orichalcum

Best student mistake so far this quarter. Holy Ponies, Batman!

Continuing on a theme, I'm going to prosleytize for my current favorite less popular show, the 4400, whose 4th Season starts on USA on June 17th, and is available on Netflix for Seasons 1-3. It's easy to dismiss the 4400 if you just hear the blurb:

4400 people have disappeared over the last 60 years. All at once, they return in Seattle in 2004, some with strange new abilities, having aged not a day and needing to reconnect to their former lives. The arguable leads are a male and female partnership of federal agents assigned to investigate and protect the 4400, a la Mulder and Scully. Episodes alternate between "4400 Strange Ability of the Week" and the larger arc plots about why the 4400 were taken and returned, the government's treatment of them, and different factions among the 4400 themselves.

It sounds like a bad X-Files ripoff. So why should you watch this show? Because of the incredibly tight writing and the great acting. While some of the 4400 special powers are conventional psychic things like precog and telepathy, they do some really interesting episodes with other sorts of abilities. For instance, one of my favorite episodes focuses on an elementary school teacher, who now has the ability to identify special talents in children. She gives a big tough boy a violin and guides him into being a musician; she shows a girl from the wrong side of the tracks how to be an artist. But things go wrong when some parents aren't happy about their children taking unexpected paths.

It also does a better job than most shows of making its main characters seem like real people, with real lives, and character traits that seem organic and persist throughout the series (I'm looking at you, BSG, as a negative example here.) For instance, the lead female agent, Diana, has an encounter with an old flame in one episode where he reminisces about her only eating ice cream alone late at night. Several episodes later, at a point when she's upset, we see Diana sneaking B&J's out of her fridge and eating from the pint right there in the kitchen at 11 PM. It's a perfect character revelation, too. Diana Skouris is a Good Girl, someone who obeys all the rules and doesn't order ice cream sundaes in public because she wants to seem adult and fit and not greedy. But when no one can see her, she eats it right out of the box.

So yeah. Go watch 4400. (I have not yet seen the Season 3 finale, fyi.) It's great, and it's got great female and male characters, and some pretty attractive ones too.

In other news of the day, Mac can make it from the living room couch down the hallway of our apartment to the kitchen in 20 seconds. I discovered this the bad way, though everything is fine. I suddenly understand the appeal of baby leashes.