Medium Dreams

Medium Liveblogging: Profiles In Terror (MED-043)

by Sheila on December 14th, 2006

Episode Name: Profiles In Terror
Episode Number: 043 (3.05)
MED-043 Summary | All Episodes

Sexy shower scene. My my. Shower Girl exits to watch TV while Shower Boy decides to…actually shower. What a concept!

On TV, Agent Edward Cooper of the FBI is on the news saying what a tragedy it is that serial murderer Richard Gomez (”The Suitcase Murderer” because he cuts up women’s bodies and stuffs them in suitcases), gets to go free because some bozo at the police evidence locker misplaced the bloody saw he used to cut up his victims.

Misplaced? How do you misplace a large, bloody saw?

Shower Boy exits the shower whistling a happy tune as they show The Suitcase Murderer on TV…and it’s Shower Boy! AAAAAHHHHHH!

Allison wakes to hear Joe whistling the same happy tune. (’Strangers in the Night,’ in case you were wondering.)

Allison: Hey songbird. Do you think you could you keep the whistling down? I’m trying to have a nightmare in here.

At breakfast, Marie watches TV snow and Bridgette says it’s her favorite channel. Hm…

Allison is reviewing a book she read back in college that features Cooper, the FBI criminal profiler from her dream. Later at work when she takes a message in to Devalos, who is meeting with…Agent Cooper! When she tells him she is familiar with her work, Cooper invites her to join them but Devalos takes her outside for a private chat first. Apparently Cooper gives him the heebie-jeebies. Devalos wants to make certain Allison does not tell Cooper about her special abilities.

Cooper briefs everyone on a series of hooker murders that started in Ohio but have now moved to Phoenix. The murderer prefers to have sex with the women after they are dead. Euw. He leaves no body fluids and is very, very good at being very, very bad.

Allison gets to accompany the task force to the morgue to view the body of the latest victim, Diane Culquitt, who turns out to be none other than the girl from Allison’s nightmare. Allison asks if anyone has considered the murderer might be Richard Gomez. Oh what is she thinking?! Right there in the morgue, she interrupts Cooper as he addresses the entire group, asking if anyone has considered it might be the one guy that slipped through Cooper’s fingers several years ago due to shoddy police work.
Nice going, Allison!

Cooper slaps her down brutally and when she stands up to him, he ridicules her even further. Gomez was suave and charming, while this uses a blitz attack blah blah blah. What a pompous ass.

Tags: medium, medium liveblogging, medium nbc, medium recap, profiles in terror

As Allison gets into bed that night, she complains to Joe, who points out she brought up Cooper’s most famous setback. Some back and forth about it being the cops who lost the evidence, not Cooper, so it wasn’t his fault versus how would you feel if you had been tracking this guy, caught him red-handed, and he got off because of someone else’s stupid mistake yaddy yaddy yadda?

Allison: That doesn’t give him a right to make a fool out of me.

Allison’s dream picks up where Shower Girl recognizes Shower Boy as The Suitcase Murderer. Ack! It ends with Gomez smashing her face with an ashtray. Conveniently, Allison sees a name on a ashtray and tells Devalos about her dream the next day.

Devalos reads her the riot act about how Cooper doesn’t want any Gomez leads - blah blah blah - but then relinquishes and says he’ll put Scanlon on it. (Reminds me of the Jim Trott character on The Vicar of Dibley: “No no no no no no no no - yes!”)

At work, Joe and a coworker Aaron are having a bad day trying to [insert technical phrase here involving big equations on a white board that do no prove out.] This leads to a brain break where they discuss their children to take their minds off the job. Aaron spends most of the conversation banging his head against the white board but perks up when Joe mentions Marie’s new favorite thing is to stare at the TV set to a channel showing nothing but electronic snow. Aaron, a total buzz kill, says his brother’s son used to do the same thing and he turned out to be autistic. Oh great! Somebody give that man a happy pill, please.

At the D.A.’s office, Allison ends up in an elevator with Cooper The Ass. He ridicules her some more, then shows her the file for his current suspect, Warren Bell, and invites her to listen in on the interrogation. She gives him the what-for instead.

Allison: I don’t know. I think I probably lack the experience and the intellect to really appreciate whatever it is you’re gonna do or say. Besides, I wouldn’t want to be a distraction. I wouldn’t want to waste your time.

Go Allison!

Scanlon traced the name Allison saw on the ashtray in her dream to a hotel in Mexico but Richard Gomez didn’t murder anyone there. HE was murdered there in 1997 by person or persons unknown.

