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Main Characters
Allison DuBois
Played By: Patricia Arquette
The protagonist, a would-be lawyer turned psychic consultant for Phoenix's District Attorney.
- Action Girl: Subverted. In one episode, Allison seems to be fighting off a group of muggers as if she were Xena. But in fact everything after the initial confrontation was a dream she had after actually getting beaten up.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Averted, or possibly even Inverted. The real Alison DuBois is actually very attractive, and Patricia Arquette, while certainly not bad-looking, made an effort to present the ''character' Allison as just an average, unglamorous mom.
- Bilingual Dialogue: Allison gets a case of faulty Translator Microbes that make everyone sound as if they're speaking gibberish (she can still speak and read English) except for a professor who speaks Navajo. It turns out that she and her assistant killed a pair of Navajo bank robbers after hearing them brag in Diné. She gets hers later when she escapes to a foreign country and doesn't notice someone paying attention to her while she's bragging to Allison in English.
- Blatant Lies: Allison claiming to sleeping normally in the episode she had to be slapped out of sleepwalking at a highway by Joe.
- The Cassandra: Subverted, by this point everyone who matters (except Joe and his wrecked sleep cycle) takes Allison's visions seriously.
- Catapult Nightmare: How Allison frequently awakens from her psychic dreams.
- Circling Birdies: In "A Changed Man," Allison falls and hits her head. Bridgette asks if she saw stars, or planets, or these. Ariel tells her that they're only cartoons, Bridgette insists that they could be in real life too.
- Deus ex Machina: Aside from Allison herself, "divine intervention" for already-dead foes has appeared twice against the mad doctor and Allison's psychic-hating stalker.
- Disguised Hostage Gambit: Allison manages to avert one thanks to her dreams.
- Emergency Broadcast: The season 7 episode "Where Were You When?" contains an instance of it, inside of one of Allison DuBois' catapult nightmares. Allison is standing in the kitchen where her daughters are having breakfast while watching cartoons on television, when an Emergency Action Notification interrupts the programme. It causes Allison to have an Oh, Crap! moment: her reaction is a Slow-Motion Drop of the glass of milk she was holding, followed by a horrified scream.
- Happily Married: Allison and Joe, who have very few marital problems despite the intense stress that Allison's career and powers put upon them. Even after his death in the finale, Allison spends the remainder of her life single, reuniting with Joe when she dies herself.
- I See Dead People: Allison does, and eventually, so do her daughters.
- It's a Wonderful Plot: In the season 2 finale "Twice Upon a Time," Allison dreams what life would be like if she married her old childhood friend instead of Joe after being throughly embarrassed at a court hearing which turns out to also be part of a dream, which gives her a clue as to how the impossible appeared to be possible.
- Let's Meet the Meat: Allison dreams of talking pigs, and after being tortured by
squealing sandwiches feels compelled to save a pig named Barney from the slaughterhouse. It turns out that what could happen to Barney isn't as important as who was fed to him. - Living Lie Detector
- In one episode where Allison hears a buzzer sound in her head whenever someone tells a lie.
- There are times when Allison sees what really happened in her head when someone is lying to her face.
- Mama Bear: Allison Kung-fu's a bunch of muggers: "Don't you dare mess with my kids' pictures." Sadly that wasn't even just a dream — she was knocked out by the muggers.
- Modesty Bedsheet: Pretty much every other time Allison wakes up. If you pay close attention, whenever she and Joe get "friendly" as they're going to bed, when she later wakes up from a dream, the bedsheet will be the only thing covering her.
- Muggle–Mage Romance: The titular medium is married to an ordinary man.
- Murder by Inaction: In one episode, a young Allison has visions about one of her friends. She sees that, by knocking on his door, she will stop him from killing himself, and many years later he will rape and murder teenage girls. So a few days later, she decides to not interrupt his suicide.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: Played with. Allison appears to have much more powerful abilities than even she anticipates given how much her psychic nature branches out into lie detection, seeing the future, and even body-swapping. However, this is usually given some variant on thematic significance, which suggests that is how she got those powers.
