The 1940s St Louis Cardinals Dynasty, Part 4: 1944, A Brief History of the Browns and how Their Pennant Was As Significant About Wartime Ball as The Cardinal's Dynasty

 

 

In Ken Burns quintessential work on Baseball very little attention is played to the game itself during World War II. However, as a reference to just how far down the quality of play had become at one the narration says: “In 1944 The Browns, the worst team in baseball before the war, won the American League pennant – the only pennant they ever won.”

That fact is considered by most historians as the symbol of just how little talent there was still playing the game in the midst of the war.  It would seem a little cruel to the Browns were it not for the fact it was thought that way by contemporaries. Indeed according to one source when many POWs were released in the winter of 1944 and told the Browns had won the pennant that year, they thought it was a trick and some were still in the custody of the Germans!

The fact is, the Browns have by far the worst postseason history of any franchise that ever exists; in the fifty-two years they existed, they won just one pennant. And because you can not discuss the Cardinals during the war without discussing the Browns (and because even the most devoted students of the game probably know little about them) a brief discussion of the Browns is in order: how they came into existence, where they were before the War and how they managed to win the A.L Pennant that year.

To start with when the American League was founded in 1901 Ban Johnson put American League teams in four cities to compete against the National Leage teams: the Chicago White Sox, The Philadelphia Athletics, The Boston Pilgrims (who became the Red Sox) and the St. Louis Browns. (The New York Highlanders came in 1903 after the then Baltimore Orioles relocated.)

  So from the start of the 20^th century, there were sixteen teams in baseball and that would be the case until expansion came. By 1925 fourteen of those teams had won at least one pennant. The two that had not yet were both from St. Louis, and indeed for the first twenty years of the 20^th century, neither team ever came close, usually finishing in the second division.

The fortunes of both teams began to improve in 1915 because each franchise would obtain one of the greatest hitters in the history of baseball. For the Cardinals, it would be Rogers Hornsby, the greatest right-handed hitter in history. For the Browns, it would be George Sisler, a first baseman who at his peak was as great a hitter as Hornsby.

Despite the fact that he was among the first players ever inducted into the Hall of Fame George Sisler has been mostly forgotten by history. In large part, this is because he spent the majority of his career with the Browns and never made it to the World Series. That is far from fair because it looked for a while like he might be the greatest hitter of all time with the potential to have a higher average than Ty Cobb.

Like Babe Ruth, George Sisler started his career as a pitcher but his talents at the bat moved him to the infield after his rookie year.  He hit superbly his first four years as a regular (he finished second and third in the AL in batting in 1917 and 1919) but in 1920 when the ball officially became livelier, his average exploded.

In 1920 when the baseball world was riveted by Babe Ruth’s incredible 54 home run season for the Yankees, George Sisler was having a season nearly as remarkable. He managed 257 hits setting a major league record that stood for the remainder of the 20^th century, hit .407 and actually led the major in total bases with 399 to Ruth’s 388. He was second to Ruth in home runs, runs scored and RBIs, hit 49 doubles, 19 triples and stole 42 bases.

By comparison, the next year was a disappointment. He ‘only’ batted .371 with a ‘meager’ 216 hits and ‘just’ 125 runs scored. But around him, the Browns were becoming stronger. Baby Doll Jacobson and Ken Williams had impressive offensive seasons of their own: Jacobson batted .353, Williams hit .347 with 22 home runs and 137 RBIs. Urban Shocker led the majors with 27 wins. The Browns finished in third place the highest they had gotten to this point in their existence.

1922 was the season that would break Browns fans heart. Sisler topped his mark by a huge margin. He batted .420 and had a 41 game hitting streak. Ken Williams hit 39 home runs and drove in 155 to lead the league. Shocker won 24 games.  Four of the five spots in RBI leaders was held by members of the Browns.  And with Babe Ruth’s on and off-field behavior leading him to be suspended by the major leagues five times, the Yankees spent much of the 1922 season chasing the Browns.

The season came to a climax in September in a three game series in St. Louis. The Yankees one the first game but the Browns won the second, in part to a left-hander named Hub Pruett, who has a place in baseball history tied to the Babe Ruth legend. In 1922 this 21 year old left hander was doing something that the rest of the American League had been unable to do for the last three years: get the Bambino out.

When he faced him in May, he struck him out and walked him once. One month later, he struck him out in relief. Two days later as a starter, he struck him out three times and walked him once. Facing him in July, Ruth made contact against Pruett for the first time by hitting a weak grounder and then Pruett struck him out the next three times. He then missed the next several weeks with a sore arm, but when the Browns called on him to pitch to Ruth with the bases loaded and no one out, he struck him out again. At this point in twelve at bats, Ruth had faced Pruett twelve times, had walked twice, grounded out once and every other time struck out.

In their next meeting Pruett walked Ruth the first time  but in the third struck him out again. Then in the fifth Ruth broke the spell and hit a massive home run. He also got a single in the eighth. Still Pruett was the winning pitcher.

In the third game, the Browns were ahead 2-1 in the ninth. If they won they would be in first place. Pruett was called into relieve. However, he gave up a walk and a base hit and outfielder Whitey Witt hit a single to drive in two runs to win the game for the Yankees. They left St. Louis with a one and a half game lead and the Yankees would win the pennant by two games.

The next year Sisler suffered an eye infection and missed the entire 1923 season. He would come back the next year but was never the same hitter. His lifetime average of .340 was more than enough to earn him induction into the Hall of Fame in 1938, but he never came close to matching the marks he’d set in his previous years. In a decade of high batting average after 122, his highest mark was .345.

Perhaps not coincidentally the Browns upswing in the standings ended with the loss of Sisler’s effectiveness. In 1923, they would fall to fifth place and rarely get that high again for the next twenty years while the Cardinals became the toast of St. Louis.

Ironically the man who turned the Cardinals from a joke to a National League powerhouse Branch Rickey had spent much of his initial career in baseball as a part of the Browns. He had been one of their  scouts, manager and had been appointed to general manager in 1917. But his revolutionary plans for baseball were scorned by members of the Browns staff – then manager Miller Huggins would say “I don’t go for this theory stuff’ – and when owner Sam Breadon offered him more money and a percentage of the profits in 1919, he switched teams.

The Browns resumed their position as the chump of baseball which is putting it mildly. In 1936 the Browns home attendance for the season was 80,632. Things had gotten so bad that by the end of the 1941 season owner Dan Barnes was hoping to move the nearly bankrupt franchise to Los Angeles. The owners were scheduled to vote on it on December 9, 1941. Permission was denied. (All things considered that may have been the best thing for baseball; the transportation system of America was such in the 1940s, it's hard to imagine that it would have been practical.

The war did not do anything to improve St. Louis’ opinion of the Browns; the Cardinals owned the city in 1942 and 1943. The Browns in those years finished third and sixth respectively and few thought that there was much of a chance they’d improve in 1944, even at the height of the manpower drain. Certainly their new manager Luke Sewell didn’t think so when he took the job. It didn’t help matters that in addition to all the other struggles wartime teams were dealing with, the Browns were populated with heavy drinkers.

One of the heaviest was Sig Jakucki, who had pitched one season for St. Louis in 1936 with an 0-3 record. He ended up pitching for the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast and his reputation for being a hotheaded, arrogant, half-drunk, bush-league jackass followed him. When the Browns were desperate for pitching they tracked him down in a semi-pro team in Texas. He was the most unpopular man in the league, but somehow he managed a 13-9 record even though he drank before, after and sometimes during starts.

Another part of their rotation was Denny Galehouse. Galehouse was working six days a week at a rubber factory in Akron when the Browns tracked him down and asked him he would be interested in pitching only on his day off.  Galehouse would spend the 1944 season hopping a train after his Saturday shift, pitching the first game of a doubleheader, and left the ballpark immediately afterwards. He was 9-10 with a 3.12 era but this was purely planning.

Nelson Potter was thirty two with two bad knees with no talent until Sewell, a former catcher, taught him how to throw a screwball. He managed to win nineteen games that year, ten in the last two months of the season.

Their infield was famously called the ‘all 4-F infield’. George McQuinn at first base was 34 with a bad back. Third baseman Mark Christman had signed with Detroit in 1935 and was only back in baseball because of the war. Don Gutteridge at second base was thirty two and was Sewell’s right hand man. But the star of the Browns was their shortstop Vern Stephens.

Stephens would be one of the few wartime players to have a career after the war and with good reason. Without question he was the best position player in the war and he was a hell of a hitter. At 23, he hit 20 home runs and drove in 109 runs, superb numbers that were simply unheard of in an era where shortstops were fundamentally a defensive position with nothing expected from them when it came to offense. Stephens made 35 errors at short that year, but his bat more than made up for it.

The Browns somehow managed to contend the entire season with their major rival being the Detroit Tigers. If the Browns had the one great offensive player left in the American League, the Tigers had by far the best pitcher. Hal Newhouser had come up with the Tigers in 1940 and gone 9-9. He was ineligible for the war because of a heart defect. He’d had an ability to strike batters out – he led the American League in strikeouts in 1943 – but winning had never been easy. He went 8-17 in 1943 and considered quitting baseball. Veteran catcher Paul Richards snapped him out of it and taught how to throw.

