You Don’t Know What You Got ‘Til It’s Gone

As this third season of The 4400 goes on, the mystery continues to get deeper. Although there have been a some twists during the episodes, the producers really gave away what appears the be the biggest mystery of them all towards the early episodes. So while there isn’t a ton of suspense with what is going to happen, there are still plenty of questions as to how we are going to get there. It’s become apparent that while there may have been a group of humans from the future that were trying to save mankind, there is another faction from the future that perhaps didn’t want to send the 4400 back to fix everything. Whatever side you are on, it has become clear that there is one factor more than any other that will decide our fate, and that factor is Isabelle Tyler.In the last episode, Shawn faced a terrible dilemma. On one hand, he could have sex with Isabelle, which might get her father upset, but would also probably be the best sex Shawn ever head. On the other hand, he could skip sex with Isabelle, and he wouldn’t feel bad about taking advantage of her. So with the bodying saying yes and the mind saying no, there is no contest: Shawn has sex with Isabelle, and she can’t get enough. Everybody wins right? Well, not quite. They are all doing this behind Richard’s back and although they have been careful, there have been a few close calls, and it seems like just a matter of time before Richard finds out.

Morning wood?

Speaking of secrets, Alana has one of her own. She has been becoming more involved with The 4400 Center, and invites Tom to a BBQ with some of her new friends. Tom has always been very protective of Alana. You would think that with all that he has seen from his government, he would trust the 4400 a little more, but the 4400 kept his son Kyle in a coma, and then they somehow persuaded him to kill Jordan Collier (when are we going to see HIM again?), which put Kyle in jail until the 4400 defense becomes legal in court.

Alana just wants Tom to be a part of her life, so he goes, but several people at the BBQ kind of resent his presence, and you can’t blame them. He says that he knew nothing about the promycin inhibitor that killed many of them, but how can you be sure? Ryan Freel (the 4400, not the baseball player) doesn’t believe him and gives Tom a hard time. We should, however, remember that Tom has done a lot of work with 4400s and some of them do appreciate his sacrifice. One of them, Heather Tobey, even calls Tom her hero, and tells Alana that she is excited to start working together.

Hmm, what’s that now? Alana is going to be working with Heather Tobey? But doesn’t she work at the center? That means that…Alana is working at the center? Well, you have to admit that she has a great gift, and it would be slightly selfish of Tom if he was the only one who could experience it. I’m not sure if Tom is necessarily jealous, but he really is a little upset that she didn’t tell him. And I know I say this all of the time, but Alana has been a great wife. She is very loyal, even after she found out her husband’s bosses nearly killed her and even after he continued to work for this agency. Even if he has serious reservations about the intentions of the 4400 center, his relationship with Alana is strong enough that he should be able to trust her.

But as big of a surprise as it was to hear that Alana was going to be working at the center, it was nowhere near the biggest surprise of the evening. That honor went to Diana Skouris, which is surprising since her daughter can see the future. Maia and Diana were preparing to head out for the day, when Maia mentions that her mom is going to forget her. Maia is accurate, but it’s hard to imagine what it would take for Diana to forget Maia.

And then Maia met her sister!

That’s right, Maia has a sister. Now, a lot of the families of the 4400 were broken apart when they were abducted, and even when the 4400 returned, many had difficulty getting back to their old lives, even with the people closest to them. Even Shawn, who was only gone for 18 months had difficulty living in the outside world.

When Diana saw Sara Rutledge, it was not a complete surprise. Diana knew that Maia’s parents had another daughter after Maia disappeared, and one of the first things she did after she started getting close to Maia was look for her sister, which was easier said than done. Sara had traveled the globe and had not returned a single one of Diana’s letter or phone calls. Still, after all this time, how can she deny Maia one of her family? Well, actually, it’s pretty easy. There are many people out there trying to get at a 4400, and pending a DNA test, Diana doesn’t want Sarah to get near her daughter.

