This show is all about justice. Interestingly, they show the flip-side of justice as being forgiveness. They set up this false dichotomy of either seeing justice prevail or forgiving. They do and try to show the permutations, like in certain particular and personal instances you can mete out justice and forgive the person as long as you still punish them. When I think of the opposite of justice and the opposite of forgiveness, the other does not spring to mind. Opposed to justice, I see what, not injustice because using that term in this context wouldn't get me anywhere, but a kind of amoral favoritism. Opposed to forgiveness is spite. I think this episode would have been much more interesting had they not been running four stories simultaneously operating in this (to me) artificial justice-forgiveness spectrum and instead examined maybe two using the double para metrics of two spectrum's an dhow they intersect. I know. I'm asking way too much from this show or any other show.
Episode 9:
Finally the Kyle storyline is starting to get some play and while I'm sure it won't wrap up until the end of the season, I'm glad to see something other than him running around having flashbacks to stuff that I've already seen. While following up a lead on who might have sold that rifle that killed Collier, Diana says to the suspect's wife, "Where is he?" Wife responds with a generic Eastern European accent, "I only married Victor to get my green card. I don't know where he's at." Diana responds, "We know he left the country two weeks ago and went back to Puerto Rico." Seriously? An epidemiologist from the CDC on load to the NTAS (National Taskforce something something) and the boss lady who is working the case with her think that Puerto Rico is an another country? Also by the end of this interview, the wife's accent has shifted several times, at one point sounding vaguely Hispanic and at another point Russian. There is some bad writing going on here, not just as mentioned above, but the whole way they are going about following up leads is pathetic. Look, you can be a sci-fi police procedural and screw a little with the sci-fi aspect because, well, there is no real world precedent for it, but you can't fuck up the procedural part because you look lazy and stupid.
Is it ironic that the last episode was all about justice, or did the writers actually set us up to see the other side of agent Tom's personality? When it's not someone in Tom's family, he is blind justice incarnate, but as soon as he finds out that not only may Kyle have been involved in a murder, but finds pretty good circumstantial evidence, he puts everything on the line to get Kyle away to a foreign country. I'm okay with this hypocrisy, I mean as far as the character goes. I think it makes him more interesting. Now we have a man who wants justice to be served no matter the consequences or situation, except when it's someone he loves. Tom just got a whole lot more interesting.
Episode 10:
This was a particularly annoying episode. Laura Allen was one of the main players, and by players, I mean whiners. Her character has this kind of paranoia thing going on with regards to her daughter, and nobody takes her seriously, even when it really is something, which might actually explain some of her character's whining. Still annoying. Please note that I do know the difference between the actor and her character, what I don't know is how much of her annoyance-causing is her and how much the character. I suspect a fair amount of both.
The main thing going on in this episode is that something is effecting only the male 4400. Okay, I can buy that. But it's transmitted by a specific soundwave that only men can hear. That I can't buy. Maybe most men, or people of a certain age because of frequency. But, all the men and none of the women? Give me some science here, people. The effect being caused by a sound is integral to how it is resolved, so I get that. Now, they could have easily side-stepped this by any number of real or made-up scientific explanations. But they didn't. They suck.
Episode 11:
The 4400 are getting sick and losing their abilities. The government is invoking a quarantine law that allows NTAC to round up all the 4400s and hold them indefinitely in camps. Both sides are talking about a war, the 4400s are afraid of it, but will fight to stay free, and the government higher-ups are denying it. This season is finally getting good. Well, it has had it's moments, like when they took out Collier and almost revealed Kyle as the killer. This is a "to be continued" episode, so I don't know how long they will keep this up, but it now occurs to me that this show at least partially laid the groundwork for Alphas, where the government rounds up and imprisons every single one that they can't make work for them. I would really love to see this show transition into using longer story arcs on a more regular basis. I feel like they should be building on shows like the X-Files, where they are experiencing new and weird things all the time, but against a consistent backdrop that is ever developing as well. I think the folks running this show might have done better to maybe go with three ongoing story elements and really develop instead of the six or seven they have going, especially since a couple are just melodrama and have done very little to advance the story or character development.
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