"Millennium"

"I was trying to walk the straight and narrow, leave the Millennium Group behind, but I know I can't do that anymore."
Originally Aired 11/28/99

I remember approaching the year 2000, the dawn of a new millennium and the fear of the Y2K bug crashing computers. I suppose it also could've caused a sense of dread and fears of the end of the world. Chris Carter tapped into that with his series, Millennium, and centered it around Lance Henriksen, who portrayed the character of Frank Black. He was a criminal profiler and possessed a gift to see inside the mind of a serial killer. Black also had a wife Catherine and young daughter Jordan, although by the end of the series he had lost both friends and family members at the hands of the Millennium Group, which he worked for and later turned against. The series came to an end in May 1999 when it was canceled after three seasons. I feel like it had a fitting ending, given that it wasn't meant to be a proper series finale, which saw Frank ride off into the sunset. Chris Carter didn't need to bring "closure" to Frank Black, but here we are with an episode titled "Millennium."

At the end of the day this is still an episode of The X-Files with Mulder and Scully, it just happens to contain a guest appearance by Frank Black. Chris Carter did invite the series' longtime director Thomas J. Wright to direct this episode and also Mark Snow's music score seems reminiscent of the early days of The X-Files and also Millennium, including a few notes of that series's theme song when we first see Frank Black. I feel like they should have asked a Millennium writer like Chip Johannessen to have a co-writer credit since Vince Gilligan was never a writer for the series and Frank Spotnitz only penned a handful of scripts. Yet, as I said, this is still an X-Files episode and you can't overwhelm the audience with too many details from a canceled series which only a fraction of the X-Files audience had watched. They created a fairly pedestrian zombie apocalypse plot, which I thought was more offensive when I first watched it in 2008 following my first run-through of Millennium, but time has been kinder to it.

Mulder and Scully arrive on the scene of what Mulder feels is more sinister than a grave robbery, which is confirmed when Skinner points them in the direction of the Millennim Group. While the group was never associated with zombies, they had an obsession with the turn of the century, and it's explained by Frank that this is the work of a schism within the group. I enjoyed how this zombie tale has roots to the black magic side of zombies than just a plague that creates zombies, which seems to be the trend in recent years. These zombies are created by a Necromancer who can make the dead rise again and salt repels them; which reminded me of an episode of Kolchak The Night Stalker, which I actually watched around the same as I saw "Millennium" for the first time. Kolchak actually dumped salt into the mouth of a zombie and attempted to sew his mouth shut to defeat the zombie, where here the opposite effect takes place. Scully arrived on the scene too late when an unsuspecting coroner removed staples from the mouth during an autopsy. I like how this episode creates classic X-Files visuals, like Mulder removing a note from the mouth of a deceased cop, the cop rising from the dead when his staples are removed, and later when flares are lit in a basement as Frank Black comes to the rescue.

The highlight of this hour is actually the reunion of Frank and Jordan, and also of the actual actors Frank Black and Brittany Tiplady, who I would assume haven't seen each other since the conclusion of their series 6 months prior to this episode. The bond between them is real, having spent 3 years together playing father and daughter. The highlight for many X-Files fans, however, would be a New Year's kiss shared by Mulder and Scully. Fans have been waiting years for confirmation of a relationship between the two, though I feel like Mulder telling Scully that she is his "constant" at the end of "The Sixth Extinction" was the true sign.