Unabridged Thoughts: Millennium (1996-1999)
As a writer, director, and producer, Chris Carter is best known for creating The X-Files, first a show and now a 30-year franchise that plucked a tense cord deep in the psyche of Generation X. This success has had a totalizing effect on Carter’s public image - either you know him as the X-Files guy, or you have no idea who he is. And indeed, aside from his monster hit, his filmography consists almost exclusively of abject failures and weird experiments. One gets the impression that he’s the sort of guy who lives in the shadow of his single jackpot idea and never managed to bottle that lightning a second time. But Chris Carter did create one other show that seemed, for a time, to have a life of its own. And that show was Millennium.
At its best, Millennium was as good as anything else then on network television. At its worst, it was an embarrassing descent into paranoid community theater. Taken as a whole, while ahead of its time, it is hard to recommend today. This is especially true given modern sensibilities and the higher level of media literacy that now pervades popular culture. Despite this, I think Millennium is a much, much more interesting show to discuss than The X-Files, largely because of the dramatic arc of the show’s fortunes. This is not the story of a show with uneven writing that limped along for three seasons. This is a show that, in spite of itself, was three distinctively different shows, each iteration experimenting boldly with the formula of the last, often with calamitous consequences. It’s also a show that resonates uncomfortably with our present culture war, because it reflects a collection of latent paranoid strains of thought lurking at America’s fringes in th 1990s, inching closer to the levers of power. The show’s core demographic at time of broadcast were white male 18-to-35-year-olds who are now, 30 years later, an indispensable tentpole of a conspiratorial, reactionary right wing. Without intending to, Millennium gives us a narrow window into how they came to see the world in the way they now do.
Chris Carter
While Chris Carter is credited with creating Millennium, his involvement in the show is generally overstated. He has at least co-writing credit for only 7 episodes, 4 of which appear in the first season. So what Carter really brings to Millennium is a compelling idea, embodied by a tone-setting pilot.
Like a lot of boomers growing up in California, Carter seems to have grown up with less of a concrete ideology and more of a collection of thematic preoccupations. His writing on The X-Files reveal that he belongs to what one might call America’s “conspiracy fandom.” We can easily imaging Carter pouring over a tattered copy of Chariots of the Gods? (1968) as a younger man, not so much believing its outlandish ideas about ancient aliens as merely thinking the ideas were really cool. We may assume he called a toll-free number to receive, monthly, each new volume in an eventually complete collection of Mysteries of the Unknown (1987-1991) that sat within arm’s reach while brainstorming story ideas. The X-Files is probably best understood as high budget fan-fiction set in this world of paranormal memes, starring Gillian Anderson as a serial-number-filed-off Clarise Starling (Silence of the Lambs, 1991) and David Duchovny as a store-brand Jim Garrison (JFK, 1991). Carter recognized earlier than most television screenwriters what an enormous appetite there was for conspiracy theories, and he elevated writers who could expertly sanitize America’s fringe subcultures of their most objectionable ideas so they could be repackaged for mainstream audiences.
This is perhaps unfair to The X-Files, or at least betrays my own opinion that I don’t think it’s nearly as good as people remember. However, the credit that Carter absolutely deserves is for his cultivation of a writing style that flatters his lead actors. Even though The X-Files was largely unserialized (as was almost all television made at the time), having leads who you want to see reacting to problems is the way to make viewers intensely loyal. Audiences loved Mulder & Scully. So when he was tasked with producing a second show for Fox, Carter understood that his new protagonist would need to have the same sticky magnetism and staying power. As he wrote the spec script for Millennium‘s pilot, he had one actor in mind: Lance Henrikson.
Lance Henrikson
If you have watched more than a handful of episodes of Millennium, being a fan of Lance Henrikson is probably a big part of why you keep tuning in. He belongs to a particular class of rock-solid characters actors who immediately elevate the material with which they are associated through their signature style, even when the writing itself is not strong. Other actors who spring to mind are Jeffrey Combs, Parker Posey, Dominique Pinon, and CCH Pounder: When one of these actors appears on the cast list, you have a pretty good idea of the sort of performance you’re going to get; if you’re a fan of that performance, you’re not going to come away disappointed in their contribution.
The first impression Henrikson makes is with his craggy, weathered face; the second is with his deep rumbling voice. He looks and sounds like someone who ran away from home at the age of 12 to ride the rails, tricked the US Navy into letting him enlist at age 15, and travelled the world, but didn’t learn to read until he was 30. This is because Henrikson ran away from home at the age of 12 to ride the rails, tricked the US Navy into letting him enlist at age 15, and travelled the world, but didn’t learn to read until he was 30. His first acting gig came about because he had built the sets for a theatrical production, and he learned to read in order to read acting parts. As an early stopgap, he recruited friends to help him record scripts on tape, so he could commit entire scripts, for every character, to memory. Henrikson’s life has been hard in very specific kind of way that is increasingly difficult to imagine in 21st-century America.