Among the returnees, Shawn is the one that is most protected. He is not only the young and handsome spokesperson of the cause, but he possesses one of the most powerful abilities as well. Shawn does a lot of work at hospitals healing sick kids. When he’s there, one of the orderlies takes a cup of paint and throws it onto Shawn, saying that he is a traitor to his own people. Although Shawn knows exactly what is happening, but he hasn’t told anybody around him. In fact, Richard had knocked on his door earlier asking Shawn about some cash transfers that he had approved. With this new threat, Shawn decides he has to come clean.

Matthew, Richard, and Shawn are discussing the paint throwing incident and speculating why Shawn could have become a target. When Shawn tells them that he had given them money, I’m surprised Matt or Richard didn’t strangle him right there. Matthew has been lobbying in defense of the 4400, but it’s hard to promote good will when your leaders has given money to a terrorist group that is trying to kill members of the government. Richard was pretty upset about the whole terrorist thing, but he couldn’t believe that Shawn was trying to divert money from his late wife’s foundation to fund these terrorist groups.

After Jordan Collier died, I had always sort of wondered how the other 4400 would take Shawn being named their leader. It always seemed like Matthew Ross, despite not being a 4400 himself, would have been a better choice to make the decisions while leaving Shawn as the figurehead. After this latest incident Matthew talks to Richard about taking a larger role at the center, and suggests that they come up with a way to convince Shawn he needs help without alienating him too much. When you think about it, this is a great plan. When Shawn was sick, Richard was drafted to be the leader of the center, and the leadership he showed impressed a lot of people, especially considering the government was after all of them. Richard has never been power hungry, but Shawn’s actions do point to the necessity for some adult supervision, and so Richard agrees to take part in Matthew’s plan.

Early on, the sudden appearance of Maia’s sister seemed to worry Diana, but after the background checks seemed to check out, she started to rest a little easier. And then came the DNA test which was…negative. Sarah Rutledge may know a lot of stuff about Maia, may know a lot of stuff about Maia’s parents, but is definitely not Maia’s sister. Suddenly, Diana had a bad feeling, and rushed to the house of a friend Maia had been playing with that day, and when she gets there, it is just as she feared. Sarah Rutledge had come and taken Maia away.

To say that Diana was upset is an understatement, but perhaps Sarah Rutledge was just misguided. As we catch up with the two of them, Maia is walking with Sarah, who says that she bought a house in Seattle so she could be close to her sister. When the two of them get inside, Maia sees that Sarah has created a room just like Maia’s when she was a little girl. Maia has a great time at Sarah’s house, but eventually she wants to see her mom. She walks out into the hallway and tries to leave, but the door is locked. Maia starts to scream, but nothing is happening. She screams a little more, and then some kids start to walk out of the other doors.

One of the children that is there with Maia is Lindsay Hammond. Lindsay is another 4400 and we only know her name because her stepfather was afraid she had run away, and Diana and Tom were assigned to the case. I could kind of see how Sarah (which is obviously not her real name) could have been misguided and perhaps thought Maia was just like a sister she had a long time ago, but seeing that she had several kids locked away in that house of hers, and apparently they are all 4400s means that there is something very wrong about what’s going on.

If there is any good thing about Maia being taken it is that she can read the future, so there had to be something in her diary that they could use to find her. Marco was given the task of investigating, but he didn’t find out too much, other than accidentally reading how he was going to die. Now, I don’t know about you, but that would have freaked me out. I mean, if you know that’s how you are going to die, wouldn’t you do anything in your power to be as far away from that point as possible? If you read that you were going to die while driving a red Mustang, would you ever set foot in a red Mustang (or any Mustang just in case the color or tint in Maia’s head is a little off?). Marco, on the other hand, was OK with it. The way he died was pretty cool, so he said he could live with it.

The only hint that Marco got about Maia’s whereabouts was that she wrote that she was “In a circle with Tyler Downing”. We know who Tyler Downing is, because he is a classmate of Maia’s, but when they ask Tyler about it, he has no clue what’s going on. So basically, that left them investigating anything with the word “circle” in it.

