Watching the previews for this show, in which Allison dreams about her first experiences as a medium, I thought that high school senior Allison (Jessy Schram, who's in the Hallmark Channel's Jane Doe series) didn't look much like 30-something mom Allison. Medium managed to surprise me, again - I found the teenaged actress entirely believable and I was lost in a whole new world of crime, mystery and death. When the closing credits run, I shout at the screen, "it can't be over already!" I'm captivated, mesmerized, in love with Patricia Arquette and the world she, and the show's producers, weave each week.

I have a weak stomach, and I'd usually be turned off by a crime that, like this one, involves pornography, incest, rape, bloody, bloody murder. But I'm strangely drawn in. It's partly the captivating plot involving Allison's high school friend, who drove to California one day in hopes of becoming a Playboy model, and was never heard from again. And it's partly the guesswork, the way the writers keep giving us one detail after another, so that the next step seems obvious but the endgame never does.

As we skip from clue to clue, from dream excerpt to slightly longer dream excerpt, I find myself knowing things, but not knowing why, or how, or guessing how it might play out. I know the earthquake dreams are related to Tina, but I can't divine how... was she in an earthquake? Will she be? It's clearly an earthquake from many years ago, and it seems symbolic somehow. And when Allison sees the councilman in the video store, I know there's more to it than "he likes his movies dirty" - but what? I never would have guessed, incest. Or, kidnapping. Or...

When the police find the car with that ridiculous amount of blood, I think, she can't be dead. But then when they count up the blood, in liters, it seems so final. So impossibly real, but yet not at all redolent of death. I watch Allison picking up bloody artifacts - keyrings, photos - and feel just as hopeless as she does. Why can't she feel anything? I wonder. How could this horror ever be resolved?

And when Allison wakes up after her final earthquake dream, certain that there has actually been an earthquake, in Phoenix, I know that something important - and un-earthquake-like - will be on the news. And there it is, a puff piece about a teacher in New Mexico who is, and is not, Allison's high school friend.

But I still couldn't have guessed how it ends up. Allison's friend was presumed dead in the Oakland earthquake of the 80s, and paid $100,000 to stay that way - new social security number, new birth certificate, new name, new life. She paid that money to a guy, the same guy (it turns out) that the councilman's daughter used to learn how to "die" without dying, to disappear. So she could get away from her terrible, horrible dad, to start over.

The last scene was rather brilliant, because I (like you, I'm sure) was surprised when Allison walks into that diner, papers in her hand and a message: the daughter will be indicted, arrested for fraud and blackmail. How could Allison do this to her? I wonder. She's delivering this punishment, herself, to the poor incest victim?

As the daughter coolly, but hollowly explains how she paid people to call her dad and plant the DVD, how she knows her dad will get away with his eight years of torture, how it's wrong - she'll be punished but he never will - I wish for a happy ending. There isn't one, I think. And then Allison does what she hasn't yet done in the show - she flouts legality and tells the girl to go, run for the border, disappear. She'll pick up the check.

When the old man's hand appears in the frame with the check for Allison, I know: it's the man from her teenage visions. I'm right, but... how could it be? Is he dead? When she was 17, could she have had visions of not-yet-dead people warning her of something that would never happen? What, exactly, is going on here?

We're left to wonder, and I expect we'll be in that state for a while. And I also expect that we haven't seen the last of diner man - his story, will we see its end down the road? I hope so.