This lived experience informs and permeates Henrikson’s performances, and is especially important to his depiction of Frank Black, Millennium‘s protagonist. Like Henrikson, Frank Black is a patient, nonjudgmental person whose empathy is a source of strength and competence. Like Henrikson (we may presume), Frank Black has borne witness to humanity’s capacity for cruelty and has been in dangerous situations, in a way that has made him reserved and thoughtful. In short, Henrikson effortlessly brings both authenticity and maturity to a genre in which protagonists are often instead portrayed as half-mad and risk-seeking. Frank Black is not a boundary-walker who struggles with evil’s seductive allure. He is not a petulant rebel who resents the authority with which he has been endowed. He is a man who has seen humanity’s darkest excesses and has glimpsed a darker evil beyond humanity’s ken, and who simply isn’t impressed.
At the same time, an absolutely critical quality that Henrikson brings to the performance is a prosocial warmth. His chemistry with Megan Gallagher (portraying Frank’s wife Catherine) and Brittany Tiplady (portraying Frank’s young daughter Jordan) feels sincere and familial. While Millennium‘s stories are often dark to the point of bleakness, especially by the standards of 90s network television, Henrikson is given opportunities in almost every episode of the first season to smile, to give and receive comfort, and to have a life outside of his job. Contrast this with the very much all-business portrayal of Mulder & Scully, and it becomes obvious why Millennium often feels like it has higher stakes: It’s clear not only what Frank Black is fighting for, but also that he remains emotionally connected to those stakes. None of this works if the audience doesn’t buy Henrikson’s portrayal of a man who is an earnest participant in what’s good in the world, and that he fights the darkness precisely to protect that goodness.
Flatly, Henrikson carries the show. He’s not merely the star, he’s the axis around which the show turns. While most crime-oriented shows create a stable of supporting investigators who provide scaffolding, Millennium regularly drops Frank into new cities with new investigators, especially early on. As such, audiences hitch their wagons, or don’t, to the character of Frank Black above anything else the show has to offer. This wagon, unfortunately, has a hard road ahead.
And The Sun Became Black As Sackcloth
The practice of criminal profiling, as initially practiced by the FBI’s “Behavioral Science Unit” in the 1970s, quickly became a topic of national interest during a decade seemingly overflowing with serial killers. Sensational journalism fueled widespread paranoia and dread surrounding the Manson Family cult, the Summer of Sam, and the Night Stalker. Perhaps no serial killer became more synonymous with calculating, Luciferian evil than Ted Bundy, and a growing right-wing obsession with a perceived erosion of civil society misunderstood these men as supervillains. There must be, many felt, a kind of superhero who is the mirror image to these bad seeds, and crime fiction seized on profiling as the mechanism for such superpowers. To ensure that good would triumph over evil, criminal profiling geniuses began popping up in fiction, Batman-like heroes who were the only ones who could stop these serial killers.
Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1981) provides the archetypal “profiler protagonist” in Will Graham, a character whose insight into and empathy for the serial killer mind is so intense that it seems to border on psychic. This idea that profiling lets an agent “see through a killer’s eyes” spread quickly in the genre, as did the idea that profilers are somehow “too close” to the darkness and are at risk of being corrupted by it. This has led to two broad styles of profiler protagonists: No-nonsense FBI robots who you would not want to invite to a party (e.g., most of the cast of Criminal Minds) or fragile, damaged head cases who are being destroyed by their talent (e.g., Wire In The Blood‘s Tony Hill, or Graham himself).
Since Carter is a writer who borrows and riffs, Frank Black is almost certainly first imagined as yet another riff on Graham, a profiler whose “visions” let him “see what the killer sees” in a way that lets him solve otherwise baffling cases involving uniquely disturbed and evil killers. However, we can see immediately in Millennium‘s pilot episode that Carter has resolved to go to a different well for this new show. You see, The X-Files is a show squarely on the science fiction side of the speculative fiction spectrum, making it “off-brand” to take a crack at many of the conspiratorial rumblings that permeated America’s fringes in the 90s. This mostly limited The X-Files to what we might call the “secular occult” - aliens, cryptids, monsters, C.H.U.D.s, psychic phenomena, and government coverups. There was, however, an entire other universe within America’s obsession with occult that was overtly spiritual and supernatural. These included whispers of Satanic cults able to do ‘real’ magic, angels and demons hidden among us, the prophesies of Nostradamus, and whole cosmologies built around esoteric misreadings of the Bible. Much of these preoccupations were, well, millennial. Carter, we may assume, was just as much a fan of these flavors of fringe weirdness as he was of the more secular variety, and in Frank Black had a new potential jackpot: A profiler whose “gift” is not merely forensic science, but actual prophecy.
