eyes doesn't deserve her belief in him. I loved the way Jennifer Love Hewitt played Melinda in these scenes. The writers could have made Melinda bitter about the loss of her father, but they wrote her with a raw neediness that Hewitt played very well. Melinda convinces Jim that she just wants some closure and asks him to find out some background on his injuries. Jim finds out that Tom, under an assumed name, has been checked into the hospital several times for strange injuries but there was no car accident. The injuries were alarming enough for the ER doctor to think that Tom might be trying to commit suicide.

After a vision and a talk with Michael, Melinda figures out that Paul Eastman didn't murder Michael. He fell out of a tree while playing in the woods and died. Paul Eastman was able to see Michael's spirit, which led him to the body. Michael was trying to scare Melinda out of the house because he didn't want his mother to know that he died while climbing a tree, something he wasn't allowed to do. Since Paul Eastman found the body, he was convicted of murdering Michael. Once this is out in the open, Michael's mother is able to talk him into crossing over.

Melinda surmises that Paul Eastman is dead and gave her the vision about Michael. She believes he is trying to get revenge on Tom and her entire family for being unjustly incarcerated. Melinda rushes over to the hotel to warn Tom but hears a shot as soon as she gets to his door. In the final scene there is Melinda banging on Tom's door while blood is oozing out from under it.

This series has a tradition of becoming darker and more intense during the last few episodes of the season, and the writers are doing is again. I don't know about anyone else, but the more emotionally gripping episodes have me looking forward to the beginning of the new season every September, unlike other shows where I lose interest over the summer. With this lead-in, I know that the finale will be a whopper!