- Nightmare Dreams: Allison's visions are standard examples.
- Omniscient Morality License: Sometimes Allison's powers lead her to irrational/illegal courses of action... e.g. when she shows up at a woman's house in the middle of the night, maces her, and kidnaps her baby. Though Allison was just following a vague Gut Feeling at the time, it later turns out that because she kidnapped the baby, the cops were there to arrest a second set of kidnappers who were planning to ransom and sell the baby. As a result, the mother decides not to testify against her.
- Organ Autonomy: In one episode, Allison gets a skin graft on her hand and wrist after burning herself. It turns out the skin came from a murdered woman who wants to help Allison solve the crime, although her "help" usually takes the form of doing things with the affected hand without Allison having any idea why (including, at one point, undoing the pants of a dead man laying in a coffin).
- Outliving One's Offspring: In one of the episodes it was revealed that Alison was pregnant with a baby boy and had a miscarriage
- Police Psychic: The main character, Allison, can talk with the dead and often has dreams of the past or future. Once she convinces the D.A.'s office that her gift is real, she is allowed to tag along on police investigations.
- Prophetic Fallacy: It would be easier to list the episodes where this trope doesn't come into play. Allison's dreams are usually vague at first, and she has a tendency to jump to conclusions about their meanings.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong
- Any dreams where time travel or alternate futures appear to be involved, such as Allison's vision of a post-apocalyptic world actually what a kidnapper/Crazy Survivalist wants his young victims to think, or Ariel suddenly finding herself 10, then 17 years in the future after her teacher is murdered.
- Or a literal episode where she's working on a murder and just so happens to reacquaint with a childhood friend and at the same time begins dreaming about when she first met him she quickly finds out he's likely behind the murder and others and in a dream alters time to stop herself from interrupting his suicide attempt.
- Shout-Out: Allison finds a pair of sunglasses that show how long a person has to live.
- Snap Back: Between Allison's visions and her normal everyday life.
- Soundtrack Dissonance:
- When Allison hears the stirring opening strings of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" when she sees items that can be the components of a bomb.
- She also hears a cheerful song while watching her ill friend from therapy being killed by the doctor.
- Terrible Ticking: In the beginning of the Season 2 episode "The Song Remains the Same", Allison hears a loud song in her head. The song repeats itself over and over until it subtly guides her to the iPod of a missing college student who was listening to the song before her abduction.
- Together in Death: The Series Finale has Joe die in a plane crash and Alison joins him 41 years later, after seeing the girls grow up and have families of their own; in death, they both appear in their mid-thirties and share a happy hello kiss.
- Unfazed Everyman: Inverted, since Allison's abilities are widely accepted as completely normal even though she's the only one (in earlier seasons) with these abilities. Anyone who knows about her secret, including her own husband, still makes wise-cracks about it.
- We Would Have Told You, But...: Scanlon does this to Allison when the psychic Serial Killer reaches her house, by making it look like the cop-cars meant to protect her were backing off. Then, after telling Allison it'll still be another ten minutes before he can come help her, Scanlon arrives seconds later to her rescue, revealing the whole squad had been waiting for the right time to do so all along and that telling her would have jeopardized their plan.
- What If?: "Twice Upon a Time" shows Allison's life if she had become a defense attorney and married, not Joe, but an earlier boyfriend who turned out to be career-minded and unsupportive.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Allison keeps a lot of guilty secrets, especially like the Well-Intentioned Extremist FBI profiler played by [1] who lets his prey go only to kill them later himself.
Joe DuBois
Played By: Jake Weber
An aeronautical engineer, and Allison's husband.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Joe's extreme skepticism and inhumane insistence that Allison think things through almost fall into irrational... except for the numerous times he is dead right, which ironically gives him just enough credibility to insist on doing the same when it will not work.
- Beard of Sorrow: Joe appears to grow a lovely example at the start of Season Six. Naturally, it's all a dream.