Framing Frank Black as a prophet who struggles with his visions works remarkably well as a storytelling engine. On the one hand, the show is initially very cagey about whether Frank’s abilities are supernatural or not, and this greatly enhances the early episodes in a way that would later be perfected in season one of True Detective. On the other hand, this takes the limiters off: It’s entirely OK for Frank’s visions to let him make impossible leaps, and this gives the show license to simply skip most of the investigating. Once we know the show’s rhythm, we begin each episode knowing that Frank will zero in on the killer with unreasonable rapidity, almost as if he’s falling into evil’s gravity well. While it’s true that perp-of-the-week cop shows tend to be depressingly predictable (our hero gets their perp in 45 minutes, or your money back!), Frank Black’s cheat codes give the show a completely different energy. They feel funereal and contemplative. Each episode seems to be asking not “Will they get the bad guy?” but instead, “What does any of this mean?”
One of the main ways Millennium does this is to spend an unusual amount of time showing us the lives and preoccupations of its killers, who provide most of the conflict in the first season. This is way ahead of its time, and only works because the cop side of the show is being speedrun by its protagonist. We see first-hand that killers in the show are brutal, vicious, and cunning, but also pathetic, insecure, and self-destructive. As television monsters, they’re unusually human, and because we the audience are granted insight into their sad little lives, many episodes end with the unusual feeling that only we and Frank Black really understand how it all came to this, as the rest of the cast struggle to make sense of any of it. Put another way, the show makes the audience feel like an insider, like they know something known only to a select few, almost like they are members of a secret society.
This brings us to Millennium’s other major tent pole: the Millennium Group. Frank Black, like all good profiler protagonists, retired from the FBI because the job was too much, only to be brought back to crime fighting. In this case, we are introduced to him as a freelancer who works with a forensic consulting group that assists law enforcement. Throughout season one, there are hints that the Millennium Group’s secretive behavior and unusual resources might have sinister implications, but it’s just as clear that their motley roster of specialists are law enforcement’s only hope in the face of otherwise inscrutable crimes. Frank is new to the Group, and it seems clear that Carter envisioned it as a storytelling engine meant to operate in similar ways to the central “shadow government” conspiracy in X-Files lore. This enticing promise (“Stay tuned to find out what are the Millennium Group are all about!”) will ultimately be the show’s downfall, but its role in the first season is mostly an easy way to justify Frank Black being airdropped into America’s Weirdest Cases all around the country despite no longer being an agent of the law himself. Indeed, a lot of cop show tropes disappear because Frank is outside the chain of command entirely, allowing the writers even more creative freedom.
So we now have all the pieces in place: Millennium is a show about a battle between good and evil during what feels like the End Times, and as such is shot through with themes that are too moralistic, too spiritual, and often too overtly Christian to fit into Carter’s main franchise. Its hero is a reserved but kindly patriarch, old and wise, gifted with powers of prophesy that serve less to bring about justice than they do to bring about judgment. It is a world of many figurative and a handful of real demons, gnawing at the roots of civilized life, and even when their campaigns of terror are brought to an end, we are invited not to rejoice, but to reflect and sometimes even mourn. In other words, it’s a show with powerful and compelling vibes, and also exactly the show someone would watch devotedly 20 years before becoming obsessed with QAnon.
Season One: This Fallen World (1996-1997)
The first season of Millennium opens with a lavishly produced pilot that sets the aesthetic and thematic sensibilities for the season. The mood is one of lamentation and quiet expectation, not tension and conflict. Visually, the show feels like a big step toward television that “looks like a film” relative to other shows airing at the time. In particular, the cinematic style of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) seems to have been a major influence; given its surprise success at the box office the year before, Fox was likely persuaded that there was an untapped market for grimly violent religious esoterica. It’s easy to forget how cheap most television in the 90s looks to modern eyes (it was never meant to be seen at 1080p, after all), and although it’s still a product of its time, Millennium‘s emphasis on the ways in which it was shot, produced, and scored feels surprisingly modern. This was a risk: While Carter lavished attention on the pilot and devoted a full month to its production, mainline production would advance much more rapidly. According to Henrikson, all of his footage for a particular mid-season episode needed to get shot in about eight days, and he would then be on to the next episode.