It is true that Tyler had no idea what was going on with Maia, but he too would soon be in the middle of everything. With NTAC still believing that Lindsay Hammond ran away, they didn’t stop to think that maybe Tyler was in danger of being abducted as well, but that is exactly what happens. When news comes in that Tyler was taken, it only takes them moments to figure out what happened, but they are still right where they started, that is until Diana lifts her coffee off of a map of Seattle. Her mug left a ring on the map. Aha! Tyler and Maia are inside that circle. It doesn’t make any more sense, but at least they know where to start.

Each week, Matthew Ross gets a little bit more sketchy. I am not sure what his deal was, but I am convinced it is not good. I am almost sure that he is not among the future-humans trying to save mankind. He has dropped hints that he knows about Collier’s disappearance, and wanting to take away some of Shawn’s power seems to go with that plan. Matthew is very smart, and he knows that there is a better way to get to Shawn, and that is through Isabelle. You know, it’s kind of hard for me to make fun of somebody for wanting to watch somebody as hot as Isabelle try on lots of lingerie, but for some reason, seeing Matthew in any room just skeezes me out. Maybe I find it so strange because it appears he could care less that this hot girl is naked in the room next to him. If he is focused enough to keep that out of his mind, he has to have something awful planned.

Anyway, Isabelle trusts Matthew(probably because of the plan that he shared with her, but not with us) and basically convinces Isabelle to help them talk Shawn into sharing his power. You may have noticed that Isabelle has developed a little but of a rebel streak, and doesn’t just do what she is told anymore. As expected, Shawn didn’t want to give up any power, but he decided to give it some thought, and there was Isabelle just as expected, but she wasn’t trying to convince Shawn to share power with her father. Instead, she told Shawn that if he wanted to keep his job, he should keep it, and if anybody bothers him about it, she’ll be there to fix it.

Shawn does sign over some of his power, maybe realizing that he was acting a lot like Isabelle when it came to keeping his power, and Isabelle is so very immature and it maybe he realizes that something is wrong with the way he was acting. Matthew thought that Isabelle was to thank for changing Shawn’s mind, so he comes over to give her another gift, but Isabelle has learned a valuable lesson. She actually told Shawn to do the exact opposite, and when she told Matt, nothing happened. She has nothing to fear from Matthew Ross, or anybody else for that matter, and just to show how serious she is, she gets all Darth Vader on him and decided to crush his trachea using only her mind. OK, so she stopped short of completely killing him, but while Shawn and Richard were signing pieces of paper to share power, we all knew the real boss was Isabelle.

When Tyler appeared at the house with the rest of the kids, they knew that if they didn’t something about their situation, they might be stuck there for a long time. Therefore, it was time for a little jailbreak. Unfortunately, Lindsay, who is the oldest and acts as the leader is taken away, and when she comes back, she has no memory of what happened and looks like she has been brainwashed, and Maia is next in line.

Downstairs, Maia is with Sarah and her strange sidekick. They want her to drink a glass of some murky liquid, but she doesn’t want to. I think it’s going to be all over for Maia, but suddenly, something strange happens. The lights go out and both of the adults collapse. The other kids upstairs are using their abilities to help Maia. Since I want to keep this two-hour recap short, I’m just going to say that when they were done, the two adults seemed to be drained of all the water in their bodies.

While all of this was going on, Diana and Tom were driving nearby. All of a sudden, Diana screams at Tom to stop. She noticed a house with some butterflies on the gate, the exact same type of butterflies that Maia had been drawing in her diary recently. Just as they are about to break into the house, Maia is finishing her escape. But as they open the door to go in, and Maia opens the door to go out, something is wrong. Tom and Diana walk into an empty house with only a realtor and some clients around. As for Maia, she opened the door into….THE FUTURE!

