Sixth Sense

We’re a little more than halfway throught the latest season of The 4400 and I am sort of wondering where all of the Science Fiction geeks have gone on TVgasm. You shouldn’t feel like you have to speak Klingon or have your own parking space at Comic-Con to enjoy a shows like this. I know I have been late with my recaps, but one comment? It’s not THAT obsucre and it’s not like I’m reviewing old DVDs of Dr. Who or something (no, I really don’t like the new series that much if you have to ask). So, even if you don’t watch the show, leave a comment and say you like boobies or something. It will make you feel better, and convince me I should spend two or three hours writing the recaps.

Now that my little pity party is over, we can back to the show which, as I have been saying, is actually pretty good. This week had something for everybody: drugs, arranged marriage, and, wait for it….Brian Dennehy!The episode begins with a girl being chased by somebody on the roof of a building. The guy that is chasing her is calling her Erica, and is telling her that he doesn’t want to hurt her, which is exactly the type of thing a psychopath says before he kills you and then wears your ears as a necklace. At this point, I am trying to figure out whether Erica, or this guy, who she calls Uncle Patrick, is the 4400. Whatever it is, Erica says that she is not going to let him touch her, and decides to jump off the roof of the building.

That’s going to leave a mark

Tom and Diana show up at the crime scene, but are kind of confused why they were called by the DEA when there were no 4400 involved. As they get there, Tom thanks Diana for some cookies that she had delivered to his house, which is funny because she didn’t send him any cookies, and was about to thank him for the cookies that he sent to her place.

Shrugging it off, the two of them learn why they were called in. The girl had a new drug in her called blink. It’s the third suicide of a blink user in the last couple of weeks, which is not out of the ordinary, except that blink has been discovered to have traces of promycin(the thing that gives the 4400 their power). It’s a powerful hallucinogen, and people see things I guess they don’t want to see. For Erica, it was her uncle, who has been in prison for more than twelve years.

As Tom and Diana are leaving, Tom sees his father (played by Brian Dennehy!), who has been dead for nine years. But how could that be? Well, Tom did eat a cookie, and suddenly it’s clear. Somebody wanted to get at Tom and Diana and gave them these cookies; at least that is what Tom thinks. Diana had a cookie, and she feels fine. She decides to take Tom to NTAC medical, where they find nothing wrong with him. And since promycin is so new, the toxicology screen doesn’t show anything. They can’t say how long it’s going to last, but just to safe, Jarvis puts Tom and Diana on two day medical leave just in case.

Last time, Shawn decided that he was going to take one for the team, and have a relationship with Isabelle. I really wish that he would stop acting like it’s some kind of forced label. So he gets to have sex with a girl who is smoking hot! Where do I sign up for that torture? He goes to a few meetings during the day, heals some sick people, then has some sex a couple of times that night (probably once in the morning), and that is all. Sure he is going to need to make sure he has plenty of ginseng around, but he’s gotta be thanking his lucky stars that he is forced to have sex with the most powerful woman on the planet now when Isabelle is around, and not twenty years ago when Maggie Thatcher held that crown. Just writing that sentence makes me want to look at some porn just to get that last image out of my head.

Shawn is going through the motions, so to speak, but while other parts of his body may be “into it”, his heart is not. Even Isabelle can see that there is something off about his performance, and Shawn confesses that whatever they had between them is now lost. Luckily, Isabelle knows exactly what will create that spark. Marriage! Wow, now things are getting a little deep. Having sex to save the world is one thing, but marriage? He’s been getting the milk for free for so long, so why would he EVER think about buying the cow?

The only answer is to bring in some help, and the only person that listens to Isabelle even a little bit is Richard. The two of them try to “nip this thing in the bud”, but honestly, what can they do? When Isabelle wants something, she usually gets it. She not only wants to be with Shawn, but believes that it is her destiny to be with Shawn. Isabelle says that they have to change their thinking. It’s an arranged marriage between the two most powerful people on the planet. The future wants them to be together, so they will be together.

In the meantime, Diana had her first hallucination. His name was Josh Sandler, a person she hasn’t seen in eleven years. She is talking with Marco about it a little bit later and reveals that she had been engaged to Josh, but broke it off. Poor Marco, he knows that Tom is seeing his father, so if Diana saw her ex, it must mean that she is thinking about him a lot, even though this is the first time he has heard about it.

