Millennium - Seasons 1-3 2006 Horror Movie Review

Millennium - The Complete First Season
Millennium marked the second major television series created by Chris Carter, who’d already made his name as the brains behind The X-Files. And, like its predecessor, it shares a lot of the same themes—it’s a crime thriller that gradually unfolds into a grand conspiracy involving the government and the fate of the entire world. Agent Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) is a former FBI agent who has transplanted his family from Washington, D.C. to Seattle, after suffering something of a breakdown. He’s an expert criminal profiler—arguably the best, thanks to his ability to “see” into the minds of killers—and he fears for the safety of his wife and young daughter. In Seattle, he joins the mysterious Millennium Group, an agency of freelance crime-busters who investigate particularly brutal crimes. As a result, Millennium is downright bleak viewing, as Black jumps from horrific slaying to horrific slaying. Moreover, there’s a growing sense of unease about the workings of the Millennium Group, so that in typical Chris Carter fashion, you don’t know who to trust. With its pre-Y2K angst and overwhelming darkness, as well as its general humorlessness, Millennium hasn’t dated as well as The X-Files. Still, thanks to Carter’s vision and Henriksen’s compelling take on the tortured Black, it’s difficult not to get hooked.

Millennium - The Complete Second Season
The groundbreaking show Millennium was about to take a new, visionary direction in its second season. Millennium could have continued its successful formula of introducing new, apocalyptic “Se7en-esque” serial killers for Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) to hunt down. But as any viewer can attest, it was the exploration of the mysterious “Millennium Group” and Frank Black’s role that held the key to the show’s potential longevity. And who better to build a mythos for the Millennium than the minds behind The X-Files: producer/writer team Glenn Morgan and James Wong. Stepping in when Chris Carter stepped aside, Morgan and Wong immediately began to focus season 2 not on the killers and their impact on Armageddon, but on Frank Black and his struggle for his personal stability and sanity. The Millennium Group, whose identify and function was never really explored in season 1, now becomes a central entity in season 2 complete with its own Masonic-like mythology. 

Millennium - The Complete Third Season
In the third season of Millennium, we find Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) a widower and a single father who is completely disillusioned with the Millennium group and their evil intentions. Hell-bent on revenge, Frank rejoins the FBI, gets a new partner, Special Agent Emma Hollis (Klea Scott), and launches a personal crusade to dismantle and expose the Millennium Group. Interestingly, the visionary, quirky, X-Files mythos-like direction in which the producer-writer team of Glenn Morgan and James Wong took Millennium in season 2 didn’t sit well with many fans. Now that a good chunk of the Earth’s population had been wiped out by the Group’s killer plague, which also claimed Frank’s wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher), Chris Carter decided to take the helm once again and redirect season 3 back to the dark, apocalyptic crime-fighting genre in which it was intended. The mythos element is still present, but season 3 is a definite return to the look and feel of season 1 where most of the episodes are individual dark crime stories. The scripts in season 3 are consistently sharp (especially Ken Horton’s and Chip Johannessen’s), and the interesting, new dynamics introduced could have easily carried the show onward for many more seasons. Sadly, it was never meant to be. Like an apocalyptic metaphor, one of the best-written, best-produced, and most-influential shows of the 1990s would be canceled at the end of season 3, less than one year before the year 2000. Fans were left to wonder about the future of Frank Black, Jordan, and the success of his personal vendetta. Fortunately, The X-Files was still going strong at the time and fans got a bit of closure with The X-Files’ season 7 tie-in episode “Millennium” (included on this DVD set).