The Return of the Millennium Beanie Baby

I'm going to interrupt Millennium a little bit today for the sake of an anniversary.

On September 26th, 1999, the Pittsburgh Pirates sailed in to Wrigley Field, where they challenged the Chicago Cubs in the last scheduled game of the century. Much to the surprise of no-one, the Cubs lost (Pirates 8; Cubs 4).

Yarrrrrrrr, matey.

1999 was also the year in which Ty, Inc.'s Beanie Babies toys were at their all-time high. Someone out there had the bright idea of commemorating the last game of the century with a special edition of the "Millennium Beanie Baby," which I reported on quite a while ago.

There's nothing new to report on, except for the collector's card it came with:



I bought this for $2.00 at Evergreen Park High School's "flea-market day" sometime in March or April. It was one of about three things I got there, and I can't remember off the top of my head what the other two were.

It's frustrating that neither Ty nor the Chicago Cubs thought to modify the bear itself. Merely issuing it with a nice collector's card (read: a piece of laminated cardboard) cheapens the "commemorative collectible" aspect. One of Ty's competitors, Salvino's Arena Bammers, kept this in mind when they issued a bear to commemorate the Chicago Blackhawks' last game of the century. This bear was incredibly well-made, with embroidery on the feet and back, and even a hockey-puck nose!

Millennium S1E7: "Blood Relatives"

Remember last time, when we talked about guys who want to live out their fantasies? The late Ray Dees, who tried to live out a dream of being a hero and ending up on TV. Dr. Sniper cured his ills with a strong prescription: Lead pill, administered at high velocity through the medulla oblongata.

Still...That one reminded me of another, similar tale. A young man would find out about people his age who'd recently died. He'd go to their wakes, ingratiate himself with surviving family members, and quietly swipe one of the deceased's personal effects. Nothing too big, usually just a small pin or something.

"This generation is a wicked generation; it seeks for a sign, and yet, no sign shall be given to it..." --Luke 11:29

Bob Bletcher called Cath that day and asked her to come to the Public Safety building. He was having trouble with a man whose wife had just been murdered. He wanted to see her one last time, but, since she was murdered, her body was evidence. Besides, she'd been viciously cut up, and Bletch argued that Mr. Cort--that was his name, see--really wouldn't want to remember her that way.



Bletch realized that it was a losing battle, so he fobbed Cath off onto Mr. Cort and called me. He, Jack Giebelhouse, and I would go have a look at the crime scene. Meanwhile, I called Peter Watts and asked him to have a look at Mrs. Cort's remains.



We met up at Forest Glen Cemetery's graveyard at noon. (You seriously thought we were going to meet at night? No, no, no...We're smarter than that. Don't tell anyone.)

Bletch and Giebs watched as I descended a ladder into the hole where Mrs. Cort was attacked. There was no body, of course--that was under examination back at the morgue. I did find a calla lily down there...I can only assume she was holding it while she was attacked. I took it into my hands, and I saw a series of flashes: a man's hand, holding a knife, attacking Mrs. Cort, her screaming face distorted by a thick plastic blanket. Atop the grave, a man--the killer--tossed the lily onto Mrs. Cort's body.

The vision faded away, and the killer's shadowed face was replaced with Peter Watts' gleaming dome. "Nothing very useful off the body," he said. "Looks like she didn't have time to put up much of a struggle."

As we walked past headstones, Bletch related the last moments of her late son, Jeffrey Cort: college running-back; won a major game; celebrated over drinks--a lot of drinks--with his teammates; tried to drive home, and had a blind date with a tree while going 60 mph. At least he was by himself.

I was more interested in the murderer. Here's what I guessed: he knew her, but his anger wasn't directed at her. More specifically, he was angry about someone else. He slashed away at her body, but not her face--if he'd had a grudge against her, he'd have gone for the face first.

Giebs was incredulous. "He knew who she was, but it wasn't about her?" he asked. "He sliced her up, but it wasn't directed at her?" He's a million laughs, I tell you. Then again, he has a point: My work is somewhat harder to understand than his, because, not only do I have to look for clues in everything, but I also have to find nuance in those clues, and every little nuance holds many different possibilities.

The four of us headed to the small church near the cemetery, and we found Mr. Cort and his daughter Greer sitting down. Bletch introduced me to him, and, once he'd collected himself, led me to his late son's body. I asked how many people came in, and before anyone else could get a word in edgewise, Greer mentioned a one "Ray Bell," a friend of his from school, one their son apparently never mentioned.

Something must have caught her eye just then--something that had been there, but was now missing. His college-football pin.

Hello again, dear readers! Let's play a game of "Spot the Difference!" Can you find what's different between the two images? I've made it easy for you!



=======================================================
The next day: Giebs, Bletch, and I pored over the Evening Post's birth and death notices. I had a couple of articles from the same edition, sent out about two days ago. One was the BMOC's death notice; the other was about a fisherman named Ray Bell, who'd made a record-setting catch in Sammamish. 

A fisherman who also swipes personal belongings from funerals for people he doesn't know? And who kills next of kin? I've had to help solve some weird crimes before, but something's really not kosher here. Just then, it hit me: That's not his name...he's using it as an alias.

Later that afternoon, we gathered at a small riverbank. Somebody found a young woman, probably no more than 19 or 20, floating through the water. Terrible waste of a life...I found the message, "STOP LOOKING," carved onto her abdomen. Cryptic, as usual. At this stage, I don't know who it's meant for. The safest guess, and the one Bletch thought of: It's meant for us.



Watts and I were in the middle of an investigation when Giebs called to tell us about a possible lead. There's this halfway house for paroled convicts in town, and it's called the Diebstahl Group Home. Our lead, a juvie called James Dickerson, lived there. "Ray Bell" smelled like a red herring...I told you.
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Bletch took me and a few officers to the group home. I wish he'd been a little more casual about all this, but Bletch went in like gangbusters and started pounding on the door. Of all things...Scare him off, that's all we need.

Connor, the guy in charge of the group home, was less than helpful. He fumbled with his keys and stalled for time, and Dickerson was slipping out of our fingertips all the while.

With Dickerson a lost cause, we decided to make the best of it and conduct a more low-key investigation from here on. I went down to the basement and found an open window. That's probably how he got out. Connor came down and told me that it led to the alley. That's definitely how he got out.
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Once back upstairs, we asked Connor a little more about James. He asked if the boy had done something bad, and Bletch confirmed that this was the case...he hesitated a little, as if even he wasn't sure. Connor said something about how James wasn't "programming," and that he was full of anger and denial. Coming from him, it sounded like a lot of slapdash jargon he'd read somewhere but didn't fully understand.

I noticed a poster on the wall, intended to motivate the house's guests to stay on the straight and narrow. Among its platitudes, I noticed "never stop feeling" and "never stop looking." "Never stop looking..." Where have I seen that before? It forced me to reconsider Connor's "well-meaning guardian" act. Meanwhile, Bletch somehow convinced our potential accomplice to commit himself to one good deed. He pulled up one of the baseboards and produced a cigar box and a number of small journals.

Among the trinkets within that box was Jeff Cort's football pin.



=================================================
I asked Cath to meet up with us at the police station. We showed her our findings, and she concluded that our friend Dickerson was a textbook case of "lost child," and swiping from dead people was his way of expressing his need for family. Bletch and Giebs were skeptical (understatement of the year), but I can't blame them. We still had him on murder, don't forget.

Included within the stuff he'd taken were several letters, all stamped "Return to Sender" and addressed to a Ms. Peggy Dechant in Redmond. Cath surmised that she might be his biological mother.

Later--much later than I'd care to admit--Bletch came and found me just as I was getting off the phone with the Johnson family. I found them in one of Dickerson's journals, so I called and asked about him. They told me their son had just died--surprise, surprise--and that he more than helped them through that time. 

You know how they say, "He was an all-right kind of guy until something bad pushed him 'over the edge'?" That's the problem: Dickerson didn't fit the typical serial-killer profile at all. No edge; no pushing. I needed a fresh angle. Too many cases like those of the Frenchman and the Dead Letters Killer have given me tunnel vision.

Peter Watts joined us and told us what he'd found on Mrs. Cort's body. Her body itself didn't have much to say; the skin was too distressed from all the cuts. Her clothing, on the other hand, carried a significant clue: pollen from a calla lily. Watts showed us a few Polaroids of time-exposures he'd done, and one from about fifty minutes in showed the message "STOP LOOKING."

