"Millennium, S1E2: Gehenna"

In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, there's nine circles of Hell. The first circle's reserved for nickle-and-dime offenders--jaywalkers and such--and the ninth circle is Old Scratch himself. 

Too bad Dante couldn't live to see 1996, because I'm sure he'd add a special level for the guy who invented multilevel marketing and the owners of companies therein. 

It's a pretty common sight: Young, clean-cut salesmen and -women, going from door to door in business wear, rain or shine, hot or cold, selling cable TV, a set of knives, overpriced financial plans, or whatever else they're selling.

They smile as they deliver their spiel at your front door,and peddle their goods with all the zeal of a preacher, but their smiles are phony and their eyes are dead. I really do feel sad for 'em.

Hmm, that reminds me of a case in San Francisco. There was this company called Gehenna, and it sold hair-care products through a call-center. As my luck would have it, there was something a lot more sinister under the surface...
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Well...I can say for sure that this second episode opens with many, many questions. It starts out with a bunch of college-age guys out on a joyride at midnight. One of them's obviously ill at ease, and his peers are egging him on--the guy next to him proffers something that looks like a postage stamp.

There's very little dialogue; the images tell a story that's open to interpretation. It appears at first glance to be some kind of fraternity initiation. Some instinct at the back of my head wants me to say that it became popular during the mid-90s to play fraternity and sorority initiations for drama. Animal House and movies like it played the premise purely for laughs, but in the 90s, the trend went the other way, and movies and TV started to show the consequences.

The consequences soon become very real indeed. That stamp was spiked with what we later learn was LSD and some other substances, and our hapless pledge finds himself on a bad trip. The other guys throw him out of the car, circle around him (the idea is to scare him with the headlights), and drive off. Alone, scared, and hallucinating, he wanders around. Something descends upon him from above. We flash back-and-forth between a bat-like demon and a man with night-vision goggles, who viciously beats the youth to death.

Immediately after the titles, we're treated to an opening quote, which we'll see until the final episode.

"I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen."--W.H. Auden

I was putting up security lights all around our home when the phone rang. It was Peter Watts, my friend and colleague at the Group. Apparently San Francisco's finest found a gruesome discovery in a park, and Millennium saw fit to take a closer look. "Gruesome discovery." Their exact words. 

I find myself wondering if they make any other kinds of discoveries. Maybe Peter'll call me on St. Patrick's Day and tell me that the NYPD found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow...or maybe a stash of the Easter Bunny's eggs a month too early. You know, just for a change of pace. 

My wife Catherine came home on cloud nine yesterday. She just got a job as a social case-worker. I suppose you could say we're two sides of the coin now: I catch bad guys; she helps both their direct victims and anyone left in their wake. It's for the sake of her job that I installed those lights--she comes home at night now, and I figured a little extra peace of mind would help.
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I joined the guys at the crime scene in San Francisco. Good thing it's not too bright out, or else Peter Watts' bald head would blind me.

The clues: a pile of ashes with a human ear sitting right on top...more like a Van Gogh than a John Doe. I saw something: a man's face behind a thick glass plate, with a bright light behind him. The poor bastard was alive when he fried.

Turns out he wasn't alone: There were several other piles of ashes buried around the park. We took samples back to SFPD, where a forensics specialist and Group member named Jim Penseyres analyzed everything. He's an all-right kind of guy, I suppose. Brilliant at what he does. 

He came back to us with news: A few of the samples had traces of LSD and several other compounds, which we traced back to an abandoned dry-cleaning plant, abandoned because of a chemical spill a couple of years ago. The place looked like a pretty good location for a horror movie.

 We didn't find too much there, except for a couple of teeth that we later learned belonged to a young man named Eedo Bolow. A quick look through police records revealed that he used to live in Petaluma with his folks.  

Needless to say, dear old Mom and Dad didn't welcome Peter and me with open arms; they thought we were the cops. Eventually, they warmed up, and even gave us the last letter their boy wrote to them. So...he was a runaway, or at least that's what I thought.

Back at base, Peter translated for us. Among passages such as, "I am cutting the ties that prevent my ascendance to a higher stage," we found some choice tidbits about "burning in the fires of Gehenna," Gehenna being the Hebrew word for "hell." There was some other stuff about a miscalculation at the pyramid of Giza; I'll probably find a book about it in Things You Never Knew Existed! the next time it comes in the mail. They've got all sorts of crazy stuff about Nikola Tesla and other conspiracy theories, especially now that the millennium is right around the corner. 

Something told me I'd be needed back at the chemical plant. Sure enough, I was right. A bunch of kids were joyriding around in German cars, and one of them caught my eye. He was visibly scared out of his wits, probably tripping on LSD. I got him before anyone else could and took him back to the station, where I interviewed him.

Trying to read him the riot act was pointless. I could see in his eyes that he was just a terrified little boy in spite of his 19 years. He started rambling about phone numbers and serial numbers, about discipline and prosperity. He sounded so...earnest, so compelling. Then he got himself so worked up that he collapsed and died. 
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When I got back home to Seattle, that word--"Gehenna"--gnawed at me. I went down to my computer and ran it through the search engine. The first hit was the Hebrew word. The second hit was "Gehenna International." This could be interesting. 

I called up another friend at the Group, Mike Atkins, who was still in San Francisco. Told him everything I saw on the screen: Gehenna deals in chemicals, industrial products, and a lot of other good stuff, but the one that jumped out at me was hair care products. Soon as I said "chemicals," he told me that he had just analyzed that boy's clothes, and they had traces of sarin in them. 
The word rang a bell: I remembered seeing something on the news about people on a subway in Japan getting gassed with the stuff. Wonder why they didn't send me there...eh, they must have had someone else on it. 

