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.

The 4400 was a series with a lot of promise.  It was out there, on TV, but it has now been cancelled.  So the only way you’ll get to see it is on DVD, and Season 4, the final season, has just been released, May 6th, by Paramount Home Entertainment.  I say it had a lot of promise, because it really was a neat idea.  Over the past however many decades, thousands of people have mysteriously vanished.  No one was able to connect these disappearances until 4400 of them are returned to Earth at the same time, obviously having been abducted by aliens.  Each of these 4400 people has a unique ability of some kind, an ability no other human has.  Telekinesis, telepathy, precognition and so forth.  But they have no recollection of their disappearance, they are disoriented and the government gets involved.

The government agency is called the National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC) - not exactly a great title for such an organization, is it?  But they are the ones who keep an eye on these 4400 people.  And at the end of Season One, apparently we learned that the 4400 people were NOT abducted by aliens, but in fact by human beings from the future.  And then they were sent back to Earth to help us all avoid some kind of calamity which was to come.  But…that calamity never occurred, because the show was cancelled.  It was run on the USA network, and produced by CBS Paramount Network Television.  The reason for it’s cancellation, apparently, was twofold - the writer’s strike, and budgetary problems.  Well, threefold.  There were also “lower than expected ratings”.  Fans of this show have launched a campaign aimed at the SciFi/USA network to get it back on the air, but it doesn’t look likely.

 And the reason for that is twofold.  One, this show just came at the wrong time.  And two, it just isn’t that good.  This is basically a cross between The X-Files and Lost.  The X-Files has run it’s course, and well…there already is a “Lost”.  And after two seasons, I gave up on Lost completely.  I just couldn’t be bothered to watch each episode and work my brain around it.  You had to watch every single episode of that show to know what was going on, and yet one episode did not necessarily follow the previous one.  So it wasn’t satisfying from one show to the next.  And with the 4400, this concept was taken to an extreme.  The end was never, in any way, in sight.  In season 4, the clues come toward the end of the season, but the rest of the episodes stand almost alone.  The NTAC chases down various members of the 4400, or people influenced by them, and then the episode ends.  And it seems as though you don’t really need to watch one to understand the others.

So each episode feels like a low-budget episode of the X-Files.  Or like an episode of that old show, The Outer Limits.  With some kind of greater purpose, maybe.  And it just wasn’t good enough to get a big enough audience to keep going.  I can understand why there IS a cult following here.  Once viewers had immersed themselves in this show, they would of course be desperate to find out how it ends.  But I don’t see that there would be much profit to bring it back just for those eleven people.  In fact, until this week, I had no idea this program had ever existed.  Now that I do, I will likely forget all about it in a week.