 I looked down at the journal on my desk and pulled the pen from its spiral binding. It was a promo pen for "Skorpion Salvage," a junkyard just outside of town. The "S" in "Stop Looking" matched that of Skorpion's logo. 



Bletch took the cue and went there with a few other cops. When he came back, he told me that James tried to split, but some guard dogs bit him bad enough for him to need an ambulance.

Cath went to visit Peggy Dechant earlier that day, and met with little success. Apparently Peggy had James when she was a teenager, and she thinks of him as a mistake. Although...Cath did say that James approached her much later on and potentially scared her off from ever changing her mind in the near future.

Meanwhile, we had James Dickerson in custody. Giebs and Bletch were interrogating him, and he kept insisting that he didn't kill either of the two victims. I want to believe him, sure, but his honesty so far leaves much to be desired. His birth mother thought as much, too: she refused even to stand up for him. 

Finally, Dickerson broke down and confessed that he killed Mrs. Cort and that girl. If he was lying before, when he said he was innocent, then he's really lying now. Just telling Bletch and Giebs what they want to hear. 
==================================================

That night, Cath and I were on the way home. Way up in heaven, St. Peter was having spaghetti for dinner, and had just gotten around to straining the pot of noodles. (A little less colorfully, it was raining cats and dogs.)

I got a red light at the intersection. Through the curtain of rain, I saw a mother cross the street with an umbrella in one hand and her young child's hand in the other. Cath was expressing her regret that there were so many kids out there just like James, and her fear that many of them would, in time, turn violent. "People full of holes," she said. "Like James: living off the fantasy that his mother will somehow make everything better."

Visions of the last two murders flashed before my eyes. I was then granted a vision of Ms. Dechant being killed in the same way and getting those words carved into her: "STOP LOOKING."

"The words. "STOP LOOKING," I said. "It was a message to James, a warning." There was no time to lose. I made for the Dechant household.
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By the time I got there, someone had already smashed in the glass on the front door. I could faintly hear the sound of running water--upstairs, probably. For what must be the...damn it, I've lost count of how many times I've ignored the little voice at the back of my head that tells me I'm charging headlong to my death.

Peggy was sitting in a corner, bleeding and in shock, but alive. James--at least I assume it's James--had already started in on her. I moved in to help her, and then I felt a thick power-cord wrap around my neck and tighten. Pure adrenaline kicked in as I kicked off the walls, smashing pictures and the glass door of the shower in the process. I slammed his head against the wall one, two, three times, but I couldn't get the cord off my neck. My one hope was to get my assailant into the tub and drown him. With one final effort, I pushed off the bathroom wall and landed him into the water. None of your "get him in and let him break free" stuff you see in horror movies--I kept my weight on him and made sure he was at least unconscious.

When I was satisfied that he was at least half drowned, I pulled my water-rat out of the drink and got a good look at him.



Connor.

I tied him up with his own power cord and called in the cavalry.
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EMTs had Peggy in their care, and the cops had Connor in cuffs. And Bletch was laying down the law. "Should have waited for us, damn it!" he barked. I didn't have time for his bluster. "She'd be dead by now," I said.

Soundly defeated, he tried to enlist Catherine's aid. It worked, to a point: She raised a couple of good arguments. I'll remember her words until the day I die: "I don't want to ask myself, 'Am I strong enough to be alone?'"

As for James Dickerson...He'll spend the rest of his life committing victimless, nickel-and-dime larcenies. He's not worth my time or the police's. If I can, though, I'll make an effort to check in on him every now and then.

Even after all that, I'll bet you anything that he just went back to his papers and found yet another "death in the family" notice. So long as he doesn't cross a line, I won't judge him.
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At first, I didn't think much of "Blood Relatives." There was nothing really unique about it at first; it seemed an inconsequential narrative. After a second look at it, my opinion has changed a little.

When I first started doing the Millennium entries, one of my first comments concerned the series' relatively small scale. It could have been "OH MY GOD NEXT WEEK ANOTHER RELIGIOUS ICON! ANOTHER APOCALYPSE!" But no: it's just one man going after one mass murderer or serial killer or whatever. It's also a series of character pieces.

"Blood Relatives" does something similar to "Dead Letters": it gives us a situation of duality. There, it was Frank Black and Jim Horn. Here, it's James Dickerson, the ex-juvie in the halfway house; and Connor, his warden. Both of them are searching for family in some way, and the duality is a matter of extent. James Dickerson is content with his small possessions, which grant to him the illusion of family. Connor, on the other hand, is a jealous, possessive man, whose need for a family drives him to kill, and send the message to young James: "STOP LOOKING." (Either "stop looking" because the only family he's going to get is with Connor, or "stop looking" because he'll be dead, too, if he keeps looking.)

Connor's madness sets the narrative into motion and also makes things worse. Had he allowed the lad to go to his funerals, there would have been no problem at all. The missing college pin would have otherwise gone unnoticed, or, if noticed, then dismissed after a moment's thought. But no: Connor had to go and kill Mrs. Cort...why, exactly? If he wants James all to himself, what good will pinning two murders onto him and sending him to prison do? (There's some bluster at the beginning about James' breaking curfew and re-establishing ground rules, but it carries some uncomfortable overtones of a relationship gone sour.)

In the end, "Blood Relatives" is a story about people who aren't thinking clearly. James' birth mother, Peggy Dechant, wasn't thinking clearly when she got pregnant as a teenager. She put the baby up for adoption and continued on with her life.

Meanwhile, James went through the foster system, which no doubt messed with his thinking enough to make him want to swipe belongings from recently-dead youths--totems, really, from which he might absorb some of their memories and live through their eyes for a while.

Finally, there's Connor, a guy who runs a halfway house, presumably to make a little extra cash on the side, and who finds himself way in over his head. The stress of actually having to take responsibility of James in particular screws up his thinking, and he comes to see murder as a means of maintaining power and control. Like the thorn in his side, Connor has his own totems in the form of the "Skorpion Salvage" logo and the "Never Stop Looking" sign, which lurk in his subconscious and manifest when he kills. (This logo has narrative weight as well. James sometimes hides in the junkyard's cars, and Connor is familiar enough with the place that he seems to have found the boy there several times before.)

I didn't really enjoy adapting and commenting on "Blood Relatives" as much as I did on "Pilot," "Gehenna," and "522666." In fact, it's sort of the first episode that I just don't like very much at all. Most of the episodes so far have had some kind of a unique life and personality of their own, but this one feels listless and bland.

If there's one other thing I can say about it, it plays out like a comment on a Lifetime movie. There's an estranged son, his biological mother and his current caretaker, and it would normally end with the mother defeating the "bad guy" and accepting her long-missing son into her life again.

Except that doesn't happen here. The intruder breaks in and swiftly takes the mother out of the action. Fortunately, Frank Black exists outside of the story's conventions, and he goes back to stop a potential tragedy. Everything seems to end happily, but Frank's outside intervention alters the story: most notably, there's no feel-good reconciliation between mother and son. She leaves him behind once more, and he goes on, just as he did so many times before.

Sometimes there just isn't a happy ending, not even for those who deserve it the most.
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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 S1E6: "Kingdom Come"

Before I relate this narrative to you, let me make a confession: I really haven't given my own faith much thought. Sure, it bubbles up here and there, like when I feel like I'm about to be killed, but for the most part it sleeps inside of me. I have to keep it that way, or else the repeated violations to it--violence, rape, murder--would drive me insane. If God's all-knowing and all-merciful, why does He allow such terrible, mindless things to happen?

I remember a guy whose faith was so challenged following a tragedy that it drove him to kill. Here, I'll tell you all about it...

"And there will be such intense darkness/That one can feel it."

--Exodus 10:21

It was a bright, quiet Sunday morning, "a day of rest," as Catherine said. I was making breakfast for the three of us when I heard the sound of glass shattering. My instincts took over, and I went to see what it was. 

Poor little thing...A small bird crashed beak-first into one of our windows.



The next thing we knew, Jordan ran over to take a look. Her worried face almost gave way to tears as she asked us if it would be all right. I tried to console her, tell her that it was just a little dazed, but Cath and I knew that it would only fly across the Rainbow Bridge.

For once, I found myself at a loss for words! Fortunately, the phone's ringing saved me from digging myself any deeper. So much for "a day of rest," Cath...!

