Evil Has Many Faces: An Overview of Millennium

There are two ways to consider Chris Carter’s Millennium, according to most people. One is to see it as an unofficial spin-off from The X-Files that ended up cancelled after it was never quite able either to find or to maintain its stylistic “feet” through its increasingly unpopular three seasons; the other is to see it as a show which was ultimately unable to recover from the fact that its plot and thematic cornerstone — a mysterious world-rocking event coinciding with the end of the second millennium A.D. — was due no more than four years after the series’ launch in 1996. (Carter was eventually able to shoehorn a Millennium ‘verse-based episode which climaxes as the 1999 New Year’s ball drops on Times Square back into The X-Files, which some might argue allowed him to provide Millennium‘s main character Frank Black with a suitably weird, dark, and somber finale.)

Despite being a welcome weekly showcase for veteran genre character actor Lance Henriksen, who turns in some of the best work of his entire career, the show faced the same challenge that defeated far better creatives than Carter, during the same era: Fannish commitment notwithstanding, you could only ever get so far trying to depict grimy Se7en-esque serial killer gore and sexual creepiness on mainstream network TV at a time when people couldn’t even swear after 11:00 PM. Eventually, this Standards & Practices inflexibility would wind up spawning a whole alternate market of pay-TV channels aimed at those who preferred their existential despair uncut for commercials.

And then, with 20-20 hindsight, there’s also the far larger problem of the Millennium itself landing like a lead balloon, in general. In the days leading up to it, I remember joking viciously about how much I was looking forward to standing on street-corners at 6:00 AM, January 1, 2000 and yelling at any passerby I thought looked even faintly religious: “Hey, what d’ya know? Still here!” But I didn’t, not least because none of the End-of-the-World last things we’d been so strenuously warned about actually came to pass, at least not immediately — it seemed like kicking a dead dog while it was down. Instead, we all congratulated ourselves for not having been fooled into forming mass suicide pacts or stockpiling canned food and Krugerrands . . . everybody I knew, anyhow. Like most of the rest of our extremely narrow slice of the world, we never saw the real downward slide coming, the one that started when the planes hit the Twin Towers. The same one that ended up with at least some of us sitting right here, pandemic-plagued and homebound, distracting ourselves by watching old TV shows and surprising ourselves by realizing just how predictive they now seem.

Yet it turns out those predictions aren’t about “the” Millennium, so much, as about millennialism as a concept — that no matter how good or bad things may seem right this second, there’s always some group of people out there simmering over their particular brand of secret wisdom/conspiracy theory scripture, dreaming of how much better it would feel to slam the reset button and burn it all to the ground so they can find out what happens next. Could be a heaven on earth where it’s fifty white virgins to every incel and women are forbidden by law to say “no,” could be an escape hatch to a fresh new dimension or friendly aliens scooping up our kids and re-homing them on another planet, could be some variety of Mad Max post-apocalyptic playground where most of the people you hate are dead and everybody finally has to listen to you because you’ve got the guns — who knows? One thing for sure, it’s bound to be far more interesting than whatever’s going on right now!

This, not serial killers and secret societies, is the horror Carter’s Millennium was actually created to explore, however haphazardly. The idea that whether or not good and evil exist, whether or not the natural ever intersects with the preter- or supernatural, human beings have a death-instinct hibernating inside them which is just as strong as our drive to love and be loved in return, if not infinitely stronger. The possibility, terrible and soul-destroying yet all too easy to believe as it might be, that the only thing ever really likely to bring about the “end of the world” for us . . . is us.

It’s a lot, I get it. And it all starts with Frank Black (Henriksen).

As Millennium‘s pilot episode introduces Frank, we soon learn the three most important things about him: He’s a former profiler for the FBI who quit after being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, a loving husband to Catherine (Megan Gallagher) and doting late-life father to Jordan (Brittany Tiplady), and currently a self-employed “consultant” who occasionally works with a mysterious cohort of other former FBI agents called the Millennium Group. Frank credits the Group’s expertise in the unusual with helping him recognize and control the special “sense” that often sent him towards particularly weird cases, ones like the “motiveless” recent murder of a strip club employee which he spots in the newspaper right after moving his family back to Seattle.

Frank immediately offers his investigative help to Seattle homicide detective Bob Bletcher (Bill Smitrovitch), an old friend, and soon discovers clues which lead them to a client the murdered woman used to call “the Frenchman” (because he was often heard mumbling the prophecies of Nostradamus to himself, in the original French). In order to decode these prophetic quatrains, Frank in turn calls on his primary mentor at the Group, Peter Watts (Terry O’Quinn). Thus the show sets up a semi-procedural pattern that nevertheless hints at deeper, darker things pretty much right from its initial scenes — its ground-note less a Silence of the Lambs-style realism cut with touches of the grotesque than an X-Files-ish sense that even its more human evils are excessive, and literally dread-full in ways that require the involvement of a person with Frank’s abilities, someone who appears to absorb the way victims’ screams intersect with perpetrators’ dreams like a modern-day sin-eater.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Millennium, both in its own time and in contemporary context, is its concentration on older or unknown actors previously confined to supporting roles. Born in 1940, Henriksen himself didn’t manage to land a main character part until 1982 (in Piranha 2: The Spawning); so much of what he brings to Frank Black is therefore informed by an already-lengthy career in the shadow of showier performances: Both the innate gravitas/apparent emotional restriction of a man out of time and the barely-hidden potential for violence of an actor whose stark bone-structure often leads to him being cast as a villain, yet also the gently surprising self-awareness of a person who understands his own nature well enough to occasionally joke about it. His onscreen marriage to Gallagher is mainly depicted as that of two adults who value themselves equally, carefully negotiating their own individuality around the slowly increasing needs of the child whose love they share — Jordan, who probably has the same “gift” as Frank, one which begins to place her in danger the more she uses it. Not to mention how, like her father’s, Jordan’s sensitivity soon attracts the attention of . . . outside parties.

