The 4400 Season 2 (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Sun]

I laughed when they described Sherilyn Fenn's character as being 30 years old. I would have believed it if the character was listed as 37 years old. The moptop wig didn't help.

 

[Mikel_Cooperman]

I agree. I am losing interest very quickly.

 

[Elizabeth S]

Yeah, I thought it was really freaky. I'm not familiar with the actor Garret Dillahunt who has also apparently been on "Deadwood". But I had to actually look him up to make sure he exists and they didn't do some kind of fabulous makeup effect on Billy Campbell. If you listen to the conversation between his character and Lily in the last part of the show, he sounds EXACTLY like Billy Campbell when he says the "So you're not a true believer" line -- the voice and inflection, as if they dubbed his voice. Being that Collier's body is missing, it really had me wonder if they did that to mess with our mind. For all I know, this new guy is actually Collier with a new face -- Collier's a 4400, so who knows what HIS abilities could be.

 

[Jason Seaver]

Is there any logical reason to believe that each and every returnee has some sort of specific purpose? It seems like it would be poor planning if that were the case; one guy slips and breaks his neck after they've returned and suddenly the future's whole plan is screwed. It seems more likely that the guys in the future would send back a group of people with diverse skills and abilities, so that Tom and company could figure out how to resolve whatever crisis is upcoming.

Of course, you'd also assume that the future people would send back actual useful information, but maybe being cryptic is considered a virtue uptime.

 

[Mikah Cerucco]

The alternative would be they sent her back like that for grins. If they want to show me this, fine. It should be a trigger for a real story, in which NTAC should at least have serious philosphical debate about what they've believed up until now.

Forget what we know about Collier's shooter and what he's going through. When you see Plague (that'd be her name if she were an X-men character), you have to question what type of benevolent beings would do that. That would be so much more interesting, and move the story along.

I don't much care the manhunt for the freak of the week. Just show me what she can do, then let's focus on the struggle with why she was affected that way, and what to do about her. There was far too much time spent on the chase, and her emotional tug of war.

As always... just my take.

 

[Garrett Adams]

 

[derek]

As for why to send the Plague girl back...my take was that in the future a plauge of similar nature wipes out a great deal of humanity. By sending her back infected...and exposing/killing a small number of people (comparatively) the event gives NTAC/CDC a jump start on studying/preventing the virus and its spread in the 'future.' Now debating the morality of this plan is another story (ie needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.) Obviously the future folk have already settled on the 'needs of the many/planet' somewhat by abducting innocents/sending back the 4400 and changing the past.

 

[Nicodemus]

My pure and uneducated guess about the reason why Plague Girl was sent back, is that the reason was to make Diana shoot her - that they're preparing Diana to be ready to kill someone in the future too.

 

[Jason Seaver]

That involves the future people being able to forsee a very specific string of events, though, occurring a year after they've already changed history.

There are ways that a person who can wipe out everyone within a specific radius quickly and without leaving a sample of the bioweapon behind can serve a useful purpose. The problem is, they forgot to send back an owners' manual.

 

[Mikel_Cooperman]

Or antibiotics for her hands for that matter.

Kinda sounds like The Greatest American Hero. No instuction book.

 

[Wendy_L]

What? Richard is out for the rest of the season? Say it isn't so. I like him. He's one of my favorite characters.

I love this show. But I will agree that last's week episode was sort of lame...but it's still better than some shows. And I agree with derek on what the plague girl's purpose is. That makes the most sense to me.

I also want to add my comments on the episode the week before. The one where Tom and Alana meet. That was such a cool episode. I love episodes like that. ST:TNG did something very similiar with Picard. Any ST:TNG fans out there know what episode I'm talking about. The episode was called "The Inner Light", which incidentally, airs on Spike TV tonight at 12am.

 

[Bill Catherall]

First of all, we don't know that these are benevolent beings. Just future beings trying to improve their time by altering the past. They possess superior technology that enables them to not only time travel but improve upon man's evolution.

Or...what if they aren't altering their past? What if they are just doing what was already done? Think about it. If you can travel back in time, and if you ever take that journey, then you've actually already done it. So when you do go back in time you're actually preserving your timeline, as long as you don't change anything. But of course, there's nothing really to change because you've already done it. Think Bill & Ted's Excellent Journey not Back to the Future.

