![]() This certainly is a game of two worlds: one very beautiful and one very empty, unfortunately leaving us with a game that is all skin and no spirit. It took me 12 hours over three nights to play, and towards the finale I was astounded by how a game so short could feel so long. Even while taking notes, the story became difficult to follow. Instead, it fumbles sensitive topics, plot points evaporate into thin air, and characters who are studied closely are left behind and never mentioned again. The Medium is hugely ambitious and could have been a site for incredible, innovative storytelling. The mishandling of such huge subjects defeats the power of the work – by the time we are examining the ninth or 10th ragged toy doll to find a clue, the tension has long dissipated. So it was fitting that the series, a combination of paranormal murder mystery and domestic dramedy, crossed over to the TV hereafter on Friday night. The Medium attempts to corral postwar horror, child abuse, mass violence, family and monstrosity without ever truly interrogating any of them. For seven seasons, first on NBC and then on CBS, Medium put across some of prime time’s most outlandish story lines by grounding them in one of television’s most believable marriages. Intergenerational trauma as a theme within horror storytelling can make room for us to explore our own fears within the bounds of fiction, but it needs the space to do so. This further splitting of the narrative is muddled and slows the pace, jarring the atmosphere. Marianne solves mysteries, Thomas blows things up. Marianne explores Niwa, and Thomas the psyches of bad men. Where Marianne puzzles her way through cordoned-off areas, Thomas simply blasts them open with powerful psychic energy. Our reserved and confident protagonist disappears for these segments, and we control a male character, Thomas, who inexplicably has double her physical prowess. This narrative displacement may have been intended to be disorienting, but was instead frustrating. For example, it reaches to empathise with the paedophile artist who abuses one of the characters, voyaging into the psyche of the abuser during the first of a handful of jarring perspective changes. Not unlike Bloober Team’s earlier Layers of Fear, the story is prone to tone-deaf tropes.
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