As for Tom, things are starting to get worse. His father is back, and it looks like he wants to stick around. Even worse, he wants to talk. To me, this is pretty good. Don’t forget that three people committed suicide by seeing people in their past, so having Brian Dennehy ask you for some conversation, while sort of annoying, isn’t THAT bad.

The next day, Tom and Diana get together to discuss their problem, and figure that spending their off days trying to solve the case is better than sitting around waiting for people that they can’t stand to come and talk to them. Diana goes to visit the delivery service, while Tom follows a lead having to do with suicide girl Erica.

Diana finds their delivery driver, and I am really surprised that they haven’t done a background check on him to see if he was a 4400 or related to one, but apparently this guy didn’t pique their interest. What they did get was an address where this kid picked up the cookie, but the case was just about to be blow wide open.

Tom decided to let his father join him on the investigation, and his father, an old beat cop, spotted the suspected blink dealer, and Tom brought him in for questioning, but that was not the big scoop. No, Jarvis found a woman, Naomi Bonderman, who believes that she is responsible for everything.

Naomi Bonderman is an older woman, and she is definitely not part of some anti-government group. In fact, she’s just a grandmother who likes to make her family fried chicken. A while ago, she figured out her hands secreted some sort of oil, and if anybody touched it, they would see somebody from their past. Naomi saw her sister, and although they fought a lot, they were able to hash out a bunch of things that they never go to before she died.

One day, Naomi touched her mailman, who had a hallucination, so she started wearing gloves. And then there was the fried chicken. The only time Naomi doesn’t wear gloves is when she is gardening, and she uses fresh herbs from her garden to make the fried chicken. One day, she had her family over, and they all at fried chicken, and, well you can guess the rest.

Naomi noticed that one day, all of her herbs were gone, and she feels really badly about everything that happened. The people she knew had all been able to use the hallucinations as some sort of therapy, but these deaths are something she hadn’t even imagined. I imagine that she discovered perhaps the greatest way to ingest drugs ever. You eat the fried chicken, which is laced with “herbs”, and when the stuff kicks in, you already have food to take care of the munchies. No more late night trips for KFC or Taco Bell!

To say that Isabelle has been moving a little faster than Shawn would have liked is an understatement, but even worse, she’s starting to work on the parents. That’s right, Isabelle went over to Shawn’s mom to tell her about the engagement. Not knowing that Isabelle is, you know, a murderer and capable of, you know, destroying the planet, Shawn’s mom was very happy. In fact, the only thing she was upset about was having to learn that Shawn was getting engaged from the fiancée and not Shawn himself.

Shawn is more than a little worried that Isabelle has met his mom, although he clearly shouldn’t be upset. There are a lot worse things that can happen when your mom meets your fiancée, and it looks like Shawn doesn’t have to worry about most of them, besides the embarrassing baby photos of course. When he gets Isabelle home, he says that she has to cut off the marriage, and if she gets mad and wants to hurt him so be it. It’s tough talk, but again it doesn’t faze Isabelle. She explains a little bit of her mission to Shawn, and says that if she loses him, she might make the wrong choice, and she feels that Shawn is the only one who can stop her.

After learning from Naomi that the key getting rid of your blink demons is actually dealing with them, Tom and Diana tried a slightly different approach to dealing with their hallucinations. The delivery boy takes Diana to the place where he supposedly picked up the cookies that he was going to deliver. The address is an empty building with nothing inside. Seriously, how dumb can Diana be? She believes the kid when he says that there was some guy who met him there that he can’t remember, and she lets him go. While there, Diana gets another visit from Josh. When she sees him, she finally admits that losing him has affected her relationships, and that seems to make him go away.

Although Diana was slightly clueless, Tom managed to get a little more overt evidence. He was looking through Naomi’s herb garden like some sort of trail guide who inspects bear droppings and then tells you how many pinecones it ate that morning. Tom’s dad decided to follow him on the investigation, and they are finally getting somewhere. Tom’s dad apologized for being a drunk bastard, but that is not why Tom’ was hallucinating about him. The real reason for Tom’s dad’s appearance was to talk about the death of the elder Baldwin. When Tom’s dad was sick and dying in the hospital, Tom missed his final moments. His dad always wondered what happened, and at first Tom said that he missed it because he was in Baltimore on a case for the FBI and missed his plane, but then admitted that it was a lie. Before he got a chance to talk anymore, Tom sees the evidence he has been looking for. Naomi has a picture of her grandson Randy, who Tom recognizes as the delivery boy who has been eluding Diana in plain sight for the last couple of days.

