As I said, it puts a nice little twist onto the whole human abduction theme that has been traveling through science fiction since forever. Since the season premiere was two hours long and there are a lot of intricacies in the story, I won't be able to give a traditional recap, because that would be about forty pages long. Instead, I'm going to try and make a quick run through this episode and try and connect what everything means as coherently as possible. By the time the second season is over, we might be all cut up and some of it may make sense.

Some time has passed since our last scene from the show, which had Richard and Lily driving somewhere into the Pacific Northwest in an attempt to save their baby from Jordan Collier (more on him later). Richard and Lily were both abducted, but about fifty years apart. The interesting thing is that, when he was abducted, Richard had a thing for Lily's grandmother. Although they never saw each other during their time away from earth, Richard and Lily almost instantly fell in love. For Lily, she found a perfect companion after her husband, who had remarried since she went missing, put a restraining order on her, even preventing Lily from seeing her own daughter. For Richard, it was a second chance at love, but also really the first chance. Richard is black, and during the time period when he was in love with Lily's grandmother, their relationship was so forbidden they never knew if they would ever have a chance to be together. Oh, did I mention that Lily was pregnant with some supernatural baby?

Like I said, they were on the run from Jordan Collier (played by Billy Campbell - this role was the reason for his ridiculous beard on The OC) another 4400 who was a real estate developer; and with his means, he envisioned bringing together the 4400 and protecting their community. Quite obviously he has some nefarious plans for world domination and he somehow thinks that Lily and Richard's baby is the key (we'll assume it is theirs since it is mulatto, but they didn't have sex while gone, so how can we be sure?). Therefore, Lily and Richard are trying to make their lives away from populated places where somebody could find them, and Jordan has plenty of people searching. This leaves them to live in places like cabins in the woods, and take jobs like car mechanic at the local garage. Their life is hard, but of course they care more about being together and all of that sappy shit.

So what is Jordan Collier up to these days? He is creating 4400 centers, where he is going to get people to open the 4400 inside of them. What does that mean and why does he want to do it? Well, all of the 4400 were changed in some way when they returned. Some of the were able to manifest their powers, and some of them looked like they hadn't been changed. Jordan believes the theory that the 4400 were sent to save humanity, so he think these 4400 centers will do just that. However, in order to build them, he needs money. He was rich, but not that rich. Luckily for him, Shawn Farrell works for him. He was abducted, and when he came back, he had the ability to heal people. Jordan uses Shawn to heal the terminally ill kids of the filthy rich in order to get them to write donations to his foundation. It sounds to me like he is building a cult, but that's just my opinion.

OK, how did Jordan know about the theory that the 4400 were sent from future humans? Well, he has somebody on the inside at the Department of Homeland Security, which was handling the returnees. The Department of Homeland Security knew about this plan after Kyle Baldwin told them. Kyle Baldwin is not a 4400, but he was connected with Shawn Farrell. They were cousins, and when Shawn was abducted, Kyle fell into a coma. When Shawn returned, he eventually visited Kyle in his hospital room, did his healing thing, and Kyle woke up, but didn't remember anything. Then again, you can't blame him. It turns out that when Shawn woke Kyle from his coma, Kyle was possessed by somebody from the future.

Eventually, Kyle understood his purpose, and that was to give a piece of information to the locals. He returns to the beach where the 4400 were returned, and is hit by a flash of white light, which we think is from the aliens, but soon learn it is from the future humans. Kyle delivers this information because his dad, Tom, tried to save him when the white light hit. His dad heard the message, and reported the information to the stiffs at Homeland Security, which just happens to be the branch of government that he currently works for. Fast forward a few months and Kyle is in custody taking an MRI every other day to see why he said what he did, and his dad is on desk duty because he pulled a gun on a guy from the FBI who was starting to get in his way.

Posted by J-Unit on June 12, 2005 3:54 PM