Millennium

MILLENNIUM – JOSE CHUNG’S ‘DOOMSDAY DEFENSE’ S02E09 (1997)

October 21, 2024

Given how often I’ve espoused Chris Carter’s serial killer-centric show MILLENNIUM, it will shock no one that I routinely rewatch select episodes every October.

One of those eps is “Jose Chung’s ‘Doomsday Defense’”. Penned by Darin Morgan, ‘Doomsday’ sees profiler Frank Black investigating the murder of an excommunicated ‘Selfosophy’ church member, a man who died wearing a Selfosophy visor and a forced, teeth-clenched grin on his face.

Beloved, aging cult author Jose Chung — previously seen in Morgan’s acclaimed THE X-FILES ep “Jose Chung from Outer Space” — enters the picture. Chung is a ’Selfosophy’ expert, as he was friends with Onan Goopta, the creator of the barely-disguised take on Scientology. Goopta was an aspiring writer under the literary umbrella as Chung, and heavily inspired by his work.

It features a number of Morgan’s creative tics: unreliable narrators, absurd antics, real-life riffs, and double-negatives. In other words, it’s the same sort of inventive, off-beat, singularly satirical work you expect from him. It’s also brilliant complimented by another beloved cult figure, Charles Nelson Reilly, who infuses Chung with an irreverent but melancholy air.

While I frequently come back to this episode for how unique and nuanced it is, there is one scene that has haunted me:

Chung is alone, sitting at his desk scribbling away at his latest novel and musing to himself.

CHUNG (sighs): “This book will be the death of me. I just can’t write any more. What possessed me to want to be a writer, anyway?”

CHUNG pours a shot of whiskey.

CHUNG: “What kind of life is this? What else can I do now with no other skills or abilities?”

CHUNG drops two Alka-Seltzers into the shot and stares at the fizzing glass.

CHUNG: “My life has fizzled away. Only two options left: Suicide, or become a television weather man.”

CHUNG picks up his pen and commences writing again.

CHUNG: “…like television weathermen, getting information one could gather simply by looking out the window, forensic profilers provide little of practical matter. Mr. Blork, however…”

This scene perfectly captures both being a writer — or any vastly interior profession — and the act of writing. Sneakily, it also provides the crux of the episode, all about writers and readers. Chung and Goopta being two-sides of the same published coin, both seeking readers in their own way, both finding readers seeking meaning in words, and Frank following the impact of those words.

“Jose Chung’s ‘Doomsday Defense’” could be a navel-gazing work about one’s craft, but instead it a ruminates on why we create and how your creations resonate once they’re out in the world, how your works can be celebrated, misinterpreted, abused, used for good or for evil, or all of the above.

Now that, dear reader, is a writer’s horror story.

ADDENDUM

Finally, there’s a single line of dialogue that I also frequently return to. I wish more folks were familiar with this episode so I could use it as a contextual joke. In a scene that segues into the above internal monologue, a Selfosophy member is in a coffee shop, seated in front of his laptop, writing a scene detailing how he thinks Chung goes about his process. To showcase to use Selfosophy’s emphasis on positivity, he declares to himself:

“Boy, my writing has really improved since I got this software!”

Has it? Has it really?

MILLENNIUM S02E10: Midnight of the Century (1997) [REDUX]

December 25, 2023

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.

MILLENNIUM: THE CURSE OF FRANK BLACK -S02E06- (1997)

October 31, 2023

CONTENT WARNING

Yet again, I am intentionally breaking the rules I laid out for Horrorclature 2023. This episode of MILLENNIUM involves childhood trauma and suicidal references. This is not a happy or carefree work. However, I feel it’s a singular, important work that deserves to be extolled on the day depicted in the episode: Halloween.

Happy fucking goth Christmas! I hope you’re either all slutted up and partying like there’s no tomorrow — no judgement! Been there, done that! — or cuddled up at home, all warm, surrounded by great, scary works.