The call took me out to a small church in Tacoma. An old colleague of mine and now fellow Group member Ardis Cohen, and a detective named Kerney joined me at the crime scene. (You might have gotten it into your head that we're an "all-boys' club" at the Group. That's not remotely true: The Group's membership is based 100% on merit. I'm proud to say that we've joined the 20th and 21st Centuries.)



Actually, Ms. Cohen and I have a little bit of history, and this particular murder ties into it. See, back in 1992, she and I were part of an FBI investigation following the murders of several religious leaders.

The vic's name was Father Silas Brown. 61; graduated from Georgetown; taught at Brussels' International Institute of Catechetical and Pastoral Studies. In other words, a Jesuit. 

Now, here he is: burned at the stake.

A couple things jumped out at Ardis and me during our examination. First, the killer put a sanbenito on Fr. Brown. Yes, that's a technical term: It's a cloak that a heretic would wear before the church barbecued them. 

Second, the killer has quite the eye for detail. This morbid display before me is totally authentic: the stake is cut to ancient specs, and he used peat and wood to keep the fire going. In fact--and you could ask her--Ardis and I saw this exact pattern back in '92...we never caught that guy.

Third, and this is the weirdest one, he had a peseta--a Spanish coin--burned into his tongue. I surmised that it might be some new thing, some refinement of the usual M.O. Whatever it is, it has to have some symbolic meaning. I'd have to go home and have a good long think about it.

As soon as I stepped out of the morgue, I ran into a one Father Schultz, a close friend of the deceased. This guy might be a person of interest...Time to make myself known. I introduced myself, tried to offer some kind of comfort, but my words rang hollow as I spoke them. In fact, I felt like a sham in his presence. Couldn't imagine why; it was just kind of gnawing at the back of my head. His take on the whole thing was that people sometimes feel disconnected, and they expect faith to help them reconnect; and they end up shooting the messenger if the message doesn't stick. It sounded a little too trite to my ears, but then again, sometimes the simpler answer makes the most sense.
======================================================
Downstairs in my "Sanctum," I was looking through a book full of old illustrations from at least the Spanish Inquisition, if not earlier. Grisly and barbaric, yet somehow...creative, inventive even. A beep from my computer interrupted my grim reverie. It was an email from Ardis, a set of photos from that case back in '92. Just about everything between then and now is identical. 

The murder's been on the news for a while, and it's got Cath scared, but not for my safety. No, it's something much bigger, something I relate to every day--she's terrified of the world we're trying to raise our daughter in, a world in which everything's unraveling and nothing is sacred. 

And all I can do is assure her that I'll bring this guy to justice and try to explain why he does what he does.

After she left the room, I took a closer look at Father Brown's stake. There was something at the top--some writing. With a little fine-tuning, I could make out "SERMO GENERALIS," and I cross-referenced it with that book on the desk. Sure enough, there was an illustration captioned, "The grand ceremonial proceeding of heretics."

Later that night, after putting my little rascal to bed, I got another email from Ardis. Something went down at a golf course in Wyoming...a Rev. Marcus Crane, found bludgeoned and drowned in an "Ordeal by Water."

The next day, I found myself in Wyoming. Here's where it gets interesting: Our little madman just killed a Presbyterian. Ardis thought we'd have to widen our net, but I disagreed, arguing that he's getting more precise. He's going through all the motions--the stake, the cloak, burning, drowning--more for his own benefit than for ours. 

Something nagged at me, a feeling that Rev. Crane didn't drown--he choked on something in his throat. Ardis and I went to the place where the workers originally dragged his body out of the water, and I found a woman's engagement ring with a man's wedding band soldered onto it. It was initialed "J.M.M."
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The case took me from Wyoming to Rockford, IL. This time, a church secretary walked in on an intruder, who whacked her upside the face and then ran off. Fortunately, she was alive and well at Froedert Hospital. 



Once the secretary had recovered, she looked to see if any of her files were missing. She called Ardis and me, and said that he had taken a year's worth of christening records. I asked her who did the christenings, and she gave me two names: first, the late Rev. Lorans; and second, Rev. Harned, still very much alive...but for how much longer?

Panicked, I called Mr. Harned and warned him not to let anyone in, but it was too late: "I already have," he said. Ardis, Det. Romero of Rockford PD, and I got into a car and raced to his home. By the time we got there, he was already dead. Covered in wounds, but there was no blood. Looks like his killer cauterized the wounds.

Unthinkingly, I looked out the window, and I saw a woman's face wreathed in flames. She was trying to escape some terrible danger. Suddenly it began to make sense. I realized that he was already in the house when we called, but he still took his time to complete his ritual. This was like a homecoming to him.

Back at the police station, we gathered around a computer as Romero pulled up a file on a guy named Galen Calloway, whose wife and daughter died in a house fire back in November 1989. He survived, of course, but he got third-degree burns on his arms and hands. 

He taught religious studies at Edgewood Catholic High; his mother's name was Janice Marie Mosier...that must have been her initials on the wedding ring we found earlier. Charged with DUI manslaughter in '92; sentenced to five years but paroled in three...and here we are, chasing him. 

He's going to hit another church sometime soon, and I can narrow it down to two, both of them Protestant. It's either the one where he laid his wife to rest or the one where he witnessed his daughter's baptism.  

==============================================
It was a hostage situation. Calloway was inside, giving a sermon of his own. He'd already shot one of them in the leg. Outside, we waited, a SWAT team armed and ready. I tried to reason with him over the phone, but it was no good. I'd have to do this the old-fashioned way...in person.
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So there I was, on my knees. He swore he'd kill me if I told a lie. Telling the truth was pointless--he'd kill me one way or another. Still, there was no other way out.

He asked me if I was afraid to die. "Yes," I said. He twisted that around to mean that I don't believe in God. I admitted that my faith has lapsed. I've seen too much meaningless violence and too many innocent people slaughtered to maintain any kind of faith.

Calloway's line of reasoning came to me in a flash. "I am afraid," I said, "but not like you. You're afraid to die because you fear God's judgment. You try to kill your faith with the tools of your own belief because of your pain, because you think God's forsaken you. You think that you can get rid of your pain by slaughtering the faith that's inside you." Whether I lived or died that night, I didn't care. I just wanted to help this sad little man. I reassured him: "God doesn't want you to kill yourself or anyone else." But it was no good appealing to his beliefs. He moved behind me and cocked the hammer on his gun. There was a gunshot, and I fell forward. Didn't even see my life flash before my eyes. It wasn't my time to die after all...Someone's watching out for me, that's for sure.
I knew at that moment what I was going to say to Jordan: Bad things can happen, but we still have to keep our faith alive, or else we'll end up like the late Mr. Calloway: so consumed by grief that we lose first our faith and then our humanity.

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"Pilot" used its killer to introduce us to Frank Black's world.

"Gehenna" and "Dead Letters" used their madmen as plot devices around which a larger story was told.

"Kingdom Come" marks a turning point for Millennium: The episode humanized its killer by giving him a little bit of backstory and allowing a little bit of his humanity to show at the climax. He kills not to fulfill a prophecy or to make his mark on the world, but to resolve his own personal crisis of faith, a crisis which has ultimately robbed him of his more human qualities.


Among its other positives, "Kingdom Come" gives all of its characters a moment to shine, even the minor, incidental characters. Right at the beginning, we get to see Frank be a husband and a father, which I just had to include because it's just such a break from the usual film-noir stuff. On top of that, it gave his daughter, Jordan, her first little glimpse into the realm of death, and it's such a wonderful "little kid moment" that it's almost funny in comparison to everything else. I like that there's a little space for some kind of normalcy, separate from the gruesome world outside.

One thing I will say for Millennium: There's almost no wasted space from episode to episode. Every line of dialogue, every minor detail, is an illumination if not a plot point. For example, after the first murder, Frank deduces that Father Brown was a Jesuit priest; Kerney bitterly recalls his days at a Jesuit high school. "Left a lasting impression...if you know what I mean." It's calculated to sound like it marks a recurring plot point, but "Kingdom Come" mercifully drops the thread in favor of a twist revelation: the killer is suffering from a years-long crisis of faith following the deaths of his wife and daughter in a house fire.