In 1944 he had one of the greatest seasons any pitcher has ever had, war non-withstanding. He went 29-9 with a 2.22 ERA. He threw six shutouts, struck out 187 batters and threw 312 innings with complete games. That year he was the winner of the American League MVP, which he would in again the following season.

Just as capable was right hander Dizzy Trout, though that was less of a shock. In 1943 Trout had gone 20-12, tying for the lead in victories in the A.L. He finished 1944 going 27-14  and led the American League in ERA with 2.12 leading the league with seven shutouts and 352 innings pitched.

The 1944 pennant race came down to the final weekend with the Browns playing the Yankees in a four game series while the Tigers finished their season against the Washington Senators. The Yankees were in third place, technically still alive in the hunt for their fourth straight pennant.  By this point, however, the manpower drain had hit the Yankees so hard that in their final series of the season they were reduced to playing Paul Waner as one of their semi-regulars.. Waner had been one of the greatest hitters in the National League, with a lifetime average of .333. Now he was forty-one and reduced to playing as a pinch hitter.

The Browns managed to win the first game against the Yankees 4-1, helped by George McQuinn’s two run homer. McQuinn had been signed with the Yankees, but with Lou Gehrig at first he spent seven years in the minors. He relished the homer. In the second game of the double header Hank Borowy faced off against Nelson Potter. In the first inning, the Browns scored when Guttridge doubled, moved to third on a wild pitch and scored on a ground out. Inning after inning Potter made than run hold up.

With two out in the ninth and the tying run on second, Waner came up to pinch hit. Before the double header, a National League fan asked what Waner was doing with the Yankees.

Waner laughed and gave an honest answer: “Because Joe DiMaggio’s in the Army.” Waner hit a blooper towards short right center that Gutteridge caught. It was the last time Waner ever came to bat again.

The Yankees were eliminated and the Browns were tied with Detroit. They had split their doubleheader against the Senators with Trout losing 9-2 in the second game.

On Saturday Newhouser beat the Senators 7-3. The Browns defeated the Yankees 2-0 on Galehouse’s 2-0 shutout. Everything came down to the last game of the season. Sig Jakuki started for St. Louis. Trout would start on one day’s rest for Detroit.

That morning the proposed Senator starter received an anonymous call in which someone offered him $20,000 if he ‘didn’t have a good day.” Leonard hung up and told his manager what happened. The Senators manager trusted him. His knuckleball danced passed the Tigers and Washington backed him up a 4-1 win.

Now everything depended on what happened at Yankee Stadium, The night before the game Coach Zach Taylor had spotted Jakucki with a brown bag. Taylor tried to take it away from him. Jakucki threatened trouble if he did and promised not to take a drink that night.

When Jakucki got to the clubhouse the next day, the trainer smelled the whiskey on his breath and confronted him. “I kept my promise,” he told the trainer. “I didn’t promise I wouldn’t take a drink this morning,

The game started with the Yankees scoring two unearned runs. Then in the fourth inning outfielder Chet Laabs hit a two-run home run to tie the game. He did it again in the fifth. Prior to that game, Laabs had hit three home runs. To the first sellout crowd for the Browns in twenty years, Jakucki closed out the game 5-2 and the Browns had their pennant.

The Cardinals were waiting for them. Had been for a long time, actually. They had won 105 games for the third straight year. Mort Cooper had gone 22-7 with seven shutouts but in one of the most questionable choices for MVP of all time, shortstop Marty Marion ended up winning, the first shortstop to win in either league. Marion had batted .267 and had hit only six home runs, but he was considered one of the most brilliant defensive shortstops of his era.  Mort Cooper finished ninth in the voting, behind brother Walker who finished eighth.  Stan Musial had yet another good season, batting .347 and finishing second in the National League in batting. However, he finished fourth in the MVP race.  Fellow outfielders Johnny Hopp and Ray Sanders were potent in the offense as well: Hopp hit .336 and Sanders drove in 102 runs,

Southworth and Sewell were friends and their relationship went beyond that. During the 1944 season, both men and their wives shared an apartment.  This worked out well because due to the scheduling of both leagues, neither one of them was in St. Louis at the same time. This relationship fell apart in October, so the Southworth’s moved into a vacant apartment for the World Series which for one of the few times in history was played entirely in the same park: Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis.

In Game 1, Cooper threw a 2-hitter but still lost to Denny Galehouse 2-1 on George McQuinn’s two run homer in the fourth. Game 2 went eleven innings and reliever Bix Donnelly was the hero for the Cardinals as he through four innings in relief and struck out seven while the Cardinals. In the eleventh Ken O’Dea hit a pitch single with 2 on to give the Cardinals a 3-2 win.

In Game 3, with two out in the third the Browns managed five straight singles which combined with a walk and a wild pitch, gave them four runs. They would win 5-2 and take a two game to one lead.

That would be the high mark for the Browns in the series. In Game 4 Harry Brecheen would throw a complete game and Stan Musial’s three hits, including a home run, gave the Cardinals a 5-1 victory. Cooper and Galehouse faced off again in Game 5. Both were superb: Galehouse struck out 10, Cooper 12, but Cooper threw a shut out while two of the six hits Galehouse gave up were home runs. And in Game 6 the Cardinal would take a 3-1 lead into the sixth. When the Browns got runners on second and third against starter Max Lanier,  Wilks entered the game and retired the last eleven batters he faced giving the Cardinals their second championship in three years.

But Southworth’s triumph would become ashes in just a few months. His son Billy Junior had been part of the Cardinal farm system. When the war began he enlisted in the Army and became a bomber pilot. He survived twenty-five missions over Europe. But on February 15^th 1945, his B-29 overshot LaGuardia Field while attempting an emergency landing in Flushing Bay. It broke apart, exploded and sank. Five airmen were rescued but Billy Junior and four more were killed.

Billy Senior was never the same. He became a heavy drinker and though it would not effect his managing for a long time, the zest he’d had for baseball never returned. The Cardinals made a noble attempt to win their fourth straight pennant that year but ended up losing to the Cubs by three games. (That 1945 pennant, of course, was the last one the Cubs would win until their World Championship in 2016.) Southworth’s managing career was not yet over, however, as we shall see in the next article.

As for the Browns 1944 was as good as it got. The next year, they dropped to third place. That season, they became famous for playing Pete Gray, a man with one-arm in their outfield.  The fact that Gray ended up playing for the Browns in 1945 is often pointed to far more as a symptom of wartime baseball than their pennant the year before.  The Browns resumed their place in the American League cellar soon after and in 1953 left St. Louis for Baltimore, where they became the Orioles. Their life in baseball has been far happier than anything the Browns accomplished in their half-century in St. Louis.

In the last full article in the series I will deal with the 1946 Cardinals who after the end of the war, proved that they still had enough to talent for one more World Championship.

 

 

 

 

 

Lost Rewatch On VHS: Through the Looking Glass

 

I have made my share of mistakes in my years in Peak TV. I stopped watching The Sopranos before the final season because I had reached the opinion that these characters were hopelessly driven by violence and incapable of change. (That was, as David Chase, the point of the series.) I refused to watch Breaking Bad through the first half of its run because I thought the concept was derivative of Weeds a series I’d watched and utterly loathed. (To be fair, an executive for FX thought the same thing when Vince Gilligan pitched it to him.) I spent much of Succession’s run utterly baffled by both critics and audiences love of a series where there was a single likable character in a battle no one deserved to win. (I didn’t come around on that one until Logan Roy died.)

All of which is to say that when I first saw the ending of Through The Looking Glass, the episode that is considered by and large the episode that basically saved the series from what was considered a middling third season (something I never understood) my reaction was not: “OMFG!” but rather “Lost has jumped the shark.” I honestly don’t know how long I held on to that belief; it was certainly well past the point the episode was nominated for Best Writing and Best Directing in a Drama but it was one of my biggest crises of faith in the interim between Season Three and Four. It may not have been until I finally reading Finding Lost: Season Three that I truly began to appreciate what Darlton had managed to pull off and why so many people we’re impressed.

In retrospect, maybe I thought had been misled by an article in TV Guide that came out that April. In it Cuse and Lindelof were previewing the final episodes of Season 3 and for a change were being relatively transparent. They told us we would see what would happen to Locke the week he spent with The Others (check); they told us Ben would get his first flashback and we’d learn some of his backstory (check) they told us we’d finally learn Charlie’s fate (sob!) and they told us the final episode of the season would have an enormous body count.  They weren’t lying there; but they neglected to mention most of the carnage would involve The Others (we actually see Juliet start to bury most of the bodies). But when it came to the details of what happened in the finale, they said the usual: “It will change everything” and whatever I was expecting, somehow the last five minutes really seemed like a betrayal. I’ve changed my mind in the interim (though if the opening episodes of Season Four hadn’t worked as well as it had I might have stuck with my opinion) but I spent a lot more time during the summer and fall of 2007 thinking Darlton had screwed up rather than on the more important things every other fan was thinking about during that same period.