Part of the reason Millennium opens strong is that it establishes its characters and their interactions within narrow contexts. Frank’s family unit is archetypal and uncomplicated, and the show encourages us to take the warmth between the actors at face value. Frank’s coworkers are similarly familiar. In detective Bob Bletcher (Bill Smitrovich) we immediately recognize the exhausted competence of a Commissioner Gordon; in his subordinate, detective Bob Geibelhouse (Stephen Lang) we immediately recognize the show’s resident knucklehead. The only supporting role that doesn’t feel like it was stamped out at the factory is that of Peter Watts, memorably performed by Terry O’Quinn. Watts represents the mysterious Millennium Group, and comes across as a meticulous egghead who has mastered various forensic sciences. On paper, Watts has the potential to be a very tedious character; during the first season, he mostly serves as a vehicle for exposition, whether it be to explain details of the crime, or drop clues about the Group and its operations, or just to give Frank the opportunity to verbalize what he thinks his visions/intuitions mean. The secret to O’Quinn’s performance is to convey every one of these details like it’s a strictly need-to-know, hush-hush, another brick in a wall that separates the war from the civilian population. Millennium is, at its heart, a fundamentally conspiratorial show, and Peter Watts feels like Frank Black’s closest and most connected co-conspirator.
As the show progresses, the most striking thing about it is that it is simultaneously a show with very conservative politics but also with a broadly appealing humanist message. I see this less as a contradiction and more as a sales pitch. Like a lot of conservative media, Millennium does not want to admit to itself that it is conservative, or that its conservatism has unanticipated costs and consequences. Frank is sold to us as a “lapsed Catholic” who simply has “strong values” and “knows right from wrong.” His empathy, his warmth, and his grit are all saintly qualities, “better than real.” What keeps him from being boring as a character is that Henrikson’s performance makes all those qualities feel earned. In the world of the show, it feels like maybe the world is ending, but also that maybe patriarchs like Frank Black can make everything alright.
Pulling back, it’s easy to see that the groups for whom this chord will resonate with most are the evangelical right. It’s important to remember that at the same time Millennium is on the air, Newt Gingrich is speaker of the house, and a coalition of knee-jerk reactionaries are being built into what will eventually become a robust and durable American fascism. The Left Behind novel series (1995-2007) is underway, and Bibleman (1995-2010) is being sold direct-to-video to parents who won’t let their kids watch broadcast TV. Millennium‘s premier comes mere weeks after the launch of Fox News. As of 1996, the media establishment still does not take this segment of the population seriously, and has only recently begun to pander to them in careful steps. Millennium is not an honest portrait of such viewers; it is instead the most flattering possible image they could have of themselves. Frank Black is the archetypal Silent Generation conservative in a mirror, brightly. He has all the patience, humility, and good judgment that the practiced hypocrites of the late 20th century claimed to have. If you’re a young adult man from a conservative background in 1996, he’s probably the dad you wish you had.
By all accounts, Carter was supposed to hand Millennium off to another showrunner after making the pilot, but whoever Fox had arranged to take the job dropped out almost immediately, and Carter was suddenly in charge of running a brand new show in parallel with the fourth season of The X-Files. Carter chose to keep his focus on his much more popular established show, and this created a very peculiar absentee showrunner situation for the rest of staff. Writers for the show, for example, were given only mild guidance and were expected to write entire episodes more or less alone before Carter and a few junior writers would make a few tweaks. Across the season’s 22 episodes, the show credits 11 directors and 14 writers.
Carter had already implied that he imagined later seasons of the show would reveal “important secrets” about Frank’s powers and the Millennium Group’s real agenda, and this set the parameters for the writers: Don’t rock the boat when it comes to character and lore, but otherwise think outside the box. So, with different writers pulling in different directions, Frank mostly remains grounded in the characterization established in the pilot, but is faced with a surprising variety of cases that take him all over the country. This is crucial: When tuning in the next episode, you really don’t know what you’re going to get. Aside from Catherine Black (who appears in every episode of the season), none of the other supporting cast are regulars. Peter Watts only appears in 13 of 22 episodes; Bob Bletcher only appears in 11; Geibelhouse only appears in 8. This makes sense once we consider how perfunctory “investigation” becomes when your protagonist has cheat codes: It’s not really a show about solving crimes, so the supporting cast has a lot less to do.