OK, I know that was a little cheesy, but that is what happened. Remember when we first met Alana? Besides realizing exactly how gorgeous she is, Tom was taken to the room where they changed all of the humans and gave them their powers. Maia is now in that room. The house she thought she was in was actually a house in the future. Sarah Rutledge was actually a woman from the future (which might be why her DNA and fingerprints didn’t show up in any database). She explained that the future humans had made an error and the 4400 didn’t save civilization, which I guess means that they can cancel the show, right?

I know, I know, I shouldn’t jump the gun. Sarah tells Maia that the kids were taken back and were going to be sent back farther in time. The future humans believe that if the kids are placed back further in time, they will have more time to change the events of the future. Maia is being sent back in time and the memories of those who knew her would not even know that she exists. Maia is crying, but there is nothing she can do. Although she says that her mom won’t forget her, we cut to Diana’s house, where Maia’s room and all of her possessions have disappeared.

And that’s how we ended the first episode, but there was more to come. Would Diana really forget all about Maia? I didn’t see The Lake House, but the second episode sort of felt like it, at least what I can tell about the trailer. Maia isn’t there, but people still remember her. Marco comes over to have dinner with Diana, and she set the table for three people, but what was even more strange was what happened with Tom. He was fantasizing about driving a fast car with his hot wife by his side, but the fantasy did not involve him running over a girl in the middle of the road. When Tom stopped the car to investigate, he saw that the girl didn’t have a face. We could tell it was Maia, but Tom, who in this alternate reality has never met her, doesn’t recognize the, uh, lack of face.

Alana is just as confused about all of this as Tom is. The fantasies that she creates come from their memories, but how could they have come up with Maia if they never knew about her? Hmm, I guess those future humans weren’t so good with their mind eraser thingy, and left a few lingering memories of Maia stay behind. And if Tom can conjure up a faceless Maia, you can just imagine what Diana is going through. She and Tom meet up with an executive who was beaten up. Jarvis thinks it might be a hate crime, but Tom thinks that maybe people hate him because he is a corporate raider and destroyed lives.

This 4400, Christopher Dubov, has a unique talent; he’s able to smell the pheromones on people. People who smell the same are the perfect match. Unfortunately, his dentist smelled the same as his wife, and he introduced them, and his son wasn’t too happy. Right away, I got to thinking that I have to find some way to make sure Tyra Banks smells just like I do. Maybe if I sent her a few hundred cases of Vitamin Water and had somebody convince her she needs to eat sushi every other day, I could pull it off.

In the first part of the episode, we saw that Shawn came clean about his relationship with the Nova group, and after being caught making out in the stairwell by a member of the staff, Shawn decides to come clean about his relationship with Isabelle. Richard had put it pretty directly that he didn’t want Shawn getting near his daughter in anyway that would require her to use Nair. I mean, he didn’t say it exactly like that, but I think you get the idea.

Richard’s reaction, which was to threaten Shawn and tell him to stay away from his daughter, was expected, but when Matthew Ross came in and found out the nature of the conversation, he said something very unexpected, namely that the relationship was “ill-advised”. WHAT? This guy is buying lingerie for Isabelle that makes her look so hot it would give David Gest a hard-on, and now he is calling the relationship ill advised? I guess he couldn’t admit to Richard that he is often in the next room when his daughter is putting on see-through lace panties, but what the hell is up with that?

Tom and Alana had put the memory of that faceless girl out of their heads, but the next time they hooked up to do a little fantasizing, there was Maia, and this time she had a face. Tom asks her if they have met before, and Maia laughs like it’s the dumbest question in the world. Although he tries to get the image out of his head, there is definitely something strange here. If he is ever going to have these fantasies with his wife again, he is going to need to get to the bottom of this.

Enter Diana Skouris. Tom went to her apartment after hearing she called in sick, and found that Diana had been trying to piece together the faces of any young girls she saw in a newspaper or magazine trying to come up with something that resembled what was in her head. The answer? Use Alana to go into the dream world and see if she can talk to Maia. When Alana takes Diana under, she flashes back to the time when she first adopted Maia. All of Diana’s memories come back and she even remembers the other missing children.

