An episode of "Ghost Whisperer" offers a lesbian storyline

On the latest episode of the CBS series Ghost Whisperer, there was a lesbian twist to the mysterious storyline. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a woman named Melinda, who has a gift to see and hear those who haven't crossed over from death "into the light." On this week's "Till Death Do Us Start," Melinda is visited separately by a wife and husband who are dead, but the wife doesn't want to be with her husband in the afterlife.

Alongside her real life beau, Jamie Kennedy, who plays the couple's son, Eli, Melinda attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding the wife's resistance to see her husband, Ray. Through her visions, Melinda sees flowers and candles in a bath at the couple's lake house, and infers that Eli's mother, Evelyn (Christine Estabrook) was having an affair.

Evelyn doesn't want Melinda and Eli worrying about the past, so she tries to deter them from finding out anything else.

Meanwhile, she's haunting Anne (Debra Monk), her best friend on earth.

Eli finds a locket in his dad's things, which he assumes belongs to his mother. Through the locket, Melinda's views are confirmed that there was an affair, and they assume it must have been Jon, Anne's husband.

Confronting Jon doesn't help, and it just makes Eli's father more upset. Ray begins to haunt Jon and threatens to kill him. At Ray's funeral, Melinda decides to put an end to it all, as the ghosts join the living to communicate what really happened — which is that Evelyn was having an affair with Anne.

Everyone is shocked, except for Jon, who had an idea that it was going on. However, Anne said she wanted the "secret to die with Evelyn," but felt bad that she had seen her the night she died from an aneurysm for "one last time" at the lake house. However, Evelyn had already hit her head on the sink and was dead on the floor. Anne tried to clean up the flowers and candles, but left the body.

The romance between the women was never felt, and it seems as if the women in death and after were more interested in their relationships with their husbands. They never used the word "lesbian," although Eli does say "I can't believe my mom is gay," with Melinda's husband saying, "That might not be the word she would use."

So overall, the episode was focused on the mystery surrounding the afterlife (as per usual with the show) and the lesbian relationship wasn't scoffed at because it was a gay one, but more so because it was adultery. However, the relationship between the women wasn't too believable, even in flash backs. And the whole "lesbian twist" angle is becoming a tired one — how many times can someone be "shocked" by the idea of two women falling for one another? Maybe their own families couldn't feel the passion, either.