Tom meets Diana at Randy’s place, but he is not there. They see he has made a batch of cookies, but have no clue what he wants to do with them. Diana goes upstairs to investigate, and once again, Josh is there to speak with her. Simply admitting that she had issues with Josh is not enough for him. He says that she needs to stop protecting herself because she is scared of commitment. All of her relationships since Josh have been with people she knows she has no future with. They might do anything for her, but there is no chemistry, and that includes Marco. Going on like she does is not fair to her and not fair to them.

It’s tough for Diana to take this, but in the midst of all of this, she finds some evidence. As she goes downstairs, Tom is just finishing another visit from his father. Tom said that the reason he didn’t visit his dad in the hospital was because he felt like they had fought so much that he wouldn’t want to have him around in his final moments. Tom’s dad says the normal “Your are my son and I love you” type of stuff, and then says, “You weren’t right about that, just like you weren’t right about..” and then they cut us off. UGH! I hate it when that happens. I am assuming that he is talking about Tom’s son, Kyle. Kyle was sent to prison for his role in Jordan Collier’s death, and Tom said he hadn’t visited because he is trying to give Kyle space.

Anyway, the big news that Diana found was Randy kept a detailed list of all of the people that he drugged, and in this binder there was a flyer for a local food festival, where it looks like Randy was going to display his wares. Diana and Tom make it to the food festival in enough time to stop Randy, but not before several people had a chance to eat the cookies. NTAC is called, the people who ate the cookies will get shrinks, and it looks like the problem is solved. But why did Randy do it? Just like his grandmother, Randy believed that being able to face your problems was a gift. He gave the cookies to Tom and Diana as a gift because they saved his grandmother from death when they found out about the promycin drug.

If it really was supposed to be a gift, it looked like it worked. Diana invited Marco over, and it looks like she was going to break up with him. They make it sound like his heart would be broken, and they didn’t show the actual act, maybe because it would be too much for us to watch all of his hopes and dreams of a marriage to somebody who doesn’t own a replica light saber, but let’s think about this. Marco had a relationship with a woman who was less than 5% plastic (I’m guessing Diana didn’t have too much plastic surgery, but you never know) and he didn’t need to inflate. That, my friends, is what we call progress. Now he needs to do what the rest of us guys do and find a girl who is too young to know that she is too good for him. That should give him at least another month of actual human contact. It might not replace Diana, but at least it will weaken the blow.

As for Tom, he’s surprised with another visit from his dad, but this time, it’s only to say goodbye. Before his dad can leave, Tom once again changes his story. The real reason why he wasn’t at his father’s bedside was because he didn’t want to be in that hospital room watching his father die. He wasn’t trying to protect his father, but was trying to protect himself. After that admission, it seems like Tom’s father is done with what he needs to do, but Tom, still feeling lonely, asks him to stay a little while and talk a little more. It’s nice that he got to reconcile with his father, but on the whole, I would rather see Karina Lombard and not Brian Dennehy at the Baldwin house.

When Isabelle started talking about how she was supposed to bring the apocalypse and whatnot, Shawn got a little worried. He spoke to Richard, but what was Richard going to do? It’s not like he was going to kill his daughter over an “alleged” genocide. Shawn can understand why Richard might not want to hurt Isabelle, but that doesn’t mean that Shawn has to sit around and wait for the world to end before he takes some action. That night, he walks into Isabelle’s room, and while she’s sleeping, he tries to do that reverse heal thing that he does. It looks like it is working, and the life is literally escaping from Isabelle, but we know that the only thing that can kill her is that syringe that Matt and Tom have.

Isabelle wakes up, and I think that it’s going to be the end of Shawn. Never having been engaged, I was silly enough to think that trying to kill your betrothed is something that would cancel a wedding. For Isabelle, she looked like she was a little upset with Shawn, but as he sits down, dejected that he didn’t kill her, she says, “I guess we’re going to get married after all.”

I liked this week’s episode, but there is so much that we are waiting on, I think we could get more. Where is Ryland this week? Still handcuffed to his truck? It looks like we are going to finally get an update on Dr. Berkhoff next at least though. I have to admit that I was kind of sad to see Diana break up with Marco, but something tells me that won’t be the end of these two. Maybe h was a little bit of a pushover, and maybe I am a little naive in thinking that they made a good pair, but I think Diana would rather rob the cradle than have to break off her engagement two weeks before the wedding again.

What did you think of this episode?