Ghost Whisperer: Double Exposure (Episode 306)

Professor Rick Payne is kissing up to Claudia, a photography professor at Rockland University whom he's asked to a party celebrating the arrival of a new dean.  That's...a really lame first date.  He couldn't, like spring for dinner and movie?  He makes the observation that she's not in any of the many photos she has around her office, but she brushes it off and makes to leave.  At the party, a student with a Rockland U magazine introduces herself and then takes pictures of Rick and Claudia, but Claudia gets upset and orders the student to stop.  She says she's not feeling well and leaves.  The student, meanwhile, notices that Claudia is missing from all of the photos.  Rick snaps a few more shots of Claudia as she's leaving and then confiscates the memory card from the camera.

Cue the sweet, sweet sounds of Jim and Melinda's lovemaking...interrupted by Rick banging at the door.  They let him in, flustered and frustrated, but he, oblivious, plops down on the sofa in between them so he can tell them all about his weird night.  They take a look at the photos on Melinda's camera, and once again, Claudia is absent.  Rick thinks Claudia is a ghost - albeit a well-respected, published ghost who teaches classes and can be seen by everyone.  Jim, however, takes a further look at the photos and spots a faint, uh, ghostly shape in the photos that appears to have followed Claudia out of the party.

The next day, Rick has been searching for information on people disappearing from photos, but he's found nothing.  Melinda is more interested in the spirit in the photos, whom Rick has named "Bob," after the guy who got his prom date drunk and stole her.  Way to get over something that happened, like, 20 years ago.  Rick says a spirit could rearrange the basic elements of a photo to make someone disappear - granting that they have the technical know-how to do so.  That would be one nerdy spirit.  I'm guessing if they spot a ghost with a pocket protector and thick glasses, that's their man.  Rick, though, says it could be Kevin, the student of Claudia's who recently died in a car accident.  Melinda is all, "WTF?" because Rick didn't tell her about this at the beginning of their conversation.  Um, since when has Rick ever been forthcoming with important information, Melinda?  If he told you things up front, he wouldn't be able to prattle on about unimportant crap for ten minutes first.  Jeez.

Melinda and Rick visit Claudia in her studio.  She tells them that she woke up one morning to find herself gone from all of her photos.  It started happening the day after Kevin, her student, died.  She says he was a talented photographer and nice guy, but he was devastated when she told him she wouldn't recommend his work in a gallery because he would only get one shot at success, and he wasn't ready for it.  Kevin left in a rage and died driving 90 miles an hour.  While Rick, for once, shows a little bit of restraint and true empathy, commiserating that every teacher lives with the fear of driving a student crazy by handing out a bad grade or criticism, Melinda spots the Bob orb from the night before in one of Claudia's photos, where it just recently appeared.  Claudia says she spotted it in another student's work - a student who also knew Kevin.

Melinda takes a walk with the student, Joseph, down Exposition Lane.  That's all there is to the scene...walking and talking.  Heh, I made a poem!  Joseph says that Claudia made a few phone calls about his work which helped him break into the business.  Kevin, however, was talented and nice, but the combination wasn't enough to elevate him to the front of the pack in a fiercely competitive industry.  He was upset because Claudia recommended Joseph's work and not his.  Melinda asks about Bob showing up in some of Joseph's photos, and he confirms that he doesn't know what the orb is, but the pictures turned out great.  He offers to email them to Melinda.

At home, Melinda and Jim are drinking wine, which I really love about them - they really seem to like their wine - while Melinda downloads Joseph's photos.  She's pretty angry that Kevin seems like such a crybaby ghost...if the worst thing that happened to him was that his professor helped another, more talented student get into more galleries, then boo hoo (or just "boo," Jim says.  Hee!).  When Melinda gets the photo downloaded, however, she sees Bob start to appear in the photo - except that Bob's a chick.  Dun dun DUN.

Melinda goes back to Rick and tells him what she found - the ghost appeared in the photo, and even Jim could see her, but when they went back and looked later, she was gone.  She wants to know what this ghost wants and how Kevin ties in, so she goes back to Claudia to see what else she might know.

Claudia, meanwhile, is frustrated because Bob the Girl Ghost has now started showing up in all of her photos, as well as Joseph's work.  Rick and Melinda try to find out how Bob fits in, if maybe Joseph or Kevin were involved with her, but Claudia gets defensive and leaves, claiming she doesn't get involved in the personal lives of her students and has no idea who the girl is.

