JUNE 25, 2006
GONE

by Craig Sweeny

"Gone" began life as a one-parter, a simple kidnapping story. The writing staff felt it was a good way to feature Maia, and we all liked the idea of someone posing as Maia's sister in order to get close to her.

But after a few days of kicking around the idea, we all agreed that something was missing. There are a lot of obvious reasons why someone would want to press Maia into service for their own ends, and that's kind of the problem: they're obvious.

We struggled to find a way to make her kidnapping something other than a typical, girl-in-peril story that's neatly wrapped up at the end of the hour's action.

Enter the future. Once we decided that Sara Rutledge was an emissary of the group that originally abducted The 4400, we had a spine to build the episode around. It quickly evolved into a two-parter, as we realized that the issues raised were too much for a single episode.

In the script, we learned a lot more about Lindsey Hammond, the young 4400 who is among the first to be abducted (re-abducted? Tricky semantics). We even shot a scene in which Tom and Diana go to her house, and interview her stepfather, who is well past the age at which he has the energy to raise a rebellious teenager.

Here we saw Lindsey's ability first-hand. An oil she secretes from her hands can rearrange the molecules in glass, and, to her father's exasperation, she has changed all the windows in her house to ornate stained glass. We had to cut the scene, which I liked a lot, for reasons of time.

We wrote a final scene for Tom and Alana, in which they're using her ability to have dinner at a restaurant they could never afford in real life. Heather Tobey makes an unexpected appearance in their fantasy world, ruining the illusion for Tom.

I thought this was a nifty "button" for the story, a visual demonstration of the costs of Alana's increasing affiliation with The Center on her relationship with Tom. Again, we lost it for time. The story makes sense without it, so the cut was an easy decision.

Gotta go. Sorry for the short entry this week ... I am just sitting down to begin work on the season finale!

Past Entries:

• (6/18) Being Tom Baldwin
  
• (6/11) The New World, Parts I & II
  
• (6/1) Ira Steven Behr's Season 3 Sneak Peek