Episode Description:

With less than an hour to stop a bus-station bomb, Johnny tries to find the source of the explosion with the help of Sarah's puzzle-writing friend. - TV Guide

Episode Review:

Johnny: "This is serious, okay? Real death. Real pain."
Elaine: "You don't think I know real pain? I'm in my mid-thirties and I'm still dating."

This was a perfect example of the winning Dead Zone formula.

Johnny and Sarah's friend Elaine worked together to resolve one of Johnny's visions of upcoming death and destruction.  Essentially, Elaine was doing what Bruce used to do: acting as Johnny's lieutenant and accomplice.  She loved it, too, and I thought she had a great sense of humor.

So why not just bring Bruce back, instead? Really?  (I'm not going to let this one go any time soon.)

I think the point of having Elaine instead of Bruce was that Elaine had a whole different perspective on Johnny.  As Sarah's best friend, she knew everything about the long, strange Johnny/Sarah relationship, and once she realized that Johnny was a great guy, she was ready to push him to get off his ass and commit to Sarah.  This in turn led to the realization that Johnny still sees himself as a pariah who brings pain to the people around him.  Which certainly wasn't the case here, was it?  He not only saved a bunch of lives, he helped three other couples with serious problems as well. (I'm just going to gloss over the fact that Johnny also caused the explosion in the first place.)

The explosion vision and the people frozen in the air was visually really interesting, although it had to be wildly uncomfortable for the extras. And the final vision where the gun dropped and went off had a real emotional kick, at least for me.  Good one.

Bits and pieces:

-- Sarah wasn't in this episode.  But J.J. was, specifically in order to tell us that Sarah was happy again.

-- I thought Elaine looked like Sarah would if she had been cast as a nerd.

-- I've seen (and reviewed) every episode of this series, and I'm certain we've never seen Elaine before.

-- The stereotypical disabled, suicidal vet character was less stereotypical here because she was a woman. That was different.  Good for them.

Quotes:

J.J.: "Mom's back into cooking again. It's awesome."

Johnny: "You design crosswords for a living. Do you actually have to take them on vacation with you, too?"
Elaine: "It's either puzzles or Hector, my cabana boy."

Elaine: "Could you tell me where I can find the bus from Montpelier?  I'm meeting a guy from Match dot com.  He just got paroled."

I liked this one.  Three out of four stars

Bille Doux reviews episodes of 'The Dead Zone' for her website.
She reviews individual episodes of science fiction & cult TV shows
for her website, located at http://www.billiedoux.com/

Behind The Scenes:

- The song at the end of the episode is titled "I Won't Let You Go" and is performed by Sarah Thiele

- When we were writing this episode, we were trying to accomplish two things, initially there was this ticking clock, there's a bomb, Johnny's running, you know, trying to stop this bomb before it goes off, and at the same time explore through Elaine's eyes the Johnny-Sarah relationship and the relationship of these other people at the airport, witch was sort of loosly or stealing from the Love Actually kind thing, these love stories shrinked through the thing. And some of that made it through, but from where we began you know trying to discover and trying to stop and have these emotional moments with thses people while you're running around trying to stop a bomb going off just didn't work really well, so what we needed from Elaine's character really changed quite a bit as the script evolved. - Writer Sam Ernst on the genesis of this episode.

Cast & Crew:

Written by: Sam Ernst & Jim Dunn
Directed by: Erik Canuel
Guest Starring: Maxim Roy (Elaine Dowd), Paul Hopkins (Andrew), Al Goulem (Dave), Jane Wheeler (?) & Marianne Farley (Daisy Hansen).