Instead, we see the first season ruminating (sometimes reflectively, and sometimes dysfunctionally) on the ‘nature of evil.’ The only easy answer the show is interested in giving is that “evil exists” - everything else is presented as complicated. The four episodes written by Carter profile dramatically different flavors of evil: serial killing, cult indoctrination, family sexual abuse, and a literal demon. Pull Frank Black out of the frame and change the musical scores, and these four episodes feel like four different shows. What holds it all together is Henrikson’s bedrock-solid performance as Frank, which keeps the show on rails even during some of the season’s riskier experiments.
Aside from Carter’s contributions, several other writers deserve mention. Two of these are Glen Morgan and James Wong, who had by 1996 been reliable creative partners to Carter, writing many episodes for The X-Files. The three episodes they penned for the first season of Millennium are particularly strong. While all three are serial killer episodes, each has a distinct and interesting premise, and the episodes share a more energized pace that is a bit more slick and commercial. It seems the suits upstairs take note of this, because they will allow this duo to take over running the show in season two.
The other important screenwriter to keep an eye on is Chip Johannessen, who is promoted to a producing role midseason in addition to writing. He writes or co-writes four episodes in this window of time, and they are easily the least coherent and most conspiratorial episodes of the season. These include such eyebrow-raising propositions as, “What if Chernobyl was an inside job?” and “What if science proves a coming planetary alignment will end civilization as we know it?” and “What if the Antichrist is alive and waking among us, but also is literally Boris The Blade, a character in a movie that doesn’t exist yet?” and “What if we use a single episode to recap the entire multiseason plot of Orphan Black, a show that also doesn’t exist yet?” These episodes are not necessarily bad (one includes a blessedly deranged performance by Brad Dourif as a conspiracy loon), but they operate on pure vibes. Don’t think too carefully about the events they depict: If you treat them as anything other than prime time drama slam poetry, they’ll fall apart under the scrutiny. These episodes also make what is, in my opinion, a crucial error: They give Frank Black a temper that he simply doesn’t have in other episodes. This does not augur well, because Johannessen will effectively become the de facto showrunner in season three.
Season Two: The DanBrownening
By the end of season one, Carter was ready to turn his full-time attention back to The X-Files. Having received the go-ahead to begin preproduction on an X-Files film that would ultimately release in 1998, Carter was all too happy to hand Millennium off. Even so, his successors were chosen by Fox, and it’s unclear how fully Glen Morgan and James Wong had Carter’s blessing when they took the reigns.
Morgan & Wong had a track record of success writing for The X-Files, but had greater ambitions. In 1995, they got their chance and created a show for Fox called Space: Above And Beyond, whose genre could succinctly be described as “space marines!” Slightly more verbose descriptions we might give today include “What if Starship Troopers (1997) but completely sincere?” and “What if Aliens (1986) but very little happens?” While the show never found its audience and didn’t set the world on fire, it wasn’t bad by 90s standards, just dull. Looking back now, it’s easy to see how it aspired to a gritty, grounded hard sci-fi aesthetic that would later be integral to shows like Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) and The Expanse (2015-2022). What was clear even then, however, was that SAaB was decidedly more conservative than its competing space shows, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) and Babylon 5 (1993-1998). This overt appeal to a conservative audience, as much as Morgan & Wong’s successes as X-Files writers, probably made Fox feel they were right for the job.
Under this new supervision, Millennium immediately took a different turn. By the end of the season premiere, our end-times dad Frank Black has murdered a perp in anger (with cause!) and has blown up his family in the process. One episode later, he has saved a small town from hellhounds by burning down a carpetbagging liberal’s house. The prior season’s vague, theme-based worldbuilding, which had only tipped slightly into the overtly supernatural, now openly embraced Frank’s gift as a sort of prophetic magic within a much more overtly Christian cosmology. The hazy nuance is dialed back. The pacing is more brisk, the tone less grim, and the production more polished. And the writing gets much, much more conspiratorial. What season two expertly anticipates is the same mainstreaming of Christian conspiracy culture that will rocket Dan Brown to authorial superstardom over the following decade.
In order to accomplish this, the show pivots away from broad allegories of war in the shadows between Good vs. Evil and toward concrete worldbuilding that positions the Millennium Group as the literal Illuminati. We can paint by numbers to anticipate some of the resulting character conflicts. (How much should Frank trust the Group and its members? What secrets will be revealed if he rises in their ranks, and will the price he needs to pay be worth it?) New recurring characters are introduced to give the Millennium Group a clearer hierarchy. Of these, the only character who deserves a mention is Lara Means, played by Kristen Cloke (who just so happens to be a former cast member of SAaB and also just so happens to be Glen Morgan’s wife). Lara is a clinical psychologist, a no-nonsense tough-love shit-kicker to play foil to Black’s unflappable wisdom, and a middle-aged conservative’s idea of a tastefully hot female guest star. She also has visions of a much less ambiguous variety than Frank’s: She sees literal angels, which the show assures us has powerful significance but which almost never seems to crack cases the way Frank’s crime-o-vision has in the past.
