As this sixth season of Medium kicks off with the first of 22 episodes (on five discs), lead character Allison Dubois (Patricia Arquette) is one month out of the lengthy coma she fell into at the end of the previous year, brought on by a brain tumor. It's bad enough that she's now partly paralyzed on her right side; even worse, she no longer has the dreams that were the key to her abilities as a medium and psychic, meaning she can't be much help to the Phoenix district attorney's office as anything other than a paralegal. Husband Joe (Jake Weber), who quit his job to take care of Allison during her illness, would prefer that her powers, and the "darkness" that accompanied them, never return, but one needn't be Nostradamus to know that they will, and soon. When they do, another season of creator/executive producer Glen Gordon Caron's series quickly hits its stride--and that's entirely a good thing.

Two of the Dubois daughters, Ariel (Sofia Vassilieva) and Bridgette (Maria Lark), share some of their mother's abilities, and thus are featured a bit more this time around (not always to good effect; an episode in which Ariel confronts a dead guy in a rabbit suit who's tormenting a young boy is fairly silly). Joe, the odd man out as the females in his life grapple with the weighty weirdness of their "gift," is the focus of a few story lines, as are Allison's colleagues, D.A. Manuel Devalos (Miguel Sandoval) and Det. Lee Scanlon (David Cubitt). But this is still the Allison Dubois show. This season, as she tries to help solve murder cases involving stalkers ("Deja Vu All Over Again"), serial killers ("An Everlasting Love"), crooked cops ("The Future's So Bright"), identity thieves ("Will the Real Fred Rovick Please Stand Up?"), a maniac who drains the blood from entire families and then poses them like wax dummies ("There Will Be Blood," a two-parter), and more, Allison's clues come to her in some very peculiar ways. In one episode, she hears the conversations of people nearby via her car radio; in another, she dons a pair of sunglasses that allow her to see exactly how many days whoever she's looking at has left to live. And then there's "Bite Me," probably the season's best and most inventive show. In the course of this Halloween-themed tale, Allison dreams that she's a character in Night of the Living Dead; what's more, she wakes up to find herself afflicted with the very same injuries her character suffered in the dreams (these sequences, brilliantly re-created from George Romero's classic horror tale and shot in black and white, are also the subject of a featurette included in the bonus material). Episodes like "Bite Me" reflect Caron's quirky, often whimsical style, and even if his inspiration and eccentric little touches sometimes come off as merely frivolous, Medium still makes for highly entertaining viewing.

Allison Dubois (Arquette) is a strong-willed, devoted young wife and mother of three girls, who has gradually come to grips with her extraordinary ability to talk to dead people, see the future in her dreams and read people's thoughts. This season, Allison and her family's world is turned upside down after her abilities are publicly exposed, resulting in sweeping changes both professionally and personally.