Monday, September 17, 2007

Is The 4400 Being Cancelled?

I was so blown away by the season finale of 4400. There was so much closure in this episode that it felt like the end of The 4400.

Let's take a look at why I thought this. Shawn's brother Danny and his mother Susan are both dead. Isabelle is dead. Evil Tom is dead. Rebecca Parish is dead. Steven Ira Behr, the executive produce was in the crowd cheering as Jordan Collier came to power. They usually reserve stuff like that for series finales.

The story was great but it seemed accelerated by Danny's 4400 ability. He was able to spread promicin like an infection and infecting everyone at will. This means that everyone in Seattle either died or got a power. This is exactly what Jordan Collier wanted. We got no real foreshadowing of this specific event. We got foreshadowing about the coming of a god. I remember something about time traveling that never really got fleshed out. The evil marked people storyline still confuses me. There were a lot of threads that were introduced that never went anywhere.

I'm glad we wrapped up the Evil Tom story. The way they got the midichl.... nanites out of his system was that they flooded him with radiation and made Shawn bring him back to life. Clever!

The cool payoffs to this episode is the powers that were revealed by the people who survived. Megan can turn metal into flowers. Jed can assimilate people and turn them into him. Not sure if this is just a projection but it is hilarious. The geekgasm is that Marco can teleport himself. (Do all geek boys want to have teleportation powers? :)

All in all, this was great writing and very nice story arc. The story was fresh and unpredictable which is why this show succeeds in my eyes. Some of the extreme wrapping up of story lines distracted me because it started to feel like the stuff cancellations are made of. I hope I read too much into the episode and I look forward to seeing The 4400 next season.

9 comments:

scifirantergirl said...

I guess there are more stories to tell like I want a little more explanation of the time traveling people. I want more explanation about the rogue "marked" people.

Will Tom take the shot and what is that going to really mean?

How is Isabelle's dad going to cope?

Are there more stories to tell?

umberhaven said...

Wow, your headline really scared me. I thought you had received scoop that it was canceled, not just guessing that it might be. I don't think it is, and I certainly hope it's not. I think they have a lot of stories still to tell.

See what I mean in one of my earlier comments about weirder powers this season... Kyle's manipulative companion only he can see, someone projecting visions of dead people, an elderly woman projecting her consciousness even after her body is dead, someone making people younger or older, someone making pies that allow people to share thoughts, Megan turning metal into flowers, etc. Weird. Heroes, it ain't.

I was wrong about Promicin being the thing to cure Tom, but once they introduced the isotope idea, I figured they'd do that and get Shawn to heal him. So, I wasn't surprised by how they did it but by how quickly they wrapped it up.

Too bad about Shawn, Tom, and Kyle losing so many people close to them in a short period of time: Danny, Susan, and Isabelle. I liked the scene at the funeral with the Baldwin/Farrell boys comforting each other. Bizarre powers aside, the heart of this show has always been about family.

It's hard to believe Isabelle's really dead, but at this point she is kind of useless and more of a distraction to whoever she's around. Without her, Jordan, Kyle, and Shawn will all be unhindered in living their respective destinies. I'll still miss Richard Tyler though. With his daughter out of play, his character will probably remain reclusive.

I'm guessing Shawn will *definitely* run for an office now. He needs to be on equal footing with Collier and NTAC to maintain a balance of power. I'm afraid that his brother Danny being the Promicin virus carrier and Shawn being the one to get the shot for Danny may come back to bite Shawn in the butt later though.

Are you sure Jed Garrity "assimilated" someone else? I thought he just duplicated himself, like Jamie Maddrox in the X-Men universe.

I was cheering out loud when Marko discovered his power of transporting himself to a place he sees a picture of. It reminded me so much of the use of Trumps from Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, one of my all-time favorite book series. It would be awesome if he actually kept an arsenal of location photos with him at all times, so that he could teleport to anywhere. It really would be just like having an Amberite or Chaosite Trump Deck.

Well, I could go on and on, but if so, I should probably do that in my own blog when I can get around to it. Interesting season; awesome season finale!!! :)

scifirantergirl said...

Great comment umberhaven!!!!!
So you still see another season in this show? It felt a little *too* wrapped up to me. If it does come back, what else would they have? The god returning or bringing heaven to earth? Isn't this taken care of with Jordan in "power" and a lot of the normals being killed off?

As far a Jed, I thought another co-worker walked up... a different person all together and that person changed. But then again, duplicating is easier and much more fun!

bettyscg said...

No one will read this, but it took me this long to see the finale on the dvr. Anyway…

I agree with you Cat, there were too many closures in this episode. A lot of goodbyes and even if some are not happy the fact that the marked ones have been defeated changes the future. As Maia said, ‘We’re in charge now”. With 9000 new members, how can the show reasonably continue with that many variables in one location, working side by side?

By the way I’ve always hated the going into the past to change the future because changing timelines is always so confusing. How can they go back for the 4400 if that horrid future doesn’t exist anymore?

Jed's double walked in with the same shirt so I think he was wishing he was two people so he could read the material faster and "Walla!".

TalcottSK said...

I really loved the first season "one episode, one ability at a time" Now, the show has moved into a bad place. The 4400 abilities, the plan from the future have become backseat. I still like the show, but it's silly a lot of the time.

scifirantergirl said...

@jon: I think they dropped the ball on the future thing. It had so many possibilities. Listen to the interview with Ira Steven Behr on Slice of SciFi #125. He kinda explains why the show took the direction it did.

window said...

I agree with all of the above. The writers essentially took a great show and ruined it.

Season One, Season Two... Brilliant. Season Three, Season Four... Abysmal.

Season Three blunders (in no particular order)

1.) Killing off Lily (This goes back to the comment about family. That's part of what made the show good: Family. No Lily. There's one less family to care about.)
2.) The goofy Isabelle in love story line.
3.) Not doing more with Richard, one of the best characters on the show. He seems to go in and out of hiding.
4.) Matthew Ross... Interesting, but he seemed to come out of nowhere. Ditto for the Nova group. Garret Dillahunt is a great actor. Wish he had more of a story arc, other than Issy drop kicking him.
5.) Alana disappearing into a painting.
6.) Promicin... Ugh. Why does everyone have to be 4400?? Why?? Why!!? Can't we just have the 4400 vs. NTAC vs. the evil government of Peter Coyote?
7.) Diana going off to Spain only to return on a whim.

I can't even bear to think about Season 4. It's a continuation of the junk they setup in Season 3.

All in all, I agree with Cat. I think it's over for the 4400. The last two episodes had the same feeling as "Nowhere Man" (if you haven't seen it, run! don't walk to your favorite DVD store). In the last two episodes of that show, they tied up loose ends, came up with a way to explain everything, and called it a day. The same thing happened in the last episodes of the 4400. I suspect the studio let them know that there would be no fifth season - in order for them to properly craft an ending to the series. Otherwise they would have too many angry fans - if they left open too many questions - and when they canceled the series.

The studio will probably wait until after Season 4 is out on DVD, and sales start to decline, before they give us the bad news.

I do love the show. That's why it was so hard to see the 4400 go down in flames (or a ball of light) due to bad writing/producing.

Mike

scifirantergirl said...

Beautiful Mike, well said.

Rains said...

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