I went to talk to Mike again, but all I got was a dial tone. Alarm bells went off in my head, and I ran off to follow him.
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Uh, hi. I'm Mike Atkins, from the Millennium Group. Frank invited me to tell my side of the story here. I'm really the only one who can tell it--I may be old, but I can remember everything about that night, clear as anything.

Right after I said goodbye to Frank on the phone, I headed over to that old dry-cleaning plant. 

It's funny: Everybody knew about the accident from a few years back, and the air should have been so thick with the chemicals as to make me choke. Not only could I breathe just fine, I couldn't smell much of anything. It occurred to me that a "condemned" notice probably doesn't mean much if you can bribe someone to draft one up for you.

I started out in a room piled high with papers and boxes--accounting, I figured--and moved on to what looked like a classroom. Where you'd expect to see a chalkboard there was instead a screen with slides flashing on it: "Facilitate envy," the first one said; it was followed by another that said "Work will set you free." I know my history...Knowing where those words come from immediately told me that these guys are nothing but bad news. 

Up on the ceiling, there was a big black dome, like one of those security-camera things. I thought I saw a faint flash of green up inside it. It was probably nothing, just my overactive imagination, or so I thought at the time.

I pressed on and found myself in the biggest area, the "warehouse." This must be where they stock the products: the hair-care stuff, sets of knives, what have you. It looked kinda like the end of "Indiana Jones." 
Couple things caught my eye: Boxes were marked with chemical symbols, warning signs, Chinese characters...My better instincts and my curiosity were at war, and curiosity won out. I found a crowbar and opened one up; inside, I found an assault rifle and a bunch of ammo. 
Jesus! You'd think they were getting ready for a siege.

And then, I found it: An industrial-size microwave oven, piled high with a mountain of ash and human bones and skulls. I poked my head in a little, and felt a pair of hands roughly shove me inside. Behind me, through the glass, there were two glowing green dots, like a man wearing night-vision goggles. I kicked myself right then and there: there was something in that globe on the ceiling.

A bright light came on, and it started humming. There was a brief tingle followed by the worst pain you could ever imagine. I was boiling like a three-minute egg, except I was alive! I banged at the door and yelled as loud as I could, but the heat washed over me.

Next thing I remember, I'm in a hospital bed. In and out of consciousness, I hear a voice say that I'll pull through. I don't know if there's a heaven or not, but if there is, there'd better be a spot for Frank Black among the heroes, not just for getting me out of a tight spot, but also for all the hell he goes through every other day...
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...So, "Gehenna." Not only is this the first proper episode of the series, but it also changes the nature of the Museum's coverage. The first episode had a fairly easy-to-follow narrative, which allowed me to freely juggle, edit, and fuse together parts of the story as I saw fit. The ultimate goal was to weave readers in and out of the narrative, with my own commentary serving as a counterpoint to the main action.

Not so in "Gehenna." This time around, the episode is composed of about ten or fifteen interlocking pieces, all of which are needed if the story is to make any sense. As I tried to streamline it by putting one or two details together, the whole thing fell apart. For example, when the Group goes from the park to the abandoned factory, the idea was to put the clues from the factory grounds into the park, and collapse the two together. When I did that, it opened several plot holes: How will he know to go to the factory later on? To omit the one and mention it later simply would not do.

The solution was to report on almost everything, but condense. Dialogue exchanges were reduced to one or two sentences; Frank's conversation with Catherine about the nature of evil got cut because it was too good to simply gloss over, but proved too long to retain. To include every single detail was never the intent: this is why I have the disclaimer, "watch the episodes for yourself."

Enough about the rewriting process; what of the episode itself?

To begin with, this, not the pilot, is the true beginning of the series. The pilot was but a prologue, an introduction to the show's overall world. Now that we're all hooked, the second episode introduces all of the major themes: dark secrets hidden in plain sight; millennial paranoia; apocalyptic thought; esoteric knowledge; and, finally, the epic battle between good and evil and the people who find themselves caught up in that battle.

How do I go about this? Oh, never mind--I'll just take it blow-by-blow.

1. ESOTERIC KNOWLEDGE--Millennium Group agent Mike Atkins makes a reference to a miscalculation at the Great Pyramids of Giza: "There is a deliberate error in the Great Pyramid in Giza, an architectural anomaly that some prophets have cited as an error in our calculation of the true calendar year. Some believe it sets the date of the apocalypse in 19981."

The truth is likely more prosaic: This very well-researched website comments that the miscalculation was a way to ensure that the innermost chamber was made up of right angles.

After all the Mayan Calendar stuff from 2012, Atkins' musings on prophecy sounded more than a little suspect. That's where the joke about Things You Never Knew Existed comes from--as far as I know, that catalog still sells conspiracy-theory books, and they certainly sold a lot of them around the year 2000.

2: AUM SHINRIKYO : Here's the best resource I could find, and it's fairly heavy-duty. Having perused the document, several things pop out. There are references to mind-altering drugs (Gehenna's LSD-laced stamps), a preoccupation with...eeeuuuurrrrgghhh...Nostradamus*, and most importantly, recruiting through "computer stores, book stores, and noodle shops."

