Brett is a high-school outcast who doesn't run with the in crowd, unlike Samantha, the cheerleader he has a desperate crush on. Then one day, he gets a parcel in the mail -- a totem with the power to grant his deepest, darkest desires. Brett wishes for Samantha to love him, and she does, although after a while her affection starts leaning toward obsession. Then murders start occurring in the school, which Brett gradually starts to connect to the totem.
15-year-old Natalie, confused to begin with, finds out about her father's affair with one of his students. Refusing to simply stand by and watch her family disintegrate, Natalie takes it upon herself to expose the problem, and in doing so calls into question the family's penchant for denial.
The Herlihys are a working class family from Chicago whose three children take wildly divergent paths: Brian joins the Marines right out of High School and goes to Vietnam, Michael becomes involved in the civil rights movement and after campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy becomes involved in radical politics, and Katie gets pregnant, moves to San Francisco and joins a hippie commune. Meanwhile, the Taylors are an African-American family living in the deep South. When Willie Taylor, a minister and civil rights organizer, is shot to death, his son Emmet moves to the city and eventually joins the Black Panthers, serving as a bodyguard for Fred Hampton.
When dosed with cosmic rays, four intrepid astronauts are given incredible powers. They decide to form a superhero group called the Fantastic Four to fight their arch-enemy, Dr. Doom.
