‘Ghost Whisperer’: Appearances are deceiving

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Nicole is gone. All obstacles are removed. And both Sam and Melinda know it. But they’re both freaked out by the freedom, and the intensity of their attraction to each other. It’s like they’re soulmates or something. How will our star-crossed Ghost Whisperer couple deal with all the delicious awkward tension?

They’ll go to a high school dance! Actually, they agree to chaperone a dance with Delia. There, they witness a guy groping on his date, much to her dismay. Then, another guy shows up, shoves the groper out of the way, and he and the girl run off together. After watching this exchange, Melinda sees a ghost appear, and has a vision of the room burning. Melinda finds out the girl, Kristy, recently lost her mom in a freak accident. Before the couple run out of the parking lot together, ghost mom says “I said stay away from her.”

Of course, the ghost doesn’t stay away from Melinda, and appears again at a very opportune time – just as Sam was leaning for their first kiss. Of course, Melinda hasn’t told Sam about her ghost whispering yet, so when he gets the wrong idea when Melinda starts trying to shoo ghost mom away. The mom demands Melinda keep Kristy away from the boy, Tim. True love thwarted again, drat! The next morning, Melinda pulls up mom’s obituary – Deborah Marks was a high powered lawyer who died after a weird accident at home. Even though there’s no mention of fire, Melinda mentions she’s still seeing ashes and fire. Melinda heads to Deborah’s house to talk to her husband, Doug, who was a judge.

Melinda tells Doug about Tim’s part in the evening, and Doug gets upset. It turns out Deborah had a soft spot for rehabilitating hard-luck kids, and tried to do so with Tim, but Tim wasn’t a good egg. Deborah appears and tells Melinda that she knows, now, that Tim was a lost cause. Melinda reaches out to touch a portrait of Deborah, and flashes to a vision of a safe behind it, open, with papers and things strewn about. In the vision, Deborah finds it open, and something missing, when she falls, and strikes a fireplace andiron, cracking her head. The fire Melinda has been seeing is something in the fireplace burning. However, Doug said that when he arrived at the house, nothing had been disturbed. Not so, Judge.

Covering all the bases with Delia and Eli, they cover the fact that if Deborah believed Tim murdered her, she would have said that – not just that he was a bad kid.

Ned, however, approaches Kristy at school, and finds out that Tim is just a friend, even though she did once have a crush on him. They aren’t together, but Deborah thought otherwise after Kristy kissed him once. And, Kristy says, if Tim was such an awful guy, then why did Deborah continue to support him? Kristy believes Deborah was in love with Tim herself. Welcome to Cougar Country!

Melinda tracks Tim down, because Grandview is the smallest town in the world, but Tim is angry and doesn’t want to talk. He says that Deborah was good to him, but that he knows now that there’s no such thing as charity, and that everyone wants something. Tim drives away, but his roommate approaches Melinda and says that Tim usually talked about her like his mentor, until one day when Doug dropped by looking for Tim… who happened to be away on a business trip with Deborah… without Doug knowing. Hmmm.

Melinda heads back to Deborah’s house, and as she pulls up, ashes start raining from the sky. Deborah appears to her, and tells Melinda that she asked her to do one thing – keep Tim away from Kristy. Melinda asks her if she had a relationship with Tim herself, but Deborah grows more menacing, and tells Melinda to stay away from her family now.

Yeah, sorry Deborah. That’s not going to happen.

Eli and Melinda now try and figure out a way to get to the safe. Doug, though, won’t allow it. So Deborah plays the ghost card. She tells Doug about the vision she had, and about the safe behind the portrait. Doug starts believing pretty fast, when Eli and Melinda tell them about Tim and Deborah. Doug says he hasn’t been in the safe since Deborah’s death, and he doesn’t know what could have been burned – even if it is evidence of her affair. At home that night, Melinda has another vision of letters burning in the fireplace. The next morning, Kristy comes to the store and tells Melinda that the police have taken Tim in, and his fingerprints were all over the safe. Kristy says that she was with Tim when Deborah died, and that she knows he didn’t do it. She tells Melinda to talk to Deborah about it, but Deborah appears and says that she wishes she could talk about it, but some secrets are better left alone.

Melinda and Eli head down to the police station to try and find out more, but Melinda is stuck on the fact that Deborah says Kristy doesn’t know how Tim is, and maybe what she burned could give more information about him. She heads to Tim’s mom’s house to try and learn more. Tim’s mom swears that Tim really is a good kid, and that even his original run-in with the law wasn’t true. While looking through Tim’s books, Melinda finds a copy of The Little Prince with the first page ripped out, and gets another flash of the burning paper in the fireplace. It was a letter written on the same first page, which came home with Tim from the hospital… when he was adopted by his mother at six months old. The book came home with Tim, and the letter was kept by Deborah in her safe.

Melinda then realizes that Tim isn’t just any kid, but Deborah’s son. She was 18, and gave him up for adoption before she married Doug. She was worried about revealing the truth to everyone when Doug was appointed a judge, and then Kristy got a crush on him. The weekend she spent away with him was just to be with him, but everyone got the wrong idea. As for who had gone through the safe, she had found it open, and the missing page from the book in the fire. She replaced everything, and meant to keep it quiet, but then she fell and died.

Melinda approaches Kristy to find out the truth. She was the one who went through the safe, and as Tim tried to stop her, he found the letter, and burned it himself. Deborah appears, and realizes that Tim wasn’t the one who broke into the safe, but Kristy. Deborah realizes that all the lies hurt more than the truth, and Melinda tells Kristy that Tim was Deborah’s son.

Later, Tim gets released from jail, and tells Melinda that he read The Little Prince a thousand times, and he always wondered where the first page was. He believed Deborah kept his true identity a secret from him, and her family, because she was ashamed of him, but Deborah appears, and tell him that’s not true. She was scared from the beginning and couldn’t stop being scared. Tim tells her how grateful he is for everything Deborah did, from the adoption to the second chance, and Deborah goes into the light.

But back to the good stuff.

During the whole ghost storyline, Melinda stands Sam up on their date. She leaves a bunch of messages trying to explain away, but Sam doesn’t listen to them, choosing to believe instead that Melinda isn’t ready for a relationship. As he tells her that it’s ok, he understands, she shuts up his doubts, and him, by kissing him. And they head out on a real date together. Sigh.

Thoughts…

• Hey! It finally happened! Their real “first” kiss! I’m all a-twitter.

• And… I’m finally used to writing about “Jim” as “Sam”. Which means this storyline must have grown on me somewhere along the line. Maybe it’s just that all those Valentines candy hearts I’ve been eating.
• Anyone else think Ned and Kristy were a cute couple?
• The ghost story was written well, even if I did figure out the ending 20 minutes into it. The first page of the book twist was a nice touch, though.