(*Interesting side note: While I was attending Moraine Valley Community College--2005-2008--I became heavily interested in anime. One of my trips to the college library yielded a book called Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture, which was published alongside an exhibition of Takashi Murakami's art. It's more or less a complete history of the otaku subculture, and there was a passage which stated that Nostradamus became fairly popular in 1970s/1980s Japan, following a wave of interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. This passage in turn tied into Aum Shinrikyo.)

AS and Gehenna are cults of personality, semi-religious institutions built around a single spiritual leader. This little detail will have much greater ramifications on the Millennium Group as we go through the series, but I'd rather not spoil too much too soon. ;)

3: MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING: Aum Shinrikyo recruited through venues such as computer stores. Okay. Millennium successfully translated that minor detail for an American audience: Gehenna International takes epic religious concepts and uses them for the venal purpose of selling hair-care products and gun-running.

Most real-life MLM companies aren't as over-the-top as Gehenna is, but their tactics as presented in the episode are more or less accurate to real-life testimonials. Indeed, many of those who have walked away from MLM companies have compared their time with a particular company to being in a cult. (Although...Were "Gehenna" to play it for 100% realism, surely Eedo would have tried to sell the hair-care products to his mother instead of leaving that goodbye note. Then again, I suspect that it's part of the point: Gehenna is masquerading as an MLM company.)

I don't know how Gehenna found the boys who work for them--help wanted ads, maybe--but I can tell you that, if the episode were to take place today, they'd use Monster and other job-search websites to find their recruits, and they'd use attractively-worded ads promising to offer whatever it takes to build "the good life." I very nearly fell into one of these when I was unemployed in 2012; fortunately, my better sense kicked in after I did my research. (As an aside, the episode's official coding is "MLM-101." An intro course on multi-level marketing?)

4: RELIGION, MORALITY, AND PHILOSOPHY: I was pleasantly surprised to find that "Gehenna" used its symbolism sparingly. The company in the storyline takes its name from a Hebrew word which basically means "hell," and that's just about it. Far stronger is the episode's moral and philosophical angle: "What is evil?" Evil, as Frank Black will learn as the series continues, takes on many forms.

"Gehenna's" evil takes the form of numbers: profits; phone numbers; addresses; Social Security numbers; that "miscalculation" within the Great Pyramid; Bible verses...Amid all of this, it's important to remember that numbers are a uniquely human invention. Mike Atkins says it best: "I've seen the face of evil, Frank. I've looked into its eyes, seen it staring back at me. The face has always been a man's face, a human face. I've always believed that evil is born in a cold heart and a weak mind."

Evil also manifests as a force which removes personal identity. All of the guys who work at the call-center identify themselves as "Bob Smith" or some variation thereof. Let me pause for a moment and clarify my comment about the name "Gehenna:" The episode points out that it's both another name for hell and also a location near Jerusalem where people sacrificed children.

Finally, evil is, at least within Millennium's purview, very mundane. The cult leader is not a flamboyant preacher, but a former chemical engineer named Ricardo Clemente.

Is he all that mundane, though? Right before he goes to see Mike in the hospital, Frank gets a good look at Ricardo, and he sees a demonic face.

5. VISUALS: In "Pilot," I said that much of Millennium's impact comes from how it uses its visuals. I want to discuss three main stages: Frank's home, the park in San Francisco, and the abandoned dry-cleaning plant.

First, the yellow house: It's shot and lit with warm, autumnal colors and a bright blue sky. It's the one environment in which the audience feels the most welcome. Even scenes at night retain this quality thanks to the lighting and painted walls. The house's welcoming qualities are tested in the first scene after the opening titles, in which Frank puts up the security lights. He has a perfectly rational reason, but one can't help but feel that the outside world is already creeping in on the bubble of the yellow house.

Second, the park in San Francisco: The green grass and flowers make the scene as welcoming as that of the yellow house, but the gray, overcast sky gives it an unpleasant weight. This element carries two meanings: First, it means that Frank is "on the case," and second, it signifies the Millennium Group. Scenes in various rooms at the police station are equally as unpleasant, with harsh fluorescent lights, dingy walls, and darkened rooms with lots of shadows. This is the world which the Millennium Group occupies.

Third, the Gehenna building: I alluded to how unsettling it is with Frank's comment that "you could shoot a horror movie" on the premises. Seriously, it's all dark gray aluminum siding, beige gravel, and dark iron scaffolding...and maroon puddles of rusty/bloodied water.

Inside, it's no better: The "Bob Smith" employees work in a mostly dark room with a row of windows letting in harsh outside light. It feels like a prison, or something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The projector, which displays messages such as "CREATE ENVY" and "WORK WILL SET YOU FREE" only strengthens the Orwell parallels, and the giant industrial microwave that nearly kills Mike Atkins suggests Nazi concentration camps. Uniquely, it's treated as just an extra little detail, and doesn't detract from the overall "dehumanization is evil" message. There are many forms of dehumanization; this is but one example of many.

The last and most important visual element in the episode is the demonic face that Frank sees when he looks at Ricardo. This face will appear several times as the first season progresses...I'll leave it at that, but I'll call back to it when it appears.

And there you have it: "Gehenna." Be sure to tune in next time, when we cover two more episodes: "Dead Letters," and "Kingdom Come."
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(Millennium copyright 1996, Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All screenshots are property of Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Millennium--This Is Who We Are for episode transcripts, which helped me adapt the episodes.)

"Millennium, S1E1: Pilot."

Welcome to Seattle. We're famous for Starbucks coffee, space needles, sleeplessness, and lots of rain.

