The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone


I was first introduced to the Dead Zone when I was twelve. It was on right before Farscape on Sci-Fi Fridays. I must have seen the last ten minutes of every episode for four of five seasons of that show. When I got to college and had an unusual amount of free time, this was one of the shows that I tried to watch through.

But I failed because I couldn’t find the last two seasons.

All six seasons of the show are now much more readily available for viewing, so I went ahead and started over to watch Johnny Smith’s story from his car accident, which opened up his ‘dead zone’ and gave him psychic visions, to the very last scene of the last episode.

I really like seasons one through five. I like the visions as fragments that create mysteries and twists and problem-of-the-week stories and the coming apocalypse storyline and Johnny’s functional relationship with Walt as the dad to his son and the husband to his ex-fiancé. I mean, there were snags in all of that, but it usually worked itself out and I found Johnny’s ability to function within the culture of his small town-like community really interesting in a psychological/sociological kind of way.

The last season, though, went a bit south for me. Half of the recurring characters were gone and the nature of Sara and Johnny’s relationship changed in a direction I didn’t particularly like. And JJ had a new actor which was really weird after so long with the other kid. And they didn’t look anything alike.

I mean, I think all the changes in the season were interesting from Johnny’s perspective because it took away almost all of his support ,but it turned into the same type of deal the last season of the X-files did. Interesting, yes, but not really the show I enjoyed watching.