One New York Life

In a show of either how quickly things slip my mind or how little I was in to this show, I completely forgot my intention to Netflix the final season when it became available. I finished season three last April and season four sat in my queue for quite some time. As it’s tax season, stuff gets watched. The last three seasons can be found right here.

I made a surprising number of notes while watching the final 13 episodes.

The Good

• One of my ongoing themes is that this show perfectly analyzes what the government response would be if suddenly human beings started to develop super powers. The xenophobic response from most of the country and politicians trying to build careers on it is done very, very well. They would continue to push until a 4400 responded and then use that person as a scapegoat to push though Patriot Act-esque legislation. It took 133 issues of X-Men to develop Senator Kelly and 141 issues to conceptualize the Mutant Control Act. Our government would be much more efficient.
• A perfect example was the outlawing of and strict penalties for taking the promicin shot. If you recall from season three, Messiah character Jordan Collier helped develop a shot which would either allow a person to develop a 4400-like ability or kill them. The government response (another excellent theme explored by the show — the ineffectualness of drug laws) is to outlaw the possession of promicin and to make testing promicin-positive a crime in itself. The registered 4400s must present themselves to NTAC (the federal government branch of Homeland Security tasked with preventing 4400 related crime), register their ability and, if it’s deemed a danger, go on a regiment of “inhibitor” or be imprisoned. The idea of our government not grasping the fact they are effectively creating a prison deterrent for a product that will immediately kill half the people who use it is completely and totally believable. Like, maybe someone should put together a profile of people who are willing to toss a coin where heads means “kill yourself” and compare that to the promicin legislation. Just a thought.
• When Shawn uses The 4400 Center to develop a test better indicating whether a person will survive the promicin shot, the central conflict of the season finally comes up. Collier believes for everyone to be equal that everyone on Earth must take the shot. He believes Shawn’s path creates two classes of people (positives with abilities and negatives without) who will always be at conflict. This seems to be what the bad guys (The Marked… more on them later) want. While we never really get a definite answer, the future seems to be a burnt out husk where people with abilities lord other people without them. This is the future the bad guys want to maintain. Which means that the viewer is supposed to either root for Magneto Collier’s “kill half the people on the planet” genocide or Professor Xhawn’s “live in harmony but maybe with mass slavery” theory. If you find yourself rooting for Collier, you’re really sort of rooting for a holocaust. Collier’s entire movement is based on killing off everyone who, by accident of birth, doesn’t display a gene mutation allowing them to survive the shot. AND HE WAS KIND OF THE GOOD GUY. Getting away with that is a great bit of writing and I tip my cap. It’s a really good moral-gray-area conflict.