Jim brings Melinda lunch at the park.  She spots an MCAT study guide in his bag, and he admits that he's thinking of applying to medical school, even though he's extremely self-deprecating about it.  Melinda is pleased for about five seconds that he's thinking about it, and then she gets pissed that he hasn't discussed it with her at all, particularly considering the fact that they might have to move.  The conversation turn into one about Melinda's abilities and the fact that they may never be able to leave Grandview, knowing what's buried underneath it, and Melinda stalks away even as Jim says they'll figure it out later.  

Melinda goes to Kevin's apartment, claiming she's a friend of a friend there to help start packing his stuff up.  She's awfully good at getting into people's homes when they've died.  She spots a picture of Kevin with a girl (Azura Skye!  Yay!), but the landlord doesn't know who she is, since he barely knew Kevin.  He leaves Melinda alone, and she walks through, spotting an inhaler before she finds the world's oldest answering machine in the world.  Like, seriously.  It must be as big as my laptop.  She hears a message from a girl named Sophie, begging Kevin to talk, even though he's angry.  Hearing something, Melinda explores further, going into the dark room, where the water is running.  When she walks toward the sink, a hand grabs out at her, which is very reminiscent of The Grudge.  All I have to say is there had better not be any creepy Japanese woman in this show.  Melinda gets up the courage to look in the sink again, and she sees an image of Bob in the water, apparently drowning.

At the store, Melinda and Delia discuss Melinda's vision and inability to track down anything about Sophie.  Camryn Manheim's hair looks fabulous in this scene, by the way.  They try to figure out if her death was accidental, or if maybe Kevin killed her and her ghost came back to haunt him until he died, too.  Delia suggests that Melinda try and find Kevin's cellphone, which was likely in his car when he died, and Melinda has to admit that she had a fight with Jim and may not be able to ask a favor of him right now.  She explains the situation, and Delia says that Jim probably has a lot of reservations and that's why he didn't discuss his decision with Melinda, but Melinda says Jim has reservations about living in Grandview after what happened in the tunnels.

Jim comes through with the phone, in spite of the fight, and Melinda finds a call from Sophie on Kevin's phone on the day he died.  She sent him a video - of her drowning herself.  Um, yikes?

At the hospital, Jim brings in a patient who's having chest pains.  The doctor sees his something-something levels are elevated, so she wants to treat this as a heart attack, but Jim says the usual physical symptoms aren't there, so he thinks it could be something-something-something.  Um, this is why I'm not a doctor.  The doctor whisks the patient away, effectively shutting Jim down, much to his frustration.

Melinda goes back to Claudia's studio to try and find her, but she's not there.  Instead, Melinda calls out to Sophie, and Sophie knocks several sheets of paper to the floor.  Before Melinda can pick them up, the pages darken into images, which Melinda fits together like a puzzle.  They show Claudia and Kevin in bed together, shot from above, which explains why Sophie was so angry at Kevin.  I would be angry, too, if my boyfriend took creepy photos of himself in bed with another woman.  Claudia walks in and sees the photos on the floor.  Melinda tries to explain that she's being haunted, but Claudia throws her out, because she can't take any more of this.  So yes, that's a GREAT idea.  Throw out the one person who seems to have a clue what's going on and deal with it yourself.  I gotta say, Claudia isn't a particularly sympathetic character so far, so I wouldn't be too unhappy if she, I don't know, took a nosedive into a darkroom sink.  I'm just saying.

I might get my wish...Claudia is alone later that night, doing some paperwork, when her computer desktop suddenly changes to a shot of her...doing some paperwork.  Sophie keeps snapping photos of Claudia with the camera on top of her monitor, until Sophie flashes on the monitor, while Claudia runs away, shrieking.

I guess that's enough for her to call Melinda and beg forgiveness, because Melinda and Rick show up at the studio.  Claudia says she never thought about having an affair with a student before Kevin, but they had a connection.  Rick, typically, tries to make it all about him...she was a teacher, the relationship wasn't equal, no wonder she didn't want to go out with him.  Melinda gets them back on track, and Claudia says she knew Kevin had a girlfriend back home with whom he was having problems, but she didn't know Sophie knew about her.  Kevin ended things before they had the argument about Claudia calling to get him into a gallery.  Melinda says the video message from Sophie came within an hour of Kevin's death, which was why he ran out.  Claudia, it turns out, wasn't responsible for him speeding away and crashing.  Claudia tells them Sophie's last name was Owens, and that she apparently had a sister in Bridgeport.

Melinda goes to visit the sister, but she's shocked when the door opens and it's Sophie.  Sophie wants to know if they know each other, and Melinda whispers that she saw her die.