- Deadpan Snarker:Bridgette: What's a 401K plan?Joe: About half of what it used to be.
- Expecting Someone Taller: When Joe first meets Captain Push, his first comment to Allison is that he thought the great Captain Push would be taller. He later admits that he got taller as the night went on.
- Happily Married: Allison and Joe, who have very few marital problems despite the intense stress that Allison's career and powers put upon them.
- Is That a Threat?: In "Penny for Your Thoughts," when Ariel's math teacher tells Joe that she believes Ariel cheated on an estimation problem because she got exactly the right number and must have looked in his book on his desk where he'd written it down, Joe points out that the odds of someone having done so, with 25 kids in the class, were 1/40. When the teacher continues to insist that she must have cheated, Joe says that if she's penalized, he'll go over his head and the teacher asks "Are you threatening me, Mr. DuBois?"
- Killed Off for Real: Joe in the series finale (which kind of doesn't seem fair to the real-life Joe) and eventually Allison.
- Muggle–Mage Romance: The titular medium is married to an ordinary man.
- Only Sane Man: His wife has these crazy dreams, to which he generally makes reasonable suggestions, only to have them ignored.
- Together in Death: The Series Finale has Joe die in a plane crash and Alison joins him 41 years later, after seeing the girls grow up and have families of their own; in death, they both appear in their mid-thirties and share a happy hello kiss.
- Unfazed Everyman: Now that Allison's children have abilities too, Joe has become this.
Manuel Devalos
Played By: Miguel Sandoval
The District Attorney of Phoenix, and Allison's boss.
- Ambition Is Evil: When Devalos is tapped to become mayor of Phoenix, he wants to know his wife's best friend's husband Benito, a very ambitious but politically weak councilman, won't use their wives' personal information against him. Benito implies that he will (he knows about both Ariana's suicide and Mrs. Devalos's subsequent pill addiction that she later beat (thankfully he doesn't know why Ariana killed herself)) so Devalos counters with $25,000 in stolen funds for an abortion for Benito's comely campaign worker.
- Karma Houdini: Devalos breaks attorney-client privilege, an offense that could get a defense lawyer not only fired but disbarred for life, by submitting to the prosecution evidence against his client, a serial rapist. He not only gets away with this, but goes on to become an assistant district attorney. As it turns out, It's Personal, the client had raped his daughter and she ended up killing herself out of guilt for not reporting the assault, which could have spared his later victims.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Devalos' revenge for his daughter on his own client. Lucky to not get disbarred for that...
Ariel DuBois
Played By: Sofia Vassilieva
The eldest of the three DuBois daughters.
- Argument of Contradictions: In "Night of the Wolf," Ariel and Bridgette have a very loud and extended one regarding whether not Bridgette's friend Bobby is real. (Bobby is real, but he's the ghost of a boy who died five years before, thus why most people can't see him.)
- Babies Ever After: Ariel is pregnant seven years in the future.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Only some of the time, though. Allison and Joe are clearly happy that she's turning into such a mature, responsible young woman.
- Heel Realization: Who's about to leave for college, is annoyed with Bridgette apparently not caring and even seeming somewhat glad she's going to be leaving. When Ariel confronts her about it, Bridgette bluntly explains that all Ariel has ever done is relentlessly tease or bully her..and that's whenever she wasn't outright ignoring Bridgette, causing Ariel to realize that she's missed out on forming any kind of meaningful or loving bond with her eldest younger sister up to this point.
- Hot for Student: Indirectly causes a lot of emotional stress for Ariel: her college interviewer's dead husband fathered a child with one of his students, and asks Ariel to erase the file with incriminating photos on his (now his wife's) computer in exchange for a perfect interview with his wife. Ariel does so, but then decides to do the right thing and restore the file. The interviewer returns to tell Ariel that she's going to help the baby financially, but unfortunately for Ariel's future she also thinks that she planted the file after being dumped by her husband. Even the dead husband is stunned despite knowing what would happen.
