Good TV

I finally watched my tape of the first episode of this season's the 4400. It's pretty good.

I'd been wondering to myself if the show I remembered as good science fiction from the 1st season was still good. I remembered that the story had changed a lot, from individuals dealing with the mystery of the future, to a titanic battle between two sides over the nature of the future.

Then I saw the symbols. Where the first season had symbols of individual lives, people struggling with the nature of change and trying to catch up with their own lives, this season starts off with stories about faith, religion, holy war, and two groups in one country deeply divided. Two sides with radically different beliefs about the future, where the future should lead and what our choices mean for our own morality.

I saw metaphors for Osama and Bush, including some wonderful lines about Messiah envy. And now that I've seen Firefly, I realized that the producers of the 4400 have cast Summer Glau to play a character eerily similar to the one she played on Firefly - a schizophrenic girl with superpowers.