God sends Joan to join the chess club while Will attempts to find an abducted child and Helen hopes for a miracle so that Kevin can walk again.

I’m foreseeing trouble reviewing Joan of Arcadia as it goes along, as the stories aren’t necessarily designed to lead towards something, they’re there to make you think. It’s tricky to rate one higher than another, as each one sets out to accomplish much the same thing and it just depends how much the various plotlines dovetail.

Here, they don’t, making it a bit of a mismatch. While I appreciate that the whole cast need to have something to do, to have a police investigation and a day or four in the life of Joan at school makes the show a little schizophrenic. So far it seems to be working okay, but I’m not sure it can continue along those lines forever.

I think this one suffers a little from not having much of God in it; his/her dialogue is always sparkling and fun, and the only major scene with this is when he appears to Joan to talk about chess. This is the traditional ‘message’ part of the episode, as she is told what chess is meant to teach her about life: that you have to play your own game, do it your own way. It’s a clever idea, and one that hits home very well as Joan realizes that what other people think really doesn’t matter.

The Will plotline isn’t quite as satisfying, mainly because it doesn’t seem to have any point: a psychic helps the police investigation and turns up nothing new in the way of helpful hints to solving the case. Yet she knows that Joan is special in some way, so what is this meant to point to? It seems like a message has been lost somewhere.

Overall it’s a good if average episode, with a strong central message and the usual strong performances. It just didn’t surprise me or make me think ‘Oh, that’s very clever’ like the ones before. But I still have faith…

***

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