Powers Grid
From The 4400 Wiki, a fan encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Powers Grid is a special feature which can be found on the 4th disc of the Third Season DVD set. It covers the thought process in what type of abilities make it on the show and who gets them.
Transcript
Ira Steven Behr: The powers themselves are the threat. The idea of the leach in Superman. The uber man. You know. The next level of evolutions is what’s really interesting. At the beginning, you know it was, you know, let’s do the freak of the week. Let’s find the 4400 with the strange ability and then do an episode about it and what we found is that that became very predictable.
Scott Peters: We have to be very careful because we don’t want to turn into X-men. We don’t want it to turn into something it’s not. We want to be very…as suttle as you can be in a world where 4400 people drop out of a ball of light, but it also needs to be something that serves the story.
Ira Steven Behr: As we start to flex our muscles a little bit with the mythology and we realize that the stories had to impact on our characters as much as the guest stars of the week with their 4400 ability we started to move away from there and come up with broader storytelling ability.
Darcy Meyers: These ability we come up with tend to be more cerebral and internalize then somebody who can pssh make your head explode cuz it seems that that’s not as interesting.
Ira Steven Behr: You know, the ability’s cool and they’re a lot of fun. But it’s really just part of the canvas of the show.
Scott Peters: It’s really just a pitching process. The writers will sit around in a room and say “hey, how about if somebody’s saliva can help you lose weight.”
Amy Berg: Sometimes it is come up with something we just think is super cool and other ways we come up with a story and then we find an ability that fits within that story. It just depends on what we’re doing with that episode.
Bruce Miller: That’s the good thing with the 4400 if you can say, “oh, I read Pride and Prejudice and wouldn’t it be cool if someone in Pride and Prejudice had this ability” so you can be inspirited by places without feeling like you’re taking ideas from other people.
Scott Peters: Certainly any of the main characters we want to give them the really strong interesting ones. Other characters, making flowers come back from a wither place pretty much they’re going to they’re not going to be around much so we give them an interesting little quirky thing to do, but it’s not something that will really impact the show.
Craig Sweeny: And the way we do it is depending whether or not somebody is a series regular or guest actor. If you look at the series regular who have abilities Richard, Shawn, ect. They have much more traditional kind of superpowers Telekinesis, the ability to heal, things you see all the time in comic books and film. What we found with our guest players is give them those iconic powers doesn’t serve us because it makes them the most interesting figure here in the story and it’s not about Tom and Diana. It’s not about Richard and Shawn. It’s about the guest players. So what we often do with the guest player is to have abilities that affect others. That affect the main characters. If you look at Tess from wake up call, she isn’t doing anything herself, she’s compelling you to do things. I think that’s where a lot of the uniqueness of the guest powers come from. Because we’re always looking at a different…it’s ultimately about a way to put our character through the story. We tend to think “what would be a really wild place to take the characters?”
Ira Steven Behr: Now we know they have them, now we’ve given to all of them. What’s the impact and who’s going to control it. To me, that’s interesting. Who is going to control this kind of powerful, life changing, society changing experience. Good stuff.
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