The new dynamics give the show new opportunties to surprise the viewer. Some episodes appear to be a killer-of-the-week story but morph into peeling back layers of the conspiracy. Others never introduce a criminal element at all, revolving entirely around personal and family conflicts. Despite this, season two feels coherent and cohesive - the showrunners being present and invested in the show makes an appreciable difference. In particular, a (mostly Platonic) triangle of motivations forms between Frank, Lara, and Peter Watts that fits nicely into the spaces between episode storylines. Watts, we come to understand, is a man of radical Christian faith who belongs to the Millennium Group’s evangelical branch. He trusts Frank’s skills and temperament but not his religious ambivalence; he sees potential in Lara’s religious visions but considers her a rookie, not ready for the big leagues. Frank, for his part, has found his relationship with Watts complicated by the Group’s power struggles and finds in Lara a sympathetic figure who is able to relate to the burdensome aspects of having a prophetic gift. And Lara is torn about whether to side with those in the Group who believe she has a divine gift or to follow Frank’s more skeptical lead. While these undertones evolve as B-plot to each episode’s A-plot, they are welcome undertones.
The A-plots, however, are a very mixed bag. Where season one occasionally tipped its hand as catering to more conservative sensibilities, season two panders in ways that can be very uncomfortable to watch. Two of the episodes in particular (“A Single Blade of Grass” and “Siren”) feel shockingly racist; a third (“Sense and Antisense”) manages to distract from how racist it is by being almost incoherently bizarre (unsurprising on both counts when we learn that it’s another Chip Johanessen joint). The worst episodes of season two are a mile worse than the worst episodes in season one.
The show also substantially muddies the B-plots pertaining to Frank’s family. Now amicably(?) separated from his wife and daughter, the show drops any pretense that they represent the goodness in the world that is worth protecting. In one sense, that’s an upgrade - there is an opportunity to promote Frank’s family to a status higher than “aspirational Best Dad trophy,” but Morgan & Wong don’t seem to know what to do with those characters and mostly squander that opportunity. When a show disappears into the lore of its own conspiracies, the “civilians” on the outside of that conflict have few options but to be confused and frustrated pawns. This is what the season settles on, eventually with dire consequences. This also robs Henrikson of opportunities to remind us of Frank’s fundamental warmth.
However, season two also contains some of the show’s best episodes. Three episodes stand out. “The Mikado” is the season’s one genuinely original-feeling serial killer episode, executing on an “Internet murderer” premise that was way ahead of its time in 1998 and today would feel right at home in a season of Black Mirror. “Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense“ is one of two cases in this season in which writer-director Darin Morgan (brother of showrunner Glen Morgan; way to keep it in the family, Glen) is allowed to play an elaborate prank on the audience by having the show parody itself (a trick D. Morgan had previously played on The X-Files using the same titular character). In addition to being surprisingly funny, this episode is also notable for being an early and scathing critique of Scientology a full nine years before South Park would take its swing.
The most interesting episode of the season, “The Curse of Frank Black,” is a classic ghost story set on a Halloween night. The episode unfolds slowly, patiently, and with long stretches of minimal dialogue. The audience, expecting some sort of crime or inciting incident, doesn’t get one; instead, a string of coincidences and mild annoyances cumulate into a feeling of whispered dread. Gradually, the episode reveals itself to be a sort of Hell House vignette, camouflaged as prime-time TV. On the one hand, it’s a bold and experimental break from formula; on the other, it’s the most explicit the show has been willing to get to this point about not merely being supernatural, but Christian in its cosmology. It’s an unambiguous flag planted in the ground that affirms where the show stands in its second season, a considerable distance from its starting point in season one.
As much as season two works, its aggressive lean into an increasingly mainstream culture of Christian conspiracy theories should give us considerable pause. While the canonical superfice of its conspiracies are presented as original fictions (no resemblance to persons living or dead, yadda yadda), their underlying form is old, familiar, and dangerous. The season comes within a hair’s breadth of declaring that the Millennium Group is an ancient and secret conspiracy that includes both heterodox Christian sects (who, today, happen to feel just like American evangelicals) and Jews. The latter is strictly implied, never stated outright, but we can infer this from two factors. First, the internal politics of the Group are framed as “believers” vs. “secularists,” with the former unambiguously framed as Christian dominionists and latter being characterized as international, highly educated, and largely amoral. Second, we learn that the Millennium Group is explicitly waging an ongoing war with a cabal of Nazi wizards who scattered themselves around the world after WWII. So, as the season progresses and the “true” motivations of the Millennium Group are implied to be dark and dangerous, how exactly is the audience meant to reconcile them as master manipulators on the global stage who are also fervently anti-Nazi?