The Bad

• The 50/50 chance between death and superpowers, while cool on paper, ended up an unimpressive plot device. Because of the nature of television, NO ONE important who took the shot died which made it come across as a free ticket to power for everyone other than the character who died in season three to establish that it killed people. I don’t think the viewer was able to properly grasp the whole “genocide” thing. NTAC display lots of righteous indignation about how the promicin shot will kill half the people who take it, but the whole idea of 150 million dead Americans and 3 BILLION bodies world-wide is never driven home. The series finale is the ONLY episode that properly addresses the body count. Shawn’s annoying little brother takes the shot and his ability creates an airborne virus version of the promicin shot. Half the people around him, including his own mother, start dropping dead — coughing blood and bleeding from the eyes. It’s the first and only time they really address the body count. It should have been addressed way sooner.
• Speaking of Shawn’s brother… the show uses a Heroes-esque “You develop a power you subconsciously want” thing. Since Danny wanted to take the shot but didn’t have the stones until he knew it wouldn’t kill him, the power he develops is to take that choice away from people. Perfectly fine. When they put him on inhibitors, the promicin builds up in his body and will eventually kill him. He asks his brother to put him out of his misery and Shawn inexplicably agrees. Now, we know Jordan Collier’s 4400 ability is to remove abilities from people who got them via the promicin shot. We know Collier has no intention on forcing promicin shots on people (his whole movement is based on making a choice). It doesn’t even cross Shawn’s mind to say “hey, Danny, hang out here in a secure room for a bit while I ask Collier to suck the ability out of you”? His go-to is “yeah, I lost my mom today but, f*ck it — we’ll get all this out of the way now”? I think it was supposed to be a powerful death scene but one of two things came out of it: Either 1) Shawn didn’t want to help his brother because he was upset about Danny unintentionally killing their mom or 2) the viewer ends up more confused then Nathan having to fly away with Peter in the Heroes season one finale. It might be the most pointless “we need to kill some people in the finale” deaths since Anya’s demise in the Buffy finale.
• Diana Skouris’s sister April remained barely less annoying than Kim Bauer. She developed an ability that forced people to tell her the truth. She used this to blackmail people. And she thought it a good idea to blackmail someone who was trying to kill someone else. This ended about as you can imagine. And again — she took the shot, got a really helpful power, was an idiot, and was drafted by the government in to a high-paying a job. The bodies weren’t exactly piling up.
• The Marked. OK, so the bad guys in the future create a process by which they can take over people’s bodies. The process leaves a tell-tale mark behind the left ear of those who have been “Marked.” In perspective, the good guys on this show can inject people with superpowers and send them back with no outward signs. The bad guys leave a creepy mark indicating that they’re bad guys. Of course, instead of injecting the person and keeping him out of the way until the takeover is complete, they inject him in a horrifically obvious way and let people get really suspicious before the takeover is complete. And it was never really adequately explained why the Marked can only travel back in time while the good guys can go in both directions. On my evil warlord list is to develop a process by which the only tell-tale mark of takeover is on the taint. They can look there, but who’d want to?
• To continue, it’s established that the Marked, when discovered, kill their host bodies and are later injected in to a new host. If that’s the case, why didn’t Baldwin kill himself immediately after he knew his cover was blown?
• As a note to all future sci-fi/fantasy writers: there doesn’t always HAVE to be a prophecy. Really. Sometimes, stuff just happening can be sufficient. Especially when the prophecy doesn’t show up until the fourth season. Kyle’s ability to see a hot redhead who delivers him prophetic messages was just… kinda dumb. It was never really explained either. Which side was she on? Was she in his head? Was she delivering messages from the future? And why and/or how did someone in the 1920s write a book foretelling everything? Did the future send someone back who knew? It seemed like a silly side-story that added nothing to the overall theme other than giving Kyle something to do. And really, he just ended up seemingly like an easily-manipulated dummy. If that was the point then huzzah; mission accomplished.

The Rest

The biggest knock on this series is that a lot of the acting was really, really bad. I don’t think it’s a mistake that much of the cast doesn’t have a ton of IMDB entries after this show. It’s soap-level acting bad and, my friends, that’s bad.

On top of that, the finale left me kind “meh.” The promicin virus halved the population of Seattle and Collier’s people had to bring order to the city. At the end, Collier takes over Seattle. Now, I can suspend my disbelief pretty far, but I find it really hard to believe that this declaration lasts more than like 30 seconds. We know the government has already developed a Super Soldier program — is it that unreasonable to believe they haven’t figured out Shawn’s test considering they have entire teams of scientists instead of one kinda-crazy guy who’s hung up on a schizophrenic girl? At some point, don’t you pretty much come to “the US Government drops a nuke on Seattle” or “The government invades Seattle with an army of Super Soldiers”?

I don’t know. I feel like an act of high treason followed by Maya’s statement that “we’re in charge. It’s better this way” was a bit over the top. At the end of season three, I mentioned I’d avoid the series. In retrospect, that’s not entirely true. The good parts were good. It’s just some of the plot holes and bad parts were so bad and now, knowing there isn’t a very satisfying end, it just leaves me kind of empty. I’m not sure how I’d end it — I just know it wouldn’t be with a 4400 takeover of Seattle.

When we last left our intrepid group of adventurers in Seattle we had just discovered that the federal government had determined how, exactly, the 4400 were given powers. The people from the future altered their bodies such that they produced a new neurotransmitter (promicin) which gave them super powers. The government then created a program to start injecting them with a chemical that blocked their bodies production of the chemical.

The third season opens with congressional hearings to put NTAC on trial for injecting United States citizens with a potentially lethal drug and with us discovering that the uber-baby born in season 2 has rapidly aged to about 20 by sucking the youth out of her mother… who dies by the end of the two part season premiere. The girl becomes a major plot point throughout the season. We discover that she is the anti-4400… somehow sent back in the womb of a 4400 with instructions to kill them all.