My story--the parts of it you came to hear, anyway--begins in a really crummy part of town. Like Alec Guinness said in that one sci-fi movie, it's "a wretched hive of scum and villainy." What was it called? "Space" something...never had much use for sci-fi anyway.

Pardon me; I haven't introduced myself. I'm Frank Black. A few years ago, I was a profiler for the FBI. These days, I work for the Millennium Group as a modern-day Continental Op. 

Hope you got a strong stomach--you're going to need it.

Millennium's pilot episode sets the tone for the series right from the beginning, with a drab, desolate shot of a gray, rain-drenched street-corner in Seattle.

That establishing shot also introduces one of Millennium's signature special effects: Each episode's establishing shot starts out with an infrared-like quality, which gradually resolves into focus. It's like we're looking at a photograph of a crime scene and "falling into" the story behind the crime.

And the scene of the crime? It's a peep-show called "The Ruby Tip." (Why do I keep calling it "The Rose Tip?"--NT) As far as sordidness goes, it's two or three steps below a strip club, one step above an adult-movie house, and two steps above a webcam girl. The place is grimy, squalid, and depressing. You're hit with an immediate sense of wrongness as soon as you step through the door...unless, of course, you happen to be one of the lonely, pathetic men who frequent it.

Still, all is not lost: The first people we meet are the girls who fulfill the fantasies of the Ruby Tip's clientele. We get to know them as people: working girls trying to get through college; single mothers with daughters; all good friends who help each other, who weep when they find out that one of their own has been murdered.

If this were any other show, Law and Order or Homicide, maybe, we'd learn that the killer went to see her every day and eventually fell under the delusion that she was in some way "his." Or, maybe, that he learned to hate women from a bad upbringing. The second possibility is brought up in the episode, but in context, Frank's too-easy explanation owes more to a series that's knows what it wants to do, but not entirely how to say it.

You might be wondering: "What sets me apart from the other guys in the room?" Is it my powers of observation? Is it my skill at putting the clues together?

It's a little bit of both plus one other thing.  See, I can put myself in the minds of the madmen I pursue. I can see the world they way they see it.

It's my blessing...it's my curse.

Frank might have left the FBI, but he's made some new friends at the ominously-named "Millennium Group," a private consulting firm which liaisons with local, state, and federal law-enforcement on their more...unconventional...investigations. (The DVD box-set's extra features comment that Millennium is based on the real-life "Academy Group," whose members include ex-FBI agents and investigators from various agencies, and which consults not only with law enforcement, but also with businesses and other organizations.)

We never really learn what the Group is or does in this first outing. Then again, we're not supposed to know at this moment. It's a secretive organization; because of this, the various police agencies with which they consult regard them with unease at best and hostility at worst. The explanation for this is simple: The group puts Frank, the profiler, outside of the accepted social narrative. For example, if he said, "I'm with Seattle PD," or "...the FBI," one would think, "Oh, OK, he's with law enforcement." Instead, his "I'm with the Millennium Group" makes one think "What's this 'Millennium Group,' and why have I never heard of them?"

...God in heaven, I'm surrounded by idiots. They found a black man's hair on the dead girl, and they're determined to follow that. I guess it can't be helped; after all, they don't have Millennium's resources. Time for a little investigation of my own.

'Way I see it, the Ruby Tip is the best place to start. The dames gave me a less than warm welcome--they figured I was just another loser, I'll bet--and clammed up tighter than a witch's nether-regions as soon as I mentioned her..."Calamity," they called her. I decided I'd better play my last card. 

"That's okay; I'm not a cop," I said. What d'you know, it worked like a charm. That tough, seen-'em-all facade melted in a second, and she sang like a canary.

Brought my notes and copies of the camera footage home with me, and now I'm getting ready to find...something. Christ almighty, this guy's a 100% Certified Grade-A Creep. He's talking to her in riddles...wait, what's he holding up to the window? It's in French.

Frank's notes on what he translated turn out to be a pair of quatrains. They sound like something (I swore last Halloween that I'd never mention him again) that Nostradamus might have written. I suppose it was inevitable that he'd be name-checked on this show, but his name isn't mentioned very often; in fact, I'd say that this is probably the only time it happens in the whole series. (I suspect I'm not entirely done with him, either, but that's for another installment.)

It's almost as if Chris Carter knew that his viewers would expect a lot of end-of-the-world prophecies in general and Nostradamus' quatrains in particular, so he put them into the first episode and got them out of the way.

I see what the Frenchman sees. He's been prowling around in a forest preserve. 

Whole lot of shapeless forms wandering around, too...God damn. Not only is this guy a creep, he's a kook. Sees everyone with their eyes and mouths sewn shut. 

There's a grave, a tomb, marked "A GRANDE DAME." It disturbs me enough to lead Bletcher and his boys on a dragnet. He's skeptical, but I don't blame him: It's a long shot, and one that's not guaranteed to pan out.

.....

We're trekking through the dead of night, wading across ice-cold waters and getting up to our shins in swampy mud. If this doesn't work, I'll lose whatever respect Bletch has for me. If it does, we'll be one step closer to our guy.

"A GRANDE DAME" marks the spot. Bletch looks ill at ease, like he heard something. A scraping noise--I hear it too.

THERE'S SOMEONE ALIVE IN THERE.

Pocketknife! Get these screws undone! No time to waste--he's burning air in there! 

The stone is heavy and slippery. One last effort...GOT IT!