The very next episode, Ariel starts losing time Futurama-style, jumping hours, then years into the future where she's Happily Married to a friend from high school and they have an adorable daughter. She's certain the time-skips have to do with a teacher who was murdered right before the decade-long jump, and right before her mom is about to tell her how the teacher's kid ties into all this, she's thrown ahead another seven years — where her mother is dead, killed that same night. Desperate for answers, she goes to see the dead teacher's son, who's the spitting image of high school sweetheart husband who's about to kill her — and then she wakes up, safe in the present and a few hours before her teacher's murder by her teenage babydaddy (he had a full-ride scholarship and wasn't about to risk it for his desperate ex-lover). Also, despite now knowing it was all just a dream, Ariel really loved her daughter. Needless to say, after all that Ariel really, really needs a hug. - Jump Cut: Used fairly cleverly: a boy offers Ariel the use of his car as a napping area between exams; she begins to turn him down but in mid-sentence we cut to her waking up in the car. It's then revealed that this wasn't a jump-cut, is was literally how she experienced the moment, and her life starts jump-cutting further and further and further, well into her twenties. Naturally it turned out to be All Just a Dream.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Bridget and Ariel.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Bridget and Ariel, in a very downplayed and normal case of The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry.
Bridgette DuBois
Played By: Maria Lark
The middle DuBois daughter.
- Argument of Contradictions: In "Night of the Wolf," Ariel and Bridgette have a very loud and extended one regarding whether not Bridgette's friend Bobby is real. (Bobby is real, but he's the ghost of a boy who died five years before, thus why most people can't see him.)
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: The mantle has long since been passed to her after Ariel.
- Medium Blending: It turns out that Bridgette has Mommy's abilities, too, but all of her premonitions are in the form of extremely chilling (and violent) cartoons.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Bridget and Ariel.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Bridget and Ariel, in a very downplayed and normal case of The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry.
Lee Scanlon
Played By: David Cubitt
A slightly gruff Phoenix PD Detective who frequently works with Allison and Devalos.
- Abusive Parents: On a more regular level, are.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Scanlon delivers one of these to an abusive father in front of his (the abuser's) terrified wife and son.
- Only Mostly Dead: Scanlon is shot in the gut to his dead brother's delight, but Scanlon (being dead at the time) can see the future a bit farther then his brother and knows he'll be revived.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Detective Scanlon and his rapist ex-con older brother.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Scanlon allowed his rapist brother to be killed by Vigilante Woman [2], although no one knew at the time. Later, driven to the edge of sleep deprivation by his brother's ghost, he beats up an abusive father in front of his family and later threatens to reveal the wife's dark past to the DA (though that might be the brother talking).
Marie DuBois
Played By: Madison and Miranda Carabello
The youngest of the DuBois daughters.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: In the future, she's angry that her dad never visited after he died (this was a dream, unfortunately it was sent from the afterlife).
Recurring Characters
Lynn DiNovi
Played By: Tina Di Joseph
The Deputy Mayor of Phoenix who begins dating and eventually marries Scanlon.
- Beleaguered Assistant: The Mayor is a total flake, something that is most apparent in "Four Dreams."
- Demoted to Satellite Love Interest: While she did keep her job as the Deputy Mayor for the entirety of the show's run, as the series wore on, it became less and less prominent while Lynn herself became little more than "Scanlon's wife."
- Mouth of Sauron: She does all of the talking for the Mayor, who is The Ghost.
Michael Benoit
Played By: Ryan Hurst / David Arquette
Allison's loutish half-brother who has also inherited the DuBois family's psychic gift.
- The Alcoholic: In his first appearance, he was almost perpetually drunk, out of a combination of attempting to suppress his abilities and guilt over being a party to a fellow soldier's fragging of their CO. He is a bit dryer in subsequent appearances.
- Back for the Finale: He reappears in one of the show's final episodes after being absent since Season 3.
- Boisterous Weakling: When caught ransacking a hotel room, he boasts about being a highly-trained soldier who has seen a lot of active combat... right before getting beaten up.