Now that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t riveted to the screen for the first one hour and fifty-five minutes of the series finale (the last five minutes my head was spinning like everyone else’s) because Through the Looking Glass is everything we all say it is.  There’s so much to talk about that has already been said that I’m going to look at it from a different perspective and evaluate the performances that are among some of the best work much of the cast will do in Season 3.  There are at least four or five performances that any of the actors could have used to submit for Emmy consideration apart from their individual episodes and two or three more that are above the pale from those who’ve done better work.

Let’s start, of course, with Dominic Monoghan. Charlie is the only character in this episode who is truly having a good time. No doubt the fact that he spends most of it sure he’s a dead man frees him from the burden of having to carry all the baggage he’s been handling all season, if not all series. He’s spent a lot of the show baring a lot of rage towards the Others; now that he’s is certain that he will succeed, he is free to spend most of the episode taking the piss out of them. (Poor Bonnie. It’s bad enough she dies down here but to spend it all being mocked by one of them really drives her round the bend.)

Charlie is so certain that his fate has been decided he decides that everything’s going to be okay. He takes a swing at Ben by absentee, casually mentions that Juliet has betrayed all of them, absolutely loves shattering all the pretensions that Bonnie and Mikhail have towards all their years of loyal service to Ben and convinces Bonnie to give him to code by giving her a chance to spend her last breath betraying the boss who had her killed. (Perhaps she’s smiling when she says her last words because of it.)

Special mention should be made to the work of Henry Ian Cusick. Apparently Desmond seems determined to save Charlie even after getting bashed in the head, and it actually seems like he might very well have done it by the end of this. Even Desmond thinks that when he doesn’t get any more flashes that maybe fate has been appeased by his actions. Charlie clearly thinks the same thing.

And then after he turns off the jamming signal, an incoming transmission comes.  Charlie turns out to be the first survivor to meet Penny Widmore. It doesn’t seem odd that’s she’s the first transmission the island receives: after all, we know she’s been looking for Desmond. And then Charlie asks about the freighter and she says those last haunting words: “Who’s Naomi?”

And at that moment Mikhail, who took a spear gun to the chest a few minutes ago, is outside the window pounding on the porthole with a hand grenade in his hand. He knocks to let Charlie know he’s there and pulls the pin. (By the way, fans of the series spent much of the next three years certain that Mikhail was still alive. They clearly didn’t listen to one of the extras on the DVD when we hear the list of the casualties among the Others and learn that Mikhail is dead. Then again, even if they did, most Losties would have been inclined to disbelieve.)

Desmond is running towards the transmission room to see Penny. Charlie knows what’s about to happen and spends his last minute sealing the room from the inside. Then there is an explosion and the room begins to flood. I’m pretty sure that just like Jack in Titanic Charlie might have been able to swim to safety had he tried. I think his true act of heroism was making sure that Desmond  - and his friends – know the truth about the boat. Cusick is nearly as magnificent in Charlies’ final moments. Despite everything he seems determined to save Charlie one last time. Then Charlie spends his last bit of energy writing on his hand (no doubt with the pen he used to write his last note to Claire) and places it on the porthole in a moment that has gone down in television history. It is impossible not to get moist around the eyelids watching the final moments as Desmond stays with Charlie to the end (he makes sure he does not die alone) Charlie crosses himself one last time as a lonely violin plays and we cut to Aaron in Claire’s arms. It seems he knows before anyone else what has happened to his surrogate father.

The next most remarkable performance in this episode is Michael Emerson. That should come as a shock Emerson has been magnificent all season. What makes his performance here different is that for the first time since we met him Ben has no control of events. From the moment Bonnie breaks radio silence to the final moment at the radio tower, all of Ben’s years of planning have completely collapsed. The survivors have known was a masterful liar Ben has been all this time, so you’d think his people would know it too. The problem is that all of Ben’s plans are coming apart at the exact moment he has begun to lose control over his people and now he has to spend much of the episode spinning to people who do not trust him anymore.

With good reason. In the space of a few hours he learns not only that Juliet has betrayed him but Alex has too.  (So much of Emerson’s performance is done without words as one knife after the other goes in.) Then he learns that his plan at the beach, which was done on an impulse, has also ended in the deaths of seven of his most loyal soldiers and the three who are left are starting to have doubts. (By the time the episode is Tom has clearly lost all faith in him.) Ben spends the first half of the episode trying to convince all his loyal followers – Bonnie, Mikhail, Richard and Alex – that he has been doing the right thing and they have to trust him. But I have a feeling that when he decides to try and intercept Jack at the radio tower that his time is over.  The idea that he can talk Jack out of this would be ludicrous for anyone, giving the circumstances.

The scene at the halfway point is another highlight. Jack and Ben face off for the first time since the submarine blew up in The Man From Tallahassee.  Jack clearly looks like he wants to snap Ben’s neck even before he tell him as much, but for once his anger is more than sufficient because Ben has no cards to play. Ben’s argument is one that would be utterly ludicrous to any one of the survivors. He is trying to convince Jack that Naomi who (as far we know) he only heard of a few days ago represents a force that is a threat to the island and she contacts her boat, everyone on the island will be killed. Now we have no reason to believe a word Ben says (though it turns out he’s actually telling the truth this time) but even if Jack did, Ben is basically sentencing Jack and his people to stay on the island for the rest of their lives. Ben then tries his last card by saying he will kill Jack’s friends (which we later find out was another bluff) if he doesn’t bring him the phone. That scene is magnificent mainly because Jack is mostly quiet and Ben becomes increasingly desperate as time runs out. He clearly was relying on Jack’s empathy and he was wrong. When Jack beats Ben to a pulp (which he’s wanted to do all season), he grabs Ben by the collar and orders them to tie him up.  And at that moment, Rousseau sees Alex for the first time. I think Ben is truly defeated at this moment; when he tells Alex that Danielle is her mother, he sounds like he has lost everything.

Ben spends the rest of the episode (and indeed much of the next season) tied up and a prisoner of the survivors. From this point on Ben is in a sense a man without a country. He will spend much of the next half of the series among the survivors but while he has the ability to manipulate them (and does so successfully many times) the curtain has been pulled back. Ben has been abandoned by the island. And the confirmation comes when Locke shows up at the climax of the episode. He tries to recover and tell Locke to shoot Jack but the look on Ben’s face speaks to something far deeper in his psyche. By the end of this episode he’s lost everything. What’s remarkable about Ben going forward is that he manages to spend much of the time looking like he’s still in charge on bluster alone.

Two smaller brilliant performances come from Josh Holloway and Jorge Garcia, both of whom play parts in the rescue of their friends in different ways. Hurley has spent much of the last two episodes feeling left out.  He was clearly hurt by Charlie sending them out and he clearly suspects his best friend is going to his death even though he keeps lying to Claire. When Sawyer and Juliet go back after its clear the plan has gone wrong, Hurley follows them determined to help. Strangely enough Sawyer (who’s been nasty ever since The Brig) actually tries a half-hearted way of being compassionate to Hugo. It’s clear almost against his will he’s starting to become friends with Hurley and doesn’t want him to end up dead on what he believes is a suicide mission.

And of course, Hurley saves the day. When we saw Hurley fix the VW bus in Tricia Tanaka is Dead, we figured it was a one-off. Then in The Man Behind the Curtain, we got the backstory on the bus and we learned that it was the final resting place of Roger Linus. Now Hurley finds the car and drives through his old camp through a path of bullets, killing Ryan Pryce. (The nicest guy on the island killed one of the nastiest Others. Talk about poetic justice.) And then, after becoming well and truly Hurley, he brags about it on the walkie-talkie and gives the good news to the camp that nobody has died. This is perhaps the highpoint in Hurley’s story and he’d have every reason to think the curse was broken. (Oh poor Hurley.)

Josh Holloway is just as brilliant. He’s been quiet for much of the last episode but when Kate tells him she ‘s going back, his sarcasm is crueler than it usually it is. (Though not wrong.) He then says he’s going back on his own and Juliet comes with him. The interaction between the two of them is fun as Juliet mocks him about the runway being for the aliens (we will find out what its for) and teasing James about sleeping with Jack. She is, however, honest about why she’s going back: she wants to face the people she’s betrayed.

It's not clear whether Sawyer is going back out of revenge or on a suicide mission: before Hurley shows up, he does seems more determined on the latter. But I do think that high on his agenda was giving back some of what the Others had dished out. When he shoots Tom is cold blood, I do believe that was inevitable. He makes sure that he tells Tom it was taking for Walt off the raft, and we all know that’s where Tom shot him which nearly killed him. Sawyer has spent much of the last few episodes looking utterly lost but after this he seems to find a new purpose. The next half of the series will be about him making his own journey to becoming the most unlikely of heroes.

We don’t see much of Locke in this episode: he shows up less then ten minutes in two hours. But Terry O’Quinn, as always, make it count. He wakes up in the pit and his legs are useless. He finds a gun on one of the bodies, manages to pull it out, and prepares to kill himself.  Then we hear the whispers and ‘Walt’ appears. He tells John to get out of the pit because “he has work to do.” A smile appears on John’s face. (We knew this probably wasn’t Walt. In a Missing Piece segment – which I will review in the introduction to Season 4 – we got a hint as to who it might be.)

