4400 Premiere Review: “Past Is Prologue”
The CW’s reboot is weighed down by too much exposition.
When influencer Gabby Petito went missing last month,
activists asked why so much more attention was paid to the disappearance of a young white woman than the cases of missing people of color. That conflict is at the heart of
4400, The CW’s reboot of the 2004 USA Network series
The 4400 about 4400 missing people who spontaneously reappear together. But the earnest effort to reframe the plot as a racial justice narrative gets off to a rough start thanks to clunky dialogue and an attempt to introduce far too many characters.
“Past Is Prologue” starts out pretty similarly to the original series, though
the 4400 fall out of the sky in a Detroit park instead of all appearing in a ball of light in Seattle. In both cases they’re rounded up by Department of Homeland Security agents, who soon discover the returned can be traced to missing persons cases spanning decades and that they seemingly haven’t aged since they disappeared.
The CW’s version features a primarily Black cast, explicitly depicting all of the missing people as marginalized or undervalued in their times. But the show’s seemingly tiny budget gets in the way of its efforts to make the political points it’s striving for. The original series provided a commentary on the growing security state following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, examining the American government’s fear of threats within its borders and the ways people might seek any chance of empowerment in a chaotic world. In its pilot, the 4400 are quickly processed and imprisoned, the characters largely introduced in institutional uniforms.
In the new version, they’re oddly stashed in a shabby hotel lobby and left in their own clothes without any significant medical examinations. This is despite the fact that it’s a post-COVID show, with their guards wearing masks seemingly just to make them more ominous while the protagonists can show their faces and wear their period-appropriate attire in a thin attempt to help us keep track of the huge ensemble. The series clearly wants to evoke the sentiments and imagery of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, but there are too few guards, and the ones there lack body armor or heavy weaponry. This might be required for some future plot point, but it feels sloppy and disingenuous. Also adding to the weakness of the setting is the fact that while it’s set in Detroit, it’s filmed in Chicago. The mismatch prevents a real establishment of place.
Even worse is the dialogue. Rather than take the time to introduce all the primary characters slowly, 4400’s writers have rushed to try to jam in as many as possible in the pilot. The result leaves them largely feeling like thin archetypes constantly shouting their backstories at anyone who will listen. They’re regularly making it clear what times they come from in the most unsubtle ways possible, such as noting the last thing they remember was watching Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, or asking if ragtime is still a popular musical genre.
The most attention is given to Shanice (Brittany Adebumola), a lawyer who disappeared from 2005 on her first day back from maternity leave. Adebumola does a solid job of portraying believable panic and grief as she desperately tries to get back to the life she left behind, but it makes the placid attitudes of the other 4400 feel ludicrous by comparison. The only other detainee who even puts up much of a protest is party girl LaDonna (Khailah Johnson), and that just comes off as an awful stereotype as all she actually wants is her phone back.
While members of the 4400 might really want to share their stories with each other given the shocking situation they find themselves in, it’s really inexplicable for their caretakers, parole officers Jharrel Mateo (Joseph David-Jones) and Keisha (Ireon Roach), who dump their tragic motivations on each other the first time they meet for drinks. While the show is clearly trying to go for the same partners-with-conflicting-styles dynamic as the original’s Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie), which itself was a riff on The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, the intimacy between those agents was forged over the course of numerous intense episodes rather than a single conversation.
Like in the original, some of the returned discover they’ve come back with superpowers. Most notably, ‘50s civil rights activist and preacher’s wife Claudette (Jaye Ladymore) discovers she can regenerate from wounds. Watching her enlist others to help her experiment with her abilities is charming, but as LaDonna’s exasperated comments that she’s locked up with a member of the X-Men indicate, this isn’t exactly an original ability. The 4400 broke from traditional superhero archetypes with a focus on powers that were more likely to change the course of the entire world rather than being useful in a fight, setting that standard early with characters with prophetic visions and the ability to heal others. For all its political ambitions, it would be a shame if 4400 was lacking that same vision for its speculative fiction.
Verdict
The 4400 was an incredible series, so any attempt to produce a worthy successor was going to be a challenge. So far, 4400 hasn’t even come close. Updating the show’s politics with a diverse cast may be a noble effort, but “Past Is Prologue” seems to miss what made the original so powerful. The writers are showing a remarkable lack of trust in their audience to keep up as they overtly explain the themes and characters, undermining the narrative with too much weak exposition.
A tiny budget and clunky dialogue keep The CW’s 4400 from providing a worthy successor to The 4400.
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