Melinda explains that Kevin is using his photography skills to haunt people, particularly Claudia.  Sophie, who didn't know she was Kevin's professor, finally puts the pieces together - he was always talking about Claudia, she says.  Melinda asks her to please tell her what happened so they can end things.  Sophie says the distance was hurting her relationship with Kevin, and he wanted her to leave her job and move from Iowa.  She finally did, showing up at his apartment and ready to make a commitment.  He wasn't there, and she looked at some of his photos to see what he saw through his camera - including the creepy one of him in bed with Claudia.  She was so angry she went to the beach, and finally she decided, on a whim, to drown herself and send him the video of it.  However, she ended up fighting against the water and dragged herself to safety.  She didn't realize the video had been sent, but when she got back to Kevin's apartment, the cops were calling about the accident.  

Melinda asks Sophie to help reach Kevin so he'll quit haunting Claudia, but Sophie refuses.  She says Claudia's actions are at fault, not her.  Melinda leaves her card and goes.  Sophie, however, isn't alone.  Kevin starts taking photos of her with her phone, and Sophie takes a photo of herself, in which she can see Kevin behind her.  CREEPY.  She keeps taking photos, begging him to stop, and he's closer and closer each time.  Finally she falls to the floor gasping for breath - the inhaler Melinda saw in Kevin's apartment was Sophie's.

Melinda, driving home, gets a picture message on her phone.  It's a picture of Sophie, with Kevin hovering over her.  She turns her car around and rushes back to Sophie's.  She breaks in the door and rushes to Sophie, who's collapsed against a chair.  Kevin is there, but Melinda ignores him to grab Sophie's inhaler.  She helps Sophie use it and then calls 911.  Kevin, meanwhile, walks over to Melinda, and she tells him to stop it, that he's hurting and scaring Sophie.  He says that he thought she was dead, only he doesn't say it in a joyful way, like he's happy he found out she's still alive.  Melinda tells him to stop, that she's seen what happens to spirits who do things like this, but he disappears, leaving Melinda alone with Sophie to wait for the ambulance.

At home, Jim gets off the phone with the hospital.  The patient he brought in did have something-something-something, so he was right.  Not only that, but the medicine they gave him for a heart attack clogged him up and made an invasive procedure necessary.  Guess that ER doctor's getting sued.  Melinda says Jim would make a great doctor, and she wants to support him like he supports her.  They talk about things, and it turns out Jim wants to leave Grandview in order to protect Melinda, because he's worried that it seems like she's been chosen to live there, particularly considering what they know about the tunnels.  Melinda says she can live anywhere, but she does think there's a reason they're in Grandview, and she can't support leaving there if Jim's only reason is to get her away to keep her safe.

At the beach the next day, Melinda brings Sophie to meet Claudia.  Sophie is predictably pissed, but Melinda says they have to work this out together.  Kevin appears, and, through Melinda, explains that he never meant to hurt Sophie.  He wanted so desperately to prove himself to her, and when she worried about leaving her job to move east with him, he heard that as her doubting his ability to make it.  Because he wanted to show her he could, he pressured Claudia to help him.  He knows now that Sophie did believe in him enough to move to the east coast with him.  Sophie forgives him, and he moves into the Light, leaving Sophie, Claudia, and Melinda on the beach staring at each other.  AWKWARD.

At his office, Rick finds an envelope with a note:  "A picture = 1000 words; Here's one - thanks."  Along with the note is a picture strip of Claudia, smiling, in different poses.  Wow, vein much?  I bet she thinks this show is about her, doesn't she?  Doesn't she?

Jim and Melinda finally, finally make up that night.  She says she feels like she's surrounded by dark spirits all the time, but she's not afraid.  She knows their anger and fear is just there to unravel and learn from, and she knows love is stronger.  Jim agrees not to let fear influence his decisions, except for maybe organic chemistry and trig, because MATH AM HARD.  Melinda pulls out a map of the U.S. and tells him to pick any city or town, regardless of size, and she'll be right there with him through med school.  Um, hopefully he'll pick a city with a college, or it might be kind of hard to get his M.D.

Melinda gets up later that night, while Jim is still sleeping, and creeps downstairs with their digital camera.  She sets it up on the TV and sets it to take several photos of her.  When she looks at it with trepidation, she sees that she is, indeed surrounded by spirits at all times.  I have to hand it to this show, that scene was genuinely creepy.  Watch out, Melinda!  I'm guessing that's not a good thing, and I hope she's got some Ambien...I can't imagine sleeping after seeing that.