...Let me take a quick detour and go back to "Pilot," just for a moment. On the commentary for that episode, series creator Chris Carter explained how a viewer complained that the show left her shocked and offended. He responded, "That's what Millennium is supposed to do."

That being said, however, explaining the killer's motivation as that particular kind of trauma may have been a little too strong for the time. Also, the eventual revelation we do get unintentionally reveals another rule within Millennium's internal logic: No matter what happens, the killers' actions are theirs and theirs alone. If his motivation had been childhood abuse at the hands of the Church, then the narrative would then have to set the Millennium Group against the institution.

THIS WOULD UNRAVEL THE NARRATIVE FABRIC OF THE SERIES.

It's taken six episodes, but Millennium has finally caught up with what I've been getting at: The Millennium Group is a shadowy external agency which acts as a force for order, and thus as a force for good. The institutions we hold dear--the church, the law, etc.--represent order and stability. Serial killers, deviants, and other madmen represent chaos. Chaos attacks order; order eventually re-establishes itself. That is the core premise of Millennium.


Were the Millennium Group pitted against the Church in this episode, it would change the core premise from "order vs. chaos" to "order vs. order," and this would force the series to adopt a new identity. Six episodes is far too early for a series--especially one that's doing as well as Millennium is at this point--to adopt a new identity.

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I think now's a good time for me to take a small break from writing the Episode Guide. It occurs to me that I haven't had a chance to really introduce you to the characters we've encountered so far.


So, come back next time for Bonus Material, Chapters 1 and 2!

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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 S1E5: "522666"

Many years ago, Andy Warhol once said, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." 

When I worked as a profiler with the Millennium Group, I had a special connection to their resources..."Intranet," is what they called it. I'm still not quite sure about the exact terms, but even then, I had a feeling that it would catch on with the public at large and make Warhol proud. 

Back in '96, the Internet had yet to catch on as a household fixture. People had to get creative if they wanted their fifteen minutes. 

In fact, there was this one nutjob who liked to set up bombs in buildings and...I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I? Let me take this from the beginning.
========================================================= 

"I am responsible for everything...except my very responsibility."         --Jean-Paul Sartre

I was in bed that night, and I couldn't sleep a wink. In my desperation, I picked up the remote and started channel surfing. A "Doctor Who" rerun on PBS--crap. "Gilligan's Island" on Nick at Nite--crap. Some stupid movie on HBO--crap. Basketball...Sonics vs. Rockets--crap.

The nightly news...breaking from Washington, D.C. I stared at the screen, transfixed at the carnage before me: A pub in the DC area called The Queen's Arms, a favorite of British diplomats, went up in a fiery explosion. God damn...The whole front of the pub was completely gone. So many people, burned, bleeding, broken, and in complete agony...that is, if the explosion hadn't already killed them. 

The last thing I saw on the screen before I set out was a pretty ordinary-looking guy--little doughy around the cheeks, thin moustache, I'd say mid-late 40s--holding one of the waitresses and calling for a medic. Nothing too remarkable, but I filed it away for later.

I was on autopilot as I packed an overnight bag and made arrangements for a flight to DC.  The next morning, I arrived at the Joint Task Force's headquarters. There was Peter Watts, who greeted me in his usual way, by blinding me with the light that reflected off his gleaming bald head.

We reached the conference room. It was an alphabet soup of just about every agency I could think of, and even a few I didn't. Not only that, but it also looked like some kind of mad-scientist setup, with all sorts of recording equipment, VCRs, and a bunch of other gizmos I couldn't name.

Our first group conference began as Agent Jack Pierson filled us in. The Washington Post got a call from a pay phone somewhere close to the pub.

(Before you ask, I don't even know who "Agent Jack Pierson" really is, or what he's an agent of. For all I know, he could be a travel agent with delusions of grandeur. I've met so many different people on my journeys that I ended up going along with it.)

Where was I? Pierson, that's right. He played a recording of the call that the Post got. There were a few, come to think of it, and the first one had a man's voice ranting about "Agents of ZOG" and "Abolish the IRS" and "The Turner Diaries." Typical militia stuff. Someone chimed in that there'd been no recent militia activity, and I could smell the stink of a red herring on that first call.

The second one was a little more convincing. The voice explained that the Abu Nidal Organization, some Middle Eastern outfit I'm not aware of, would carry out the attack. Nice try, but the call went out well after the pub went blooey. Another red herring, but this one didn't smell so bad.

The third one went out ten minutes before the bombing. Pierson commented that it sounded like the bomb codes used by the Irish Republican Army. No ranting voice; no threats; just six tones that sounded like "5-2-2-6-6-6."

You'd think the "666" would have been a religious reference, but it was just a stupid pun. Write down those numbers and the letters you see above them on a touch-tone pad, and what do you get? 
"K-A-B-O-O-M."

We're dealing with the worst kind of nut: one with a sense of humor.

The next morning, at about 10:15 or so, I joined Watts and Pierson for a drink at the pub. We would've had a drink, but there was almost nothing left of the place. I wandered over to the back of the pub, the center of the explosion. Ugh...I could practically see the regulars caught in the middle of it, hear their screams.

A bomb-squad guy came in with a piece of detonator in an evidence bag. The thing had too many wires on it--backups in case one of them failed. Smart and funny...He'd be a real catch if it weren't for the whole "mad bomber" gig.

He pulled out another evidence bag, this one with a briefcase's three-digit combo lock (the briefcase was made in Egypt). The guy's a genius for engineering the bomb, but an idiot for where he put it--anyone could have found it. From the way he made the detonator, I suspect he just didn't care.

Outside, Pierson was talking to a woman from the ABC network. Seems "Nightline" wanted someone to explain the mad bomber's mind. Pierson looked at me, and I said, "I have a job." That's the last thing I need, to go on "Nightline" and make Ted Koppel look handsome.

A multi-level parking garage caught my interest. Intuition told me that he watched the explosion from on high, away from the flying debris. (Probably got more enjoyment out of that than he would from seeing my craggy features on "Nightline.")

There were six cigarette butts on the ground. Must have been a British brand...of course, he got them at a British pub. 

There were a few other things, but I'd rather leave it at that before I make myself sick. Take my word for it: He definitely got a thrill from all this, if you know what I mean.

Back at HQ, Pierson gathered us for the noon meeting. We'd all gathered a lot of evidence: fingerprints; serial numbers on the parts from the bomb; the works. I took all of it in, and told them that we're not dealing with a terrorist.

1. A terrorist would try to stay unseen, put the bomb somewhere sneaky. This one was actually inside the pub.

2. A terrorist would get out of Dodge as soon as possible. This one stuck around, watching from a parking garage.

3. A terrorist would make a simple bomb. Doesn't matter if it goes off or not, it'll still send a message if someone finds it. This one made his bomb specifically to go off. It was intricate, overly complicated.

I warned them: He's obsessed, and he'll be living this fantasy he's created as much as possible, for as long as possible. He'll be listening in on us with the latest gadgets, like RF detectors and cell-phone cloners.

After all that, Pierpont set a new commandment in stone: "Land-line communication only." That meant nobody except for me could use a cell-phone to talk about this case. I half-expected someone to accost me for special permission, but to my surprise the issue never came up. I guess they figured what I already knew: Pierpont had a trap set, and I was the bait.
==============================================
Later that day, Pierson and I were out on a prowl. He'd go into a phone booth, and I'd chat with him about the case on my cell phone. We'd go at it for a while, then find a different reception site. It was like fishing in a way, except we couldn't drink beer or play cards.

There was no need for either. My cell rang, and I heard those six tones: "5-2-2-6-6-6."
==============================
We went back to HQ, where Agent Sullivan was demonstrating some equipment. I resolved to call him "Q" from now on at the sight of all this stuff.

The overall purpose of this setup was to triangulate his position from the cell phone's signal. Never mind, of course, that he'd use a bunch of cloned cell phones. Sullivan assured us that that would make him difficult, but not entirely impossible, to track. All we had to do was keep him talking. It's an old trick, just made new with fancier toys.

Suddenly I remembered that I'd been up and about for 37 hours straight. 

And then my cell rang. There it was, "5-2-2-6-6-6."
I answered.
He responded.
"Who is this?" I asked.
"A star," he said.
Click.

Good. Let him call me back.

