Hello friends and welcome back to TV Tuesday! This week I’m bring you all my thoughts on season 5 of the TV show, The Dead Zone based on the book by Stephen King.

The season starts with, you guessed it, the apocalypse plot. We start right where we left off with Johnny trying to help Miranda, yet she still wants to go through with the wedding to Stillson, thinking it’s the only way to stop him.

I hate how this ended because it didn’t have to be this way, she was going to marry him. But the money guy who’s been behind so much already (he killed the financial guy to make it look like a suicide, making Purdy do things he didn’t want to… he’s basically the manipulator), anyways he kills her by giving her a pair of poisoned earrings… which how did the poison kill her if it went into her ears? But I digress.

Miranda dies, and for what? For the show to step away from the apocalypse plot once more.

What I did like about that episode was Miranda actually loses those earrings and it is Johnny who tells her where to find them, a slight homage to the book where Sarah loses her wedding ring and Johnny tells her where it is… I liked that.

This season also took a radical race, white supremacy, religion turn that I wasn’t expecting. Like, I mentioned in season one there has always been this undertone to the show that talks about racism and points it out, but we get an episode where a white power killer comes to kill a brown man and they dive a bit into white supremacy but I don’t think they really dig deep enough, it felt more like that scratched the surface of it. It was good to see it talked about and brought up but when you mention it in one episode and then walk away from it like it was a one off instance doesn’t really do it justice as this is something that happens every day, as Bruce will once in a while point out.

So Johnny uses his abilities to take down that guy and he uses his abilities to take down these guys who are super religious and believe that this bone fragment was part of John the Baptist’s finger, belongs to them and not the church. Even Purdy gets a little head over heels about it because he wants Johnny to touch it to see what he can see, if he can see John the Baptist with Jesus… that would be some trippy stuff, seeing that far into the past. Anyways, he gets it to the rightful owner, or who he thinks is the rightful owner, back to the church, without touching it.

Again, he uses his abilities to help people. He helps a kid in witness protection from being killed by two guys after him for what his grandfather and father did in the past, he also helps a woman give birth while at the same time catching an escaped killer. He helps a guy who’s gotten way over his head in debt after winning the lottery (for that one I don’t know why Johnny helped that guy, he was too obsessed with money to genuinely be helped.)

Dana returns for an episode and she gets all flirty with Johnny and that reminded me of Alex from last season. I guess that one off Christmas special wasn’t going to fit in with the overall story because she’s gone, as if it had never happened. Strange. I really like Alex, maybe she’ll come back.

There’s an episode where Johnny is in a choke hold and it completely messes with his visions. It was such a confusing episode because the same events kept happening, but in different perspectives, talk about trippy; it was interesting that they decided to make outside factors trigger his visions in such a way. I feel like there are so many directions you could take that. In the end though, he’s able to save everyone before anyone gets killed.

We also get very religious again. This is when the apocalypse starts to be talked about as Armageddon as Johnny gets a vision of a little girl being killed in a landmine and he must save this cult from believing they are about to experience the rapture.

In the same vein, we get some background on Purdy. A woman comes to him claiming he’s her father. He quickly rebuts that, but we do learn about his past and how he used the girl’s mother for money. He took her money when she was really sick because she believed that he would exercise the sick out of her… which obviously didn’t work. He felt so guilty that he killed her mother that he continued to give her checks throughout her life. Johnny then gets suspicious thinking Purdy did the same to his mother, but Purdy claims not to. I did like the background we got in Purdy because he’s always been this character who seems to have ulterior motives and a mysterious past… now we know why.

We get a return character from season four; a woman who Johnny saved from being abducted is back. In season four, we saw her go back to the man who abducted her and that ending was was left opened-ended. Now, cut to the present where we see she tried to keep that man alive as best she could, and when she couldn’t any longer, she goes after anyone who is close to Johnny for revenge (because clearly she didn’t want saving). So she abducts JJ and Sarah.

Walt goes crazy, it was kinda cute to see him lose his mind over what could happen to her. Johnny uses his gift to help locate her; in the process though he learns that Sarah is pregnant. I have to say I wish Johnny hadn’t told Walt, it wasn’t Johnny’s news to share; I get that he thought Sarah wasn’t going to make it, but still it should have been Sarah to tell him the news he was going to be a father. Once again, Johnny has interfered in their life. I’m glad that this baby will bring Sarah and Walt closer than ever before.

The season ends on an assassination on the Vice President and of course Johnny is brought into the fold as a witness because they (meaning the guy who orchestrated the whole thing, Malcolm, more on him in a minute) wanted Johnny to know, but not to help. Well, good on him because it worked. The Vice President is shot dead and Stillson was with him; he tried to save him but he couldn’t. So, now with this opening in the White House, guess who’s going to probably getting it… the American Hero, Stillson.

There have been a lot of epiosdes this season that jump all over the place and start to really hurt the watcher’s head – this finale was no different.

Back to Malcolm because he’s been the puppeteer this whole time, he’s the one who’s been controlling Stillson, even when his father was alive, he killed his soon to be wife, Miranda, and now this. What is his game? Is he the one who wants to bring on Armageddon (the apocalypse… as we’re calling it Armageddon now), not Stillson? I have so many questions, but I have a feeling I won’t get answers. There’s only one season left and I heard that it ended on a cliff hanger because the show never got renewed. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.