If you’ve been following along with this blog, you know that I absolutely love Chris Carter’s MILLENNIUM, specifically the second season when he handed the reigns to James Wong and Glen Morgan (who would go on to help kick off the FINAL DESTINATION franchise).

“Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?

“Since Willie’s death, I catch myself every day, involuntarily talking with him, as if he were with me.”

Abraham Lincoln — upon the death of his son

There was nothing like it on TV in the mid-to-late 90s. It was astoundingly dark, but had moments of levity. It was super smart, but wasn’t pretentious. It had motherfucking Lance Henriksen as Frank Black, an overly-emotionally sensitive ex-FBI profiler, and LOST’s Terry Quinn as a morally dubious, potentially exploitative head of a quasi-cult.

It is one of my favorite seasons of TV and this episode — The Curse of Frank Black (CURSE going forward) — is one of my favorite episodes from that season.

I know this episode like the back of my hand. I vividly recall my mind being blown when it was first broadcast, and I have revisited it every October for many years now.

CURSE has many of the hallmarks of the best MILLENNIUM episodes: it leans far more on showing rather than telling; there are more than a few scenes where little more than an utterance occurs. It’s extraordinarily visual for network TV at the time. Also, most importantly, it is seriously empathetic. It showcases Frank’s origin story, when he realized he felt too much, felt for people and could read people far more than others. (Hence why he was so great at being an FBI profiler.)

It’s that sense of empathy from a man — who, again, is played by a middle-aged, very craggy Lance Henrickson instead of some young emo 20-something — that is rarely seen on TV. It’s his empathy that undermines his entire life. It’s a trait he inherited from his mother — along with an ability to see the demons and angels that inhabit the world — and it fucks over his career and his marriage and his life. Folks simply do not understand the way he feels, despite the fact that he knows how they feel. Frank is haunted, not just by the demons and angels that he actually sees, but by how much he feels for others.

As noted in the content warning, CURSE takes place almost entirely on Halloweens. One from Frank’s childhood, and one current Halloween. It opens with Frank prepping for Halloween, gutting a pumpkin. Odd events start occurring around him, such as radios turning themselves on or refusing to dial in correctly, electricity going out, and his car sputtering to a stop. All of these events occur around the number ’268’. Frank exits his busted car, runs into kids egging houses, scares them off and then sees his house — the house he and his wife and daughter once were happy in — and he eggs his yellow house himself.

We flashback to when Frank was a youth. He’s dared by friends to trick-or-treat the house of a scary, chain-smoking shut-in who lives at a singular 268 number, Mr. Bob Crocell, played by Dean Winters who has great comedic chops. He is best known right now for being Mayhem in insurance commercials, but also Dennis ‘Beeper King’ Duffy in 30 ROCK, however he was also dramatically great in TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNER CHRONICLES. This is not a comedic performance; it is extremely dark.

Crocell is ruminating on his life and just wants to be left alone, but he allows young Frank Black into his abode. He forces Frank to listen to his horrible mental tribulations and his time in the army before he offers him his deserved treat, which is a lone cigarette, and it’s not even a candy cigarette.

Fast-forward a few years: Frank and his friends drive by the house. Crocell is being carted out of his house, dead on a covered stretcher. His friends make light of it, but Frank bluntly remarks about how Crocell was misunderstood.

FRANK: “He killed himself.”

FRIEND: “…yeah, because he couldn’t take being a commie traitor.”

OTHER FRIEND: “He’ll go to Hell for killing himself.”

OTHER FRIEND: “I always heard he, you know, liked men. That’s why he killed women.”

FRANK: “…it’s none of that.”

FRIEND: “How would you know?”

It’s Frank’s empathetic awakening, something that will loom over him for the rest of his life. As someone who has felt too much and felt too hard and felt haunted for so many years, this depiction hits me intensely.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Tell that to Frank Black.”