- Grand Theft Me: He makes a deal with the ghost of a businessman named Carson Churchill, who gets Michael's life back on track and turns him into a success, in exchange for Michael allowing Churchill to take him over every so often so that Churchill can complete his Ghostly Goals. Unfortunately, Churchill neglected to inform Michael that his plans involved bumping other people down a heart transplant list so that his sick wife can be moved up it.
- In-Series Nickname: "Lucky."
- Interrupted Suicide: In his final appearance, his life has gone to crap again, leading him to nearly jump off of a bridge before being interrupted by the ghost of Carson Churchill.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Michael can be very crude and obnoxious, but at the end of the day he will do the right thing, he just needs a bit of a nudge in the right direction sometimes.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Joe very clearly dislikes him, seeing him as as a loser and a bad influence, and only just barely tolerates him for Allison's sake.
- Phony Psychic: While he does have actual powers, the advice that he gave people who called his psychic hotline tended to just be whatever random crap that popped into his head.
- Refusal of the Call: Allison's half-brother Michael a.k.a. "Lucky" is in denial about his powers, though that doesn't keep the plot from finding him. Allison herself used to drink to block her powers when she was younger. In an episode from the final season, he ends up straightening his life out with some help from a ghost who takes over his body, but has to work with Allison to defeat the ghost's sinister agenda.
Kenneth Push
Hannah
Mr. DuBois
Played By: Bruce Gray
Joe's deceased father, a businessman who never had much time for his family, something which he is trying to make up for in death by acting as an occasional Spirit Advisor to Allison.
Marjorie DuBois
Lily Devalos
Tom Van Dyke
Cynthia Keener
Played By: Anjelica Huston
The head of a crime hotline called Ameritips that Allison works for in Season Four.
Ashley Whitaker
Major Villains
Larry Watt
Played By: Conor O'Farrell
An unscrupulous defense attorney who has frequently butted heads with Allison and Devalos.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: He was the show's most frequently appearing antagonist, but also just an unscrupulous attorney, and thus a far cry from the usual rapists, killers, kidnappers, gangsters, etc. (he did defend those types of people in court, though).
- Amoral Attorney: His schemes include having a murder victim's twin sister impersonate her, and having a mole in the DA's office leak information to him.
- Antagonistic Offspring: His own son tried to frame him for sexual impropriety and murder, and it is hard not to feel at least a little sorry for Watt when this is revealed to him by Allison and Devalos.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: While prominent in the first two seasons, he was dropped without much fanfare afterward, making only one further appearance in Season Five.
Doctor Charles Walker
Played By: Mark Sheppard
A hebephilic serial rapist and killer who was lynched in 1902. He has spent the proceeding decades continuing his crimes as a ghost, bringing him into conflict with Allison.
- The Butcher: In life, he was known as "The Butcher of Wichita."
- The Corrupter: After finding a psychically sensitive person, usually a male doctor, he spends anything from weeks to years acting as the Devil on their shoulder, encouraging them to rape and disembowel a young girl before abandoning them and moving on to another proxy.
- Despair Event Horizon: His wife, Maude, was his Morality Chain, and after she died, Charles gave in to his darkest impulses, which helped to suppress his pain and grief over losing Maude.
- Dragged Off to Hell: The unseen spirit of his wife Maude pulls him out of their descendant, Jack, and into the afterlife. While it was implied that Charles could return, he never did.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: While he did assault his mother during a moment of blind emotion, when he snapped back to his senses, he looked shocked, and apologized. Later, when his mother visits him in jail, the two hold hands as Charles tries to console her.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: His mother and his wife, Maude. This only extends to them, though, as he was wholly indifferent to his son and his descendant, Jack.
- False Friend: For Ariel in "Doctor's Orders." He acts as her confidante while pretending to be a new librarian at her school, but only as part of a plan to manipulate Allison.
- Familial Body Snatcher: He possesses his own descendant, Jack, in "Blood Relation."
