Hello friends and welcome back to TV Tuesday! This week I’m bring you all my thoughts on season 3 of the TV show, The Dead Zone based on the book by Stephen King.

The third season starts back up with Stillson and his evil plans to destroy the world… yet only Johnny knows about it. One of the girl’s on Stillson’s campaign goes missing, obviously Johnny is trying to help because he was tipped off by the future that something was going to happen to her.

Yet, as the investigation continues, Johnny is beginning to look more and more like a suspect. They get to the point where they can’t do anything but arrest him. It doesn’t help that Johnny has been having blackouts and can’t remember large chunks of time, so he can’t for certain say he did or didn’t kill the girl, Rachel.

I thought it was wild that they had him arrested and in a cell but still let him go out and try to touch things to find out where she could be. Like, any other person they wouldn’t even let out of his cell, let alone walking in the forest alone conducting a search party.

In the end, she’s found buried. Johnny still knows Stillson is behind it, he just can’t prove it. Meanwhile, Stillson is being his gross self, hitting on Sarah and trying to take down reverend Purdy since Purdy believes in Johnny.

They stage this elaborate plan to make it seem like Purdy’s financial advisor committed suicide and left a note saying he killed Rachel and that he’d been secretly taking money out of the company so that Johnny could be set free.

I know we’re going to be coming back to this plot, we have to. Because now it looks like Purdy is working alongside Stillson to avoid blackmail. Plus, we still don’t know about this end of the world deal.

While he was working that case, Johnny got close with Rachel’s sister, Rebecca, and now she’s his girlfriend, I guess.

It feels like a lot of the cases or visions that he’s getting this season are really personal to Johnny.

He has one case where a little girl has gone missing and he keeps having flashbacks to the night of his accident, somehow the two seem to be linked. In the end, we see that this little girl was in an accident, the same way that Johnny was nine years ago. 

Then he stops a man from committing suicide – the connection to Johnny is the man became biter because he lost his son. The guy tells him the only difference between Johnny and him is the fact that he still has the chance to be with his son.

This is the episode where JJ finally finds out that Johnny is his biological father. I was wondering how long they were going to wait to before breaking the news, but this season has really opened up the character dynamics and I like where everyone is. Sarah finally seems to be over Johnny (even though in a later episode she said she would have waited for him if she knew he’d wake up), JJ doesn’t seem to hate Johnny like he did in season one and I love that Johnny and Walt are at the man-hug stage.

Speaking of Walt, we get an episode into his past, which finally gives us a deeper dive into him as a character, since he’s still very one dimensional. We learn that he grew up in the town they live in, in Maine and that he had a really good friends growing up. One of them is back in town and ends up stealing Walt’s gun. Johnny is reluctantly brought in on the case to help locate the gun and stop the friend from doing something bad.

Johnny ends up going to a wedding with Sarah, since Walt couldn’t go, but he ends up showing up and Bruce is there because Bruce is always around. Johnny has a vision that the bride’s first husband isn’t dead like she thought he was. This spirals the question between Johnny and Sarah – would Sarah had waited for him if she knew he would wake up… which she doesn’t tell Johnny but she said she would have.

Now this bride has some big questions to answer. I do like that we got a resolution and that she was able to see her not-dead husband and he be okay with marrying her fiancé.

These guys pull a prank on Johnny, claiming his visions are an invasion of privacy and can’t be trusted. But when the prank he sees, isn’t really a prank, the validity of his visions is confirmed.

We also see that these twins targeted Johnny specifically because their mother gave everything they had to Reverend Purdy and the Johnny Smith “foundation” which proves that Purdy has been profiting off Johnny.

I have to say, Purdy has gotten sketchier and sketchier. In another episode animals start going crazy (it almost felt a little Cujo) and it’s because the dam is going to break and the noise it’s making is driving the animals crazy. We learn that it was dear old Purdy who put the dam in and didn’t care that people voted against it because he knew going in, it was going to burst.

We still get a few episodes where Johnny uses his powers for good to help people, he helps a girl escape death from a company who want her dead for the wrong reasons, he stops a school shooting, years before it’s ever going to happen.

We almost lose Bruce to a hate crime – I’m glad that it didn’t happen because I didn’t want Bruce to die. Johnny has a vision that someone he cares about dies, but he can’t see who. The fact that he didn’t even think it could be Bruce was very sad. When he does finally figure it out, he wants him to stay at the police station so his vision doesn’t come true. I’m glad that Bruce tells Johnny that he doesn’t want another black person to die because he didn’t. Like that wasn’t even something Johnny considered, and probably never would have thought of being a white male.

In the end, no one dies, but I think it was a good episode that showed microagressions and pointed out things that white people would never think about.

The seasons then ends with, you guessed it, another cliff hanger about the end of the world.

So, Johnny has been having blackouts and his headaches have been worsening so the doctors want to try and remove the “dead zone” of his brain… I’m thinking if they do that, what’s the point of the show?

He’s also worried he’ll be in a coma again, so he appoints Sarah to make the call to not leave him in a coma. This is all great set up for what will happen in season 4 possibly as we flip back to Mr. Stillson.

Johnny knows that something wasn’t right with the way everything went down with Rachel’s killer – he doesn’t believe Purdy and Purdy comes clean that he faked the suicide note on his financial advisor, but he doesn’t know who killed either of them.

Johnny knows it was Stillson, but getting the evidence is very hard. Rebecca wants to help Johnny lock Stillson up; she tries to alter one of his visions where she’s buying a gun with buying him a cake – in the end Johnny sees the truth.

We find out that Stillson probably killed Rachel because she caught him committing voter fraud, but again – they can’t prove it.

The season ends on Johnny having a vision of the future, JJ is a teenager, and Johnny’s face is half scared and his eyes have cataracts. The future Johnny tells present one not to go back and try and save Rebecca, because she’s gone to try and assassinate Stillson.   

I’m sure the next season is going to open on this plot, but I’d like to see some further progression on it. I feel like we get too little every season, and maybe that’s what stretches this show so far.

I did like seeing Johnny’s visions more tailored towards his life, that was done well. So now I’m curious to see where we’ll go next season.