Millennium: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Frances L. Egler
Millennium was the creation of The X-Files guru Chris Carter. Carter seemed to want to get beyond the mythology hole of Mulder and Scully that he had created after the silly feature film X-Files: Fight the Future, and just delve every week into a new, gruesome crime, into a world full of twisted serial killers, and the one man who can stop them: Lance Henriksen.
Lance Henriksen, you say? Why, who is that? Only one of the creepiest B-level character actors around. A supporting player of many fine James Cameron films (The Terminator, Aliens), Henriksen and his creviced face are the very dark soul of Millennium. He is Frank Black, not the lead singer of the seminal punk band The Pixies, but rather a "retired" FBI profiler who moves his all-too-lovely wife and young daughter back to his and his wife's native Seattle from Washington, DC for "the weather." As they roll up to a lovely yellow bungalow on a sunny (!) day in Seattle, you don't know which is more disturbing: the serial killer in the previous scene who fantasizes about sewing his victim's eyes shut while reciting William Blake, or the image of Lance cooing and nuzzling noses with his young daughter. It just doesn't look right. The happy family and the sunny weather can't last long in a show like this.
Soon all the cute stuff is over as we learn that Frank is not only the best detective in the world, as he can determine the cause of death without even examining the body of the victim - every time - but he has the special gift of putting himself in the mind of killer. Get Frank to a crime scene, and he sees the slaying all over again, in vivid color, with a little cinemagraphic flair, just to give the special effects guys something to do. Some police departments may actually need evidence to catch a serial killer, and Seattle seems to have quite a lot of them. But Seattle has Frank Black, who walks in the room and tells all the other detectives the profile of the killer in his crusty, beleaguered monotone. He's not that happy about it, and neither are the police. As Frank puts it, not in the most original way, "It's my curse. It's my gift." Bill Smitrovich is his befuddled former colleague on the detective squad who wants to believe in his buddy, but has this nagging idea that they might want to investigate the murders the old fashioned way, too.
Each episode brings another killer, another first-person POV killing experienced by Frank, and more shocking violence. So unrelenting in its brutality and dark tones, the crimes become more difficult to tolerate as a new killer, sometimes from Frank's past, emerges. Not content to have the contrived "Frank gets to murder scene, sees how murder happens, catches killer, goes to Starbucks" storyline played out each week, Carter adds the extra dimension of the shadowy group that Frank now works for, the "Millennium Group." Fighting evil everywhere is their mission and associates of the Millennium group pop up to assist Frank, largely when he doesn't need it. More is revealed about the background of the group as the series unfolds. Another thread through the series is the constant threat to the lives of Frank's lovely wife (Megan Gallagher, who seems as bewildered as anyone whose husband would choose to return to this line of work) and pre-school daughter. If it wasn't queasy enough watching bodies hacked up weekly, throw in a little child endangerment to really get the stomach rolling.
Carter enlists many of the very good The X-Files writers on Millennium (Glen Morgan & James Wong, Frank Spotnitz) and the episodes are nicely structured. The production quality, both sound and cinematography, is also extremely good. But at the core of this series is a relentless stream of blood and bodies, all supposedly tempered by Frank Black and his Millennium crew fighting for good. If you found Mulder and Scully's annoying humanity and chemistry distracting from the occasionally brutal violence of a good monster episode of The X-Files, then Millennium is the show for you.
Each of the six DVDs is packaged into its own slim plastic case, with short episode descriptions and special features listed on the case. There is no booklet listing all the features and episodes listed in one place. The cases fit into one cardboard storage box.
