Cynical Cinema

I picked up The 4400, The Complete Series, out Tuesday the 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  And I started watching it.  And then I kept watching.  I stopped taking notes because it was interfering with my viewing of this show.  And I started to pay really, really close attention.  I got through Season One, and went to bed.  The next morning, as soon as I got up, I started Season Two.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had begun Season Three.  I woke up early the following day to complete Season Three.  And then, a couple of days later, I had watched the Fourth and Final season.  This was actually the second time I had watched Season Four of The 4400.  I watched it alone in May, when that season came out on DVD, and I gave it four stars out of ten.  I stand by that review.  As a stand-alone DVD set, Season Four merits four stars.

But now I was addicted.  I was desperate to find out what happened.  I had to know how this series ended.  And I watched all four seasons of this show.  I should have known.  After all, I had already watched the fourth season.  The fourth, and final, season.  And I remember how that one ended.  In that, it didn’t.  It didn’t end at all.  It didn’t answer any questions at all.  It just got cancelled and taken off the air.  I just watched thirty-three hours of this show.  Thirty-three.  Hours.  And at the end…nothing.  I was a little peeved.  But that was nothing compared to the fury of my girlfriend, who had watched all thirty-three hours with me.  She was incensed.  She had just wasted an entire weekend, and 33 hours of her life.

Here’s the basic premise:  Over the past 50 years, people have been abducted from all over the world.  All of a sudden, 4400 people are returned to Earth, all at once, all in one place, without having aged a day.  Each of the 4400 has a special ability - telekinesis, the ability to heal others, pre-cognition, and so forth.  The government gets involved, and tries to suppress these abilities.  We find out pretty quickly that these are not alien abductions, but rather these people are being taken by humans in the future, who are sending them back to hopefully change the course of history and save all of humanity.  And after a while, it looks like a war is brewing.

Then it ends.  It’s over.  If you’re the creator of The 4400, and you want to sell your “complete series” DVD, it seems like it would have been a fairly easy thing to do to film maybe five or six more episodes in order to wrap it up and give the viewers some closure.  The people who had invested in this series and who would purchase a 15-disc set to find out how it actually ends.  In fact, you could well market it to people who had never seen this show before as well.  Because this show was good.  It was VERY good.  Incredibly compelling, like the beginning of Lost.  And watching the first season made me absolutely rabid to find out the secrets and the stories and the result of the whole process.  In fact, you could maybe have created a satisfactory conclusion by filming TWO more episodes.  So why not?

Instead, this is what we get - a fifteenth disc that is full of special features, once the fourth season ends.  One of those special features is an introduction by Scott Peters, the creator of the show.  He talks about creating the show, and how pleased he is with the ardent fans who posted on the internet message boards and discussed the show and so forth.  Which is fine.  By all means, thank the fans!  But…then what?  You must have had some idea how the series was going to end - just tell us what the plan was!  It’s too late to do it now, just tell us the end.  It is no longer a spoiler, it is now the only catharsis available to us, the audience.  Help us out here.

The fact is, I felt incredibly ripped off after 33 hours of watching this with no resolution whatsoever.  Why bother with this, I thought.  In fact, thanks to the wrath of my girlfriend, I was ready to give this show a one-star rating.  After all, I was sour too because she woke me up in the middle of the night to express her anger - she had stayed up four hours later than normal to get to the end, because she too was addicted.  But I reconsidered, because if this show was compelling enough to make us that passionate about seeing an ending, it must have been doing something right.  And the show itself deserves at least nine stars.  But I will not give it nine, because it is false advertising.  The 4400 Complete Series is some great television, but there is nothing “complete” about this series.