Oh no. How will Allison ever live this down? She was oh-so-publicly wrong. There must be some obscure connection between Gomez and today’s murderer. There must be!

Allison arrives home to find Joe watching Marie watching snow on TV. He has discovered she is partial to channel 282 and that she does not see snow, but rather a funny man who is talking to her. Joe is freaked out and wants to have her tested for autism. Allison thinks that is a ridiculous idea because she knows her daughter and she is not autistic. Ooh, a fight! Joe is concerned that Marie sees things other people don’t just like Allison does, and Allison’s visions are pretty awful.

Allison: Okay, I am just trying to understand this. Are you hoping she doesn’t have autism or that she does?

The next day, the news is out about Gomez’ murder in Mexico back in 1997. Cooper morphs into someone human and thanks Allison for figuring it out so he can stop brooding about Gomez going free. He invites her again to sit it on an interview with Warren Bell. (They couldn’t find Bell to interview him yesterday, thus the second chance for Allison. How convenient.)

Bell is a registered sex offender. Girls die everywhere he goes. He says it is coincidence. Then he accidentally drops his pack of cigs on the floor and Allison gets a vision when she picks them up for him. In it, Bell is torturing an emaciated dog with a lit cigarette. Bastard! Allison leaves the room in a hurry and Cooper comes out to offer her some water. She tells him what she saw.

Hey wait! What are you doing? Devalos told you not to tell him! But Cooper says he’s met people like her before.

Cooper: You see things, don’t you? That must be quite a burden. … You go into the heads of murderers whether you want to or not. I admire you but I sure don’t envy you.

Devalos calls her at home later to say they executed a search warrant at Bell’s place and found the dog. Still alive, poor thing, so maybe there is hope for it. They matched the dog’s hair to hairs found on the murder victim. Hooray!

But Allison dreams of Gomez again. As he saws up a girl in the bathtub of the hotel room in Mexico. he is rudely interrupted by…it’s Cooper! Gomez asks how he found him. Cooper says, “It wasn’t easy,” right before shooting him in the stomach. (Hey, Cooper is a leftie.) That sounded like a silencer. Was that a silencer? Did he find him in 1997 and murder him in true vigilante, thwarted FBI profiler, assassin fashion? Kewl!

Is this going to cause complications in his newly budding friendly relationship with Allison? Is she going to feel the need to tell on him? Oh the moral dilemma!

Allison and Joe have a late night chat about that very thing. She does not understand why she had the dream about Cooper killing Gomez in cold blood. What is she supposed to do about it? Nothing, as far as Joe is concerned and he says he is pretty sure she feels the same way.

At work, Cooper is not happy with Devalos (much gesturing of the arms seen through the glass walls) and he storms out of the office. Devalos tells Allison why. He is offering to take the death penalty off the table for Bell in exchange for a full confession so the families of the murdered women can have closure.

As Joe tries to work from home, Marie runs around the room like an airplane while the TV plays snow. He is on the phone with Aaron and hears his partner’s kid running around in the background (AJ?) saying “airplane.” A few questions later, he finds out the kids are both watching the same channel, only his channel shows show because he has not subscribed to the premium channels. Allison arrives and he fills her in on Marie.

Joe: I think she may be a felon. I think she is stealing cable.

(So this is the stealing cable episode! I thought it wasn’t going to be until later. Shows you how much I know.)

Allison dreams of Cooper skulking about the police evidence locker and removing something from the box marked “Warren Bell.” Cooper’s phone call wakes her. He tells her to turn on the news, where she sees Warren Bell expressing his happiness to the press for becoming a free man. The only evidence they really had on him - the dog hair - has mysteriously disappeared from the police evidence locker.

Oh great. When Cooper thinks the guy is not going to get the justice he deserves, he steals evidence so the guy goes free and he can later track him down and administer his own brand of justice. THAT’S why she had the earlier dream about Cooper killing Gomez. Because he was going to do it again!

Allison confronts Cooper in the D.A.’s conference room as he packs up his task force stuff. She says Richard Gomez’ saw must have been hard to get rid of, what with it being so bulky and all. Allison tells Cooper she can live with the knowledge about Gomez but not the foreknowledge of what he plans to do to Bell. She will find a way to expose him if something happens to Bell.

Cooper doesn’t think she will, actually. They both know Bell will do it again…unless something happens to him. When the time comes, when Allison hears Bell is dead or missing, she will think about the girl lying dead in the park. She will think about the dog with the cigarette burns.

Cooper: We both know your choice won’t be as easy as you imagine it’s going to be.

And he walks away, with Allison staring after him.

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