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Sensing Season 5 of Medium with Patricia Arquette and Jake Weber
by Troy Rogers
 A few years ago it might have been difficult for some to picture Patricia Arquette as a domestic crime fighting medium with psychic abilities. After four successful seasons on NBC, Arquette's image is now firmly associated with her small-screen character Allison Dubois, who still struggles to cope with being a wife to her TV husband Joe, played by Jake Weber, and dealing with family dynamics while seeing dead people and an unpredictable future.
As Season 5 of Medium kicks into gear on Monday, February 2 and the debut episode "Soul Survivor" that centers around a case of mistaken identity, we stared into the future and suddenly got a strange, otherworldly feeling that we'd soon be talking to Patricia Arquette and Jake Weber on a conference call. To our surprise, the events of the future played out like our earlier vision when we recently caught up to the two Medium actors to get the psychic goods on the upcoming season.
THE DEADBOLT: What made you decide to settle into the director’s chair this season?
PATRICIA ARQUETTE: I always wanted to check it out and see how it was. I mean, when you’re in front of the camera for a lot of years on a show that has a specific style and rules as far as shooting, you start feeling like you understand those rules. So I just wanted to check it out. I mean, there would be moments where I felt like things were unexplored, that I wish they could’ve been, but the reality as a director on one hour television, or any kind of television, I think your hands are very tied. But I just wanted to see what it was like and checked it out and it’s like using a completely different part of your brain. There were actually times where my head hurt. It felt like my brain was going to liquefy.
THE DEADBOLT: Jake, do you have interest in doing the same thing?
 JAKE WEBER: I’m more interested in directing theater than film, or than TV. I’d like to direct something maybe on film and TV, but not on this, because ... I don’t know. I’d sort of like to come at it from a fresher perspective.
THE DEADBOLT: Everything seems to be getting back to normal in the Dubois household. How long do you think that is going to last?
WEBER: [laughs] I don’t know. You know, it was so dark for a couple of years, which I kind of love, but I think it’s good to give them a little bit of relief. They’re still in a bit of an economic [crisis] - sort of in the same spot that the country is in. But they have sort of a little bit of the light at the end of the tunnel and they’ve been going through this tunnel for a couple of years. So I think it’s nice to give them a little bit of grace and a little bit of happiness. And they can start having some fun with it and stuff, you know?
THE DEADBOLT: Is there a difference between a physic and a medium?
 ARQUETTE: I think they’re the same thing. But for some reason, Allison Dubois, the real Allison, really didn’t like the name "psychic". It conjured, for her, images of sort of people who were taking advantage of people and some kind of hippy thing and she wasn’t like that, like crystals and incense. So for her that was important. I think it’s interesting - The word "medium" instead of "psychic," for me, reminds me more of how people who have this relationship with the dead go back to early civilization, when it’s a more antiquated word for this. We had them in the '20s. And Mary Todd Lincoln used to have séances to try and get a hold of Abraham Lincoln. Going back, back, back to Houdini and all of his séances, so those were mediums and that’s the way it used to be. It was someone in between both worlds.
THE DEADBOLT: Is it easier or harder for Alison to tackle a case where the victim is close to someone she knows?
ARQUETTE: I think it’s harder because she doesn’t really see things clearly, as clearly with distance from the person, or have the same perspective as when it’s somebody who’s more disconnected from her own personal life, or the needs of people she cares about .
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