There’s one amazingly stark, darkly back-lit scene where Frank enters his attic and sees Crocell there, chain-smoking as usual. Then the ghost-of-Halloween-past (or future, depending on how you look at it) Crocell delivers a monologue that chills Frank:

“I know you’re feeling strange right now kid but, believe me, it’s a hell of a lot creepier for me to be back.

That night, I was so dying to know if the dead can return… if there was anything afterwards, ‘member?

The time when you’re really asking the question and when you really need to know just goes by like — nothin’.

But you know the answer.

Forever.

I’ll tell you this: all that stuff your hear about the fire and the brimstone and the rats and the excrement and the demons tormenting you for all of eternity — there’s none of that stuff.

It’s worse. It is so much worse.

It is for me, at least.

Imagine having to suck on this [cigarette] for all eternity. Man, I wish someone had told me!

Others, they uh— they ain’t got it so bad, I guess. I don’t know. But you’ll know… soon enough.

I’ve been sent here here because you’ve become me.

The way people look at you, what they say about you, making stuff up… pretty soon you come to believe it’s true and then it’s really all over.

You know, I threw things at my house too. Not eggs though. I think I threw dog crap.

Yeah. I threw dog crap from my backyard at my kitchen window.

I never cleaned it off. Imagine that.

The one thing you’ve got that I never did is that you’re getting close to understanding what’s about to happen. And He’s been watching you — uh-huh, oh, yeah — more closely and more often the closer you get.

Here’s the deal, kid. Give up the fight. Sit it out. Forget about this Millennium Group.

Go back to your wife and to your daughter and to your puppy and to your yellow house and just live out a nice, happy, normal life. And there’s gonna be a place for all three of you afterwards.

A place, believe me, where a lot of souls wish they could be.

But you pass on this… and you’re going so much farther than I have ever been.

Hell, the way you gutted that guy who took your wife, the anger inside of you, whoo, I don’t know why you’re not being offered a sweeter deal.

You got the heat inside of you to fight for this side so what I’m asking of you is really simple. Sit back and do nothing. Anyone can do it. Hell, most people do.

Take this deal, kid. Secure you and your family’s future because the time is near, and He will win. There’s no way He can lose!”

Frank then responds:

“When will it happen?”

And Crocell is gone.

It’s a harrowing, sensitive piece, one about empathy and trauma and temptation and complacency and giving up, with a perspective that is rarely seen — even in contemporary prestige TV.

Happy fucking goth Christmas.

MILLENNIUM S02E10: Midnight of the Century (1997)

December 25, 2020

(DVD) While I have a favorite Thanksgiving film (PIECES OF APRIL), and a favorite New Year’s Eve film (AFTER THE THIN MAN), I don’t have a favorite Christmas film. However, I do have a favorite Christmas TV episode, and MILLENNIUM’s -Midnight of the Century- is it.

MILLENNIUM is about Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), an offender profiler who has astounding intuition. Also, he can see angels and demons. In the second season of the show, he’s joined by Lara Means (Kristen Cloke) who also suffers from being bestowed the same ‘gift’. These are people who feel too much, feel too hard, who have insight and empathy they don’t want, but feel they have to utilize their gifts to help others.

MILLENNIUM’s holiday episodes, including the Halloween episode -The Curse of Frank Black- (also my favorite Halloween episode of all time) hit pause on the machinations of the Millennium Group that Frank Black is involved with, and instead focuses on Frank Black reflecting on his past, present, and future. -Midnight of the Century- features him mulling over the ramifications of passing along his ‘gift’ to his daughter, reminiscing about how his mother struggled with the same ‘gift’, and confronting his father (Kolchak himself, Darren McGavin — although I suspect most know him as the father in A CHRISTMAS STORY) about his mother holing herself up in their spare bedroom until she died.

It also includes a terrifically poignant story that involves a barely disguised Red Rose Tea figurine, the likes of which I grew up with.

It’s not all devastatingly sad, though: Frank Black takes a bit of time to detail why the killer in SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT is a spree killer, not a serial killer.