Sure enough, he did. Bastard's full of himself...taunting me.
I demanded that he prove himself.
He did, rattling off the specifics of his bombing.
"I want to help you," I said, knowing that he didn't want my help. Whatever, I just want to keep him talking.
"I need a name," I said. "What do I call you?"
"I already gave you my name," he said.
"Your name's 'Kaboom?'" I asked. "Like the little green guy from 'The Flintstones'?"
Click.

Sounds pretty uneventful, I know, but Sullivan got a trace from all of that.
=================================
Watts, Pierson, Sullivan, myself, and a few other agents convened in an alley. We'd split into two groups, each taking a black van.

Watts' group would go south to the Rock Creek area; I'd join Pierson and Sullivan's group and go north to Mill Creek Cemetery. Once established, we'd cast our lines and wait for a bite.

...And wait...and wait...and wait. Awful lot of swimmers, but none of them hungry. For the past three hours, we got those same six tones every fifteen minutes. He's burning us out on purpose. We've got no choice but to wait him out--we know his game.

At 5:17, my phone rang. Could this be the big break we were waiting for?

No, but it was Catherine. I smiled to myself a little as I answered. She was about to say something, but I told her I'd call her right back and hung up...and then called from a different phone.

She was about to read me the riot act, but I very gently interrupted her and told her that my cell is monitored. She continued on, explaining that Jordan had a nightmare about me. I was about to reply when my other phone--the monitored one--rang. I couldn't just hang up on her, so I left "her" phone on the line while I answered the other one.

"Getting any sleep, Frank?" the taunting voice asked.
"Shouldn't let it keep you from calling Catherine."

Big mistake, Sonny-Jim. That's the one thing you don't do--you don't bring Catherine into my work. All right, I'll play your game.

"You must be pretty tired yourself," I said. Rule number one of the game: I don't rise to his bait
"No rest for the wicked," he shot back.
"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," I said.
The van started to move. Sullivan must have gotten a signal, because I noticed him talking into a receiver, feeding coordinates to Watts' van.

The bomber prattled on, explaining how he was an artist, and how his work touched people in a deep, life-altering way. His words exactly. Of course it's a life-altering way--if I were caught up in one of his explosions, I'd say my life had been pretty well altered!

Still, I kept on buttering him up, agreeing with him about the high caliber of his art, about how the anticipation builds and leads to...the moment of impact, of fire. I was on a roll! Never heard myself talk so much in my life! He said something that left me more than a little rattled: He said that I'd be as famous as he is, once I'd caught him.

And then he told me his next move: 9:00 tomorrow morning.

Click.

At least we were in the right area, but it would still be a needle in a haystack, and we only had three hours to find it.

At 6:30 in the morning the next day, Pierson set two search parties out into the Mt. Vernon area. Each team took half the town to search and notify businesses and civilians alike.

And I...oh, damn, the exhaustion's catching up with me. Watts took one look at me and said, "You need sleep, Frank." I agreed with him, and confided that I wish I knew what he wanted. "It's more than a thrill," I said to him. "First he alerts the authorities there's a bomb. After a day he needs more...so he has to contact us? He taunts us to the point of near-capture?"

I couldn't stop thinking about his earlier comment, that I'd be a star after I captured him.
================================================
I went into an office building to let the receptionist know about the bomb threat. Might as well do my part, just in case.

And then I saw a parking garage, just like the one across from the pub. On a hunch, I went up to one of the higher levels. Sure enough, I found the same kind of cigarette butts I found earlier.

As I ran out of there, I called Jack Pierson and told him to get a bomb squad to 2300 Oglethorpe, north of my location. I was nearly out of there when I felt the shockwave of a huge explosion. I was thrown to the ground, my phone flying out of my hand. It wasn't even 9:00 yet.

The phone rang. I crawled over to it and answered. "Just warming up," the voice said. "Third floor."

I ran like a maniac into that building. The stairwell was full of smoke, alarms, and agonized screams. Some would run away in terror, but it only gave me the strength to keep going. I urged those who could still move to get out before the other bomb went off.

Finally! The third floor! Next thing I knew, some idiot practically ran me over in his haste to get out. No time to holler at him: from my new vantage point, I saw the suitcase bomb. Another guy shoved me out of the way before I could move an inch. He said, "Don't worry, I'll get you out of here."

Fade to black.
====================================
I was in the building. A bomb had just gone off, and the halls and stairwells were crowded with people. I saw two women about to be caught in the worst of it. I grabbed their shoulders to drag them to safety...and saw my wife and daughter's terrified faces, engulfed in a blinding, white light. There was a rapid, high-pitched beeping noise, which I assumed was another bomb...

...and then I woke up. I was in a hospital room, and Catherine was there. She explained that she entrusted Jordan with a close friend of hers, and came to be with me in person.

Cath always did worry too much about me, but I never thought she should stop.

And then she said something that worried me a little. A man came to see how I was doing...the guy who pulled me out of the explosion. I just looked at her with a blank expression, and she turned on the news to jog my memory.

The evening news was ablaze with the story. The Fox-affiliate's coverage showed a pretty young woman out in the field. She was interviewing a pretty ordinary-looking guy--little doughy around the cheeks, thin moustache, I'd say...mid...late...40s...

That's the same guy I saw in the news coverage of the Queen's Arms bombing.

With that, I completed the jigsaw puzzle. He was trying to make himself look like the hero and me the villain...and I walked right into it.

"How does it feel to be a star?" the reporter asked.
He said: "I just did what anybody in my place would have done."

Words fail me now as sure as they failed me then.
===============================================================
Jack Pierson practically laughed me out of the room when I told him about my idea. In a way, he's right: there was no way for him to bring in a local hero--twice over, I might add--without an absolutely air- and watertight case against him. 

I elaborated: Ray Dees engineered the two bombs he used in that building so that he could easily survive it unscathed. Being a janitor at that building, he knew just where to be, in the right place and the right time. People have died because of his actions, but he doesn't directly want to kill...that's just a side effect of his sick obsession.

Pierson considered it, and then Watts showed him a sheaf of recently-faxed papers: Ray Dees' military records from eleven years ago. Turns out he was an explosives expert, and he'd been in Egypt, which explained the briefcase remains from earlier. 

I saw Pierson's eyes light up in horror as all the pieces fell into place. He ordered two SWAT teams to go to Dees' apartment and get whatever they could find, and we followed their lead.

One thing was for sure: he left in a hurry. Almost nothing was left of his little operation, save for a room full of electronic gear, still going. On a nearby display, I saw...my own cell number and present frequency. He's smart--he knew we'd be coming. 

My legs almost gave way under me, and I grabbed hold of a table to steady myself. Pierson told on of his men to take me back to the hospital...I'm probably still uneasy after the explosions, I reasoned. Still, I assured everyone that I could make my own way to the hospital, but I'd need a ride to my rental car.

Everything was just fine as I got into the car...and then my phone rang.

5-2-2-6-6-6.

"I've been waiting for you, Frank."
Dees. He just couldn't resist one last confrontation.
"You can't move and you're just waiting. You know it's going to end, but you don't know how."
No, and that scared me. I played my last card. At this point all I could do was buy time.
"Raymond, do you know precisely what happens at the moment of detonation? You lose your power. You lose your control. Raymond...you're a hero. A star. Are you going to throw all that away?"
I heard his voice grow agitated. He accused me of trying to take his fame away from him, and said that he'd get it back by taking me out.

Raymond, Raymond...You just don't get it.

"It's time, Frank."
I heard a gunshot.
I just sat there for what felt like hours. Finally, I got out. There he was, as dead as a fried oyster.

Watts told me later on that Dees' detonator was a fake, and that my car was not, in fact, rigged to explode. My face burned: I realized that we practically gave him what he wanted on a silver platter.

Later that night, Ray Dees got the fame he wanted on the ten o'clock news. My only victory out of all this? He's known as a mad bomber, not a hero.

All that work he did? All that planning? It all went...kaboom.
===================================
On the surface, "522666" doesn't seem to have a lot going for it. In fact, its "race against time to catch the mad bomber" narrative could work as an episode of NYPD Blue or another series. That being said, its details make it unmistakably Millennium. Let's take the episode apart and "profile" it.


1. STORYTELLING: Millennium makes excellent use of television to tell this narrative. From Frank's insomniac channel-surfing, to the news coverage of the bombings, to his Nightline invitation, television serves as the most important recurring theme.

