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The 4400, episodes 3x01-3x04 (non-spoilery)

This new season is pretty cool. I'd totally forgotten that the third season was starting this month, but now I'm all caught up.

I've been liking this show more and more with every season. The first season was alright, the second was interesting, and it's moved up to "pretty cool". To be honest, I'm hella more interested in the mysteries behind the 4,400 returnees-with-superpowers than I am in any of the conspiracies on Lost. Both shows have this air of the unexplained serial that reminds me a lot of books I read as a teenager. But whereas Lost has too many characters I don't like and a muddled sense of direction that brings back bad memories of Chris Carter, The 4400 has lots of characters I like (though few that I outright love) and one hell of a sense of direction. Where this show is going exactly is a mystery, but it's well on its way and the end result is going to resemble something like a disaster movie, I think. Lots of screaming death and cool explosions and human melodrama.

Lost (though admittedly I haven't seen all of season 2 yet) is great at producing tension in an individual scene or episode, but it doesn't sustain tension well in a consistant flow. It doesn't build tension on top of tension. It's always making like there's going to be something big and then backing off or in some way not satisfying the audience. And I'm all for prolonging the mystery, but you have to give the audience something to hold onto or their interest will wander. My interest in the island mysteries of Lost regulary ebbs. It's why I can watch 5 eps in a row and then not care if I don't watch for 3 months.

The 4400, while sometimes slow-paced, is excellent at building plot tension. The show doesn't operate in arcs-- rather, the entire series is one long arc, and we're still rising, rising, always rising. Eventually we'll hit the brink. And it will be awesome: probably full of love and betrayal and murder and fanaticism and christ vs. antichrist figures and civil war and time-travelers and aliens and possibly the earth dying if it all goes wrong in a 12 Monkeys sort of way.

I'm looking forward to it.

Edit to add: Also, many of the characters on Lost annoy me (I really only like Sayid and Hurley and Eko and Clair, at this point.) Almost none of the 4400 characters annoy me; they either interest my curiousity or creep me out. For example: Sean interests me, Isabell creeps me out. Pretty much every character on the show fits into one of those two catagories.* Sometimes a character can move from category to category; last season Kyle went from "creepy" to "interesting".


I don't think I've mentioned this before, but the 4400 has always felt like a real-life version of The X Men movies to me. Like, XMen is a fantasy version of what would happen based on pre-established existence of mutants all throughout history and the universe. The 4400 is a realistic (or as realistic as you can try for) look at what would happen if there really WERE a bunch of mutants suddenly living among us.

Now I kind of want a Doctor Who/4400 crossover. Anyone? Flist? Beuller?


Edit to add #2: Oh man-- my brain just started shouting at me "WHAT WOULD METHOS DO IN THIS SITUATION?" --not knowing your death ahead of time, but being in the 4400 world. Why oh WHY does my brain keep wanting to start crossovers tonight? But it'd be pretty cool... Immortals passing themselves off as 4400s and trying to decide where they personally fall on the ideological spectrum and Methos having some twisted history with Jordon Collier and... oh my head. Make it stop!


* Except Marco, who is adorable hotness.