The 4400: All the cool kids are getting injections

You can't say nothing happened on The 4400 this week. With only a week to go before the season finale, there was enough action in this episode to get everyone who cares about the fate of the promicin-enhanced world keyed up for next week. Deaths! Shootings! Arguments! Kidnapping! Nanotechnology! And injections! Lots and lots of injections!

(Unless you want details, don't read any further.)

Evil "Tom" from the future was all about causing trouble this week, and I must say I liked it. "Tom" has turned out to be a very good villain; he's arrogant and irreverent, and I'll miss him when we inevitably have to go back to Vanilla Tom. Rocky Road "Tom" cut a swath of destruction starting with Maia, who he injected with a temporary inhibitor to keep her from having visions. This came after an extremely creepy moment when "Tom" picked Maia up from school and proved that "Don't talk to strangers" is a good rule, but is woefully limited when we start to talk about body snatchers. "Don't trust anyone, not even me, unless I give you the secret password, and even then, get ready to run" would probably be a better rule around the Skouris household. After Maia, "Tom" went on to kill Curtis Peck for talking to Diana and Meghan, and then harassed Diana a little bit about her inability to hold on to a man. It was after she had confronted him about being marked, and yes, he's a bad guy, but still – jerk. And why is that always relevant in cases like these? Every time you see a male-female pair of partners arguing, the guy always brings up the woman's lack of a love life and tells her that he is the longest relationship she's ever had. I think what I mean to say is: shut up, "Tom."

Everyone else at NTAC – who had a speaking role, that is – was concerned with only one question: how do you solve a problem like "Tom"? And what is the problem, anyway? The quasi-scientific answer was that the future agent personality is spread through the system with nanites, which you will remember, in their friendly version, from MST3K. The only way to get rid of them, explained Marco, was to subject Tom to a huge dose of radiation, which would kill both the nanites and Tom. But once Diana confronted "Tom," they knew that he knew that they were on to him, and they had to lure him to an ambush. "Tom" dispatched Meghan easily (NTAC bosses are never very resilient anyway), and then it was all down to "Tom" and Diana. He sneered at her a little, told her she'd never shoot him, but then she proved him wrong. Yep, she shot him, and right in the gut, too. Between that and their other confrontation, it was a good week for Diana kicking butt. And I never get tired of seeing that.

In other news, Tess got herself a bunch of useful and obliging p-positives and rescued Kevin from Promise City. Yay! Kev was then free to continue work on the compatibility test, which Danny (Farrell? Shawn's brother? You remember) took him up on. And thanks to Danny's massive corpus callosum, always a hit with the ladies, he was able to take the shot and survive. However, the same was not true of Danny's mother, who had a bad promicin reaction, what with the coughing up blood and the bleeding from the eyeballs. Was it his ability? Danny certainly talked enough about wanting to be a healer to tempt the fates and bring the irony of anti-healing down on his head.

Isabelle, meanwhile, did her thing and abducted Jordan from Promise City (it was a bad week for the Promise City security team), but not before getting some sweet lovin' from Kyle. And once Jordan was in "Tom's" clutches, "Tom" menaced that he would make Jordan a "traitor to his cause." Jordan underwent a similar procedure to being marked, in which they pumped some liquid into him that would make him use his ability to take away others. Apparently, the future has never met a problem that it didn't try to possess.

What will happen in the finale? Will Tom survive? Will "Tom" survive? Will Jordan and Danny go on unwitting rampages? I'm excited – are you?