X-Files Episode Guide: Millennium

Written by Vince Gilligan & Frank Spotnitz

Directed by Thomas J. Wright

Before I rewatched this episode, I had decided mainly for reasons of my own, that I should try and watch 'Millennium', as I had basically ignored it when it was on the air the first time, and most of what I had heard about it had been fairly negative. So I made a commitment and watched all three seasons of the series.

Millennium is one of the odder series in TV history, an anomaly in programming that would come before or since. It is impossible to tell what mission statement Chris Carter had when he created the series, and what he was tying to say. Part of it has to do with the fact that for every season it was on the air, it had a different showrunner - Carter for Season 1, Glen Morgan and James Wong for Season 2, and Chip Johannsen for Season 3. And aside from the brilliantly solid work that Lance Henriksen put in for the series, the episodes have little in common. Season 1 takes a solid forensic approach to cases, usually involving serial killers, Season 2, involves cases more inclined to the paranormal, and Season 3 mainly deals with a combination of the two. All of them are focused on the end of the millennium and what may come, but the series could never quite come to a consensus as to what that meant or even what the Millennium Group had in mind. Even that vision differed from year: season 1, they were ex-FBI agents trying to help local law enforcement, Season 2, they were a Mason-like cult that resembled something more out of Dan Brown, and in Season 3, they were a group bent on sinister means that may have led to world domination. It's hard to figure out what was the mission here.

That said, while 'Millennium' was deeply flawed, it wasn't a bad series. When they were good,  episodes were capable of being as searing and mesmerizing as any TV series could be. Bad scripts could be pretentious, but the good ones could be fascinating. And as a rarity, it never seemed to know what it exactly was, but it kept experimenting, even up to its final episodes. One could understand why Carter and Ten-Thirteen thought that it deserved some kind of closure.

Unfortunately, this version of it just doesn't really work as a finale to those fans who had been watching the series loyally. For starters, while it is good to see Frank Black finally meeting up with Mulder and Scully, the picture that we get of him locked in an asylum, trying to discard any pretense that he cares what the Millennium Group was about doesn't jibe at all with what we saw him doing when he left with Jordan for parts unknown in the series finale. The idea that Frank would discard everything he has thought for just for a safe life was something that he rejected in the series; here he doesn't seem to want to fight at all. And even his great gift: the profiling skills he demonstrated over and over again throughout the series is revealed to be something of a fake: the reason that he can profile the necromancer so well is because they know each other.

But even if the character of Frank Black weren't muddled badly, this whole idea of what the Group seems determined to do doesn't fit in with any of the versions we got during the series. The closest version that it comes to is Morgan & Wong's version of the religious rites, but it still doesn't fit in well at all. And even if it did, the problem is that the idea of the apocalypse, a huge concept for a series to handle, and one that 'Millennium' never got a grip on, seems to amount to four corpses in a basement. This is what the group was pushing towards all this time? That's a bigger disappointment than most of what we got for the X-Files mythology.

So for those who were fans of Millennium the series, this episode can't come as anything but a disappoint. But as an episode of the X-Files, it doesn't do much better. The idea of necromancy is an intriguing one, and has some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, its never made clear how exactly Johnson is raising the dead. If its only working for the 'Four Horsemen', it doesn't explain at all what happened to the deputy. And it doesn't seem to explain why Johnson would go back to the morgue and save Scully from being eaten by the zombie deputy. The whole concept is so bizarre that Scully doesn't even try to explain how its happening. We know she's gotten a lot more open-minded, but this kind of thing cries out for some of her healthy skepticism. She doesn't even try, which is a theme for this episode. Even the idea of the millennium actually coming in 2001 seems more like a slur on the series that we didn't bother to correct.

But there are some people who will just ignore all this and decide to like the episode anyway, and we all know why. The kiss. Mulder and Scully finally kiss on the stroke of the new millennium, all supposedly so that Mulder can say to her "The world didn't end." The shippers must have been dancing in the streets after this episode, even though it was pure cheese. But just because this moment finally came after six seasons of Carter and company saying otherwise (though there denials got a lot fainter after the movie), doesn't mean we should give this episode more credit than it deserves.

A lot of the problem with Millennium may be the episodes writers. Considering that Carter and Spotnitz were still here, it doesn't make much sense for Vince Gilligan, who never wrote for the series to write the episode. Gilligan is usually great for anything, but this time his inexperience shows, and it really hurts the episode. There are some interesting reasons to watch this episode - Henriksen is good, and there's a brief appearance by future Oscar winner Octavia Spencer as a nurse - but those fans of 'Millennium' hoping for closure will definitely not find it here. Millennium was about a lot of things, but to try and sum up everything it stood for in a gunfight in a basement between Mulder, Scully and Frank Black along with four zombies will not fly. For those who were fans of both series, this can only play as a disappointment.

My score: 2 stars.