Though we start off chasing supposedly “mundane” serial killers, the supernatural enters into Millennium far earlier than most people might pick up from a typical series recap. An argument could be made, for example, that it first raises its head in “The Judge” (episode four of Season One), but either way, Season One also contains both “Lamentation” — the introduction of Sarah-Jane Redmond as Lucy Butler, a woman who’s either a witch or possessed by a demon, maybe both — and “Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions,” in which Frank is approached by a lawyer intent on recruiting him for evil purposes, who is later assassinated by a teenager possessed by something else entirely. Butler reappears in both Season Two and Season Three, where she confirms her status as both Frank Black’s nemesis and one of the series’s most overt expressions of inhuman, “outside” evil, but even without her presence, we still get episodes like “The Curse of Frank Black” (2.06, in which the ghost of a man damned for committing suicide warns Frank to leave cases in which he senses inhuman evil alone) or “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me” (2.21, which features four demons disguised as human beings sitting around in a diner, swapping stories about how Frank Black recognized them and put them off their hellish stride). Granted, those both occur after Carter asked Glen Morgan and James Wong to take over as showrunners and let them work without direct oversight, marked in general by a sharp tonal shift and up-tick in overt supernaturalism from which some critics say Millennium as a whole never entirely recovered. But even in Season Three, where Carter returned as a consultant with Chip Johanssen and Michael Duggan as the new showrunning team, set on confirming the victorious faction emerging from a schism within the Millennium Group itself as a slightly more understandable enemy, we still get both a Lucy Butler episode (“Antipas,” 3.13) and an episode which appears to set up a whole new inhuman evil nemesis for Jordan Black (3.16, “Saturn Dreaming of Mercury”).

Don’t worry, though — the procedural element does continue throughout, anchored both by Frank’s choice of job and a raft of equally great acting from continuing characters like O’Quinn, The Stepfather himself, who manages to negotiate a role which sometimes demands he be Frank’s best friend and sometimes his worst (human) enemy, full of charm, deception and genuine humanity (Peter Watts’s monologue about why he joined the Group after losing his own ability to process crimes so dreadful they picked away at his faith is a master class in subtle tragic acting). Then there’s the amazing turn from Glen Morgan’s wife Kristen Cloke as Lara Means in Season Two, a similarly “sensitive” agent who ends up joining the Millennium Group while Frank ultimately rejects them, only to plunge headfirst into a visionary downward spiral that culminates in a twenty-minute hallucinatory psychotic episode set to Patti Smith’s “Horses” (episode 2.23, “The Time Is Now”).

Season Three, meanwhile, gives Frank a new partner to play off: Canadian actress Klea Scott as FBI Special Agent Emma Hollis, introduced as a bit of a Clarice Starling expy, who also ends up being courted by the Group through Peter Watts. Scott’s character arc has her consistently playing Scully to Frank’s Mulder, yet always allows her agency enough to make her own decisions, shoring up the series’s overall respect for female characters as complicated human beings. See also CCH Pounder as forensic pathologist Cheryl Andrews, Harriet Sansom Harris as profiler Maureen Murphy, and Catherine Black herself, who not only gets a whole episode without Frank’s input in Season One but investigates a case with Lara Means in Season Two (2.19, “Anamnesis”).

By current standards, Millennium — like The X-Files itself — is very much a period piece, firmly ensconced in the dead technology, popular storytelling modes and cultural ideals of a different era. (A whole Season One episode is plotted around the since-discounted idea of every networked computer suddenly zeroing out at once during the 1999-to-2000 changeover, while one of its overall standout episodes, “The Mikado” [2.13], is a straight-up serial killer thriller that spins on a live-stream snuff website so old-school it only refreshes every twenty seconds.) Nevertheless, its surprising experimentalism, moments of the outright numinous, and sheer emotional power continues to impress, especially when exploring the sadly subtle border where fantasies of power can slide from harmless to harmful, threatening to destroy others, destroy ourselves, or even — at their most intense — the entire world.

As eventually becomes clear, the purpose of people like Frank and Jordan Black may be to provide a sort of healing spiritual guidance for an increasingly despairing millennialist global culture drunk on one part zealotry to three parts terrorism, made up of people so disconnected from what’s going on around them they feel they have the right to choose “a better path” for everyone else. And that concept, sadly, still sounds extremely relevant to the time we’re living through right now.