I looked at him, and the sight of him made my blood run cold. A boy, maybe 18 or 19, with his eyelids and mouth stitched shut and his hands bound. His muffled screams practically freeze my blood. Bletch radios for an ambulance as Seattle's finest gather around. Me? I take the guy and...I just hold him until help arrives. I'd be terrified too.

There was something in there with him. I remembered seeing Calamity's headless body in the morgue. We just found her head in a Ziploc bag.

Are you there, St. Peter? It's me, Frank. Make a reservation, just in case: This bastard's going down one way or another.
.......

Back at the PD, I decided I'd better call and check in at home. Bletch, ever the gentleman, stepped out for some coffee. 

Busy signal? Now that's suspicious. I put down the receiver and the phone rang. The voice at the other end said that a blood sample was sent from this building to a lab downtown.

Something--intuition, a sixth sense, whatever you want to call it--led me down to the morgue. There was a man in there--The Frenchman! He looked at me with wild, deranged eyes, and demanded, "Who are you to condemn me?" That's when I saw ten gleaming inches of stainless steel come out of his ill-fitting lab coat. 

He charged at me, but I managed to get the stiff in front of me between us. Important lesson: When in doubt, improvise. Not that it really mattered--he was so sloppy and undisciplined that I could dodge most of his stabs. To think that his previous kills had such cold, rational skill...I must have really gotten under his skin. Good.

Anyway, the whack-a-doodle was right up in my face, ranting about a prophecy and a final judgment. Just as I was about to face my own final judgment, a shot rang out. And another. And a third. It was Doubting Bob Bletcher, finally come to his senses. My gift sometimes inspires less-than-positive emotions in most people, but I just take my lumps in stride. I know they'll come around eventually.
.....

The hell am I thinking? I can't leave without introducing my two significant others. I hadn't forgotten about them; I was saving the best for last. (That's why they're "significant.")

My wife, Catherine, and our 'little miracle', Jordan. They said we'd never be able to conceive, but we brought her into the world all the same.

I try to protect them from the darkness of my world, and they pull me back when I get too close to the edge of the cliff. Anyone else would have left me by now, but she's stayed, and I can't possibly say how grateful I am for her.

They're also why I left the FBI and moved us to Seattle, into the bright yellow house that we call home. 'See, back when we lived close to the Fed, I was on the trail of a serial killer. I got him all right, but shortly after that, I got a thick manila packet in the mail. I found Polaroids of Cath and Jordan inside it. They were getting into a taxi marked "Seattle."

They're the light in my life. I'd do anything to keep them safe from the nightmares out there...and at that point, I felt like it was all for nothing. I'd rather not bring that up, not right now.

You may wonder, why am I bringing up stuff from what now seems like so long ago?

Because it happened again. This time, they were getting into a taxi marked "Seattle." In other words, these were just taken while I was chasing the Frenchman.

...No! Get a hold of yourself, Frank. Now, slow down and remember: You've got the Millennium Group on your side. Catherine and Jordan are still alive--you just said goodbye to her and wished her luck on that job interview.

You're not alone in this, and there's no shame in asking for help.
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Hmm, that's an excellent cliffhanger there. Take out the bad guy, make everything right with the world, and then pull out that one last trick.

Just from that pilot episode alone, I can say that Millennium certainly hit the ground running. This pilot means business: It establishes itself within the first few minutes and then swaggers through with solid narrative and dialogue, and camera- and set-work which enhance the script and serve to keep jacking up the tension bit by bit. The pilot tells so much of its story without words: through lighting (next to nonexistent during the hunt through the forest; warm and sunny in the yellow house where Frank and his family live); cinematography and editing; careful location scouting...I could go on and on with examples, but I can sum it up by saying that it tells its story and then some.

If a pilot is a sign of things to come, then I can say that I'm most impressed by how mundane it is. It doesn't even try to cast the main conflict as a battle in the epic war against good and evil, but keeps it at the basic "catch the madman" level. His apocalyptic rantings are given no further weight than deranged rantings, which is neat. I expected the Millennium Group to use prophecies and things to guide its epic-scale mission, but it turned out to be just a slightly-shady consulting group without mystical trappings

Best of all, it can stand on its own apart from the rest of the series. If it had only gotten a lukewarm reception, and had Fox nixed the series, it would still be an interesting curiosity and a saddening reminder of lost potential. Fortunately, it premiered to rave reviews and some of Fox's highest ratings.

In fact, I'd say that the pilot is so self-contained that it's far too early for me to say anything more about the series. Join us next time as we review "Gehenna."
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(Millennium copyright 1996, Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All screenshots are property of Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Millennium--This Is Who We Are for episode transcripts, which helped me adapt the episodes.)

"Millennium": Introduction

Hello again, and welcome back to The Millennium Museum!

Lately, I've been experimenting with "series" posts instead of the usual "one item, one post" approach. It gets kind of boring after a while, I admit, which is why I had to take a break from The Life Millennium and write a couple of lighter posts, just to give my brain something else to do.

That said, Life taught me something: If I'm to stick with the longer style, I'd better do something different and creative with it. This next stretch of posts, covering the first season of the 1996-1999 series Millennium, is set to be very different from the usual reviews and episode guides you'd normally find.

One word of caution: My guides are merely a supplement to the series, a way to further your understanding of how the show fits into the bigger picture of the years leading up to the millennium. In order to truly understand, you'll have to find the episodes for yourself. Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube are good places to start; as for me, I got the complete box set on Amazon for about $35 used...I still say that it's one of my better purchases.