Then at the climax of the episode just as it looks as if rescue is imminent, Naomi falls over backward with a knife in her back – and there is Locke. This is the only scene of significance that occurs between Jack and Locke in the entire season and its terrifying.  At this point the fan has every reason to believe Locke has finally gone over to the dark side as he points a gun at Jack and tells him to get away from the phone. Locke fires a shot at Jack and then points the gun at him saying he doesn’t want to shoot him. Much will be written about what happens in the next encounter but when Jack stands with his hands up and Locke with the gun out, the viewer could be forgiven for thinking John might just follow through. The fact he doesn’t – and in fact makes a variation on the same desperate plea Ben did – makes us truly believe that he has become as corrupt.

This brings us to the highpoint of the episode – Matthew Fox. Many people watching the episode the first time were frustrated with every flashback because it was another Jack story and by this point the viewer was sick of them. We didn’t want to try to work out where in the timeline this was; we just wanted to get back and see if the rescue was going to happen. But the reason that ‘Through the Looking Glass’ is a masterpiece is because it rises and falls on Fox’s performance.

I’ll admit to being frustrated with the flashes initially but you could let that go because of Fox’s willingness to commit.  Jack has spent the entire series trying to be in control, even when his lesser impulses led him but in the flashes here, it’s clear he’s entirely given up. In every sequence Jack’s looks like he is holding himself together booze, pills and muscle memory. He can barely make the effort to seem normal in any sequence: the raw pain and suffering he feels is apparent every moment he’s onscreen.

And this is completely paralleled by what we see Jack doing on the island.  Jack knows after the third explosion doesn’t happen that the plan has fallen apart. He spends much of the rest of the episode trying to maintain a façade of control but he’s more emotional then usual. Perhaps that is the reason he confesses his love to Kate for the first time in this episode.

As I mentioned he is exceptional in the scene when Ben threatens to kill his people and when the shots ring out, he beats Ben to a pulp, and then picks up the walkie and tells Tom what he’s going to do. He is more open with Kate then he’s ever been after he thinks his friends on the beach have been killing and he shows a side of him that is ugly but fitting. He wants to show Ben that everything he has worked for has failed and that he has finally beaten him.

Fox runs the gamut throughout the island: his face showing measure of rage, agony, despair, blessed relief and when he finally announced that there is a rescue elation.

And then comes the final flashback. Jack is in an apartment that is a complete wreck, there’s spoiled food in the sink, papers everywhere, maps on the wall. He reaches whoever he’s been trying to contact since the beginning and then they set up a meeting late night.

That night Jack is barely holding it together until a car pulls up. The driver walks out…and it’s Kate. The two have a discussion where Kate barely seems able to be in the company of the man she once loved. And Jack tells us that he has been flying every Friday to the Pacific, hoping for a crash. The implication was obvious to me the moment I heard it: Jack is hoping to find the island again.

Kate walks away to his desperate pleas: “We were not supposed to leave.” And those final words: “We have to go back!”  And then the purpose of the title has been realized: we have been truly through the looking glass. This isn’t a flashback, it’s a flashforward.

I think most of the reason I thought the show had lost it was because the idea of the flashforward was unprecedented at the time. (This would not be the case for long: a little more than 2 months later Damages would debut on FX and become the first series to use flashforwards as part of it episodes.) And that’s the thing we don’t always recognize game-changers when we see them.

The questions started the moment the episode ended, most notably who was in the coffin and what did he mean to Jack and Kate. Now I was never the kind of person to pause an episode and look at the details of everything (ok, not for Lost at least) so I didn’t try to look at the obituary. That was probably wise considering almost everything in it would be a lie, at least here. The major theories had was that the person in the coffin was Locke or possibly Michael. I was not inclined to believe it was either: I didn’t think it was Locke because I couldn’t see him leaving in the island and at the time I thought Harold Perrineau was done with the show. Did I have a theory at the time?

Here's one that I briefly considered. It was Ben. Hear me out. Jack clearly had a complicated relationship with him: he wasn’t friend or family, but they were both leaders of their people. Ben had spent their last interaction telling him that if he made the call everyone would be killed and questioned why Jack wanted to go home. When we see this episode, Jack is sick of lying and it’s clear that home has offered nothing for him. No one would have shown up to Ben’s funeral because (as far as we knew) Ben had never left the island and had no friends or family. Ben had told Jack that he had to protect the island; perhaps he had died doing so. We might not have seen his name in the obituary but we already know Ben loved using false names and maybe Jack recognized one.  And when Jack says: “We were not supposed to leave” that’s something Ben had spent more time saying than Locke had. And Kate would have had no reason to show up to Ben’s funeral either.

In a way had the writers followed through this might have been more radical than what actually happened: they had spent the last two seasons building Ben up as the ultimate threat and now it turned out he had been right and had been removed by a greater one.  Few would argue the choice the writers did was the wrong one, but it would have been a hell of a play. (This theory, it’s worth noting, would hold up until in the Season 4 finale and by that point, might have been more likely than who was in the box.)

No one who saw Through the Looking Glass could argue that the game had been radically changed. Whatever you might have thought about Season 3 overall, it is universally agreed that the writers would kick it up a notch for the final three seasons. Ben was right when he said it was the beginning of the end, but in a sense of Lost’s best work, it was also the end of the beginning.

 

VHS Notes: We see quite a few film trailers throughout the finale. The biggest box office sensation will be Ratatouille which would eventually win the Oscar for Best Animated Film in 2007. There were also some undervalued gems in this one: the exceptional Kevin Costner thriller Mr. Brooks and William Friedkin’s minor masterpiece Bug which was the first time I ever saw the brilliant Michael Shannon in anything. We also saw previews from what would be the doomed 2007-2008 ABC season: the critically acclaimed Pushing Daises and Dirty Sexy Money, the successful Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Private Practice – and the bizarre Geico insurance spinoff Cavemen. Well, they can’t all be winners.

 

 

 

The History of FDR's Court-Packing Plan, Part 2: Roosevelt's Frustration With The Nine Old Men, His Plan, How He Arrived At It and The Blunders He Made From The Start

 

Note: Much of the material in this article and those to come are from 168 Days a Book written at the time of the battle by esteemed journalists Joseph Alsop & Turner Catledge. Both men were Washington insiders – Alsop would become infamous for being part of the so-called ‘Georgetown Elite’ – but their integrity as reporters of the period cannot be questioned.

By 1935 it was agreed that while the New Deal had not brought prosperity back to the nation, it was bringing recovery.  This would put the Republican Party in a bind not merely for the 1936 election but for the rest of FDR’s term in office and well after his passing.

The New Deal was everything the conservative base of the GOP – including Herbert Hoover, still prominent in it – hated with an utter passion. The problem was, it was working so well that none of the Republicans could find a good way to attack. In the 1932 campaign Hoover had stated that if FDR was elected “grass would grow in the streets of New York and Philadelphia.”  And by the time of the Democrat convention that year, the Democrats threw it back in his face.

Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas who basically got the nomination because he was one of the few major Republican office holders to win reelection in 1934, was the first of FDR’s opponents to face this impossible bind. He eventually settled on a method known as ‘me-tooism’ where the Republicans would essentially argue that the New Deal was working but if you put them in office, they could run it better and more efficiently.  This would never be a winning proposition during FDR’s electoral run and by the time he had died, the New Deal was so entrenched in the social network that most Republicans decided there was nothing to be gained electorally by campaigning on destroying it. It would not be until Barry Goldwater in 194 that the Republicans would nominate a candidate for President who ran on an anti-New Deal platform and not until Ronald Reagan sixteen years that they would manage to elect a President on one of deregulation.

FDR never had reason to doubt winning reelection in 1936. And indeed, it was during this year that he spent a fair amount of time concentrating on the one clear source of opposition that the New Deal was facing: the Supreme Court. During the first two years of FDR’s term the Court had been divided on much of the New Deal legislation but in May of 1936, the court unanimously invalidated the National Recovery Act. Not long after the court made a series of rules that began to invalidate major parts of the New Deal, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act and striking down  the New York Women’s Minimum Wage Law. They also made decisions that limited the government’s power on bankruptcy and labor’s ability to negotiate with corporations. FDR had been willing to take a certain measure of patience with the court but these decisions infuriated him.

They also infuriated many Americans. Like today, there was a frustration at the Court being out of touch but in this case it had to do less with ideology than age. In the middle of 1936, an article denounced the Court as ‘Nine Old Men.’ There was a fair amount of truth to that description: six of the nine Justices, including Charles Evans Hughes, were 70 or older and the court had been intact since Holmes had left it late in Hoover’s term. FDR spent months discussing the issue with his own brain trust, including his Attorney General Homer Cummings and legal minds such as Felix Frankfurter. 

Wisely, FDR kept his thought about the Court out of the 1936 campaign. The media was by a considerable margin endorsing Landon (the last count was that two-thirds of all newspapers did) and while Landon himself did not think he had any chance of beating FDR (he mentioned as much to a reporter in September on condition of secrecy) the media desperately wanted to seize on something to get him out. During the fall, The Literary Digest a magazine known for the earliest attempts at public opinion polls began the poll that had accurately predicted the winner of every election since 1920. From the start of their polls to the end Landon was in the lead, and when it ended a week before Election Day, Landon was winning with 360 electoral votes to FDR’s 171.

