(Season 4, Episode 11 – “Life on the Line”)

We’ve been at this “new Jim” thing for awhile now and I’m just not all that into it. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t think the show needed a dramatic change in the dynamics of its two leads anyway. I’ll admit, when I heard Jim was going to die, I kind of liked the idea of him being dead and an earthbound spirit. We could learn so much about the other side that Melinda only gets to glimpse.

They even teased us with a hint of some of that with Jim seeing his brother and the light and everything, but then they came up with this Jim/Sam Quantum Leap ripoff idea, and here we are. They’ve turned Melinda into a kind of weird stalker and Jim into something that isn’t quite Jim. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I think I’m going to have to declare the Jim/Sam tangent as a fail. While I’m at it, I’m going to categorize this week’s ghost story a fail as well.

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(Season 4, Episode 9 – “Pieces of You”)

I was on board the idea of killing Jim to shake up the show. I thought him being a ghost who hung around Melinda and helped her out from the other side was nothing short of brilliant. It would allow us to learn more about the other side and what the ghosts experienced there. We would get the emotional torment of Melinda not being able to get any closure or move on because Jim was still there.

We’d get to see their love transcend death and become something far greater, though much more morbid. And we got that … for exactly one episode. Now we’ve got Jim 2.0 and it’s Eric Green from Jericho. While it’s nice to see Kenneth Mitchell getting some regular work, playing the mirror image to Jim’s Dr. Sam Beckett isn’t much of a gig. Not to mention that the whole situation is just too weird.

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CBS

(Season 4, Episode 7)

Thanks a lot, guys. That had to be one of the most gut-wrenching hours on television in recent memory. Jim and Melinda had what is quite possibly the most perfect romance in the history of television. Their love for one another was absolute and complete, and it was the heart and soul of this series. When that heart was ripped from Melinda’s chest with Jim’s accidental death last week, the question became where do you go from here?

We know that Melinda can see earthbound spirits, and we knew that she’d seen Jim at the moment of his death. But it raises so many complicated questions. Of course, it would be difficult for Jim to leave Melinda and cross over. Since he can still interact with her because she can see him, how can he possibly understand that the best thing to do for her is to move on. We know that ghosts are often confused shortly after death, and as lucid as Jim seemed tonight, I think he’s still a little fuzzy on some things.

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