• Television Series Review: The 4400 – Huh?

    Date: 2009.03.28 | Category: Reviews, Series | Tags:

    At the moment, I’m posting some old rants, reviews and the likes to my blog. Some of the stuff has just been lying around on different computers and desktops, some of it has been posted online, some has even been banned online (damn that dirty mouth of mine!), but whether it’s interesting or not, well… You be the judge :)

    This is actually the one that got me started digging up old crap. It hasn’t been posted anywhere, it was simply a conversation with my cool work buddy that reminded me that I once dissed The 4400 in a .txt file on a Windows computer somewhere swearing through my teeth that I’d post it somewhere. I didn’t, until today :)

    As with basically all my other reviews, it’s a discontent one (It’s so much easier when you hate it, people!). It’s also geeky, but hey, that’s me ;) Anyway, here it is:

    This show got exactly 8 minutes worth of my time. Dumb script writers, dumb producers, dumb casts and so forth are one thing, but when they think their audience is dumb as well, that’s where I get off. Always. Pissed. And like I said, in this case, I got off after eight minutes.

    Let me tell you why.

    Okay, let’s see… In the first episode (of which I’ve seen eight minutes), we are told about a meteor heading for Earth at a velocity of 3,000 km/sec, with an “impact in 28 minutes”. Ten seconds later, we are told that, “China just launched its missiles at it.” Another thirty seconds after that, we are presented with this uninterrupted conversation,
    – All right, our missiles are in the air.
    - And when is launch two?
    - France and Russia.
    - NORAD’s saying the first flight of missiles will intercept in fifteen seconds.

    Okay, stop right there, let’s think about this (oh dear god, no) for just one minute. How far away exactly is the meteor?
    [3,000 km/sec] * [60 secs in a minute] * [27 minutes] = 4,860,000 km

    Traveling that far in fifteen seconds would require a velocity of what?
    [4,860,000 km] / [15 secs] = 324,000 km/sec

    Okay, let’s consider this excerpt from the NSBE, describing the world’s fastest missile:

    Lockheed Martin LOSAT: World’s fastest missile
    Fired from a Humvee, the LOSAT (Line-of-Sight Anti-Tank weapon) tops out at more than 5,000 feet a second – twice as fast as most ground- and air-launched missiles. The weapon, which will debut next year, has a five-mile range and is propelled by a solid-rocket motor. It employs no explosives; kinetic energy alone drives a penetrator rod into an enemy tank.

    Okay, so 5,000 feet/sec is 1.504 km/sec, which means that the missiles that America in “The 4400″ are firing, are supposedly more than 215,425 times as fast as the world’s fastest missile. Treating your audience as idiots is in my book a cardinal sin. With a budget like this, why didn’t they hire decent script writers? Why do we have to take this? Well, as it turns out, we don’t :) So let’s not event waste time thinking about how long a missile would stay functional in the Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of 324,000 km/sec.

    Bye-bye, “The 4400″. RIP.