Review and Recap: The 4400 Season One

Though I very much enjoyed season one of Resurrection, many of the discussions online kept bringing up The 4400 as a referential.  The curiosity finally  got to me and I decided to give it a go myself.  The 4400 is about a group of humans who are abducted and suddenly returned all at once.  We aren't originally told who took them but by the end of this season, we learn that they were taken by humans from the future to avert a catastrophe which would lead to the near extinction of all humankind.  Many of the 4400 who returned were also given special powers.  NTAC (The National Threat Assessment Command), which is a division of Homeland Security, is the unit assigned to keep watch over the 4400, for both the protection of the 4400 themselves and the general population.

Much of the first season deals with the 4400 trying to adjust to the new timeline.  Some are able to continue on as though nothing went wrong and others, like Richard Tyler, an air force pilot who disappeared in 1951
discover that most of their family is gone, along with any trace of the society they once knew.  This is what makes the season compelling to me. Because of the large number of returnees, The 4400 does occasionally engage in a returnee of the week story; however, due to the fact that the 4400 quickly become organized and the same NTAC agents work each case, the story never lost its cohesion and it managed to keep the meta plot moving quite nicely. As much as there is strong sci-fi element to The 4400, it's the human relationships that keep this showing moving.

The 4400 is very much a White centric show despite being located in Seattle and the 4400 consisting of people across the globe.  Unsurprisingly, The 4400 is also overwhelmingly U.S. centric.  I am not surprised by the Whiteness of the show because sci-fi has a long history of excluding people of colour.  Richard Tyler seems to be very central to the show itself but his position as the only man of colour very much tokenizes his character. The 4400 does a great job of depicting the racism he faced as a Black man in the military in 1951; however, in the  present time, race disappears as an issue for Richard.  He is told about Blacks in high level government position and racism is depicted as something which is an archaic idea.  It is further problematic  that when Richard has problems gaining and maintaining employment, he then compares the oppression he faces as a member of the 4400 to Jim Crow.  To be clear, these words were placed in this character's mouth by the writers.  Not only is it a false equivalency, it's absolutely racist.