While the polling was going on Republicans and the media seized on it based on the idea that FDR would be defeated. FDR never doubted it, though his electoral guess was far off too: He thought he would win with 350 electoral votes to 181.  So on election night, even he was surprised when he won the greatest electoral landslide in history with more than sixty percent of the popular vote and carrying every state but Maine and Vermont. (Not long after the 1936 election, the Digest folded. )

Now that he had his popular and electoral mandate FDR thought he could concentrate on the idea of reform for the Court. Unfortunately his popular mandate caused him to misstep from the start. Prior to his announcement of every major program he had made to this point, he had first consulted with his teams of his advisors: first his storied ‘Brain Trust’ and when he had the legislative plan in mind, Congressional Leadership. At the time the heads included his Vice President John Nance Garner, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, and Speaker of the House William Bankhead. But this time he assumed his massive mandate in Congress would override any objections they might initially have. So his sole helper during this time was his A.G. Homer Cummings.

It was not that Cummings was not unqualified for the job, either as a Democrat or a legal scholar. He had been a loyal Democrat for forty years, and though he had initially been a temporary posting for Attorney General after FDR’s first choice Montana Senator Tom Walsh died before election day, in a Justice Department besieged by lawsuits against the New Deal he had kept it going all this period. But Cummings had never been admired by many of the intellectuals that made up FDR’s Cabinet and Brain Trust and the idea of being part of changing the Court ahead of them stirred him.

FDR and Cummings knew they had four alternatives: they could propose an Amendment enlarging the Federal Powers of the government. They could limit the court’s jurisdiction, they could require more than a simple majority to invalidate an act of Congress, or they could ‘pack it.” They rejected the first alternative quickly and while Progressive Senator George Norris had a bill before the Senate about the third option, both Cummings and FDR thought Norris’ reading of the Constitution was wrong. After discussion with Frankfurter, they decided ‘the best way out was Court Packing’. There was precedent: the Court had expanded from its original seven members to nine, so it was not against the Constitution. Privately all were aware that this was a ‘taboo’, but the Court had weakened that taboo with its behavior and considering the Republicans were fundamentally outnumbered, what opposition could they provide. 

Just before making a goodwill trip to Argentina FDR told Cummings he would present a court bill to Congress as soon as one could be ready and he hoped one would be when he returned from his trip. But when he did a month later FDR told him that none of the proposed solutions were satisfactory.

Cummings revisited the issue and decided to make the age of the judges involved the principle. He was guided by a recommendation Justice McReynolds had made in 1913. In it McReynolds had recommended that when any federal judge, except for those on the Supreme Court, did not retire at the age provided by law the President should appoint another judge to preside over the affairs of the court and have precedence over the older one. McReynolds, at this very moment, was on the Supreme Court and was now at the heart of the opposition to the New Deal.

Almost from the start this suggestion by Cummings became FDR’s favorite. FDR was a lover of irony and using one of his enemies own ruling to undermine him appealed to him. Even the fact that the conservative block of his own party would oppose it did not strike him as a problem; their opposition would fail. So he made the decision – but aside from Cummings, no one else was told about it or advised about it.

This was a mistake because two of his major advisers, Benjamin Cohen and Thomas Corcoran, had discussed the idea with Solicitor General Reed and early on dismissed the idea of extra judges.  They had toyed with the idea a year earlier; Corcoran had suggested it to Progressive Senator Burton Wheeler, a year ago and had written a speech on it for him that Wheeler refused to deliver. But they thought the best plan was an amendment to the Constitution that was far closer to an earlier suggestion: the amendment would have allowed Congress to override court decisions on a point of law, by a two-thirds majority at once, and a simple majority after an intervening election. Congress would also have the power to invalidate state acts thrown out by the Court.

Furthermore while he did later on discuss the bill with some of his advisers, including trusted friend Samuel Rosenmann, FDR was arrogant enough to believe that leadership would unilaterally support whatever bill he proposed that he saw no need to consult Congressional leaders at any time in the process. Nor did he make any effort to give advance notice to officials who were in charge of labor or farms. FDR’s was so determined for this to be theater, that he assumed the surprise would carry the day.  That to this point leadership had an unblemished record of subservience to the White House but offering advice that might help when they were asked.

Almost from the start there were warning signs. In his jubilance he broke down and showed what he had ready to many members of his inner circle.  As 168 Days puts it eloquently:

“With them he was like a father exhibiting a favorite son to an old friend. (His inner circle) felt like they had been confronted with a child in whom any but fond parental eyes could see the symptoms of incipient disease. All of them were astonished; all of them saw more trouble ahead then the President looked; some of them…were completely horrified by the indirection of the message, its highly sophistic reason and its implied condemnation of old age. But the time for radical changes had passed…The President was in no mood to heed minor danger signals.”

The actual bill was relatively simple and fell into four major parts.

First, when any judge of any federal court who had been on the bench ten years waiting more than six months after turning 70 to retire or resign, the President might appoint a sort of coadjutor for them.

Second, the number of judges on any court should be permanently increased by the appointment of additional judges, bur the membership of the Supreme court should not be increased by more than six.

Third, the Chief Justice might assign extra circuit judges to any circuit court of appeals where a press of business occurred and similarly to district courts with crowded dockets.

Fourth, the Supreme Court might appoint a proctor to watch over the status of litigation, investigate the need for assigning extra judges to congested courts and recommend their assignment to the Chief Justice.

As Alsop and Catledge write the bill was clearly written to solve the problem with the reactionary course of the current court but FDR never referred to it when either he or Cummings proposed it to Congress. In his bill President euphemistically referred to courts as easing the justice’s burden but in other words it discussed that the court needed ‘young blood to vitalize it’. The inner circle knew the moment that FDR made this proposal to Congress, no one – not in the legislator or the general public – would be deceived by what FDR was proposing.

And by far the clearest one should have been obvious. By this point the spectre of fascism was sweeping Europe. Much of FDR’s legislation involving the New Deal had infuriated the Republicans and interests by saying that his actions violated the Constitution and were dictatorial. FDR had managed to deflect these arguments based on the popularity of the New Deal to this point, but a decision to fundamentally reshape the Judiciary – the one branch of government where FDR and the Democratic Party did not have a majority well beyond the pale – was not merely horrible optics but perilously close to what Fascist governments across the globe were doing.

And he more or less basically confirmed then when he finally announced his measure to the inner circle on February 3.  FDR came inro a meeting with Congressional leadership and his cabinet that day in a hurry with a sheaf of papers. He briefly announced his purpose, giving a few snatches from the message. Senate Majority Leader Robinson flushed deep red. The others did their best to keep their astonishment from their face. In less than five minutes he broke off, said he was sorry he had to leave, but the press was waiting and they’d know about it in a few hours because he was sending it to Congress at noon. The press was a mix of delighted, and disturbed, and he told them far more than he had done so telling his cabinet and Congress. “He kept smiling’ Alsop said, “as if he were asking the assembled newspaper men to applause the perfections of his scheme.”

By this point the meeting in the Cabinet room had broken up to dead silence.  Hatton Summers had the first and clearest reaction: “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips.” But his reaction would be mild compared to Vice President John Nance Garner.  When the message was still being read before Congress, Garmer would leave the rostrum and hold his nose with one hand and gestured thumbs down with the other.  Garner supported the bill for awhile but from this point on he was no longer a loyal follower of FDR.

Few expected this to matter considering Garner’s own opinion of the Vice Presidency’s importance was generally held by Americans. More importantly was how the battle in Congress would take place. In the next article in this series, I will deal with the makeup of the membership of the 75^th Congress, where the most virulent opposition would come from and how the battlelines would form.

The Disruption Series Conclusion: Now That The WGA Strike is Over, Please Tell Us What You Won. Seriously.

 

When it was announced last night that the WGA and the studios had reached a tentative deal that seems certain to end the strike that has lasted more than five months, I was surprised by my feelings.

I expected to feel relief that television would return to some degree of normality within a few months and that this nightmare was over. I expected to feel some empathy for the writers who have spent all this time on the picket lines for an uncertain future. I expected to feel something resembling happiness. But that wasn’t my first reaction.

No what I feel is a combination of visceral contempt and a white-hot rage that this stoppage had to go on as long as it did. And I’m more surprised that the majority of my negative feelings are not directed towards the corporate bosses but rather the writers that have been on strike for so long and the actors that have joined them on the picket line.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be. Over the last several weeks I have become very aware of just how contemptible and elitist the behavior of these guilds have been towards everybody – not just the studios, but the people who work on their sets who don’t have the benefit of working for guilds, members of the political left, fans of their work,  even their own membership who dared the voice anything resembling opposition, and every element of their industry. I expect that within a few weeks or months this may fade, but I do fear that these artists have  incurred damage that will be felt in the years to come and that they were either blind to these consequences or knew of them and didn’t care.

I was going to write this article in a kind of mock celebratory tone at first: to make it very clear how utterly hollow this ‘victory’ is for everybody. But at this point, I don’t think these people – particularly the WGA  - deserve to have this subject treated with humor. This was a deathly serious matter that deserved to be handled with kid gloves. Instead, their policy was pure scorched earth. So while my rage is still fresh, I’m going to explain why all of you people working in the guilds who’ve spent the last five months on picket lines, truly have had your heads up your asses since the beginning.

