"I've seen monsters. They exist. It's like when you look in a mirror - there are monsters behind it. But even more destructive is the everyday man functionaries that believe and act without questioning." - Lance Henriksen as Frank Black
Millennium: The Complete Second Season DVD Review
By A.J. Carson
When Millennium returned for its second season on September 19, 1997, the series had undergone some subtle changes. With the show's creator and executive producer, Chris Carter, busy wrapping up the feature film based on his hit series The X-Files, creative guidance on Millennium fell to X-Files vets Glen Morgan and James Wong. The two chose to deemphasize the "serial killer of the week" formula that seemed to dominate the first year in favor of a season-long conspiracy arc similar to the one that fueled The X-Files. Did this move reinvigorate the series, or was it a creative failure? Both, it seems.
Character actor Lance Henriksen (Alien vs. Predator) stars as Frank Black, a Seattle-based profiler who is able to solve horrific murders thanks to his deep understanding of the criminal mind. With just a cursory look at a crime scene, Frank can accurately guess exactly what happened and offer a psychological profile of the murderer. His gift is so acute that his profiling ventures beyond mere intuition into near-psychic premonitions. Frank had formerly worked for the F.B.I., but at the beginning of season one, he was recruited by Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn, star of Lost and Carter's short-lived Harsh Realm) to serve as a freelance consultant for the secretive Millennium Group, an organization dedicated to fighting the chaos its members predicted would erupt at the turn of the century. Throughout season one, this simply meant that Frank investigated the gruesome crimes of a wide variety of serial killers and psychos. In season two, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the Millennium Group might not be as benevolent as it first appeared. His involvement with the group also threatens the safety of Frank's now-estranged wife, Catherine (China Beach's Megan Gallagher) and his young daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady). Frank senses that he should abandon the group, but realizes that doing so would mean never uncovering the organization's secrets.
One flaw of the series' first season is that it is so unrelentingly bleak and gory. Henricksen is a gifted actor whose severe (yet handsome) looks make him a daring choice for a TV lead. In the first season, however, his character's gloom-filled austerity made the series somewhat of a downer. In season two, the writers more fully develop Frank's human side. This is accomplished in a variety of ways. Frank's love for Bobby Darin's music is one example. (The making-of documentary included with this set speculates that Morgan and Wong chose Darin simply because they were fans. A case could be made, however, that it was a more deliberate decision. Although Darin's music is smooth and lively, many of his songs - like "Mack the Knife," "18 Yellow Roses," and "Goodbye, Charlie" - have an undercurrent of death, and the singer himself died at the age of thirty-seven.) In "The Curse of Frank Black," Frank faces the ghosts of his past and his future after spending Halloween trick-or-treating with Jordan. The past is represented by his remembrances of a seemingly creepy neighbor (Oz's Dean Winters) who served as a neighborhood boogeyman when Frank was a child. Through these memories, Frank realizes that unless he changes his ways, he, too, is destined to become the bitter recluse who scares the neighborhood children.
Not all of the episodes eschew violence and gore. "The Mikado" is a creepy chiller in which a serial killer who last struck in the 1980s begins another murder spree, this time updating his techniques by performing his execution-style killings live on the Web. "Monster" involves the killing of a young daycare student.
The season's two most interesting episodes are also its most unique. In "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" and "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," the series' usual darkness is leavened with large doses of black humor. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" stars Charles Nelson Reilly (Match Game, Lidsville) as Jose Chung, a writer of pulpy novels (including A Lapful of Severed Tongues) who was first introduced on The X-Files. Here, Chung has written a magazine article that somewhat defames the followers of a Scientology-like belief system called Selfosophy. When a Selfosophist interviewed by Chung is murdered and the author begins to receive death threats, Frank becomes involved with the case. Soon, Chung - who is perky even in the face of threats on his life because it means that his story has affected the public - is tagging along with Frank and practicing his own brand of dime store profiling. The episode is a delight from start to finish, and Reilly deservedly received an Emmy nomination for his strong work here.
"Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me" centers on a group of devils who meet each morning at a donut shop - four old coots who sit around bitching about the old days and how things have irreparably changed for the worse. They have mundane jobs as newspaper deliverers and telemarketers, but in their spare time, they tempt people into sinning, like when one of them talks a susceptible loner into becoming a serial killer. This episode is filled with offbeat humor. In the outlandishly funny opening sequence, the paperman casually lobs his wares into birdbaths, onto roofs, and even directly at roaming cats. Another enjoyable segment extols on the hellish nature of man's life, including snooze alarms, ties, and coin operated laundries. A third devil convinces a serial killer to target a Satanist, laughing gleefully when the hapless victim screams for the prince of darkness to save him. Only one portion of the episode - a self-indulgent tirade against network censors - falls flat. Although they appear to most mortals in their human form, each of the devils have been glimpsed in their true form on separate occasions by one person - Frank Black, who is barely seen in the episode. Like "Jose Chung," this episode also features a '70s era star in a bravura performance. Maude's Bill Macy appears as one of the devils, proving that Maude was right when she declared "God'll get you for this, Walter."
These two change-of-pace episodes were both written and directed by Darin Morgan. They are both enormously entertaining, but with their irreverent tone and playful disregard for Millennium's conventions they might as well be from another series altogether. Imagine an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in which Mary gets brutally raped, or an all-slapstick episode of The Sopranos and you'll begin to have an idea of how radical these episodes are. Someone get this guy a series of his own!
In the second season, Frank also gets a new partner of sorts. Lara Means (Kristen Cloke) is a fellow forensic psychologist who has been recruited by the Millennium Group. Lara's gifts are somewhat different than Frank's. She often has religious visions involving a shimmering, golden angel of death, as befits the biblical motivations and themes that are stressed throughout the season. Almost every crime encountered by Frank and Lara has religious undertones, and the Group, it seems, is much less secular than it first appeared to be.
The conspiracy plotlines involving the Millennium Group are not quite as inscrutable as the labyrinthine messes presented on The X-Files, but they are almost as pointless. "Beware of the Dog" starts off as a standard thriller involving a preternaturally evil pack of killer dogs, but it soon degenerates into sub-X-Files mystical mumbo-jumbo. "19:19" tells of a kidnapper who receives inspiration for his crime from the Bible. The idea isn't necessarily a bad one, but the episode presents too much nonsensical, Bible-based crud. When a main character says, as if he is presenting a profoundly original idea, that "the only thing we can be sure of is that it will be the children who save us," one has to wonder who the show's creators thought would take this stuff seriously. As the season progresses, the Millennium conspiracy grows increasingly ridiculous, leading to one of the most ill-conceived season enders ever filmed. The season ends in a way that suggests the producers did not expect for the series to be renewed, but even cancellation is no excuse for the messy, absurd final half hour.
The twenty-three episodes that make up Millennium: The Complete Second Season are divided onto six discs. The discs are housed in slim, clear keepcases. The back of each case features basic information on the discs' contents, including short episode synopses. The keepcases slide into a cardboard outer sleeve. The overall design is similar to that of the first season.
