Speed Demon repeats on 3 August 2007
This coming Friday Melinda will confront a death-head race car driver and Delia's troubled son Ned in episode 214. "Speed Demon." It all starts when Melinda calls Jim on her cell as she comes home late from an estate sale. The call drops out and Mel finds herself driving in circles in an alternative reality populated by a crazy race driver and a mysterious woman who is able to start her stalled vehicle. (click here for the MelindaVerse information on this episode.)
The first time we watched "Speed Demon" we found it to be a very unsettling. Especially the part at the beginning where Melinda's car breaks down on a dark road. And it didn't get much better until well into the show. So on a second viewing (with some knowledge of where the back story was going, as well) we discovered some interesting elements in the plot we had previously overlooked.
There was clearly some sort of external "force" or "hand" that was guiding the events. In the very first scene Mel is stranded in some sort of other dimension where she encounters both the spirit she is going to have to help and his significant other. But we don't know that at the time and, in fact, the spirit tries to drive Mel away. This appears to be a much stronger case of destiny for Mel than the typical "How do they know to call you?" that Jim has noticed before.
The other strong theme was how much lying Melinda had to wade through to find out how to help those who needed it. Both the spirit and his significant other lied a lot, of course, but there was also the problem with Delia's son Ned misleading both Mel and his mother. All these lies made it very difficult for Mel and Rick to figure out who the ghost was.
Lastly, we would like to note the show again did a twist on a classic horror scene -- one in which we see only the pants and shoes of a mysterious stranger getting out of a black vehicle on a dark night. In this episode, the stranger was wearing jeans and well-worn cowboy boots. We feared for Mel's safety as she rushed to raise the window and find (with no luck) something to defend herself. But instead of a crazy redneck, the stranger proved to be a beautiful female mechanic who quickly got the Jeep running. We note that there was a variant on this scene in last week's episode "The Woman Of His Dreams" where the mysterious stranger was also a woman.
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I really enjoyed re-viewing this episode. Like much in the Melindaverse, "it's complicated"! I did notice two nicely parallel scenes: the first is when Melinda takes Jim along with her to the dark road where she got "lost", and the car runs away from her, careening out of control. Jim grabs the steering wheel and together he and Melinda get through the ordeal without injury. Later, in the big race, the ghost lover is riding along with his (former) fiancée and when her car goes out of control (because of his sabotage) he sees he was wrong about her, and grabs the steering wheel to help her survive. The first scene, with Jim helping Mel, is a clear pre-figuration of the ghost lover and his woman.
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