The answer isn’t complicated: Millennium‘s second season has taken a crude plaster cast of Christian conspiracies form the mid-90s, rotten to the core with racism and antisemitism and very cozy with skinheads and Clinton-era militiamen. Once the copy has been pulled out of the mould, everything is shot through a Barbara Walters soft focus lens for the sake of plausible deniability. It’s taken a hateful worldview full of incoherent reactionary anxiety and sanitized it in a strong bath of Prime Time TV Standards & Practices. This is the ugly truth of shows like Millennium, as entertaining as they sometimes are, as much as we enjoy the personas of its principal cast. Season two is Baby’s First Globalist Conspiracy. Through talk radio, chain emails, and barbecue meetups that serve as low-key Klan recruiting drives, fans of The X-Files and Millennium and later The DaVinci Code will be told how to decode the “hidden truths” in these works. In this way, season two provides a window into the very early stages of a radicalization funnel that today’s Republican party has been flowing through since the end of the Cold War.
In fairness, I don’t think Morgan & Wong are themselves full-throated fascists. From their body of work, I’d peg them as incurious conservatives. I’m inclined to think that they, like many 90s conservatives, saw the kooky conspiracy theories at the fringes of their communities as harmless fun, fodder for popcorn entertainment just like the flying saucers and duct-crawling monster men of The X-Files. But this casual commodification of conspiratorial thinking has always had the risk of spiraling out of control. Who knows what sort of cultural force Millennium would have become if Fox had kept Morgan and Wong on for five or six seasons? While there’s zero chance that it would have ever become the kind of cultural juggernaut that The X-Files remains even today, I think it could plausibly have become a pillar of dominionist indoctrination alongside The Passion of the Christ (2004) and the Left Behind books.
Instead, Millennium‘s ratings steadily (if gradually) declined to around 5 million US viewers an episode. The numbers weren’t abysmal - Deep Space Nine already had a slightly smaller audience at that time, while Babylon 5‘s audience was substantially smaller. Still, Fox wanted X-Files numbers and we now know with hindsight that no new show was going to get X-Files numbers ever again. Furthermore, Carter was reportedly unhappy with the direction of the show. With the end of production looming for season two, the writing was on the wall: Morgan & Wong were not getting contract renewals, and the show was possibly going to be canceled altogether.
So, in a rather baffling fit of pique, Morgan & Wong did the unthinkable. In the last two episodes of season two, they ended the world.
Season Three: What If We Threw An Apocalypse And No One Came?
We may conclude from a number of context clues that Chris Carter was displeased with the show he returned to as showrunner in the summer of 1998. Frank’s family isn’t merely broken, but shattered by the self-sacrificing death of his wife Catherine in the final moments of season two. The Millennium Group had dropped its mask and the audience may presume they are some flavor of baddies from here on out. Any long-term plans Carter may have had to slowly unfurl the Group’s machinations or explore Frank’s family life have become moot. But maybe none of that matters anyway, because season two’s ending implies that most of the rest of the world has also died, thanks to a pandemic seemingly brought about by the Millennium Group as part of an elaborate vaccine conspiracy (all harmless fun, surely, to make that your season finale). It feels very much like Morgan & Wong decided that if they couldn’t play with Frank Black, nobody could, and torched the place as they left in the name of giving their audience a spectacle. Their reconciliation with Carter was probably a slow process: They do not return to collaborate with Carter on anything X-Files-related until the show’s 2016 revival.
Step one is for Carter to heavily retcon the ending: No, the world was not destroyed in a pandemic. (That was a hallucination!) Instead, the effects of the virus were limited to the Pacific Northwest, with perhaps only a few dozen victims. Step two: Frank Black is now once again at the FBI, with every cliché that entails. His unflappable demeanor is now in a state of permanent flap: He’s furious that the Millennium Group killed his wife (and presumably several dozen others) and nearly killed his daughter; understandably, he is also flummoxed that no one takes his accusations seriously. Aside from various tense exchanges with Peter Watts (who has fully embraced the heel turn that has been asked of him), Frank’s main punching bag is his long-suffering boss Andy McClaren, played by Stephen E. Miller. McClaren can’t afford to lose Frank’s talents but can’t seem to keep him on a short enough leash either. Which brings us to step three: Hoping to cool Frank down (or at least keep tabs on him), McClaren partners Frank with Emma Hollis, played by Klea Scott. Hollis is a newly promoted special agent, untested and idealistic, who knows Frank by reputation for his profiling talents and then struggles to work with the raving loon he has become. Both quickly realize that they’re guided by common values, and the show follows a mostly procedural formula that can be summarized as “What if Mulder was older and crazier, while Scully was more inexperienced and black?”
