Personally, I’d have thought it was pretty awesome to have the pink Power Ranger as a babysitter. Unfortunately, Erin Cahill’s character came with a lot of baggage. Since this is ‘Ghost Whisperer,’ I’m sure you can imagine what that baggage consisted of.

This episode took a break from the ongoing plotlines involving Shadows and Shinies, and all that other creepy stuff we’re learning goes bump in the night other than ghosts. Instead, it got back to the heart of what ‘Ghost Whisperer’ was all about: helping a lost soul go into the light. I’m ashamed to admit it wasn’t until very late in the episode that I realized the spirit was portrayed by Catherine Dent (‘The Shield’). The make-up wasn’t that intense!

The episode also pushed the limits of forgiveness and understanding about as far as they can be pushed. We’ve had some angry ghosts before, and they can definitely be a danger, but Laura (Dent) really surprised me.

It was more the quick “I didn’t know” at the end after she’d tried to murder both her husband and Kelly (Cahill), and suddenly everyone was happy and in love. I understand the capacity for love and forgiveness in the human heart is pretty big, but Laura had been tormenting Kelly for who knows how long, and endangering the lives of the children in Kelly’s care.

She’s probably done irreparable damage to Kelly’s reputation for child care, which no amount of “I have a gift” can salvage even if Melinda were inclined to go around the neighborhood and try to explain to everyone what was really going on. Plus, the kid in the car seat with the car rolling into traffic? You can’t argue that Laura knew there was no way that baby would get hurt. That’s reckless endangerment.

Then there’s the fact that Laura was going to kill both her husband, Gil, and Kelly. They would have surely died had Melinda not shown up as timely as she did. That is outright brutality, and seems even excessively harsh for most of the ghosts we’ve seen throughout this show’s run. But all’s good in the end because “I didn’t know.”

The extremes were handled a little sloppy by the writers, and that was mostly because it was a rather poorly written closing scene when Laura went into the light. That said, the argument could be made that she clearly made some terrible judgments while she was alive, so perhaps this behavior was within the exaggerated realm of her character, as ghosts tend to take things a little further than their live selves would.

Alcoholics are certainly known to do horrible things from time to time, and then think a hasty apology can make up for all of it. Because they have a dulled sense of the activities they did when they were drunk, they usually don’t realize just how frightening or devastating they were. At least, not until or if they sober up sometime later in their lives. That’s why they generally go back and apologize for their bad behavior.

So, by that logic, I’m going to say that Laura as an earthbound spirit was still an alcoholic, thus exhibiting the impaired judgment and lack of emotional empathy that goes along with it. I’m still not sure, though, why all those parents were leaving vague and positive reviews of Kelly when used as references.

They didn’t know she was haunted and they weren’t being haunted themselves, so you’d think they would be brutally honest that she was terrible and endangered their children. Of course, that would have killed the progression of the story right there, as Melinda would have just dismissed her outright and moved on.

We’ll call this episode the calm before the storm, as I’m pretty sure we’re going to start ramping up to some kind of big climax with the Shadows by the end of the season. It would have helped to have at least a hint of them this week, but I don’t mind a break or two along the way. We got some nice family moments with Jim and Aiden, with a very sweet family date at the end. I might have to try that with my son one night for my wife.

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