Now keep in mind, my first job is that of  a TV Critic. I love much of your work and I do appreciate everything you have done for me and people like me for so many years. The thing is,  I know that you are capable of the complete obliviousness that so many people have when they think they’re absolutely right in their position and decide to willingly blind yourself to reality.

First I want to congratulate on something truly remarkable. That you managed to convince your allies on the left that two guilds whose  combined membership have less than half the population of the city of Boston are the face of organized labor, worthy to be talked about as those who are punished for unionizing at a Starbucks or walking a picket line in Detroit. I suppose I shouldn’t be you work in Hollywood and you’re very good at constructing believable if completely fictional narratives.  Which is what the left completely bought into from day one.

Honestly, this says far more about the left’s own blind spots then their own, but I would expect nothing less from people who believe a company with such a problematic racist and bigoted history as Disney as their idols because their decision to have the title character in their live-action Little Mermaid be African American or that one of the most blatant product placement movied in history was actually one of the most brilliant feminist stories of all time. There was no truth to either, but both concepts made the far right heads’ explodes, and that was good enough.  But considering the real problems that organized labor is facing around the country, you’d think even the most extreme progressives would think twice about deciding to back the membership where one prominent member says he is suffering because he has to sell ‘one of his houses.’ That is the kind of tone deaf phrase that the left loves to mock Republican candidates when they say they understand working class struggles. But because it came from Billy Porter, they let it go untouched.

The WGA and SAG-AFTRA have gone out of their way to frame this as a struggle for the soul of their industry against exploitive corporations.  Bullshit. It was bullshit when I first heard it and its bullshit now. Bill Maher had it dead on when he said this was not some struggle where the guilds were some versions of Che Guevara or Ceasar Chavez.  As someone who appreciates everything these guilds do for my entertainment, I was surprised how little empathy I was able to find for them for their struggles.

And that’s because they aren’t really, not the way those at Amazon and Starbucks are facing, not the ones that the UAW is now.  Everyone who worked at the Guild had skills and fallback positions that the people who work in these unions just don’t and they know it.  No one’s lifelong ambition is to work on as a barista or on an assembly line. Everyone on this picket line realized dreams that millions of people around the world would kill for.  Anyone of them could live for weeks or months on ‘the exploitative pay’ that so many members were complaining about. I am reminded of a line I heard from the horror-parody Bodies Bodies Bodies I saw earlier this year. A bunch of Gen Z women are terrified that there is a killer among them and they start shouting at each other about which of them is the biggest victim. One of them shouts about a book the other wrote about coming up from poverty. “You were never poor!” she shouts with contempt. “You’re middle class!” Infuriated, the woman says: “Lower middle class!”
 

No this was not about the future of the industry, mainly because no one can see the future. This was a cash grab. And really the privilege has been showing since the start. Shawn Ryan complained that he wasn’t receiving any money from Netflix for The Night Agent, even though it was a hit series. Aaron Paul telling interviewers he hadn’t received any money from Netflix for Breaking Bad. You couldn’t have given away the game more clearly if you tried. This was never about some kind of exploitations but people wanting more than they thought they were entitled too.  When the loudest voices complaining are millionaire talents, its really hard to argue that this is about the rank and file.

I really would like how the argument for this strike was framed to its membership, particularly everything we increasingly learn about streaming services.  You want to argue that talent isn’t getting their fair share from Netflix? How do even know that Netflix is making untold billions of your labor? The only source for Netflix viewership for years was Netflix and in the last couple of years not only has it been learned that the numbers were inflated but the company’s prizes have been dropping. We have no idea what viewership for so many other streaming services, we basically have little more than the word of the companies.  For all the guilds know for sure, the reason no one has been giving them a fair wage for streaming is because theirs far less money in it than you think there is.  And it’s not like you got nothing for your work: you were all made something for this. No, what you want is the ‘residuals’. That thing that no one else but someone creative makes.  A cashier at McDonalds doesn’t get a bonus from every Big Mac they sell.

A residual is the definition of privilege. Every time someone spends their paycheck paying for a movie or show you appeared in you get money. Kind of makes you slightly exploitive, too. Yes I know the studios and the streamers are benefited off the sweat of your labor.  Like you could have somehow made a Breaking Bad or House of Cards or The Bear with no one willing to give your more money than you needed to anybody. Or are you going to take the critics’ point of view that the art is done for their sakes and no one else’s? Either way, it’s pure elitism.

But I get why you framed this as a struggle between the poor and the studios. Neither one of you could blame the people truly responsible: the viewers.  The fragmenting of the TV audience has been great for your work and art but its increasingly led to smaller and smaller paychecks.  And considering that everyone wants to pay as little possible for anything, when you create a system where the cost to watch an entire series is practically negligible, of course millions of Americans will jump on board.  All of you – the studios, the streamers, the writers, the actors – went to where you thought the money was.

Now the money’s drying up. Your industry has been as a result getting shakier and shakier, particularly over the last few years.  Mainly because you are too good at your jobs: there are hundreds of shows out there, far too many for any one person to hope to follow. Executives have been alarmed about this trend for a while. I imagine they won’t have to worry about it for much longer: this strike has been a huge economic loss for the industry and networks and services have been cancelling shows right and left.

I have little doubt you will frame this in the weeks to come as purely punitive, and it may well be. But it doesn’t change the fact that your actions over the last several months have done much to financially undermine an industry that has been struggling across the board for the last several years. Stephen Amell took an immense amount of a heat a couple of months when he argued about a labor stoppage being ‘reductive and myopic’.  I argued that he knew this better than most because his most recent series Heels was on Starz, a network that has been struggling financially over the recent years.

Well, last night the other shoe dropped. Starz cancelled four series – one of which hadn’t finished filming – because of the strike. One of them was Heels. Other networks have followed suit in recent days mainly because of the financial losses of the strike.  The Guilds might have argued that they were trying to provide financial security for the future  but its going to be hard for security if there are fewer shows and by definition, fewer jobs.

And all of this comes after a loss of $12 billion to the state of California which has been felt in the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers who rely on the film and television industry to make a living but do not have the protections of a union. Almost nothing has been said about them, and those who have tried to argue for them have been stomped down and silenced. Drew Barrymore attempted to start her talk show in order to provide a living to the people who worked for her who hadn’t seen a paycheck in five months. The reaction of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA was to essentially shame her on social media and bully her into reversing her course of action.  You didn’t do the same to Bill Maher but the left was more than willing to do that for you because they already hate him. And the fact that Stephen King decided to take him to task is just offensive. A millionaire castigating another millionaire for thinking of the people who work for him instead of his fellow writers is a line most of you would think to stupid for some of your movies.

All of this is just going to do more short term and long term damage to an industry that has been on shaky ground for years.  None of this has done anything to help any of the problems, short term or long term, Hollywood might face but it’s never been about this. It was about doing what so many accuse the rich of doing: getting as much money out of the industry before the lights go out.

 This may very well be the tipping point for Peak TV: you and your ilk have been whining about having fewer options before, I can’t imagine you’ll have more now.  For network TV, this strike could be the nail in the coffin; cable has been undergoing more and more mergers causing the market to shrink, and who knows what the future of streaming will be going forward.

 I don’t know if the general public noticed or truly cared about the labor stoppage the last several months. But I think we’ll find out very soon. They’re pissed that the fall season has been ruined, and they’re impatient for new shows (which make no mistake is why you got the deal you did now).  The public has a short memory and maybe by the time new seasons finally start airing again, they’ll have forgotten what this is all about. And if I were you, I’d hope so. Because right now, I am royally pissed at what you claim to have done in the name of the future of your industry but was really all about getting more money in a field where many of you make more of us in a month than the average American sees in a lifetime. You’ll celebrate your victory while millions of us (myself included) continue the long search for a job that most of you would probably consider beneath you to work at.

And do celebrate what you’ve accomplished. You managed to drive an entire industry to a standstill for five months. You caused hundreds of people to suffer a loss of income and several of your future shows to be cancelled, causing future loss of income. You snuffed out every voice of opposition and managed to maintain complete loyalty to your cause even though members on the picket lines must have had constant doubts. And you did all of this in name of a slight raise of income for your work in an industry that is already in trouble and that the lion’s share of the people who watched as a distraction if they had time when they came home from dinner after their ten-hour grind at work.   I guess the progressives are right. You are the face of organized labor.

But I am professionally grateful for this stoppage. Because of your immense desire to force the industry to make more money for you than you were getting,  the Emmys have been postponed until January. Which means I’ve had more time than usual to get caught up so many of the series I usually don’t get a chance to because of the lack of time. Thanks to your bull-headedness, I managed to see Welcome to Chippendale’s, Poker Face and can now finish series like Andor and Wednesday in a leisurely fashion rather than the rush-rush I usually can. I can watch series I wouldn’t normally, like Bad Sisters and Daisy Jones & The Six and I can take my time watching the most recent seasons of The Crown and Only Murders in the Building. So when I finally have to do my Emmys briefing (in December) I can write a position of more confidence than usual.  So you did make at least one person’s job easier as a result of your stupidity: mine.  I know that this was far from your intention, but let’s be honest: much of this was done without any real thinking of consequences for people. So an earnest thank you for that if nothing else. I’m truly grateful. Please don’t let the circumstances repeat  any time soon.