Ted's dad's keys were missing because "future Ted" stole them so he could hide them and bust everybody out of jail in the past. That benefited "present Ted" and "future Ted." But, when "present Ted" reaches the point in the timeline where he travels back in time to steal the keys decides not to do it he'll alter the past and his future will be changed. But that won't happen because he already did it. The timeline is set.

So maybe "future dudes" are just preserving their timeline by sending back gifted people (dad's keys) who, not only improve (or actually maintain) the future, but introduce the plagues or disease that are part of their world. They have to maintain the good and the bad.

 

[Wendy_L]

Bill, you just totally made my head spin. Whoa ~ what a rush.

 

[Qui-Gon John]

Anyone know if they're gonna show this seasons episodes so far in a marathon or something? I missed this when it started. Otherwise I'll have to wait for the DVD's.

 

[BrianW]

Bill, that's hilarious.

 

[Wendy_L]

Haven't seen anything about a marathon but if I do I will post it here.

I do know that USA usually reairs the entire season of their shows sometime between September-June and it might even be before the DVDs come out. Sometimes they will even start with Season 1 and run all the way thru.

 

[Mikah Cerucco]

@John Co -- This is why they need to find a legal on-line distribution mechanism for TV shows.

re Time Travel -- always give a headache. It isn't that I can't follow the various explanations... it's just that I can't follow the explanations of the explanations without getting lost in some type of recursion loop.

re No more Richard -- bummer.

re Benevolent or not... my point exactly, Bill. We don't know, and that'd be pretty terrifying (read dramatic) to me. They need to focus on exploring that and not focus on the freak of the week aspect. It's OK to show these different people and their abilities, but they should come 2nd to the overall story. At this point, as far as we know, these 4400 were sent back by the Borg. (Get my point?)

re Plague being sent back to prepare humanity to deal with some future plague, I'm sure many explanations are plausible, but we should have enough information in the episode to allow us to get some bearings. I saw nothing in the episode I could use to conjure up any type of "why" with any degree of credibility. In effect, I can only guess. Saying that, I'm looking at the 9 seasons of X-Files on my shelf and how that series explained very little. It doesn't inherently make a series bad if it doesn't explain things. It was clear to me, however, with X-Files that it was a show that wouldn't explain things, so I better just enjoy the freaky stuff that happened from week to week. I was OK with that. With this show, I don't see that as the premise. With this show, there's a destination, good or bad. Each week, we should get closer to that destination, and try to learn all we can so that if we have any influence at all, we drive things towards the outcome we want, which may or may not be the outcome the puppetmasters are trying to bring about.

 

[nolesrule]

Time travel is a recursion loop.

 

[Alex Spindler]

Well, I'm of the opinion that they're using the Paycheck time travel concept, which is to say that you don't evaporate if you kill your own dad and you don't have to do actions you've observed in the past.

In essence, they have a way of both sending things back but also for viewing the results of their 'intentions' before actually doing them. So they start by building time travel and time viewing in their messed up world. They figure what things led to their problem and decide 'what if we abducted a woman and changed her to emit a poison'. They then viewed that and saw that it wasn't enough. So they thought, 'what if we also sent back a little clairvoyant girl to interact with one of the agents'? And they saw that, combined, that got the agent to kill the girl. At that point and time, they go back in time and grab the woman and the little girl, change them, and send them back. And their observed changes follow course. And the people who would have been their parents follow a different timeline course and get to a future which is better. And the future people never have a past that had 4400's, just the course of events that made things so bad.


As for my own opinion, I'm a bit wary on the idea that the plaguewoman 'innoculated' us against that plague. If that were so, I'd think there would be some small amount of survivors. I'm thinking she was possibly to 1) advance science into understanding a plague that went through clean suits (very possible), 2) Condition the agents toward killing a 4400 (unlikely because this has happened in the past, indirectly in the pilot), 3) make it so the agent will focus more on his son, which she told him to do on the phone (most likely in my mind). His son is important and I'm certain it's not a mistake he was messed up during the abduction attempt and it wasn't really a failure.

Just my thoughts

 

[Mikel_Cooperman]

Believe me, you arent missing much. This season has been a huge letdown. I think the people who created the show may have had a plan but whomever is in charge now does not. Does René Echevarria even have anything to do with the show anymore? I never see his name in the credits.