In a show or movie involving time travel, there always comes a point in which the story completely falls apart under normal suspension of disbelief. For The 4400, it happens in Season 3. Let’s start with a list:

1) During this season, we discover that it isn’t really that hard for the people from the future to take people out of the time line. One plot-line has them taking Maia away from the current time line and placing her and the other 4400 children further back in the time line. Afterwards, the episode makes references to new inventions and diseases that were cured that currently aren’t… the thought being that taking these kids and putting them further back made the world a better place (to really drive home the whole “ripple effect” thing for people who didn’t get it earlier). In another instance, Tom tries to commit suicide in an effort to communicate with the future. As he dives off a bridge with a noose around his neck, the future people pull him out. If this is the case, why all the shenanigans about taking people and sending them back where they don’t belong. Why not just send future people back and do it all in secret instead of creating a global panic about 4400 people with super powers?

2) We discover that there’s some other faction working against the 4400… this faction somehow impregnated Lily with a baby who would suck the life out of her mom and then go on to kill all the 4400. At some point, she is approached by an agent of this other team who tells her what her destiny is. Again… how, exactly, was this other crew able to create this baby and impregnate Lily under the noses of the other group? Are we supposed to believe that this group from the future can time travel but can’t figure out if a woman is pregnant?

3) We discover that the people from the future who took the 4400 originally can mind-wipe people. As mentioned above, they take Maia away and she’s only remembered passingly in dreams and visions. She’s wiped out of any photograph and no one remembers her. Again, if the people from the future have the ability to do this, doesn’t it stand to reason that they could just erase anyone they didn’t want from the time line? Or, if they wanted to send someone back who could unlock musical or artistic ability in people to just take them in the middle of the night, do it, and put them back so it’s less weird when a kid suddenly develops the ability to play violin? Or, at the very least, that the teacher isn’t arrested for abuse when she does it?

4) We discover that the people who made the 4400 know about Isabelle and what she’s been sent back to do. But, again, we established earlier that they could come back and remove Maia from the time line and make it so no one remembered her. Yet, somehow they can’t do it to this girl. Even if you wanted to explain it as something along the lines of “she’s some weird anti-4400 messiah and they can’t affect her”, they could still have removed her mother before she was born and preventing her from ever being born. Instead of doing this, they give Tom Riley a syringe full of some mysterious green goo with the instructions to inject her. Now, we’ve established that they can send people back… pretty much any time anywhere. But instead of doing something silly like, I don’t know, sending an agent back who could do it without question, they give it to Tom who doesn’t want to kill a girl who’s done nothing wrong yet. Or even better, sending an agent back to appear right behind her and doing it before she has a chance to react. Why are future plans designed by Rube Goldberg?

5) Biggest and foremost: if the time travelers can just do stuff to the time line, why are they relying on people who have no idea what’s going on to do it? Why wouldn’t they, you know, just go back and do shit? Why do they need all these extra people to show up in a flash and deal with panic and government intervention? Wouldn’t it be a million times more efficient to just do it Terminator style and send specific people back for specific missions? I mean, hell, in this world the time travelers can even go back once their work is done. They’re not even stuck in the past to pollute the time line further than it already is.

There isn’t much left to say about the show at this point because this season is more of the same. The characters are mostly annoying while the government and news response continues to be perfect. You have a congressional hearing where a member of NTAC tells the people that they injected these people with inhibiting drugs for the good of National Security. The people eat it up while completely ignoring the abject wrongness of it. In fact, if you told me this entire show was written to be a statement on the Patriot Act, I’d totally believe it.

The Holy Crap! moment of the season comes when we find out that Jordan Collier, who was shot and killed by Tom Riley’s son is, in fact, alive. His body vanished after his death and we discover that he’s been walking the Earth. While this is going on, both the government and The 4400 are in a race to “invent” synthetic promicin. The government program is national defense, of course, while The 4400 continue to do it to unlock the Inner 4400 in us all. As it turns out, synthetic promicin is only 50% effective. In half the people, it gives them a super power. In the other half of the people, it kills them. Once we discover that Collier is alive, we find he’s been walking “for decades” to spread the message of The 4400. If you’d like to change which religion you think they are “symbolizing” in this season, just choose the one that had a messiah killed who later came back to life. The only difference is that Collier spreads his gospel after he’s resurrected… not before.