That's not to say I'm about to leave you stranded. Millennium isn't as well-remembered as its parent show, The X-Files (perhaps owing to its short, three-season lifespan), so I will take you through the main action of each episode. I'm not going to do a typical, dry, scene-for-scene synopsis, though...You'll just have to read on to find out what that is!

There will be a few key illustrations here and there, borrowed from my copy of the Complete Series boxset. In the spirit of good faith, I'll make sure to credit them at the bottom of every page.


Are you ready? Here we go...

COMING SOON....

 

 

 

 

 



Beanie Babies: Class of '99 and Class of '00

Today is graduation day for the current senior class at my old alma mater, Evergreen Park Community High School. I myself was Class of 2005, and I remember the occasion as bittersweet, as all fond goodbyes are.

Still, I figured that now's as good a time as any to give a shout-out to the classes of 1999 and 2000 with these two Beanie Babies, which I picked up at our annual "Memories to Go Village Garage Sale."

This ugly-cute duo represents the last class of the old century and the first class of the new century. In that way, they're perfect bookends. Also, their coloring is noteworthy: Class of '99 is a funereal dark gray, as if closing out the century with a knowing, slightly grim smile. Class of '00, on the other hand, is a vibrant light brown, like a sunrise that's full of possibilities.

One final observation: Class of '99's mortarboard shows off its year in a stately Brush Script MT Bold, whereas Class of '00 gets stuck with...Comic Sans MS. Points off for a new millennium.

"Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death"

Today is May 21st, 2015, and later on this evening, the UK charity Comic Relief will make its debut in America as NBC hosts the first "Red Nose Day."

Comic Relief began on Christmas Day in 1985, as a response to musician Bob Geldof's hugely successful Live Aid charity concerts, which raised at least £150million for famine relief in Ethiopia1 . Since then, Comic Relief has raised millions through its Red Nose Day and Sport Relief events.

Ever since that first telethon, Red Nose Day has displayed top talent year after year in sketches which lovingly poke fun at British TV shows, movies, and celebrity gossip. One of the better Red Nose Day sketches was 1999's entry, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, which starred Jonathan Pryce as The Master; Julia Sawalha as Emma, the Doctor's companion; Roy Skelton as the voice of the Daleks; and (takes a deep breath) Rowan Atkinson; Richard E. Grant; Jim Broadbent; Hugh Grant; and Joanna Lumley as the Doctor.

Curse aired in March of 1999, which means that it's technically a Millennium thing, but somehow I think there's a better way to look at it. I list it on my blog not as history, but as a guide to the future.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is The Curse of Fatal Death, hosted by Comic Relief's official YouTube channel:

ANALYSIS

CAUTION: HIGH-LEVEL GEEKINESS AHEAD--BE YE WARNED

It had been barely three years since the 1996 TV Movie premiered. Thousands of fans had pinned their hopes onto it...but it was a false start. Doctor Who was simply not ready to come back full-time as a TV series, and this Comic Relief sketch looked like the best we'd ever get to new Who on TV.

As I said, though, it's a window into the future: Curse has quite a few things to its name. First off, it's The Mill's first special-effects project, and this little charity sketch led to The Mill doing most if not all of the new Doctor Who's special effects work from 2005 to about 2010 or so.

Second, it's present-day showrunner Steven Moffat's first professional writing credit for Doctor Who. He and his predecessor, Russell T. Davies, made their bones in writing for, creating, and producing shows that had next to nothing to do with Doctor Who, and in this way they perfected their craft and learned what makes for good TV in general. They got a good handle on narrative flow, dialogue, character arcs, and sustaining a 45-minute episode, all of which served to bring Who back with a bang in 2005.

Going back to 1999 for a moment, The Curse of Fatal Death is unusual as far as Doctor Who spoofs are concerned. Earlier parodies, such as those seen on The Victoria Wood Show and The Lenny Henry Show, used cheap jokes about the show's low budget, poor effects, and ludicrous dialogue, and they were mostly predicated around "Oh, God, isn't this just the stupidest thing you've ever seen?!" As a result, those earlier attempts had a nasty, mean-spirited edge.

Curse's parody, on the other hand, is much more affectionate. It's constructed as a Doctor Who story first and foremost, but it's a story that happens to be full of jokes. The whole cast works together to give the story a weight that normal spoofs wouldn't have. (It's a little bit like Airplane! in that the actors are all absolutely serious, but everything around them is absurd.)

The same goes for the sketch's impressive production values. The sets, filmed on Pinewood Studios' 007 stage, are as solid as anything you'd see on the current run of Who. (Interesting side note: The TARDIS Console Room set and the Dalek props derive from a fan-film called Devious, notable for being Jon Pertwee's final filmed performance as the Third Doctor. BBC Video saw fit to include parts of Devious onto the DVD release of "The War Games" many years later.)

There's more here than just the story's affection to the classic series, though. In many ways, Curse eerily foreshadows things that would happen in the revived series. Right off the bat, we're faced with the Doctor wanting to settle down and get married. Within the context of the Classic Series, this would have been controversial to say the least, but the New Series has done it with the Tenth Doctor and Rose's love-story, which did not have a happy ending.

Next up is the "Spikes of Doom" sequence, which involves death-traps and multilayered time-travel gambits. While it's played for eye-rolling laughs here, complex time-based stories would later appear in the episode "Blink" and throughout River Song's story arc, which was a love story told out of sequence. (In her first story, she died, but not before leaving enough room for adventures that we would see in the future, but which had already happened from her perspective.)