Back at the 4400 center, Richard just can’t seem to win. He tries to tell Isabelle to stop seeing Shawn, but she doesn’t want to listen to him. She says that the sex is wonderful, which is not only horrible for a father to have to listen to coming out of his daughter’s mouth, but is sort of questionable. How does Isabelle know if the sex is good or not? She’s too naive to know what’s good or bad at this point, right? And how much do you learn from reading a Dr. Ruth book or watching the fake moans in a Kelly Wells video?

But Richard has more problems than his daughter’s apparent horniness, and that is that Daniel Armand, leader of the Nova Group, wants to chat. I know we are supposed to believe that the Nova Group is bad, but I have to tell you, after seeing how shady Matthew Ross has become and how upset he was when Shawn was giving them money, I am sort of starting to think that maybe they are just misunderstood. Daniel implores Richard that they should be allies, not adversaries, and he wants to discuss Shawn’s future.

Richard brings up this conversation with Matthew and Shawn, and the three of them decide what would be the best decision. Richard kind of wants to talk to Armand (and hey, it’s not like he would be sad if Shawn suddenly wasn’t around to grope his little girl), but Matthew knows that it’s not that easy. The Nova Group has proved that it can get to Shawn, so they are going to have to use a different strategy. With Shawn imploring Richard not to make the same mistake as he did, Richard decides not to meet with Armand.

When Diana and Tom told Jarvis about the abduction of all of the 4400 kids, it was sort of hard to believe, because they didn’t have records of any of them. Luckily, Marco was able to get it all to make sense. Tyler Downing? Found him in a picture when he graduated first in his class at Yale. Lindsay Hammond? Was adopted by Robert Goddard, who pioneered rockets. Now remember when the women who said she was Sarah Rutledge said that they were going to send the kids farther back in time to see if they could be of a little more help? Well, it looks like it worked at least al little bit, because Marco mentioned synthetic oil and lunar colonies, which obviously is a lot more advanced than what we have now.

But what about Maia? What was her greatness? Well, she didn’t really amount to much, but it wasn’t her fault, because the future-humans delivered her to a time before the smallpox vaccine, and Maia died of the disease in the mid 19th century. Now I’m not sure how Diana would have reacted if her daughter had lived a normal and healthy life, but when she found the circumstances to Maia’s death, she went crazy. She went over to Tom’s house and begged Alana to let her see Maia at least one last time.

Alana agrees to help Diana, but after only a few minutes in Alana’s fantasy, something happens. Tom, who had gone out to make some coffee, comes back and finds his wife and Diana on the floor. Alana seems to be OK, but there is something wrong with Diana. Alana says that when it was time to come back to reality, Diana didn’t want to let go. They take Diana to the hospital, where it looks like she is in a coma. The doctors say that she has bleeding on the brain and her vitals are not steady. They can keep her stable, but if her condition doesn’t improve, she might die.

Tom decides that he is going to have to find a way to talk to Diana. Alana and Tom do a little three-way thing with Diana, and Tom starts to speak with her. Although we know it is dangerous for Diana to continue on in the fantasy world, Diana doesn’t want to leave. So what if she has only a couple of months to live? That could be years inside the fantasy world, and Diana wants to have as much time with her daughter as possible. Tom realizes that he is not going to be able to change her mind, but has a plan to get the children back.

If this is your first season watching the 4400, you may have been a little confused at the next part. Tom goes to a bridge to kill himself. He wraps a rope around his neck using the hangman’s noose and jumps off of the bridge, but before his neck snaps, he’s taken to the future. See, in previous years, Tom has been told that he is to play a significant part in the role of the 4400. They sent him Alana specifically so he could cope with the stress of his job and the stress of losing his son. They fell in love in Alana’s fantasy world, and were there for eight years before they broke away and met each other in the real world, with eight years of marriage making them a very close couple. Anyway, the future-humans have invested a lot in Tom and weren’t going to let him just die.