The season closes with Collier giving the promicin injections to his army of the downtrodden with instructions to disperse them across the country to anyone who wants them, making sure they know the risks and rules of injecting themselves with the drug. The season closes with the viewer at home being offered a syringe of promicin.

The last season comes out in May. I guess I’ll give it a watch just to get the closure. At this point, recommendation to avoid.

Because I have OCD when it comes to finishing TV Serieses that I start, I let the Netflix Queue continue on to The 4400 Season Two. After the eight episodes of Season One, my thoughts on the series were a resounding “meh.” The show had mediocre acting, a storyline that Marvel Comics has been telling for about 40 years, and hit-or-miss characters are mostly miss. Toward the end, the parallels to Scientology, Billy Campbell’s Jordan Collier, the dead-on nailing of how every division of the United States (from homeland security, to CNN, to the conservative talk show hosts, to everyday joes on the street) would react to this happening was enough to get me to watch season two.

It begins about six months after the close of season one. We discover that Homeland Security has created a smaller division called the National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC) to deal with the 4400. Also, Agent Skouris has adopted the pre-cognitive Maya as a daughter. Tom Baldwin’s son Kyle has recovered from his coma and is getting ready to start college. Jordan Collier has created a 4400 Center in Seattle as most of the 4400 have settled around Seattle.

This season’s over-arcing storyline is the growth of the 4400 (for lack of a better word) religion. Collier recruited Shawn (the kid whose hands can heal) as his miracle worker. Shawn can heal any disease just by laying his hands on the person. He begins curing cancer and rare, terminal diseases. Collier isn’t allowing him to do this out of the goodness of his heart. The people he is healing are being carefully selected for their ability to help fund the 4400 Centers. They are carefully selected politicians and members of the press who can help get Collier’s word out there. When word of Shawn’s healing powers get out, people start coming to the center in droves. Coupled with the release of Collier’s book 4400 and Counting, he begins holding press conferences promising to “unlock the 4400 in all of us.” People begin to come to the center, donate money, and take classes. Collier begins to preach a certain type of lifestyle… one devoid of mind-affecting, psychological drugs, and promoting certain diets and healthy eating. The people who come to the center are given levels (called keys). A new person entering the center is Key One. Later, after some indeterminate amount of work, their level is raised to Key Two. Celebrities are encouraged to join the center and are given escalated status and pushed through the ranks to expand their influence. Shawn, in particular, is encouraged to avoid his family because “they wouldn’t understand what we’re trying to accomplish here.”

Any of this sounding familiar?

In another part of the state, Lily Tyler has given birth to her baby Isabelle and they remain on the run from both Collier’s group and from the government. You see, all of the 4400 have to take regular trips to the NTAC Medical Center so they can be examined for various health problems and, you know, special powers. Ones who don’t make their normal appointments are collected by NTAC. The baby is inexplicably like… two years old… but believe it or not, this might not be completely unintentional.

The problem I’m finding with this series is that it’s really hard to root for the characters I know I’m supposed to be rooting for. Richard and Lily have a really annoying dynamic together. Tom’s son (the kid from the first season who spent four years in a coma) is extremely annoying. To a point I understand that he went to sleep at 17 and woke up 21… so he’s still developmentally a teenage, but he stomps around the house and complains that his father works too much. His father, who last season was going to the hospital every single day to visit him in a coma now is suddenly ignoring him entirely and forgetting to send tuition checks to colleges. Kyle’s mother, who left his father, seems to have zero interest in maintaining a relationship with her back from the dead son.

Also, they almost go TOO far out of their way to make the point that everyone who isn’t a 4400 hates the 4400. I do understand that if people were suddenly inserted into the word with Superpowers that there would be a faction of people who felt it was their god-given duty to track them down and execute them. But things like Lily being in a store where a man is passing out flyers calling the 4400 the scourges of Satan who then recognizes her as one and proceeds to track Richard, Lily, and the baby through the woods with shotguns border on the edge of reason. Their end (which came when the baby, Isabelle forced them to shoot themselves) was also a bit crazy. In an even further bit of crazy, Lily and Richard move on after the hunt down fiasco to temporarily settle with another 4400. They then go to a dinner party where they meet some non-4400s and they discover Richard was taken from Korea and he was one of the first black pilots in the US Military. This makes one of the other black dinner guests angry and it later leads to an exchange where he asks Richard “how many boots did you have to lick before they made you a pilot”… which just seems crazy to me.

