The 4400 and The Dead Zone have both been cancelled.

Sorry, I completely spaced on my 4400 recap this week …

Curtis Peck is a really bad filmmaker (think Ed Wood) and one of the “original recipe” 4400s. His ability is to uncover conspiracies in the process of writing about them. His resume includes the Kennedy assassination and Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, and his latest film — “The Marked” — involves Bad Future People.

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This episode was a nice step in the right direction. Maia’s visions of a fascist future were suitably creepy and foreboding, and showing us an entire town filled with Promicin-powered citizens finally gives us a sense of the pervasiveness of the “freak” situation. Still, the writers could have taken it a bit farther than they did. I’m reminded of scenes from the X-Men comics/movies, where we see kids playing ball with each other, and every five minutes, somebody has to yell, “Hey, no fair using your powers!”

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Diana finally finds April, who is a human lie detector. She’s caught up in a murder, the details of which are kind of fuzzy to me. Anyway, Tom and Diana take care of it, and April gets hired by NTAC. Diana decides not to go back to Spain. Shawn is thinking about running for office. Kyle and Isabelle decode the Future Book, and discover a list of names of people who need to get Promicin shots. And Tom is the last name on the list. And … that’s pretty much it. Once again, by the end of the episode, I’m left wishing something more would happen.

Okay, the holiday is upon us tomorrow, so I doubt we’ll get much chatter about this last week’s episode. Once again, it was okay, but not really earth-shattering. Old woman takes Promicin. Old woman gets power of astral projection. Old woman gets killed, but her astral version sticks around, and it becomes a classic ghost story where the person can’t “cross over” until their killer is found. It was kind of clever to do this in a sci-fi way instead of a horror way … but not all that clever.

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In this week’s The 4400, a misguided father tries to “fix” his autistic son by giving him a Promicin shot. The kid then gets the power to make people’s fears seem real, thereby driving them crazy. Tom and Diana — who’s now working for NTAC again — track the kid down, Shawn heals his autism, and the father goes to prison. But I’m guessing it’s not the last we see of that kid and his fear schtick.

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In the Season 4 premiere of The 4400, it looks like the writers have gotten back to the “freak of the week” formula that served the show well in the first couple of seasons. The big difference now, of course, is that the “freaks” are no longer only 4400s. Now they might be what Marco calls “Extra Crispies” — people who have taken Promicin injections and received powers from them. At one point, we see a newspaper headline that reports 6000 people will die from taking Promicin injections by year’s end. So using the 50-50 formula we were given in last season’s finale, this means that roughly 6000 people will have received powers in that time. Which puts the total freak count up to 10,000 or so at this point … and growing.

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