4400 Episodes

Some fans of The 4400, like fans more generally, would have liked the show to go on forever, eventually dying a languishing and humiliating death as it runs out of steam.

I just watched the end of season 4, the final season of The 4400, and I think it was a satisfying, appropriately dignified way for the show to end. In one sense, I prefer this end in its prime to its becoming a soap opera, or going on the way the X-Files did, losing its major characters and plot lines and yet still bulldozing ahead on its momentum.

This doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a sequel, a spin-off. But to continue under the name “The 4400” when the story has come to be about a whole city that is populated by increasing numbers of people who are promicin positive and have developed remarkable abilities. Such a show could explore fascinating and important subjects, like whether having remarkable gifts is enough to make a person tend towards good and evil, the prejudices the gifted and the not-so-gifted have towards one another, and what it would be like if those breaking and those enforcing the law all have seemingly supernatural abilities.

There is an obvious name for the such a show: “Promise City”.