I’ve never been subject to a show with such oddly disparate writing skills. On one hand, the overall, natural progression of what would actually happen is spot on. On the other hands, the characters are terrible. As this season finishes up, the 4400 discover that the government has known along what was causing their powers and their “necessary check-ups” have been an excuse to inject them with a serum that prevents the body from developing the powers. The problem with this is that it starts making them sick. As news of this starts to leak out, a terrorist cell of 4400s develops.

Now that I’m more than halfway through, I guess I’ll finish this, but I won’t be happy about it.

Ah, the summer of 2004. I still lived upstate. Cable was free because of my roommate’s job with Time Warner. My mortgage was 1/5th of my current rent. I had a deck, a yard, a savings account, and a car.

And Lost had not yet made Sci-Fi on television cool.

When The 4400 was announced on USA, I really didn’t think much of it. The premise didn’t really interest me. In fact, I didn’t even really know the plot hook until part-way through the third season and no one had actually mentioned whether or not it was any good until a bit after that. When I recently discovered that the last season was the final season, I decided now was as good a time as any to watch it.

The Plot Hook: In 2004, 4400 people who have disappeared from the world over the last 60 years re-appear, having not aged a day, in Seattle. These people include a little girl who disappeared in the 1940s, a Korean War soldier from the 1950s, and various people from the 90s and 00s. They are returned with powers. The aforementioned little girl can see the future. An old man has the power of telekinesis. Steve Brady becomes a ninja. As we find out over the course of the season, these people were not selected for no reason. There was a purpose to who was taken, why they were changed, and when they were returned. This is the story told over the six-episode arc of season one.

The Good

- The show handles the reaction to these mysterious returnees very well. The reporting of the 24-hour news cycle filling hours and hours of stories of these returning people. The government illegally detaining these people. The ACLU filing for the release of the citizens. People trying to re-integrate into a society that really doesn’t want them. And then the sudden dawning on society that these people may not have come back completely normal.

- The character Jordan Collier is amazing. A rich man whose motivations are very uncertain after the first season he becomes the “face” on the 4400. He appears on the 4400 version of the O’Reilly/Greta/Nancy Grace/Wolf Blitzer show in the 4400-verse. He buys a gated community for every 4400 resident who wishes to live there. He’s rich, intelligent, and persuasive… everything a burgeoning cult leader should be. I don’t know where the guy is going to go over the next few seasons, but I know he’s going to be an important figure.

The Bad

- The ancestors of the show’s characters are obvious. The skeptic female scientist and the believer lead investigator tracking unexplained phenomena while working for the FBI Homeland Security had been done previously… and very well before collapsing under the weight of too many conspiracies. Although, by watching this show, you can certainly see the original inspiration for Heroes.

- They spend a lot of time making you hate just about every person on the show that isn’t either a 4400 member or a government employee. The families of most of the characters are two-dimensionally mean. One of the returnees returns to her husband’s house to see her her now 12 year old daughter (who was six-months old) to find her husband remarried and a daughter who was never told her current mother wasn’t her biological mother. Instead of allowing the returnee to get to know her daughter, he immediately files a restraining order and has her arrested. A man who was the partner at an insurance firm returns to find that his interest in a firm with his name on the letterhead is gone and the man who now runs the company won’t even give him a job. A brother treats his other brother like a freak. It’s very heavy-handed and, to a point, unbelievable.

- The plot gets a little heavy-handed at times… but I’ll forgive them because their first season was a run of six-episodes. They had a lot to communicate in six hours.

- Do we really need more “creepy little girl who can see the future” or “mystery baby might be the new messiah” plotlines? Haven’t these been done to death elsewhere?

- With the xenophobia of the 21st century likely well-documented by X years in the future, it isn’t really outlined why kidnapping people and grandly reinserting them into the timeline in 2004 is more effective than kidnapping someone, modifying them, and reinserting them into the timeline before anyone realizes they’re gone. Why is a girl from the 1940s more effectively creepy and omniscient than a girl from 2004?

The Verdict

I’m not in love with this show and am kind of surprised it made it through four whole seasons. I am, however, sufficiently curious to see where it’s going… and the idea of it being a closed world now (since it’s been cancelled) actually makes me more likely to grab the 2nd season somewhere along the line.

To this point, I give it a resounding “meh.”