Underrated Series: Millennium

 

 

This entry requires a bit of personal introduction first.

Approximately ten years ago when I was beginning to write about television seriously I decided to rewatch The X-Files and review every episode for my column and, later on, my own blog. (My reviews of the series were among the first entries that went up there.) At this point in my career as a reviewer The X-Files had been among the first series I ever posted reviews on the internet for but they had been lost several years previous and I wanted to see if my opinions had evolved in the years that had passed.

By this point I was also involved in the purchasing of many of the books written about television series. There had already been countless books written about The X-Files but the most detailed one to that point was Robert Shearman’s Wanting to Believe. Because Shearman wanted to be a completist, he opted to not only rewatch every episode of The X-Files but also the short-lived spinoff The Lone Gunman as well as Millennium. Now Lone Gunmen had an obvious connection to the parent series, but Millennium’s  was more tangential.

Chris Carter, who created The X-Files follow-up project was Millennium. It had taken over The X-Files old Friday night at 9 pm time slot in October of 1996 but it had never achieved the popularity, either critical or from fans that Carter’s previous creation had.  From its debut until its cancellation in May of 1999, it was always compared unfavorably to The X-Files, viewed as relentlessly dark, constantly pretentious, formulaic and having no direction, and from its premiere until its cancellation never clear about what it was supposed to be about.

At the time of its original run I had almost completely ignored it. I wasn’t watching TV with the same furor I would even a few years later and the critical response basically left me cold to the idea. I vaguely remember watching maybe two or three episodes until it ended and thinking nothing of it.   I would have had cause to ignore it altogether had not in Season 7 of The X-Files, Chris Carter decided to air an episode titled ‘Millennium’  that was about the lead and some of the themes of the series. (Full disclosure: it’s not very good and is remembered mostly because it’s the first episode where Mulder and Scully kiss.)

Now Shearman ended up rewatching all of Millennium for his book, primarily because of that same episode of The X-Files. Shearman was being a completist. It is only because I read Shearman’s book and eventually most of the reviews of the series that I decided in the midst of my rewatch (around the time I reached Season 4 of The X-Files) that I should do the same. I had no intention of reviewing the show but at the time I was between jobs and I figured it would kill time. 

Millennium was not streaming anywhere in 2015  but I had a ready recourse. By this point in my career I had been using Netflix to rent DVDs of TV series I had never watched before. I had done so with Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad and I would do the same with the first two season of House of Cards.  So over the course of a little more than a year, I ended up watching the entire series. In a way, my timing couldn’t have been better: society was about to enter the same kind of grim and dystopian mood that was the atmosphere of Millennium nearly two decades earlier.

Even now I’ve never been sure what to make of Millennium.  Certainly X-Files fans are divided on it. Assessing it for his book Shearman admits the tone is ‘schizophrenic’ and can be pretentious, but he also thinks that it’s the ‘most ambitious thing that Ten-Thirteen (Carter’s production team) ever attempted” and at times, “the most powerful and most thoughtful.” This opinion is not held by the writers of the next most detailed episode guide of  The X-Files; Monster of the Week, where both writers dismiss the series as pretentious and heavy handed. I think there is an argument that both reviewers are correct in their assumptions: Millennium is everything people say it is both the good and just as frequently the bad.  But the reason I think the series never got the respect It did in the 1990s and still does not today is because Millennium was, perhaps even more than The X-Files, ahead of its time when it came to how television was operating.

Trying to describe what the series is about is nearly impossible because I’m pretty sure it never figured it out. That, however, is to be expected when you consider that every season it was on the air it had a different set of showrunners each of whom had what amounted to a completely different mission statement for Millennium, one that almost always completed contradicted the previous showrunners version. There are some devoted fans convinced that there was an underlying theme to the show about certain elements but I’m inclined to doubt that, partly because it is designed by Chris Carter and he made it very clear after the fact he went into The X-Files with no road map for its mythology. I should also add that Carter, who was the initial creator of Millennium may not have intended for this series to be a mythology show.

When Millennium opens Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) is a former FBI agent who has just moved to Seattle with his wife Catherine and their young daughter Jordan. Frank quit the Bureau after jailing a killer who took Polaroids of his victims, and a second unknown party sent him Polaroids of Catherine. He moved to Seattle and is now consulting with the Millennium Group – which Carter says is an organization for former law enforcement officials who are working together to ‘battle the dark forces of the coming millennium’.  Frank is a master profiler who tells a Seattle detective he has the ability to see what the killer sees. “It’s my gift,” he tells him. “It’s my curse.” The Group offered to help him understand this gift and he and his family have moved to what they call ‘the yellow house’ – the symbol of purity in the bleak world of Millennium.

Another series would make it foremost importance to explain the nature of Frank’s gift: is it intuitive or supernatural? A flaw of the series – not the first or the biggest – was that it never came close to doing so and that the Millennium Group never helped in that regard.  The problem that more people had with the show in the first season was how relentlessly dark it was in subject matter.  Throughout the first season the major focus of Frank Black would be tracking down ‘the serial killer of the week’.  A complaint was how utterly formulaic this became after just a few episodes: Shearman starts to become tired of it as early as the fourth.  There was a reason for that: in 1996, this kind of series focused on getting inside the heads of serial killers was unheard of in broadcast television. (That same year NBC would debut Profiler which featured Ally Walker essentially doing the same role that Henriksen did.) And I’d argue that neither TV critics nor audiences were equipped for this, certainly not those who had spent the last three years following Mulder and Scully chasing down aliens and monsters.

It’s now crystal clear that this was a major way Millennium was ahead of the curve. Within seven years CBS would debut Criminal Minds which ran for more than fifteen years and dealt with an entire team doing exactly what Frank Black was doing. Even by that point, the procedural had begun to focus very much on this same point Law and Order: SVU debuted the year after Millennium was cancelled and so many of its killers make the ones Black chased look tame by comparison.  Perhaps if Millennium had stayed the course of the mission statement Carter set forth in Season One, it might have been a bigger hit.

The problem came late in Season One with the episode Lamentation. In itself, this is by far one of the most brilliant episodes of the entire series. Frank spends much of the episode dealing with a killer named Fabricant, who is labeled the most ruthless killer the show has yet dealt with – and trumps it by the end of the episode with the creation of Lucy Butler, by far the series greatest creation. Sarah Jane Redmond initially plays Lucy as a gullible woman whose become Fabricant’s prison wife. By the halfway point of the episode, she’s carved the second kidney out of his body and has left it in Frank’s refrigerator. She ends up in Frank’s house and Bob Bletcher, at this point one of the major series regulars, clears Catherine and Jordan out. He sees Lucy at the stop of the stairwell. She then transforms into a demon (the show refers to her as ‘The Gehenna Devil’) and cuts Bletcher’s throat and leaves him hanging from the ceiling.

This episode is a complete shock to the formula. The problem was the series started to get too ambitious. In the next episode ‘Powers, Principalities, Thrones & Dominions’, Frank gets back to work, but now he begins to encounter hallucinations and gets the first signs that angels and demons are in the world. At one point, Frank is told  by an angel that he is caught the middle of a supernatural battle and his own survival is irrelevant to these forces. That’s an impressive leap to take for any series, but its very hard for one that has spent its first season telling you its just about serial killers and the Black family.  One is reminded almost of how Supernatural started out being about two brothers trying to find their demon hunting father and ended up being a battle between good and evil in which their own fates – and that of the human race – seemed truly incidental.

By the end of the season it really does seem like the show may have found a niche in its ending – but then they change the game again. In the season finale Frank has managed to thwart another killer while on vacation and he and his family go home. Frank leaves Catherine for a moment and comes back to find her missing. The note the season ends on is so innocuous that you almost think it’s a misunderstanding and everything will be fine – but the series has changed forever, and we didn’t know it.

The first season of Millennium is generally considered the best because it’s the most consistent. Henriksen is good throughout, and never steps wrong. There are many brilliant episodes, most of them tied to serial killers with occasional supernatural issues. The problem is the show doesn’t have a handle on its supporting cast. The only performer who holds her own throughout the series is Brittany Tiplady, who plays Frank’s daughter Jordan. She was always a talented performer and she’s fun to watch and sweet.  No one else holds up as well. Megan Gallagher is one of the most talented actresses in television, but as Catherine she was never given anything more to do than to be a supportive wife in Season One. Her character actually got worse in Season 2. The other prominent regular was Terry O’Quinn as Peter Watts. There were several regulars for the Millennium Group but O’Quinn made the most appearances in Season 1 with eleven.  O’Quinn’s work is solid throughout, but he does not have much of a personality. In a way, O’Quinn would be a victim of the writers’ problems with determine with The Millennium Group was Watts’ personality would change as they redefined it.

In Season Two Glen Morgan & James Wong, who had written several episodes in Season One, officially took over as showrunners. In the season premiere, they tore down the foundation by having Frank track down Catherine, who has been kidnapped and shows such brutality that he kills her abductor. Immediately afterwards a horrified Catherine tells Frank to move out and they separate for the rest of the season. Then the Millennium Group begins to change: Frank now logs in on a computer that has an Ouroboros symbol as well as a countdown for the millennium. We are now being reminded of it from here on it, and it starts to become grating.