Tom finds himself in the same place where they had re-altered the children. The woman formerly known as Sarah Rutledge is there, and tries to explain that they were never supposed to remember the children. They were supposed to let go and let the pain leave with them. When Tom says that they can bring the children back or he’ll go back to his suicide attempt, Sarah Rutledge agree, but then asks for a little more help.

As powerful as the future-humans who took the 4400 were, their enemies have been just as resourceful. Sarah agrees to let the children live, but in return, Tom must take on a burden that the future humans aren’t sure he is ready for. Now, I would say it would be a good idea to first find out what you are getting yourself into before agreeing to take on a project with the fate of mankind in your hands, but Tom says he’ll do whatever they want. Next thing we know, Tom is back at his house. For a moment, I am scared because it looks like Alana isn’t there, but she could be working at her studio or the center. To tell you the truth, I think I was more scared than Tom.

As it were, Tom wasn’t returned back to his house, but to the house where all the children were taken. All of the kids are safe, but there was an envelope with his name on it. He’s going to open it, but first he needs to reunite Maia with her mom.

It’s always tough on a parent when they feel like they missed out on their kids’ childhood, but can you imagine how Richard must feel? The reason he missed out on Isabelle’s childhood was because the job had him working late or traveling, but that his daughter is a supernatural being who suddenly aged eighteen years in one afternoon. To make matters worse, the person that he would have leaned on most to get him through this difficult time, his wife Lily, died, apparently in connection with her daughter’s aging.

Isabelle may have missed out on the terrible twos and being a toddler, growing up as a kid, puberty, and adolescence, but she is making up for it with her rebellion these days. Her father has enough to worry about with this whole trying to protect the 4400 from a terrorist group among it’s own membership, so when he tells her that he doesn’t want her to see Shawn, she should understand that he is under some stress. And if she doesn’t agree with him, she should take out her frustrations by trying to kill her father, but that is what she does. She says that she appreciates how much her father cares for her, but he should stay out of her business, and begins to do the choke thing that she did with Matthew on Richard (with Matthew smiling all the way). She comes to her senses and apologizes, but you can see that she has crossed a line, and might not be able to go back.

With thoughts of his daughter’s ability to crush him like an ant using only her mind, Richard talks with Daniel Armand. He is not going to have a meeting, and Daniel decides that he has to do his own thing. Daniel is a 4400, and we don’t know his ability, but in one scene we see him closing his eyes, concentrating, and in the next scene, Shawn is in his room, tearing it apart, looking for a bug that was planted. When he can’t find it in his room, he starts to think that maybe it’s inside of him. Uh oh, you know what that means! Shawn takes a knife and starts cutting himself. I kind of feel bad for him, but then I think about what is going to happen to Daniel Armand when Isabelle finds out what happened to Shawn, and I know that is going to be 1000 times worse.

The last step in all of the craziness of the last couple of episodes is Maia and Diana. When Tom takes Maia to see her mom, she is still in a coma. I’m not going to pretend that there was a lot of suspense that Diana might not wake up, because mother and daughter were soon together and very happy. No, the real suspense was right at the end, when Tom opened his package. There was a syringe and a simple note. His mission?

KILL ISABELLE!

Wow, have to say that I didn’t see that one coming, but overall, it is a very interesting twist. If the future-humans that are helping humanity want to kill Isabelle, that means that Matthew Ross is almost certainly working with the future-humans who are not so benevolent. And seeing how powerful Isabelle is, it makes you realize why the future-humans want her dead.

Tomorrow, the previews say that somebody dies, and we don’t know who it is. My first guess is going to be Matthew Ross. Tom is going to try and kill Isabelle, and Matthew is going to try and protect Isabelle. Or perhaps we will see the return of Jordan Collier, who will get rid of Matthew, knowing that Matthew betrayed him. Or maybe I just want to see Matthew die because he is so creepy.

What do you think of this episode? Confused about the timeline? Who is going to die this next episode?