Third, in the sketch's funniest set-piece, the Doctor burns through his remaining lives even faster than he normally would. Rowan (Mr. Bean) Atkinson plays the Ninth Doctor; Richard E. Grant, the Tenth; Jim Broadbent, the Eleventh; and Hugh Grant, the Twelfth. And then the Twelfth Doctor dies, but comes back as Joanna Lumley, who then falls for the Master!!

The first thing we're looking at is the idea of the Doctor breaking the "thirteen regenerations limit," which was introduced fairly late in the classic run, but became part of the accepted ruleset all the same. THIS HAS HAPPENED FOR REAL in the 2013 Christmas special, "The Time of the Doctor."
The second thing we're looking at is the idea of the Doctor coming back as a woman, which was reused as the Master coming back as "Missy" in Series 8 (short for "Mistress").
===============================================================
Forward-thinking aside, I have to put Curse back into its context. At the time, Doctor Who was all but dead and buried as a pop-culture institution. At best, it was a fondly-remembered piece of nostalgia from more innocent days; at worst, it was the prime example of just how much better TV is today, and how hokey it was back then.

That a Comic Relief sketch was seen as "the best we're ever going to get to new Doctor Who" demonstrates just how far a once-revered institution had fallen by 1999. Certainly, the BBC novels, Doctor Who Magazine, and several specials on Blue Peter kept it going, but it just wasn't enough. Those six years, from 1999 to 2005, were a long and lonely vigil...

I suppose I could say that, just as 1999 bridged the gap between one millennium to the next, this little sketch bridges the gap between two eras of a series that I have loved and held on to for nineteen years...twenty next May. It's slightly alarming how fast time can go by...




1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Aid#Raising_money

The Life Millennium, part 5

Here we come to a milestone: the halfway point in the Life Millennium series!

Before we move ahead any further, I should pause and point out why I'm covering each development in detail rather than just doing a simple list.

The simplest way to put a ranking like this together would have been to organize them chronologically, but the biggest problem with chronological order is that it implies an endpoint (or, more cynically, that the world and its people are on a downward slide). Another problem with this method is that it's just too broad: many things could have happened in a given year or decade, but nothing in the next year or decade!

Ranking the top one hundred developments from minor-impact to major-impact forces a historian to use his or her imagination and state a more convincing case as to why they are listing one thing but not another. Also, it implies that a story is unfolding across several different cultures, which gets you out of the Western world of development and into a much broader perspective.

The idea of a story unfolding is something I will get to once I review that other Millennium book, which is much more in-depth than this volume and contains some very surprising things.

Anyway....

59. "The First Newspaper, 1609."

Ah, the newspaper: Once a staple of Sunday morning, it has largely gone the way of digital media.

Digital or otherwise, the newspaper's story begins in Strassburg, Germany, where the Relation was first published in 1609. Its first headline read, "Signor Gallileo [sic]...found a rule and visual measure, by which one can...look at places 30 miles away, as if they were close by." (The description sounds like a telescope.)

I say "headline," but the Relation, which was printed on the earliest presses (this will come up much later), didn't have them. In fact, it didn't have advertisements or illustrations, for that matter. Really, it didn't look anything like what we think of when we see the word "newspaper." That would develop in fits and starts throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and wouldn't reach its final form until 1833, when the "penny press" could print massive amounts of papers. Still, everything had to have started somewhere.

58. "Rubber Baron, 1839."
In 1839, Charles Goodyear developed vulcanized rubber. Before his "vulcanization" process, natural rubber was a really unreliable material: It hardened in the winter and practically melted into a sticky goop in the summer. Anything made of rubber simply did not hold its shape!

You see the Goodyear name on tires everywhere, but the brand's namesake repeatedly drove himself into debt in his quest for a more stable form of rubber: "While in debtor's prison, he began combining raw rubber with everything from witch hazel to cream cheese...He accidentally spilled a drop of rubber mixed with sulfur on his hot stove."

From vulcanized rubber comes the boom of the car industry (rubber tires), and from that comes...well, most of modern life, really. What to do with all those old tires, though...?

57. "A Woman's Choice, 1914."
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, published in 1914 a pamphlet called The Woman Rebel, which marked the beginning of the birth-control movement. Obviously, it wasn't exactly greeted with open arms at the time: The pamphlet ended up hitting her with an obscenity charge--brought upon her by male judges--and she left America for Europe for two years, but came back more determined than ever to make a serious impact.

Sanger opened up a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, but within nine days the police raided it.

Then, in 1923, she set up the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, "the first doctor-staffed birth control clinic in the United States, where diaphragms and advice were dispensed."

She died in 1966, but her work lives on: Dr. Gregory Pincus dedicated his research, which led to the contraceptive Pill, to Sanger's legacy.

56. "The First Restaurant, 1120."
Taking us out of the real world, just for context...You know how, in The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy works, the heroes stop at an inn to rest for a night and convene in secret, where their enemies weren't looking? Those places had some basis in real life, but they also offered a place to bed down for a night, and I would put those in the "lodging" category first. The first actual restaurant, without an inn attached, can be traced back to 12th-century China. "The journal of 12th century Chinese bureaucrat Meng Yuanlao--arguably the first restaurant reviewer--offers a meticulous account of an emerging restaurant culture in Kaifeng, the capital during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126)."

Besides offering good food, the restaurant served as a place where people could gather in a setting that was on one hand much more formal than the "inn" setting I mentioned, and on the other still fairly casual.