Purely on the basis of their performances, Henrikson and Scott have good chemistry. They sell Frank and Hollis as an odd couple who figure out their common ground and cultivate trust. A few fans still insist that Klea Scott “ruined Millennium,” but that’s not true and probably more than a little racist. She and Henrikson were doing the best they could with the scripts they were given. And boy howdy, are those scripts awful.
Carter rapidly reverted to an absentee status - the decision by Fox executives to renew Millennium caught everyone by surprise, and Carter remained much more interested in tending to his firstborn franchise, same as he ever was. So in practice, the ship from here on out gets helmed by Chip Johannessen and his first mate Michael Duggan. While Carter will swoop in a few times with scripts that harken back to some of his season one ideas, season three is mostly dominated by the formless, angry incoherence of Johannessen-style conspiracy. Gone are the slick repackagings of season two that trick you into feeling both smart for getting the reference and safe for seeing it all has harmless fun. Long gone is the somber, nuanced sadness of season one. It’s Pepe Silvia yarn wall time, baby, and before we’re done, we’ll reveal that the real reason the Millennium Group went bad was because of J. Edgar Hoover! Buckle up for the revelation, because it’s not the hip new theories of Christian fascists that lie at the heart of the world; it’s the older, duller Cold War paranoia in those yellowing paperbacks your belligerent uncle keeps telling you that you need to read. Given a second lease on life, Millennium fizzled out because it tried to trade in its audience of 30-somethings for an audience of 50-somethings, and with anemic ratings, ended up getting canceled instead.
Is There A Point To All This? Let’s Find A Point.
When Millennium was good, it was great; when it was bad, is was cadaverous marionette of its best self. At all times, it was reflective of a reorganization by 90s media around a new set of political identities. Rewatching it now will be nostalgic for some, claws-on-a-chalkboard for others. Like I said at the outset, it’s hard to recommend.
I still stand by my position that it is a more interesting show than The X-Files, and that we can learn quite a bit more from its failures than we can from its older cousin’s success. We can learn an important lesson, I think, in the gulf between what Millennium‘s paranoia story was about and what its performances conveyed. As much as the show disappeared into its own conspiratorial vortex, Frank Black remains a compelling role model in many respects for most of the show. As I reflect on modern “prestige television,” I’m struck by how rarely I feel like a character is “better” than the show they’re a part of. The opposite formula seems like it’s easier to pull off: Many objectively great modern shows give us tragic and irredeemable scumbags (your Walters White and Tonys Soprano) at the center of their timeless productions. Prestige television doesn’t need to be all antiheroes.
The bottom of it all for me, though, is what it means to push past nostalgia and face history. The late 90s have been an object of fascination for a while now, and as much as fashion ebbs and flows, time periods that have passed through that fascination lens tend to become strange caricatures of themselves. It’s easy now, I think, for people to think of the late 90s and remember Daria, and Deep Space Nine, and Frasier. People are still rewatching The X-Files and Friends. It’s harder to remember that era’s more conservative elements, the mood and themes that dominated half of the country’s culture. It’s unflattering to reflect on how rudderless and hair-trigger conservatives seemed after the Cold War ended but before 9/11 once again made it cool to hate foreigners. It’s unnerving to confront how morbidly eager many were for apocalypse, and how incoherent they were in their hatred of a majority of their fellow citizens. When asked today, many won’t answer honestly about the way they comported themselves in those days; indeed, many can’t, having sold themselves a different story.
So there is value in reminding ourselves of the bad behaviors of the past, and also in reminding ourselves of the stories people have told themselves about themselves. Millennium describes a bleak world full of violence that can neither be prevented nor predicted. It’s a doomed world, running down the clock of its 4th quater. It’s a fantasy world, despite Chris Carter himself describing it as “more real” than the world of The X-Files. But it’s a world many people in its audience would rather have lived in than the one they had. It is a world of slim hope for only the ‘right’ people and none for the rest. We would be wise to disagree with such visions instead of ignoring them. Because those visions, those big-yellow-house-for-me-but-not-for-thee aspirations, endure and animate our politics, and we ignore those forces at our peril.