Her
heart pounds ferociously inside of her chest and her breathing is as erratic as the ticking of a preset clock. She feels her muscles ache as she forces her legs to carry her a little bit farther to her destination. A woman is destined to die and she must save her. But only if she can get to her
before her nemesis does. Before he sets the order of this precariously balanced universe back in its place as he believes it should be. Just another typical day in the life of Tru Davies.
Originally called Heroine, this prematurely cancelled FOX television series entitled Tru Calling featured a young woman named Tru Davies, a recent college graduate, who is forced to work the night shift at a city morgue in New York City once her medical internship at a hospital falls through.
During her first night on the job, she discovers she has the innate ability to relieve days as the bodies brought into the morgue ask her to help them. Now, going back several hours earlier, it is up to this resident heroine to follow her destiny and prevent these people from dying or, at the
very least, try to avert other problems from occurring that would've been caused by that person's untimely demise.
As if that wasn't enough, Tru also has to deal with the hectic lifestyles of her family and friends. There's her loyal best friend, Lindsay, her brother, Harrison, who is a compulsive gambler and her lawyer sister, Meredith, who is a drug addict. In addition, Tru's supportive but quirky boss,
Davis, who helps her every step of the way with her destiny. Halfway through the first season, we are introduced to another character named Jack Harper who we later discover possesses the same unique abilities as Tru, only his job is to make sure the dead actually stay dead. Throughout the last
part of the first season and the rest of the short-lived second season, the ultimate battle is on between Tru (Life) and Jack (Death) as they fight to preserve the balance and answer each of their respective callings as the race against time divides them.
Since Tru and Jack are inherently opposites, they represent what the other does not. They are forced to co-exist together so the universe can be balanced. The Chinese philosophy of yin and yang fits the two perfectly. They are the unity of opposites, often seen in human perceptions of phenomena
in the natural world. As representatives of the yin-yang theory, they describe the polar effects of phenomena, representing a philosophy of duality. In other words, one cannot exist without the other. I believe what makes this show compelling is this very juxtaposition. They are both strong,
independent thinkers who march to the beat of their own drum and follow their own set of beliefs.
What I like most about this show is that Tru represents a heroine, the prime exemplification of female empowerment. She discovers that her ability came from her mother whose murder she witnessed from a closet when she was 12 years old. Knowing this, she draws great courage and strength from
within herself as she is continuously confronted with danger.
When her boyfriend, Luc, is murdered in the season one finale, it activates Tru's motivation to want to beat Jack more than ever before. Tru then takes matters into her own hands when her second boyfriend, Jensen, is murdered and when he won't ask for her help, she goes out and finds another
body that does. Since this was the fifth episode of the second season and there were only six episodes in season two, we never found out what happened in the aftermath of Jensen being saved when he was in fact supposed to stay dead for good.
One of the writers, Doris Egan, posted a blog on LiveJournal detailing some of the show's future developments had the show continued, which would have somehow made Jensen suddenly fascinated by death, eventually turning him into a serial killer. This would have made Tru to reconsider her
decision, based upon her own selfishness at the time, and forced her to turn to the one person who has experience in ending lives: Jack.
While my fan girlish tendencies believed that there was hope for a romantic relationship to blossom between Tru and Jack, despite their differences, I can also see that this show could have gone in a myriad of different directions. And being my favorite television series of all-time, it is
without reservation that I think Eliza Dushku's portrayal of Tru Davies should have earned her an Emmy for Best Actress in a TV Drama Series and an additional nomination for the entire cast to win the coveted Emmy Award for Best TV Drama Series of the Year.
Lara Ameen is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in English with a double minor in Creative Writing and Disability Studies. She enjoys writing about her favorite paranormal television shows and is fascinated by the relationship between psychology, spirituality and the
paranormal. Her biggest aspirations are to be a fiction novelist and television screenwriter.
