TVSquad

(S05E05) The Dead Zone is losing its cohesiveness. At least during the early seasons of the show, there was a coherent subplot to all of the shows. The current season's shows seem to be stand alone, but they also seem to be marginally relevant. They are, instead, rather heavy-handed and preachy. Looking back through the episodes from earlier in the season, the most compelling one seems to be the season premiere, in which Greg Stillson's fiancee is (apparently) killed by snake venom right before her own wedding. But instead of continuing with anything about Stillson, none of the other episodes are the least bit inter-related. I know I am going on and on about this, but I do like for my television shows to at least acknowledge that there have been other episodes before that one, and that there will be another episode next week. I am not all about stand alone television.

It is interesting that last week's episode was called "Articles of Faith," when this week's episode, "The Inside Man," was actually about the attempted robbery of a religious relic.

The episode starts with John Smith having a vision of Reverend Gene Purdy pointing a gun at John, who is wearing the black ski mask of a robber. John tells Purdy he has thirty seconds to do the right thing.

Fast forward to Purdy and John in a museum. Purdy shows John a small bone, which is reputed to to be the finger tip of John the Baptist. John points out that it's not like you can do DNA tests to make sure, and Purdy makes a joke about how John could touch it-- imagine what he would see. John reaches out and touches the glass around the case and sees it shatter.

This episode has a lot of false starts. John has several visions that involve the guards at the museum getting shot by robbers. One of the guards (the one with the mustache, of course!) is helping the robbers, so John changes things around, gets the guards out of the way, and takes a guard's place with the the robbers simply by putting on a black mask. Apparently, the robbers don't know each other, despite the fact that one of them saw the complicit guard at the beginning of the episode, and he looks nothing like Johnny Smith...

In a sideline, during the power outage that forces the museum to be cleared out, Walt Bannerman and Johnny's son J.J. get separated. J.J. ends up hiding in the exhibit room where the artifact is displayed, and takes pictures of the robbers setting up a timer around the artifact. Then, J.J. ends up locked in a room with the mustached security guard, who has been taken out of the way by being knocked out by a pipe, after he rigs the electricity so it will go out. However, compared to other episodes in which J.J.'s safety leads Walt and John to behave nearly irrationally in their concern to recover him, nobody seems overly concerned that people are running around the museum with black masks and guns and J.J. is missing. So, why have this subplot? Well, we'll find out later.

The robbers lower the temperature of the bullet-proof glass around the relic, and shatter the glass (check), but then they still have to get the relic out of a stand which protects it. One of the robbers is a woman with a large tattoo on her arm, and she sticks her arm up inside the stand and just as John wonders whether she will be able to get her arm back out (let alone the relic), her arm gets stuck.

Meanwhile, John touches the oldest of the robbers, and has a vision of the robber as a child hiding under an altar at a Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Nazis with big guns have infiltrated the church, and four monks are on their knees. The Nazis shoot the monks, pull the child out from under the altar, and take the relic from him. Now, as an older man, he is here to rectify an old wrong.

This is one of the underlying themes of this episode. I admit that I found that to be the most interesting part of the episode. I love Orthodoxy, and find it fascinating. However, the tone of the episode was very sympathetic to this older robber, who is now a monk. However, in the original visions of the crime, two security guards were killed by the masked robbers, and I was under the impression that the old man was the one who killed them-- he is the only robber with a Ukrainian accent. And I must admit that I am not a big fan of religious jihad. If it is not okay for some people in the world to commit crimes in the name of their religious beliefs, making waving guns around okay, then it is not okay for older monks who feel they have been wronged by Nazis.

Then, we go on to find out that the relic that almost costs the female robber her arm? Is a fake. The reason J.J. was locked in the room with the security guard was so he could take the guard's walky talky and distract one of the robbers at a key moment in which they all have guns aimed at each other, and John is able to disarm one of them (while ignoring the fact that his son has just cried for help over the walky talky).

Reverend Purdy has kept the real artifact for himself, because he is having a crisis of faith, and wants John to touch it for him and tell Purdy what John the Baptist saw when he looked at Jesus. So, John, who doesn't even have faith to speak of, gives Purdy a short lecture on faith being belief in things unproven. The monk says that he knows the relic is authentic in his heart, not his mind. So, of course, Purdy gives the relic to the monk-- without John touching it.

The episode ends with the monk returning the relic to his parish, and a lot of people bowing their heads and crossing themselves (and Orthodox cross themselves from right to left, not left to right, and I was watching, and I think they did it correctly.)

But I still disagree with the basic tenet that if you have religious faith and act under that conviction that your faith condones your actions-- that when you are acting under a Higher Law, you can get away with hurting innocent people, or stealing things, and it's just okay. After all, last week on The Dead Zone, a reverend was commiting race crimes based on HIS religious beliefs-- obviously THAT was not okay. So, why have this episode? Does it further the show in any important ways? Are the writers trying to come to terms with their own crises of faith?

I think it's more likely that the show is monopolizing on the current fervor over The Da Vinci Code: Anything, any relics, any artifacts, that harken back to the time of Christ, are hot entertainment commodities right now. So is faith. These are interesting times we are living in-- and watching it make its way into the mainstream media (well, as in television, even though USA is still a cable channel) is interesting-- but the execution of these story lines is too clunky, too preachy, and too pointless. All of these episodes need to start adding up to something, instead of resonating into the vacuum of one lost episode, hidden among the many.