55. "Childhood Found, 1633."
Three centuries before Dr. Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care, a Moravian bishop named Johan Amos Comenius published The School of Infancy.

For context: In 1633, much of Europe was in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. I won't go into too much detail about it, but it devastated most of the continent. Besides the casualties of battle, famine and disease made life a short, miserable affair. "...Children worked hard and died young. But Comenius was a utopian who believed the pathway to an earthly Eden was education. If children were not loved, [and] not educated early and well, their souls could be lost."

Most of Comenius' writings were lost and forgotten when he died, but he planted a seed all the same. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed Comenius' sentiments, as did "Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi," who opened "the first infants' school."

I myself remember reading somewhere that the drive for compulsory education in England and in America came about when reformers saw children who worked in factories, and were unnerved at how they had already adopted all the bad traits of their adult counterparts...especially the jaded, "I-don't-care-anymore" attitude. Remember that, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, factory employees worked long hours in conditions that would either 1) gruesomely injure them; 2) kill them fast; or 3) kill them long-term from breathing in soot and other chemicals. That's bad enough for an adult, but imagine a child of nine or ten working in this way. Worse yet, imagine that they've made a new friend or two at work...and then had to watch their new friend get pulled into the machine, never to come out.

If there's one thing a child should never have to experience, it's that kind of indifferent despair. There's plenty of time for that in adulthood.

54. "Tobacco Catches Fire, 1535."
From the diary of French Explorer Jacques Cartier, who traveled among the Iroquois Indians in the early parts of the 16th Century: "When we tried to use the smoke, we found it bit our tongues like pepper." I can only assume that they had offered him a peace-pipe, but, in any case, Cartier described his first encounter with tobacco, which he took back to Europe with him. Initially, it was sold as a "cure-all" for various ailments, but it really found a foothold when it became the Jamestown settlement's first major cash crop. And then, mass-produced, pre-rolled cigarettes were introduced in the 1800s, and tobacco became a major industry.

Now, on the other hand, we're starting to shy away from cigarettes. The risks of cancer and emphysema are so well-known that to even start smoking is all but pointless!

53. "The Coolest Invention, 1834."
A long, long, long time ago, the human race developed agriculture. In this way, the first farms came into being, and successful farms made their owners wealthy enough that they could hire people to work the land for them. Those first homesteaders now had enough spare time to say to themselves, "Remember how dreadful it was to work in that summer heat? Now that we've got it made, why don't we try keeping ourselves cool when it gets too hot?"

Rich people imported snow and ice, and packed it tightly between the walls of their homes. It worked well enough for centuries, but, when snow and ice melt, restoring them from a liquid back into a solid is next to impossible.

Or at least it was until 1834, when an inventor named Jacob Perkins built and patented an early refrigerator. His invention used compressed liquid ether, which produced a cooling effect when evaporated; the ether was then re-condensed back into a liquid. Seventeen years later, his invention saw its first commercial use at an Australian brewery, and shortly after that, major shipping companies began to refrigerate, especially if their cargo could easily spoil.

"In 1902, Willis Carrier installed the first air conditioner in a Brooklyn printing plant--it not only cooled but also controlled humidity--and before long his machines were showing up in department stores and movie theaters. The first safe and quiet kitchen refrigerators appeared in the early 1930s. Fewer than 1 percent of the homes in America are now without one, and most contain frozen foods--thanks to a process developed in 1925 by Clarence Birdseye--another marvel of the Cool Age."

"52. Tick, Tock, 1656."
In 1656, a Dutch astronomer named Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock. Before Huygens, we relied first on sundials and water clocks, and then on mechanical deadweight-clocks. All of these were good enough for their time, but even the best mechanical clock regularly lost track of time.

Huygens' clock was the most precise timepiece of its day, and it saw widespread use in just about all quarters. Chemists and physicists could now keep better records for their experiment logs; shopkeepers could keep fixed hours; and workers could keep track of how long they worked.

"51. Liberty for All, 1865."
In 1865, the Civil War came to an end after four years of bloody combat. Millions of slaves found themselves liberated, and the South's plantation economy crumbled.

With that said, the end of the war was just the end of the fighting. The major turning point happened on New Year's Day, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. (I very nearly said "delivered the Emancipation Proclamation," but that would have been confusing it with the Gettysburg Address.)

...So, you may ask, how did the Proclamation ensure a Union victory at the end of the war?

I'll tell you: It changed the premise of the war from a political imperative (rebuild the union) to a moral imperative (end slavery as a legitimate economic practice). As far as morale goes, restoring the Union is good for the first few rousing speeches, but it's an abstract goal, and the realities of war--the carnage, the death, the disease--conspire to dull an already fairly-weak mission statement.

"End slavery," on the other hand, is a moral goal. "For the nation's 3.5 million slaves, for its abolitionists and for some of its politicians, the crucible of civil war would allow the U.S. to live up to its best traditions, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, as a land of liberty and equality for all."

"50. A University Education, 1088."
In 1088, a group of law students from Bologna, Italy, founded the first university. They collected and researched Roman law, and then drew their own conclusions about how to apply it to the present day. It might not seem like much now, but their work built the legal foundations of European society.

Not only that, but those same scholars established the university as protected ground: "When Bolognese landlords threatened to raise scholars' rents, student protests led Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to award them protection from exploitation in 1158."

"Students also made professors sign contracts to deliver lectures on particular subjects--and promise to remain at the school until the end of the term. Soon professors needed a license to teach (the earliest academic degree), and a real university took shape."

Not bad for the 11th Century, huh?