Millennium

I never liked horror growing up.  I either found myself fueling my fear of the darkness or just found the film itself an insult to my intelligence as story attempts to basically serve me the equivalent of inhuman children stomping on ants for 2 hours.  Luckily as I got into my young adulthood the genre of psychological thrillers had started to take its place as modern horror.  Yes, granted, there are some totally still bent on having sexed up, beautiful teenagers hunted down by senseless masked maniacs, and they are still not fun to me.  But then there were series like Millennium which pit our hero against pure intellectual evil.  I am a true believer in the fine line between genius and insanity and am glad, though at times pop-occult, the series tries to make every villain formidably intelligent to the protagonist, Frank Black (Lance Henriksen).

Millennium was the other series that Chris Carter was running in parallel to his more famous series, the X-Files.  At the time, even though the X-Files can be quite shocking and creepy, Millennium was marketed as a horror equivalent to the X-Files.  The show was about a man named, Frank Black.  He was an ex-FBI investigator who had become quite successful at profiling and tracking the worst serial killers.  At the beginning of the series he becomes burnt out and ultimately frightened into continuing his line of work when a serial killer starts targeting his wife and child.  Frank moves back to his childhood home on the west coast in Seattle where he decides to join a group of consultants who monitor occult events and use their knowledge base to avert the signs of the impending millennial apocalypse.  Frank had been approached by the group not only because of his successful career but also his unique mystical gift to see things from the perspective of a psychotic killer from observing the scene of a crime or a victim's body.  These "psychotic" episodes are presented in the show as quick flashes of surreal footage but is quite effective at explaining what Frank Black's visions are like.

The show portrays Frank as a regular average older man who because of his late in life marriage to his wife, Katherine, feels he is blessed with his 5 year old daughter, Jordan, who he values above everything else in his life.  His wife Katherine, though not fully understanding of his work and his gifts tries to let Frank continue his work as a profiler though as the series progresses she is eventually forced to decide between protecting Jordan and herself from the darkness Frank draws to himself or standing by the man she loves.  Frank is often accompanied on his investigations by several characters who are either members of his local police precinct (where he work previously before working for the FBI) or are members of the mysterious Millennium Group itself.  His contact to the group throughout the series is Peter Watts who is well played by Terry O'Quinn (later to be famed by his riveting portrayal of John Locke on Lost).

The show spanned 3 seasons leading up to Y2K itself but sadly had to be properly ended in an X-Files episode.  As I was brushing up on Millennium facts, however, I fell upon an article that said somehting about a possible Millennium movie to be done with out Chris Carter at the helm.  Interested and hoping it will not be as fail as the latest X-Files flick I will have to settle till then on the complete 3 season series I have on DVD.