A hallmark of second season MILLENNIUM episodes are their exceptional music programming, and this episode doesn’t disappoint as it utilizes Tchaikovsky’s Arabian Dance (from his Nutcracker Suite – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPuf9krTR4w) as a haunting refrain.

It’s a quiet, contemplative episode that’s not only a substantial character study, but also perfectly captures the many facets of Christmas. While it is certainly not the most uplifting Christmas episode of a TV show, it is one of the most remarkable.

MILLENNIUM (FOX, 1996-1999)

November 1, 2020

(DVD) Sadly, there’s no way to stream this show, no way to digitally purchase any eps, and the DVDs are definitely costly, but I can’t talk about undersung TV shows without discussing MILLENNIUM.

MILLENNIUM was Chris Carter’s second FOX show, launched midway through X-FILES’ run. The first season was a severely grimdark and mostly lackluster procedural about Frank Black (Lance Hendrickson, giving it his all), a gifted profiler hunting down serial killers, with a mostly untouched framing device about the killers being obsessed with the upcoming millennium. I do not recommend the first season.

The second season was handed off to X-FILES alums Glen Morgan & James Wong — yes, the folks behind FINAL DESTINATION — and they reframe the show into a battle of Christian sub-sects — the Owls versus the Roosters — and they ramp up the ‘gifts’ that have been bestowed upon Frank Black in that he can see devils and angels, then they double-down on his family guilt by adding Darrin McGavin as his father. The show culminates in a ‘burn the fucking world down’ finale that Morgan & Wong surely thought would result in the show being cancelled, because they were fucking pissed off at FOX’s notes and knew they would not be invited back.

Not one, but two episodes of the second season were written by legendary TV writer (and Glen Morgan’s brother) Darin Morgan, probably best known for his X-FILES ep -Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’-. Darin brings Chung back in Morgan’s -second- most memorable MILLENNIUM episode: -Jose Chung’s ‘Doomsday Defense’-, which is a must-see, and entertaining enough as a stand-alone.

For my money, Darin Morgan’s most memorable episode is -Somehow Satan Got Behind Me-, and it’s something special: four devils — literal devils — gather in at a donut shop in the early morning hours to discuss their latest accomplishments in corrupting humanity. That’s it, that’s the episode. It’s surprisingly melancholy and hits hard, and it deserves more attention.

The other facet MILLENNIUM S2 excelled at was silence. So many MILLENNIUM S2 episodes went five or more minutes without anyone saying anything, and the pinacle of this is with their Halloween episode, -The Curse of Frank Black-, in which ‘modern day’ Frank Black maybe utters 100 words, tops (most of which boil down to an argument with his tech sidekick as to whether the killer in SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT is a spree killer or a serial killer). Instead, the score speaks for him.

What Glen Morgan & James Wong always excel at is infusing their scripts with the perfect song, usually via counterpointing or general sentimentality. Season two introduced so many classic artists and songs to my young mind: Terry Jack’s Seasons in the Sun (via -Goodbye Charlie-), the muzak of Love is Blue from Paul Mauriat (via -Room With No View-) and, most importantly, the goddamn entirety of Patti Smith’s Horses for a ten-minute scene in -The Time is Now Part 2-, which is paired with a no-budget experimental phantasmagoria that, as I watched it live in 1998 — imagine watching this on network TV in 1998 — dropped my jaw. I’ve still never seen anything quite like it on TV. (No spoilers concerning the link below — it’s mostly context-free.)

Morgan & Wong — predictably — were jettisoned after season two, and the third season rolled back their finale and, apart from the addition of Klea Scott as Frank’s new partner and a somewhat amusing Halloween episode, it limped along for 22 eps before being cancelled. There’s an epilogue episode in X-FILES’ seventh season (the fourth ep) but it’s perfunctory and lackluster.

Just stick with the second season and you’ll be fine.

(Shoutout to the hardcore MILLENNIUM site https://millennium-thisiswhoweare.net/. They’ve been doing great work for so many years.)