From this point on, the Millennium group itself – which to this point has been solely about law enforcement – now begins to take on a sinister nature. There are meetings with old men in cabins, we meet a woman named Lara Means who seems to have a gift for vision and profiling, the cases begin to become more supernatural and at one point it seems that the group is now involved in deeper themes like hunting down the true cross and has separated into sects calls Owls and Roosters.  Lance Henriksen wrote in his memoirs years later that the sudden change in the show’s tone utterly baffled him, and it starts to become apparent in his performances. Henriksen is notorious for having a great stoneface but starting in Season 2 as the mythology begins to develop, you can see just how frustrated he is that his character has to go along with what both we – and the audience, frankly – clearly think is nonsense.

In a way, this is also a foreshadowing of how television would become just a few years later: initially monster of the week episodes having an underlying supernatural mythology. This very year that Millennium was making the effort and frequently bungling it, Buffy The Vampire Slayer was airing its full season and doing everything right that this show blunders with. That the series is increasingly taking on a tone that is very similar to The X-Files isn’t helping the cause of the show either. Sometimes the supernatural elements work very well, to be sure but there’s so much of an attempt to tie everything in to the upcoming end of the millennium that you’re genuinely wondering if they know what they’re doing.

Then at the end of Season Two, when it looked almost certain that the show was about to be cancelled, Morgan and Wong decided on their boldest stroke. They decided to tear down their failed vision for the series and make it window dressing for a power conspiracy. At one point Frank tells Catherine that he agrees the Millennium Group is nothing more than an insidious cult built on world domination. And their plan is to bring about the apocalypse…not in six hundred days, but now. At one point Frank insists: “There is no millennium!”

A contagion kills of a family while they are having their chicken dinners and we learn that a genetically enhanced virus is going to be released. Members of the group will be given a vaccine to survive – but not their families.

The end of Season 2 is terrifying and features incredible moments including an extraordinary nine minute segment when a hallucinating Lara Means, who has been plagued by vision all season, has a vision to a Patti Smith song in which we see her being driven mad. Describing it is pointless because it defies description: I’ve never seen anything like in thirty years. At the end of it Lara is wheeled off catatonic, but not before she gives Frank her portion of the vaccine.

In the final scene of the episode Frank and his family go to a cabin in the woods to prepare for the end.  Catherine insists Jordan be given the vaccine. That night she develops symptoms of the contagion and walks off into the woods to die. In the final scene, Frank’s hair has gone shock white. His visions seemed to have turned the static and he looks ahead dumbly. Jordan asks about her mother but is distracted by her father’s hair. She cuddles into his arms happily.  It’s one of the most brilliant closing scenes in the history of television…

…except Millennium was then renewed for a third season. Morgan and Wong had left, and while they say they had a plan for a third season post-apocalypse I have my doubts. Instead the third season steps wrong immediately by telling us: remember that apocalypse we spent the last two episodes building up to? Didn’t happen. (They didn’t come up with a better explanation actually.) Anyway Catherine’s dead now, the series has moved from Seattle to Virginia, Frank’s working for the FBI again and he’s been partnered with a new agent, Emma Hollis. To say the show lost the narrative thread is an understatement.

I give credit to the new showrunner Chip Johannsen for making the best he could with an impossible situation. To be fair, he did his best with what he’d been left with. It wasn’t nearly enough, but there were moment throughout Season Three where you could hear the music of the old Millennium. But yet again, the series made an error with the Millennium group. At the end of Season Two, it was presumed that Peter Watts had betrayed the group in order to save Frank and had died saving Lara.  Now he’s reinvented as a dangerous foe, trying to win Frank and Emma back on to the side of The Millennium Group.  There are occasionally times it works – at one point Peter is forced to deal with the abduction and possible murder of his daughter unless he betrays the group – but it’s yet another twist that didn’t help and already confused series.

Perhaps the best move of the show was to give more time to Brittany Tiplady as Jordan. In one episode, she seems to become a victim of death itself which leads to Lance Henriksen in one of his greatest moments on the show as he offers an agonized and confused prayer as last rites are being read over her. In another episode Jordan, who has occasionally seemed to have the same ‘gift’ as her father, becomes convinced her neighbor is a demon. She has his gift but none of the maturity so she can’t realize that the real threat is a child. It might have been the right move for the show going forward, but by this time the series was living on borrowed time: Millennium was cancelled not long after, though it did manage to have a strong final run in its last several episodes. (I won’t give away the actual ending, even though it’s pretty ambiguous.)

Everything about Millennium had elements that would have been so much more fitting had it aired just a few years later. The series was so too dark for broadcast television in 1996 but by the end of Season One, Oz debuted on HBO the first in an era of TV series that would focus almost entirely on characters so much darker than anything Frank Black would deal with.  These days almost everything on network television is darker than the threats that Frank had to deal with on a weekly basis.  Similarly the shifts in story arcs are something we are more used too, along with deeper mythologies. And shows like The Walking Dead have their starting points in the boxes that Morgan and Wong ended Season Two in.

And so much of the threats that Frank dealt with involving the Millennium group that seemed far-fetched a quarter of a century ago are part of the daily discourse: ritualistic killers, belief that demons and angels are walking among us, cults that seem to control the world – hell, the last few years we lived through our own plague and some people thought that was a government conspiracy. These days an entire generation has been named for the era that we were all so terrified of and are now just as certain that the end-times are upon us. And that actually lead me to the reason that despite everything that took place on Millennium there might have been a message to lead us forward…and it came from the most unlikely source.

Those of you who have read my reviews on The X-Files remember the piece I wrote on Darin Morgan and how he utterly changed the world of television in just four scripts.  One year after leaving The X—Files Glen persuaded his brother to write a script and make his directorial debut for Millennium. He actually did so for two episodes which most fans of the series consider the show’s highpoint because they are practically the only comic episodes in the entire three seasons of the series.  They are regarded highly by his peers: ‘Somehow Satan Got Behind Me’ and ‘Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense’ both received award nominations; the latter from the Emmys. And its that one I want to discuss.

Darin Morgan’s comic episodes for The X-Files were hysterical but had a gloomy undertone which you’d think would have fit perfectly for Millennium.  If anything, his episodes are ridiculously cheerful, which is fitting because he is making fun of the pretentions of Millennium.  This seemed a little harsh: Shearman describes it as ‘kicking a puppy with a broken leg’.  But the thing is, after spending so much time in gloom and pretensions, we loved it.

Jose Chung for those of you who might not know was played by Charles Nelson Reilly in Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, Morgan’s final episode of The X-Files.   This could have seemed like the most blatant X-Files crossover at all but at Shearman points out ‘this is no more like an X-File than an episode of Millennium.”  Chung is writing a book about Selfphosophy – a religion founded by a sci-fi writer that is primarily centered in Hollywood and is set in secrecy and intends to sue anyone who questions it. (No Morgan doesn’t even pretend he’s satirizing Scientology here; you’re honestly surprised he didn’t get sued.)

Chung shows up when a fan who was expelled from Selfosophy Joseph Ratfinkovich, ends up getting electrocuted. Chung ends up meeting Black at the scene and its wonderful to watch Henriksen in action throughout the episode as he gets to make fun of everything he and the show stands for. At one point, he reads a story where a version of Frank Black shows up at a crime scene, chats up all the women, delivers snappy one-liners and punches somebody who suggests he look at the corpse. The message of the episode is ‘Don’t Be Dark’, which is against everything Millennium stands for.

 In case I haven’t made it clear Morgan is making a no-holds barred attack on all of the pretension that the show (which his brother is writing!) stands for. At one point Frank asks Peter about the Groups attitude towards Selfosophy and Peter shuts him up immediately:

Frank: “You’ll stare down evil incarnate.

Peter: Evil incarnate can’t sue.

Everything Chung says is a repudiation of Millennium and there’s something curiously inspiring about it. At one point, when he is being threatened by someone so angry that he has mocked his cause, Chung angrily defends his right to wallow in sarcastic humor.  I won’t tell you Chung’s ultimate fate (in keeping with Morgan it is equal parts comedy and tragedy) but he gets the last word not only of the episode but of any idea of what the show considers about the apocalypse.  He predicts that the next millennium “will usher in one thousand years of the same crap.”

For a writer who found so much of his comedy in bleakness, that’s damn near an inspiring message. Chung actually points out in the episode every generation thinks that it is living in times of tumultuous change. Does this generation think the apocalypse is coming any day now? The previous generation was just as certain of it.  Millennium argues every conceivable threat we thought was coming – there’s even an episode devoted to a cult around Y2K – but as Mulder and Scully said in the X-Files episode, on January 1^st 2000, the world didn’t end.  Every generation has people who are certain the world will end in their lifetime. They keep getting proven wrong.

Millennium still can’t be found on streaming but all three seasons are available on DVD. I advise fans of TV to track it down. Perhaps this generation’s audience will find it just right. I myself might end up finally buying the whole series just to have it.  We have lived through an era of dystopia that does seem to increasingly mirror the world in that series. Maybe doomsday will come in our lifetime. But the more I think about it, we’re not that lucky. I think we’re far more likely to have another thousand years of the same old crap. And maybe we’re better off that way.