Christmas

Merry fucking Christmas, if you celebrate it!

Ready to read about one of the most emotionally devastating Christmas episodes of TV ever? Good.

I’ve previously posted about the Christmas episode of MILLENNIUM, Midnight of the Century, but felt like it needed a deeper look.

A brief summary of the MILLENNIUM series, despite the fact that — like HARLEY QUINN and RATED Q, I will also never, ever shut up about MILLENNIUM — it was a three-season show about intuitive, sensitive FBI profiler Frank Black, embodied by Lance Henrickson’s gruff voice and serious but soulful presence. He has a spiritual sense of premonition, visions, and general human sensitivity and empathy, far beyond most.

In the season that this episode takes place, Frank is no longer with the FBI, but a freelancer. He’s estranged from his wife Catherine and daughter Jordan because of where his abilities have taken him. He’s also disowned his father Henry because he feels that Henry let his wife — Frank’s mother — wither away and die alone.

Similarly, for all intents and purposes, Frank is alone and he’s struggling with that.

This episode — Midnight at the End of the Century — takes place around Christmas. Catherine hands Frank a drawing that their daughter Jordan made. It’s of an angel, and Catherine notes that Jordan said grandma helped her draw it.

Not Catherine’s living mother, but Frank’s dead mother.

This is entirely an episode all about generational and inherited trauma, and the helplessness of the parents who see their brethren walking the same doomed trail as they have, but still wanting and hoping for better. Well-wishing.

Frank: “You know Jordan. She’s just …sensitive.”

Catherine: “Telling me that she colors with her dead grandmother is a little bit more than sensitive.”

Frank: “Come on. You know Jordan. She’s got a gift. You can’t suppress it.”

Catherine: “Your gift gave you a nervous breakdown. This gift makes you see horrible images. It—it’s turned you away from your family, from your daughter. It’s caused you to turn toward the Millennium group.

“Frank, you never even consider that this gift that you have could be lying to you. Because you don’t see yourself withdrawing from your family, hiding behind your… ability.

“If this has happened to you, what is it gonna do to Jordan?

“I want her to have a choice. I want a childhood free from this.

“I want her to know that she has someplace to turn other than within herself…”

Frank: “Like me. Right? It is what it is. There is nothing we can do to fix it.”

Catherine: “… time’s running out.”

All of this provides an impetus for Frank to seek out his estranged father, played by the magnanimous Darin MacGavin (who starred in KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, the series that spurred Chris Carter to create THE X-FILES and MILLENNIUM). Frank is seeking an explanation as to why he believed his father cruelly locked his wife in a second floor bedroom until she died.

As you might suspect, the answer he receives is more complicated than that.

I do not want to spoil matters in the off-hand chance you wrangle a copy of this episode, but I do want to note that there is a significant plot point regarding tiny ceramic angels bestowed by the packaged tea that they routinely buy.

You have to have been a specific age and have a specific sort of parent to have remembered these sort of tea-centric figurines. If you bought a box of Red Rose Tea, you’d receive a Wade Whimsey, a small, themed ceramic figure.

My mother collected them and they stood in a glass cabinet in our dining room, looking over us as we supped. So, yeah, you could say that this episode really hits home for me, and I’ve never seen any other work mention them, much less lean on them as a significant plot point, and definitely not as a Christmas-centric endearment.

This episode has Frank — yet again — wrangling with his past. However, this time it’s a moment of reconciliation, one of understanding, of letting go.

Midnight of the Century is a soulful and emotional episode that leaves the viewer worrying about how inherited traits might complicate their life going ahead, while also mulling over the fallout of said traits, how denial of said traits by the progenitors might affect their brethren, and simply living with one’s self.

Is it Christmas-y? I’d argue it is. What is Christmas if nothing else but acknowledging and living with the fallout and repercussions of Christ being born?

Is it full of cheer? No, not at all, but there is a very specific sort of peace that comes with it, even if it is full of hopeful sorrow.

Merry fucking Christmas.