While we're still on that subject, let's take it one step further: News coverage serves as the episode's most important recurring theme. My first impression of its villain, Raymond Dees, is that he'd be a perfect reality-show contestant. One problem: "522666" came out a few years before shows such as Big Brother and Survivor found their footholds on American boob-tubes, so I can't make the case that "522666" is anticipating reality TV....or can I? Believe it or not, the most basic form of reality television is the local news, which Dees makes full use of by tending to injured people in the aftermath of his explosions.

At the beginning, in the pub, we see him clearly. At that point, nothing says "mad bomber" about him; he's a perfectly ordinary if somewhat off-kilter Joe Schmo whose only flaw is that he tends to get lost in his thoughts. Speaking of his thoughts, when he imagines the moment of detonation, his surroundings look like grainy film stock, as if he were watching a lurid exploitation movie from the 70s. Since it's revealed later on that he derives sexual release from watching his bombs go off, it's a perfect if really creepy visual metaphor.

One other thing I noticed: Compressed-time storytelling in cop and detective shows is so commonplace that people sometimes jokingly complain, "Why can't real cops solve the case in an hour?" (Because that hour represents the edited highlights of several days, that's why.)

"522666" exaggerates that device by having its story take place over one to two days. (It also foreshadows another, later Fox hit, 24, whose hour-long episodes took place in "real time.")

2. CHARACTERS: "522666" has three regulars--Frank, Peter, and Catherine (Jordan is mentioned, but not seen)--one villain, several one-shot "joint taskforce" agents, and a lot of miscellaneous civilians.

The lion's share of the characterization goes to Frank and Ray Dees. For the first time, there's a feeling that hero and villain are truly opposed to each other.

It begins with tiny details: Dees stands at the parking garage, obsessively watching the pub; meanwhile, Frank irritably flicks through a series of channels, and when he gets to the news report, he lingers for only a moment before setting about his packing. The biggest moment, though, is when the lady from Nightline asks Frank if he'd like to appear on that night's edition and explain the bomber's motivation. His reply: "I have a job." Dees wants nothing more than to live out a fantasy as a hero on televised news; Frank wants nothing more than to stay out of his enemy's fantasy.

Moving on to Ray Dees, he's unusually three-dimensional. The Frenchman was a straight-up nutter; "Gehenna's" villain was practically nonexistent; the Dead Letters Killer was a homicidal gadfly; and the Judge was just...the Judge.

This time around, he's got a clear motivation. He wants to be a star, just like any of us, but the way he goes about getting this makes him a Bad Guy. Being a hero and helping people in the aftermath of an explosion is one thing; doing the same in the aftermath of an explosion which he himself engineered is entirely different.

More than that, though, he considers himself an artist. As the Joker said in the 1989 Batman movie, "I make art until someone dies." While on the phone with Frank, he poetically describes the effects of a bomb exploding:

3. A SIGN OF THE TIMES? I'd really, really rather not think about it, but I can't help but draw parallels between this episode and the Oklahoma City bombing, which no-one references...and I'm okay with that, because it would have been too soon. Indeed, there's a very strong line drawn between fantasy and reality: Timothy McVeigh performed a vile act of political domestic terrorism; Raymond Dees made and planted bombs solely for his own puerile self-gratification.

In the end, it's perfectly all right that Millennium doesn't match note-for-note with current events. It only needs to convey the emotion of the time, because, again, its main goal is to dramatize the unraveling of society as we know it.
====================================================
(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 S1E4: "The Judge"

As a profiler, I spend much of my time going after those who commit violent crimes. It's usually pretty easy to draw the line between lawgiver and lawbreaker, but there are times when that line gets blurred. What happens when a former lawgiver decides to take the law into his own hands and pass judgment without a fair trial? 

The Millennium Group takes interest, that's what happens...

"The invisible world seems formed in love, the visible spheres were formed in fright."

-- Herman Melville, 1819-1891

I had lost touch with my good friend Bob Bletcher at Seattle PD. The Group's had me going places, and there just wasn't time to check in. He harbored no resentment, as I learned when he invited me onto the case and into the home of a woman named Annie Tisman. She called the police after a delivery guy gave her a package with a human tongue inside, wrapped in plastic.

I picked up the box and saw in my mind's eye: the victim; a man wearing an executioner's hood; and a third person cutting the vic's tongue out. Good thing I skipped breakfast.

Bletch took me to one side and told me that he's no stranger to this kind of thing, but his expertise is usually limited to fingers and hands at most. "We need your expertise on this," he said.

Let it be known that I'll never turn down a cry for help.

=================================================================

Later that night, the post office delivered a package to my front door. After reading Jordan a story and putting her to bed, I went down to take a look. It was a severed p...no, I'm just yanking your chain. 

Bletch had sent me a box of photos from the coroner's. He had mentioned severed fingers earlier--this must have been from the past four years. 

I scanned them and sent them to the Group while I got Jim Penseyres on the horn. He agreed with the examiner's conclusion, namely that the victims were alive when they had their various parts removed. He and I both wondered why the villain who did this hasn't been caught, and he surmised that said villain is very careful with how he disposes of the rest of his victim.

He told me that he had called in Cheryl Andrews, the Group's medical examiner, to take a look. Just then, Catherine called to tell me that dinner was ready. The secret to my marriage is this: When the queen calls, I answer. Sometimes with a "no," but we make it work.
=====================================================

Later on, Jim, Bletch, and I met Cheryl at the morgue. She concluded that the victim's tongue had been cut out after he'd died, and this particular killing wasn't as refined as all the others were. Bletch thought the killer had some rage issues, but Cheryl believed he was just getting sloppy. Whatever it means, I didn't think he was going to stop any time soon.

When I got home that night, Cath had something for me--a little information from the water-cooler. Apparently, one of her coworkers is counseling Annie Tisman--yes, the woman who got the tongue from the bogus UPS guy. 

Cath's account of how Annie became a widow in the first place sparked my interest: Her husband went to jail for robbery about twelve years ago. He appealed, claiming perjured testimony against him. Somebody did him in before anyone else could look into it. The plot thickens. (I've always wanted to say that...)

Right after she told me about her day, Bletch called me again, asking me to meet him at the morgue. 

Before me were two stiffs: One was a guy in his fifties or so; white; killed by blunt-force trauma to the head. Det. Giebelhouse had already ID'd him as Jonathan Mellen, a retired Seattle cop.

 I, of course, went to look at the other one. Bletch assured me that I was looking at the body of a vagrant, probably trying to jump a train when his bag threw off his momentum. Still...Something about him kept my attention. Something under his fingernails. I was pretty sure we'd find some kind of clue to connect our two John Doe's, and later on I found out that my idea was right. The hobo was an ex-con who'd been in and out of jail, but went straight when he was released five years ago. Bletch found Mr. Mellen's DNA under the hobo's fingernails, and everything looked pretty cut-and-dried...but it wasn't good enough, not for me. There was a connection, but that wasn't it. 
====================================================
The next day, sometime in the afternoon, I got another call from Bletch. Down in the morgue (if I took a drink for every time I ended up meeting Bletch there, I'd be pretty well drunk by now), we looked at a package that went through the X-ray scanner at the Federal Building, addressed to someone called Philman. Inside was an amputated foot, with part of the shin attached. A pathologist commented that the victim was alive when it happened.

 On a tray, I noticed a sock, taken from that foot. There was a little bit of dirt inside it. That interested me, so I took some of it with me in an evidence envelope. Seattle's finest were already overworked and underpaid, I figured, and they deserved a little bit of extra help.

Later that night, I was on the phone with Cheryl Andrews and Jim Penseyres from the 'Group. Turned out they learned something about the late Jonathan Mellen: He was the cop at Annie Tisman's husband's trial. Seems he'd perjured himself, and that's why she was sent his tongue.

Cheryl interrupted the call to tell us that she didn't find any traces of metals or chemicals in that dirt I sent her, but she did find some cranberry seeds. 

Our killer's base could only be a disused cranberry farm. I relayed the information to Giebelhouse and Bletch, and they got a search party underway.

I went with them to the first of three farms on our list. There, we found a man with a missing foot inside an old oil tank. He was already dead, but he tried to keep himself alive by using his belt as a makeshift tourniquet. (I later learned that this particular man was once a landlord. He skimped on some security lights, and one of his tenants fell down a stairwell and died because of his greed. Can't remember his name for the life of me, but it's just as well...I'd rather forget anything about him.)

