Is Medium Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot
Somewhat, 4 out of 10. It's a crime procedural where the clues arrive as nightmares, and some of the nightmares are unpleasant.
Ruling: It's a detective show with a psychic, so pick episodes one at a time and check them for animals.
Medium ran for seven seasons and 128 episodes. Allison Dubois helps a district attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, solve crimes, and her clues arrive as dreams. Her employer has to hope she sleeps well.
The premise, briefly
Allison Dubois uses her dreams and her conversations with the dead to help a Phoenix district attorney's office find missing people and catch killers, while raising three daughters with her husband Joe.
The verdict above is spoiler-free. Everything below, including the ending, stays hidden until you pick a depth.
Joe dies in a plane crash, and Allison spends the finale dreaming of a future where he survived. Joe's ghost tells her she invented that future and has to let go. She dies as an old woman in 2052 and reunites with him.
The dream in season 1, episode 6, early in the series: a man breaks into the Dubois home and tries to kidnap Allison's daughters, insisting he is a golem, a devil and a monster all at once. It turns out to be only a dream.
A dog dies in Medium. One episode has a dog tortured, and another has a dog dying after Allison dreams about it. A cat is killed in a third.
It is a crime procedural with dream sequences that run from odd to grim, and the animal cruelty is worth checking before each episode.
How it ends, the scene you're dreading, what happens to the dog, and the bottom line. About twenty seconds to read.
What actually happens
A wolf chases her through the Phoenix airport
Allison Dubois is a medium who works with District Attorney Manuel Devalos and Detective Lee Scanlon in Phoenix. In her dreams she sees past and current events and passes messages between the living and the dead. Season 1 sets the pattern. She dreams about a serial killer who abuses his victims after they die, a marriage counselor who nudges a young couple toward a murder-suicide, and a wolf that chases her through the Phoenix airport until she jumps off a roof. In episode 12, she, Devalos and Scanlon investigate a murder blamed on the ghost of a man they all saw executed. The scene people dread most comes early, in episode 6. Allison dreams that a man breaks into the Dubois house and tries to kidnap her daughters, and he insists he is a golem, a devil and a monster at the same time. It is a dream, and it is a single episode. The finale is a two-part case in which Allison and a Texas captain named Kenneth Push chase a killer who cuts out his victims' hearts and leaves a verse from Isaiah, 14:21, at every scene, while Joe and the kids get tired of her never being home.
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She sleepwalks onto a highway
Season 2 picks up three months after the finale, and Allison's dreams turn stranger and more personal. One dream traps her in a loop as a mental patient receiving barbaric experimental treatment. She sleepwalks into traffic on a crowded highway at night, and Joe has to pull her out. A recurring dream shows the staff of the DA's office being slaughtered, which makes her jumpy at work. Dr. Charles Walker, the psychopathic doctor from season 1, begins turning up in her dreams again, mentoring other doctors to murder. She helps save Tyler, a little boy who was drugged and shot and then abandoned at a waste dump, and she investigates the death of a coffee shop manager on the anniversary of her own miscarriage. An enigmatic man she thinks of as the Angel of Death shows up in dreams about her own demise. The season ends with her dreaming of a whole new life as a successful attorney, where she still has visions and her new husband dismisses them.
A birthday camcorder picks up a murder
In season 3, Allison and her daughter Bridgette, whose dreams are animated, both dream about several violent crimes. She relives the same awful day in her dreams, and every attempt to fix it makes things worse. When Dr. Walker reappears, she fears his spirit may be inhabiting the living. She buys Joe a camcorder for his birthday, and it starts showing her images that seem connected to a murder nobody is sure took place. She clashes with an FBI profiler named Agent Edward Cooper when her visions disagree with his findings, and she becomes spooked by a young boy's doll that appears to have pushed its owner toward killing. Allison dreams that a psychic killer she helped put away escapes and comes after her in her own home. A disgruntled coworker takes Joe and three others hostage at his office. In the season finale, Allison's powers are revealed, and she has to get the killer convicted by herself.
Allison gets a nine-month head start on the past
Season 4 opens with dreams of a boy who is snatched from a toy store. Allison completely loses her hearing when a deaf girl is kidnapped, and Joe steps in to help. Her nemesis, the defense attorney Larry Watt, hires her as a consultant. Her mother-in-law Marjorie visits with a secret and asks Allison not to tell Joe. An investigator named Cynthia Keener and Allison look into whether a missing local girl is connected to the kidnapping of Keener's daughter in 1998. Allison also investigates a couple's house where a baby drowned long ago, and Devalos is reinstalled as DA when Van Dyke's health fails. In season 5, Allison wakes under a highway overpass with no memory of the last six hours, prepares for the end of the world, and wakes up five years in the past, nine months pregnant and never having met Devalos. A man who thinks God wants her dead stalks her, and the ghost of a madman jumps into her mind and turns her dreams into nightmares. The finale ends with a brain tumor, a delayed surgery, a stroke and a coma, with doubts about whether she will survive.
The star witness is a pig
Season 6 begins with Allison slowly regaining her abilities after the coma. Ariel starts acting strangely, and Allison suspects a slain stripper may be possessing her. Allison becomes so fixated on rescuing an 11-month-old boy that she kidnaps him. She wears sunglasses that reveal numbers across people's foreheads, she hunts a serial killer known as the penny jar killer, and she installs a talking burglar alarm that she suspects is communicating with her daughter Marie. In the episode Dead Meat, she befriends a pig who may know where a missing animal rights activist went. In the season finale her brain tumor returns, and Ariel hears back from the university she wanted. In season 7, a missing homeless man appears in the dreams of Allison and Bridgette, and the two switch bodies. Allison is also haunted by flashes of a bomb going off at 9:18 a.m. in an office tower, on a day she can't identify. She also dreams that her brother Michael tries to kill himself, and the next day he turns out to be traveling to Phoenix for business.
The ending, explained
In the series finale, Joe dies when his plane goes down, and Allison hears it happen over the phone as he tells her he loves her with all his heart. Seven years later she is a successful lawyer working under Mayor Devalos, and her dreams and a drug smuggler suggest that Joe survived the crash. All of it turns out to be a dream that Joe himself gave her. She wakes in the present, and Joe's ghost tells her he really did die in the crash, and that she invented the smuggler case, the beach in Mexico and his survival because she could not accept losing him. He tells her to let go and then disappears while she pleads with him. The story then jumps 41 years to the year 2052, where an elderly Allison lives in a retirement home and listens to a message from her great granddaughter on the answering machine. She passes away minutes later and is shown reuniting with Joe, looking the way she did 41 years earlier.
The post-credits ruling
Nobody has confirmed whether any episode of Medium has a scene after the credits.
Questions people ask at 1am
The whole plot of Medium is hidden, ending included. It stays that way until you ask.
You don't have to sit through seven seasons of Medium to know how it ends. Install Scaredy Cat and it will blur the horror before you see it.
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