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.)

"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."
====================================================
(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.
=============================================================

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."
====================================================
(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....