It was so precise...I was pretty sure that his killer was no lone butcher, but someone acting under orders. If he was taking orders, chances are he'd have to go somewhere to get those orders in the first place. 

Bletch and I took an educated guess and headed to a sleazy road-house called the Tittle Tattle Room. Ruby Tip...Tittle Tattle Room...where do they come up with these names? 

Bletch went to get a drink and the lowdown on the rum sorts who frequent the place, but the bartenders didn't feel like talking. He wanted to get out and check the parole records, but intuition told me we'd find our man after all. I found a mirror...I saw him, and he saw me. I motioned Bletch to go back to the car. It was strange, but that guy didn't panic when he saw me. 

There was nothing left but to wait until the place closed. One by one, the guys shuffled into their cars and onto their motorbikes. One last car remained; the target got in and drove off. Bait.
==============================================================

We tailed him to a modest but immaculate house. Bletch took point while I waited in the shadows, behind the gate. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I noticed the owner...and he saw me. He...smiled. Honestly, it was one of the most unnerving things I've ever seen.

We took him into custody. Bletch got done talking with an Assistant D.A., who advised us that there just wasn't enough to charge the guy, even with all his scrapbooks and the ever-mounting evidence against him. 

Meanwhile, Giebelhouse was interviewing him. We learned that he was a livestock auctioneer; he gave us a demonstration that would have been awe-inspiring in any other context, but here, it was just plain terrifying.

Giebelhouse emerged from the room, a little shaken. He said that the guy wanted to talk to me, and I obliged. I felt like a fly about to go into a spider's web.

He answered to the name "Judge," but would also answer to "Legion." You know, like in the Bible--Jesus banished demons from a herd of possessed hogs, and that's what the demons called themselves.

Here's where it took a surreal turn: He actually offered me a job working with him. That's what sent a chill up my spine: He honestly believed that he was justice incarnate. Justice, so pure and so absolute, that it seemed divorced from humanity itself. I don't roll like that, and I let him know in so many words. 

Even so, it was tempting in a way. That's what scared me the most.
==========================================================
Come to find out, the Judge had sued the city left, right, and center not long after we took him in. Can you imagine the nerve of this guy? He thinks he's above the law, but when he's cornered, he uses the law to his own advantage. It's possible that he's fully aware of the rank hypocrisy. This is...this is all a game to him. 

Bletch and I returned to the Judge's home, thinking we'd find his accomplice there. He stayed behind: If this turned out to be a bust, we'd be in serious hot water. 

I went in. My instincts proved right, because the guy I'd been looking for, the Judge's right-hand man--name of Bardale, I learned--was there. Calm, rational, and bitter; and he was covered in cuts and blood. He was an ex-con, and that's how the Judge found his henchmen: parolees, all of them, fresh off the bus out of jail.

He told me that the Judge betrayed him, and he led me out to the pigpen. There, amid the pigs and the dirt, I saw the Judge's lifeless body.

Ashes to ashes, and swine to swine.
=====================================================

For the first time ever, the Millennium Museum encounters the most terrifying beast of all: Schedule Slip. My plan was two episodes every two weeks, but I've had a couple of really action-packed weeks at work.

Dear me, where to begin? "The Judge" isn't quite as heady as the last three episodes were. In fact, I could say that this is where Millennium settles into a standard "killer-of-the-week" formula, and there's something oddly inconsequential about it: the titular Judge believes himself above the law and carries out a perversely pure form of justice, but he's a lightweight who uses the law to his own ends when it suits him and uses ex-cons to do his dirty work; he either has them killed or sent back to jail when he's done with them. (I tell you what, he'd make an excellent CEO.) Other than all that, he has virtually no other background beyond his occupation as a livestock auctioneer.

His demise is anticlimactic: There's no final confrontation between good and evil, no blood and thunder. His henchman disposes of him offscreen and chucks him into the pigpen. I've noticed that almost all of the killers in Millennium are disposed of quickly and without ceremony. Once or twice would be bad writing, but four times in a row indicates that it's by design. We're denied the catharsis, the release we'd feel at the end, when we see justice served for ourselves. When I sit back and review these episodes, the impression I get is that of a series of small, disconnected, and otherwise unimportant victories. Perhaps these madmen, these demons of society, are symptoms of a bigger problem: the unraveling of society to come, right before the turn of the millennium.

As with Jim Horn in "Dead Letters," I'd like to think that the Judge is another warning for Frank, a warning of what might happen if his pursuit of justice gets out of hand. There is something to be said for how he uses ex-cons to do his bidding: Mightn't he, in some strange way, represent the Millennium Group? It's too early to tell, but it's food for thought, and certainly something to keep in mind for later on.

Other than that, it's good to see C.C.H. Pounder grace the screen in yet another program (I'm a fan of Warehouse 13, and I maintain that she made the otherwise dire Robocop 3 somewhat tolerable). The cast is on fine form, but the tone of the episode is off.

Will the series pick up? Join me next time for the next two episodes: "522666" 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, S1E3: "Dead Letters"

Speaking not only as a profiler, but also as a human being, the most disheartening thing I'll ever see is a jaded cop. I'm lucky to have a good support network at home and in the Millennium Group. They keep me from falling into that state, but not all of us are so lucky. 

I remember an old friend of mine, name of James Horn. Detective at Portland PD; married, with a son. We tracked down the "Dead Letters Killer" a while back. Haven't heard from him in a while...I wonder what's happened to him. 

Oh, just so we're clear: I've never much cared for that name, the "Dead Letters Killer." It's a little too sensationalized for my tastes, but it has a ring to it, so I'll not object too loudly.

"For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me. And what I dreaded has happened to me, I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes."--Job 3:25-26 

Jordan woke me up this morning because she was having a bad dream. I let her in and reassured her that everyone has bad dreams...and then my pager went off. No time to help my little sweetheart see it through--I was needed elsewhere.

The Group directed me to an animal center in Portland, Oregon. Awful place, full of trapped animals, wild and domesticated alike...I think I can safely say that they didn't take kindly to me at all. Considering that their exposure to humans has only been of masked municipal trappers, I don't blame them at all.

Before I hit the door, I saw in my mind's eye...the letters "Y," "R," and "Y," and they looked like they'd been written on Scotch tape. Weird, but whatever. So long as it's not a guy with his eyes and mouth sewn shut or something like that, I'm not complaining.

Another grisly scene. I'll say this much: She's not half the girl she used to be...literally. Meanwhile, I'm getting next week's "Jumble" in my head. This time it's "R," "R," "Y," "I," and "I." 

The next morning, I went to Molly's Coffee Shop for breakfast and a way to make sense of all this. It's pretty much "Scrabble meets Mastermind," and if I could work this into a game, I'd be filthy rich. Problem is, it's not going anywhere. I've tried "IRREVOCABLY," "RITUALLY," "RISKY"...nothing.

So engrossed was I that I didn't hear the bell on the door ring. A big guy took a seat next to me. One look at him, and I recognized him as Jim Penseyres, from the 'Group. 

We shot the breeze for a while, and he told me that a couple of his colleagues didn't want to take on the Portland case at all, while a few others thought we should just wait a while. He agreed with the second, and tried to pull Holmes' serial-killer criteria on me--specifically, the one which said that they usually wait 30 days between kills. I stopped him right there. "Look," I said, "This guy isn't going to wait around. I give him ten days before he starts again."

Jim wondered why I wanted to take on this case so badly. "He left a message," I said. Shaking his head, Jim realized I wasn't going to take no for an answer, and directed me to a one James Horn, who works with Portland PD, and who helped bring San Diego's "Highway 8 Killer" to justice.

As soon as I got to his office, I sensed that all was not right in his world. Sure, he was a good host and all, but it looked and felt like a mask he was putting on. I made friendly-like for a while, and he let his guard down. Admitted--more to himself--that there were problems at home. He was quick to change the subject, and I was quick to oblige. Better not tear that Band-Aid off too soon.

We looked at a file on the killer. You'd think most of these guys kill for sexual gratification, but no, not this one--the girl's body showed no signs of violation. It's entirely possible that this guy has never had sex in his life. There was another detail, one that I've never seen in any other killer: He put duct-tape all over her face. James and I could only guess that our killer shows remorse afterwards...

