The 4400

Who are the 4400?

Over the decades, people have mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again. Conventional wisdom calls the disappearances alien abductions.

Now what appears to be a comet is on a collision course with earth. But the comet changes course, slows, and comes to a delicate landing in Seattle as a bright ball of light. There is a blinding flash and the ball of light disappears. And out of the mist walk people, four thousand, four hundred people to be exact.

They are the people who've disappear and none of them are a day older than the day of their disappearance. The mysterious group is placed into quarantine, and the Seattle office of the Homeland Security Department is put in charge of monitoring and investigating them.

HS Agent Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) has a personal stake in the mystery. His son Kyle (Chad Faust) slipped into a coma three years ago on the night his nephew Shawn (Patrick Fleuger) disappeared. Now Shawn is back, with no memory of where he's been.

Tom's partner Diana Skouris (Jacqueline MacKenzie) develops a personal interest of her own. She becomes close to and eventually adopts the oldest and yet youngest of the returnees, Maia Rutledge (Conchita Campbell), an eight-year-old girl who disappeared in 1946.

As the 4400 are released from quarantine and allowed to return (or try to return) to their pre-abduction lives, it becomes clear that they have been changed. Shawn can heal. Maia can see glimpses of the future.

Coincidences (or... are they?) abound. Richard Tyler (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a black man who disappeared in the early 1950s, was in trouble with his Army buddies in Korea for getting involved with a white woman. Another returnee, Lily Moore (Laura Allen) from the 1990s, is the granddaughter of Richard's former girlfriend, with the same name and same appearance. Is it any wonder that Richard and Lily become involved? Neither can return to their previous lives; Richard's is long gone, and Lily learns that her pre-abduction husband has remarried and the baby she left is a little girl who doesn't know her.

And Lily has returned from wherever they were pregnant. Lily's baby Isabel not surprisingly also has mysterious powers.

Relations between the returnees and the government are complex, with the government in some instances helping and in others hindering. Suspicion is mutual. Jordan Collier (Bill Campbell), a real estate mogul before his abduction, founds The 4400 Center with strong cult overtones, which becomes a rival power center.

The 4400 debuted on the USA cable network in July 2004 as a mini-series. At the end of the mini-series, viewers learned that the 4400 were not abducted by aliens after all. Instead, their abductions had been engineered by humans from the distant future. In that future, humanity faced a mysterious crisis of total annihilation, and the solution they developed was to take these people from the past and set them on a course to change the future. The returnees themselves have no idea what their role in changing the future is supposed to be.

The mystery continues as a weekly series on USA Network.

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