Status Updates From Back to Frank Black: A Retu...

With the internet little more than a tadpole to the ugly frog we see today—a frog we might someday transform into something a little more handsome than its current self—

Millennium delights for the very reason that it spoon-feeds the viewer virtually nothing. Few easy answers are to be found. Few explanations are offered.

'The average first season episode contains no more than approximately twelve seconds of hallucinatory footage from the profiler’s point of view in total. Based on the running time for an episode of the series, that amounts to 0.4% of the total screen time.'

Astonishing. And yet these are the images that sear into your brain and linger.

'...when faced with cult leader Ricardo Clement (Bob Wilde) after he is brought into custody, Frank’s visions flash him images of an archetypal winged demon.'

Huh? Did I miss something? Frank's 'flashes' are very chaotic and layered.

“I see what the killer sees… I put myself in his head. I become the thing we fear the most… I become capability. I become the horror, what we know we can become only in our heart of darkness.”

We get killers and violent men and puppies and kids, all in the same package...

I think at one point she asked us, ‘Do you have research?’ And of course we had the same research as Dan Brown, we just didn’t steal it word for word like he did!

Cometh the hour, cometh the man; such times call for a champion such as Frank Black. “He’s not another James Bond—he’s the opposite of James Bond—and he’s not a Partridge family. There is a reality to it so, yes, there’s a place for Frank Black in the twenty-first century, and I think there is room for a guy like me doing it!”

Frank Black remains a figure of hope. In the third millennium, Henriksen suggests, the wave of violence and strife forecast by Carter’s Millennium has become tidal. We need his greatest hero now more than ever.

In the final analysis, Millennium is not about these monsters; it is about our response to the monsters. I have often likened the series and its first season, serial killer conceit to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966-69). There, each week, the starship Enterprise visited another alien world and saw the crew’s values reflected, challenged, and often affirmed by the planet or civilization of the week.

The millennium has come and gone. America’s fin de siècle is over, but the battle against the “thousand points of darkness” is still being waged.