We headed for the scene of the crime--the animal shelter. The victim was a "parking enforcement officer" named Karen Anderson. We took a look around the lab itself, or rather, I looked for that message while James went into "man-of-action" mode. My first observation: This guy's got a short fuse. Likes to have things done a certain way. We're going to have a lot of fun working together...not. Before we got into a barroom brawl right then and there, our pagers went off at the same time. We were wanted elsewhere, at the post office. Remind me to thank the warden later for that stay of execution.

We hit the post office. I saw a sign marked "DEAD LETTERS OFFICE," and couldn't help but chuckle at the irony. Got another vision: "A," "Y," "R," and then "A," "I," "I."  We stepped inside.

Another victim, cut in half just like the first. Her remains were shrouded in black plastic, and she had duct tape over her face. Something about that duct tape...I asked a techie for some Scotch tape and a couple of sheets of acetate. After pressing the clear tape against the duct tape, and transferring it to the acetate, I got this result: "HAIR TODAY GONE TOMORROW." 

As if by instinct, I pondered my own thinning hair.

The next day, back at James' office, we hashed out a basic profile. He thinks our killer is an ex-cop. I think his theory is valid, but he's got a few loose screws. Suddenly his son comes charging in, happy as a clam. Daddy's not so happy--in fact, he's really mad. I don't think I would ever snap at Jordan the way he snapped at his kid. His wife--Cindy, I later learned her name was--immediately gave him what-for. She told him that T.C., their son, wanted to surprise him by coming in early, and he was expecting them to show up at 4:00. 

Cath and I thought we should invite Jim, Cindy, and T.C. over for dinner the next day. We could all get to know each other outside the confines of the job. Naturally, Jordan and T.C. made fast friends...how nice to be young and innocent. Jim--I think I'll call him that from here on--said that he really didn't want a divorce, that he was terrified of failing his son, of becoming nothing more than "a face covered in gray tape." I took one look at Cath, and I could tell what she was thinking from her expression: "With a mug like Frank's, gray tape would only be an improvement."

This guy's troubles reminded me of something Dostoevsky wrote: "There's nothing more sad that a life that ends, and no-one knows or cares." I realized that our little madman feels like he's faceless, so he covers his victims' faces. He feels like a dead letter at the post office, so he kills. Women and sex make him feel even worse, so he murders women. He feels remorse after he kills, so he leaves clues. He's trying to get himself captured, believes he needs to be punished. I agree with him on that, but I'm kind of worried that Jim'll get to him before I do. I'm no glory hound; don't get me wrong...I just believe that they're still people in desperate need of help, and Jim's going the other way. To him, they're nothing more than monsters. If he keeps going down that path, he's going to destroy himself and everyone close to him. I've got to get through, somehow.
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A couple of days later, we learned that he killed again. This time, it was an orderly at St. Joseph's Hospital, in the parking garage. We're guessing from the blood-prints we found that he has some kind of a vehicle--the prints are moving away from the scene. Two important clues: A broken lens from a pair of glasses and another message. "NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED."

True to form, Jim blew his top. I noticed a press-gang behind us, cameras at the ready, and I told him he'd better watch himself. "That's just what he wants," I said. Jim's taking the bait like a good little trout, and with a hothead like him on the case, I have to make the smart moves.

Press-gang...That gave me an idea. We fed the newspapers a bald-faced lie, that the killer misspelled "VENTURED" as "VENTERED." Now we're throwing out the bait. 

That night, there was a candlelight vigil outside the hospital. We set up a heavy police presence well away from those who came to pay their respects. Sure enough, Jim was champing at the bit for a piece of the action. Before I could placate him, our squawk-boxes blared. They found a suspicious-looking character.

Jim leapt into action like Bulldog Drummond. He tackled the guy and...I can't even describe it. 

Worse yet, it wasn't even our killer. Just a head-case who escaped from his floor, he wanted so badly to say goodbye. After the cops took him back to his room, I gave Jim a good chewing-out. He didn't even try to apologize. Instead, he pulled that old "what if it was your wife or family?" card. "Look," I said, "He's not about to go after our wives and families." And then I got his problem: He's trying to get inside their heads, when he should be trying to put them into his head. The way he's going about it is going to drive him crazy at this rate.

And then I realized something. We handed out 30 pins to be left on a board at the memorial. I just counted 31. He was here, hiding in plain sight.

Jim and I put out flyers in the hopes that someone might recognize one of the faces on it. One of them had to be a match. We got a call from a young woman at an eyeglass-lab in Woodburn, a saleslady. She tried to calm him down when he lost his cool earlier that day. I "saw" him reach out and slap her hard...bastard.

Our last option was clear: Set up a stakeout and wait for him to get his glasses. 

One of Portland's "dames in blue" volunteered to be a decoy for our little operation. We had about 20 officers backing us up in case things got out of hand. Everything was picture perfect, except for Jim. I told him to go home, take a load off. The last thing we need is a loose cannon to make things worse.

Come to find out that he didn't go home. Instead, he found our man, and I found Jim beating the tar out of him. The coppers came and put the nutjob in handcuffs, and Jim realized that he just ruined our chances of putting him away. Because of his rage, his fear, his loss of control, all the stuff in that van would be inadmissible in court. About all we could hope for was the stuff found at his house: DNA samples, personal effects taken from his victims, hair clippings. The DA said it should be plenty. 

Bigger things than our case were damaged. That little outburst cost James whatever chance he had of getting into the Millennium Group.

And there you have it: James Horn, the detective who couldn't. 


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"Dead Letters" marks the point at which Millennium loses its apocalyptic leanings and takes a step back toward an average, run-of-the-mill procedural...or so I thought when I first watched it. The episode disappointed me at first because it lacked any of the first two episodes' apocalyptic leanings, but, after a second viewing, I concluded that it's a lot more interesting the second time around, and there's a lot more going on under the surface than I thought.

First things first, let's talk about what the episode is. "Pilot" and "Gehenna" set up the formula; "Dead Letters" confirms one of the series' main rules: The killers and madmen themselves are less important than their effect on society itself and on Frank Black and those around him.

Halfway through the story, we meet a "reflection" of Frank in the persona of James Horn, the buff, macho detective and potential Millennium candidate. It's telling that he once answered to "Jim," the more friendly and informal shortening of his given name. "Jim Horn" has two neat syllables, as does "Frank Black."

At first, he's set up to be Frank's equal and perhaps his competition, but when he insists on the more formal "James," he instead becomes a dark mirror for our hero. Everything in James' life has gone wrong: his work has overwhelmed him, his wife has separated and taken their son with her, and he feels like he's slowly and inexorably drowning in his own masculinity.

In any normal show, the main protagonist would take the bait and start a pissing contest, but Frank isn't that kind of hero. Instead, he displays a more sensitive, more empathetic nature, and in so doing, he reveals James' bravado for the farce that it really is. Unfortunately, this farce has destructive consequences, as we see in the "memorial" scene, in which James shakes down and brutally beats an innocent hospital patient who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (To be fair, though, even I was fooled: The way the scene was shot did set him up to be the killer.) James even went as far as pulling out the old "what if it was your family?" card, which I've seen in use among the more aggressive parts of Facebook and the rest of the internet. Frank, to his credit, responds, "He hasn't killed our wives or families."

Now we see the effects of that bravado: James has been taking his work too personally for too long, and it's driving him off the deep end. We see a little bit of that in the episode's climax: He starts to perceive everyone walking down the street to look like the killer on the flyer, and almost every car passing down the road to be an orange VW van.

I'll say it again: Were this any other cop show, Jim's no-holds-barred assault of the (real) killer would be shot, edited, and presented as justice dispensed. Here, it's nothing more than a man losing control of himself.

The resolution is an anticlimax, the villain disposed of with a few words about the evidence against him. Justice is beside the point--this resolution is about the consequences of police brutality. James Horn, the cowboy cop, loses whatever chance he has of getting into the Millennium Group.

The ending has some more subtle, more horrifying implications: It leaves us with the feeling that Jim's been doing this for quite some time, and only now is he learning that it's doing him no good. With that in mind, we start to wonder: Has he been acting up at home? It's possible. Will he start acting up at home? It's possible, but less likely.

Jim Horn started out as a possible rival to Frank, but ended up serving as a glimpse into what might have been...and a warning of what might happen in the future.

Frank ought to watch himself, lest he end up like his colleague. Will this pan out later on? We shall find out as we go through Series 1. Come back next time for "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.)