- Faux Affably Evil: He almost always has a polite veneer, and at one point even refers to Allison as his "old friend."
- Grand Theft Me: He usually just acts as a voice in a person's head, but he is capable of full on possession, performing it on Doctor Kenneth Holloway, Elisha, and Jack Walker.
- Gutted Like a Fish: His preferred method of murdering someone was by disemboweling them, with a blade or just his bare hands.
- Identical Grandson: His descendant, Jack, looks exactly like him, due to also being played by Mark Sheppard.
- Maternal Death? Blame the Child!: When his wife Maude died giving birth, Charles ignored his newborn son in favor of cradling and weeping over Maude's body. He apparently abandoned his son afterward.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Though it is implied that he is not a real doctor, and that he just pretended to be one to lure in victims and because he has a medical fetish.
- Serial Killer: He murdered fourteen girls in life, and several more through proxies as a ghost.
- Serial Rapist: He rapes, or sometimes just molests, his victims before killing them.
- Villainous Breakdown: After Allison thwarts one of his murders, Charles completely loses it, and is left impudently screaming and raging at people who cannot even hear him.
- Would Hurt a Child: He targets adolescent girls, with the youngest being 12.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: He abandons his proxies after finally making them snap and rape and kill someone, and coerced one girl into killing herself because, even though she was more or less completely under his control, she was simply too "stupid" to be of any further use to him after Charles used her to get close to his descendant, Jack.
Sonny Troyer
Played By: Jim Holmes / Eric Stoltz
An evil psychic who uses his powers to prey on women as "The Bad Samaritan."
- Bad Samaritan: This was his In-Universe Nickname, derived from his habit of preying on women while they are alone and in distress (one broke her ankle while out hiking alone while another's car broke down on the highway in the middle of the night, for examples).
- Couldn't Find a Pen: After murdering one victim, he used her blood to taunt Allison with the message, "Wrong roommate, Allison."
- Dramatic Irony: In his debut, he is unaware that his car has a bad oil leak, and by the end of the story, it conks out, leaving him stranded, alone and in distress, on the side of the highway in the middle of the night, just like one of his victims.
- Evil Counterpart: One of the show's two evil psychics, he used his powers to harm people in need, in contrast to Allison, who uses her powers to help people in need.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He has glasses in his second appearance, and they make him look kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer.
- Great Escape: After foreseeing that a passenger airplane will crash into the prison that he is currently being held in, Sonny uses the chaos caused by the crash to escape, after dousing his cell and everything in it with rubbing alcohol before swapping clothes with another prisoner.
- Harassing Phone Call: He makes two of these to Allison, one of which ends with the reveal that he is right outside of her house, while the other unnerves her to the point that she is unable to sleep, which allows Sonny to claim another victim without having to worry about Allison dreaming about him or her.
- Hidden Depths: He has a thing for accents, something that we learn in "We Had a Dream."
- Only Known by Their Nickname: In his first appearance, he was just called "The Bad Samaritan" and credited as "Caller."
- Serial Killer: He had at least six known victims at the time of his death, all of them women that he had raped and usually strangled.
- Serial Rapist: He rapes his victims orally, vaginally, and anally.
- The Villain Knows Where You Live: After Allison foils one of his murder attempts, Sonny calls her from right outside of her house.
Edward Cooper
Played By: Kurtwood Smith
A famed FBI profiler who leads a double life as a Vigilante Man.
- Vigilante Man: Kurtwood Smith ("Red") and Laura Prepon ("Donna")'s characters, an FBI profiler and a rape victim-turned-self defense instructor (who haven't met, seeing as Red died before Allison met Donna), kill serial killers and rapists, respectively.
Lucas Harvey
Played By: Tony Curran
A mechanic and psychotic religious fanatic who believes that psychics are blasphemous and tools of the Devil.
Paul Scanlon
Played By: Dean Norris
Scanlon's older brother, and a Serial Rapist.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Detective Scanlon and his rapist ex-con older brother.
