Tensions rise as the attack on the Bois Blanc puts everyone in danger. Jharrell and Claudette try to reason with Manny, even as he reveals a seemingly impossible truth. Mildred still believes that her sister can be saved.

So, Manny came from the future. Like, the really far future. And in this finale, we get to see what that looked like, and why he came back to do what he’s doing. And that’s where the show starts to get perilously close to jumping the shark.

To be fair, no ‘reasonable’ explanation was ever going to appear for the 4400 suddenly dropping out of the sky from various time periods with a green flash, but this setup, of a future gone bad and people there doing their best to try to alter it, is definitely madder than some of the other explanations that they could have picked. Nonetheless, this works, because rather than focus too long on all of that side of things, the show works hard to make us care about its characters, even as it messes around with our perceptions of who many of them are.

Take Mildred, who’s been a bit difficult to really like for a long time but here really coms into her own, even more so than in the previous episode. Mildred, it turns out, is a truly noble soul who wants nothing more than to feel a part of a family and help those in need of her help. Starting with her sister.

Or rather, getting to her sister once the small matter of a literal siege at the hotel is taken care of. The mob is there in force, and not even her powers can stand against the surprising ones of her sister, leading them from the front. It’s only thanks to a random contact Shanice has with one of them that the real endgame of the 44orumers is discovered, and it’s difficult not to see an awful parallel with the events at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6th 2021, both in terms of an out of control militia mob overrunning a building looking for victims, and in terms of their plans for those victims. Grim stuff indeed.

There’s also a lot here about people having to confront reality, and whether it’s nobler to try to fight the good fight from within the rules of society, or simply to try to smash that society altogether and build a better one from the ashes. Manny clearly favours the latter, and however much Claudette thought she knew the man, it becomes obvious that even she didn’t know quite the extent of his plans in that regard.

Jessica is forced to confront the reality of what Bill Greene and her other superiors have gotten her into (far too late, I might add). Shanice is forced to confront the feelings she has tried so hard to forget and Andre is faced with the most difficult choice of his life as he finds himself asked to keep a dark secret from all those he cares about. Mildred finally gets some peace, though not in the way you might expect, and as the credits come down on what’s been a thrill ride of a finale, more questions get posed which start to really play with the core ideas at work here. Here’s hoping we get a second season to start answering them.

Verdict: A blistering finale that offsets the goofier elements of the meta narrative with some solid character work. 9/10

Greg D. Smith