Absolute Knave

The Dead Zone: Playing God (2003) – Michael Vejar

The big hook to this episode is that it features Ally Sheedy, who of course starred with Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club back when they were both quite a bit younger, in a substantial guest part as an old high school friend of Johnny. It’s worth it all to hear a middle-aged Hall talk about being a “skinny little nerd” in high-school and how Sheedy’s character was too much of a “head banger” for him. The “ain’t that cool?” quotient gets upped even further by a brief cameo by John Kapelos, also of the Breakfast Club. But the real performance is by Lochlyn Munro as the hell-raising, fast-living brother of Sheedy’s character. The essential dilemma of this episode is that Johnny’s visions seem to indicate the death of first one of the siblings and then the other. As he tries to intervene and tweak the circumstances to save them, he finds that it seems impossible to save them both. Is Johnny going to have to choose which of his friends will live and which will die? Even worse, is he going to have to play an active part in the death of one of them? This is a fantastic episode. It leaps instantly to the head of my list. It’s a gut-wrenching meditation on the heavy burden Johnny bears. The moral dilemma, the hard choice at the center of the episode, is a classic: who is more worth saving, an amoral, irresponsible jerk or a kind, good and generous person? In the end, how do we rank the value of a life? Hall’s performance is anguished and, toward the conclusion of the episode, when he realizes the action he has to undertake, he reaches something like the best performance he’s yet given on the show. The conclusion is a painful one and we’re made to understand the cost of any life, but it’s also a hopeful one as we understand the natural rhythm of the universe and the ways in which death is not the end for a life. It’s a moving testament to just how good episodic television can be.

The Dead Zone: Zion (2003) – Michael Robison

To this point, Bruce, Johnny’s physical therapist and friend, has been my least favorite of the recurring characters. He doesn’t have the emotional depth of the other recurring characters and is often given little to do besides be a sidekick/comic relief. His role is less well-defined than any of the other main roles. Well, I should caveat that I still prefer him to Dana Bright, the annoying, sexually voracious reporter who seems to have crawled out of some much worse show and into this one, but Bruce isn’t a character I have much affinity for. In this episode, Johnny accompanies Bruce back home to a small Southern town in order to attend the funeral of Bruce’s father, who has been the pastor of a small evangelical church there. The episode’s premise is a very weird one; after the funeral, Bruce and Johnny are left alone at the casket for a moment and when Bruce touches his father’s body at the same time as Johnny touches him, Bruce ends up getting transported into a weird vision/alternate reality. In this alternate reality, Bruce never left home, never became estranged from his father and is, hilariously, a preacher in his father’s church. As Bruce tries to adjust to this new world, he’s given the chance to make peace with his father in a way he was never able to actually do. There are some fine dramatic scenes between Bruce and his father, who is ably played by Lou Gossett Jr. who manages to create a character who is simultaneously too hard on his son and yet filled with love for him. Late in the episode, alternate universe Bruce tracks down alternate universe Johnny and Hall appears as a very different Johhny, twitchy, hard-edged, violent. The show seems to be making the point that it was Bruce’s destiny, or his calling, to speak in the spiritual language of this episode, to be Johnny’s friend and that without Bruce’s friendship Johnny would have spiraled down into a sociopathic mess. I suppose that’s a fair point and, in some sense, I appreciate the show’s effort to get way outside the box on this one and to give some depth to a character that hasn’t had a whole lot. But even Bruce is at a loss when trying to explain to Johnny what happened, once everyone’s back in the real universe; it was like Bruce was inside one of Johnny’s visions, albeit a vision that Johnny wasn’t even actually having himself. I beg your pardon? Seriously? Experimentation is fine, but let’s not just completely break the rules of the show. This is not a good direction for Johnny’s visions to go, if you ask me. I hope this was a one off. It was a fairly entertaining episode, but I’m philosophically opposed to the foundational premise of it. At least Lou Gossett is a lot of fun.

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