These are all excellent qualities. It's not the most gripping television, and it only lasts maybe a minute before Frank and Lara follow Peter into his study, but it helps the show, at least for me, because it reminds us that these are all people with lives outside of hunting for bad guys and unraveling conspiracies.
One of Millennium 's ongoing weaknesses is that, even with all the doomsaying and the incessant reminders that Frank has a daughter whose innocence could be lost forever! You need a world worth protecting to make the threat of its loss a potent one, and in general, "Midnight" does this quite nicely. The writing is great throughout, too.
Frank deals with the hassles of the season, most notably trying to find the perfect gift for Jordan this part is a little sitcommy, but it's so startling to see anyone on this show do anything even remotely resembling normal that Frank getting frustrated that his ex-mother-in-law got Jordan the same gift he did, a Jurassic Park giga-pet remember those? Plus, the store clerks who offer Frank less-than-helpful advice were just odd enough to be exactly in keeping with the series as we know it , and the small joys of it as well, along with memories from his own childhood, and his mother, who believed in angels and saw visions, and died when he was young.
If "Midnight" could be said to have a plot, it's that Jordan gets a visit from Frank's mom in spirit form, and Catherine is worried that the little girl's "gift" will eventually lead her down the same path as Frank, estranging her from her loved ones, and leaving her bitter, alone, and lost. This is the one part of the ep that didn't quite work for me.
The concept is fine, and it's much better used later on, when Frank realizes that the reason his father was so hard on him as a child about his "abilities" was that his father was terrified he'd suffer the same fate as his mother, who saw angels, and then went off and died in her room, surrounded by the drawings she'd made.
But Catherine has always been a difficult character for the show, and "Midnight" doesn't quite manage to do well by her.
While her concerns are legitimate, her accusations that Frank is somehow ruining his life with his work with the Millennium Group still ring false, no matter how many times she raises them. I just don't really get the idea that Frank is becoming as isolated as she claims. He's definitely lonely, sure, and "Curse" did a great job of making him seem almost more like a legend than a human being, but, well, so? It's hard to believe that Frank could ever be entirely "normal, and too much of what Catherine says comes across as telling us, not showing us, which serves the unfortunate effect of making Catherine herself look strident and unpleasant.
This happens a lot on male dominated genre shows: the wife or girlfriend character is all too often forced into the "mother" role of constantly nagging at the hero to keep him from doing whatever the hell it is he does that made him the center of the show in the first place. And Catherine suffers far less than some in this regard.
But it's frustrating, because her central concern for Jordan's well-being is legitimate, and one that Frank clearly feels himself. This is a small complaint, though, and, like I said, most of the writing really holds up nicely. Peter has this great monologue at his party about how fast his kids have grown up, and how he wishes it was possible to control the flow of time, to keep his children young forever, and to stretch out autumn and spring as long as possible.
It's not the most profound idea ever expressed, but it fits his character, as a father, and as someone whose always been shown to be more of a soldier than a general. Plus, there's a nice turn at the end, when he talks about how he'd make periods of regret last longer, so that it would be easier to resolve them and move on with our lives. It's just a great scene, and O'Quinn gets the most out of it.
Not quite as good, but still up there, is Lara's speech to Frank about the first time she saw an angel, and how that changed her life. In fact, a good portion of this episode is Frank listening to other people, which seems like an odd direction for a show to take with its protagonist—but it works. Lance Henriksen is a fine actor, and one of his greatest assets is his face; wonderfully expressive, and lined more deeply with life than any dialog could convey. There aren't a lot of actors who could manage to be interesting just watching other people speak, but Henriksen holds everything together.
It's interesting—the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" Linda Black quotes to her son, and that he hears throughout the episode, aren't words of hope.
They're from Macbeth :. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. These are not Christmas-y thoughts, and Ms. Black doesn't seem all that happy when she speaks them.
From the little we hear about her, Ms. Black doesn't have much reason to be happy. She has a loving husband and son, sure, but her brother died at Normandy, and she sees angels all the time, but the angels don't tell her what anything means. They just let her know when people die. Which is how she learns when she'll die, which can't be the happiest news flash to get.
He lost his beloved wife to something he couldn't understand, and when Frank showed signs of following in his mother's footsteps, well, Mr. Black wasn't able to handle that.
McGavin will soon make his appearance on The X-Files , as a retired FBI agent, but here, he's just a sad old man who wishes he knew more about his granddaughter. Arguably the crux of Mr.
Available on Netflix , Hulu , and Amazon. It is, in some ways, the real season premiere for season eight, getting out from under all of the mythological stuff in the two-part premiere and settling back into a monster of the week format. But that would have removed one of the most pleasurable things about the show: two FBI agents heading off somewhere into the American hinterland and discovering that things are not as they expected them to be.
The problems that ultimately sink this episode are twofold. For one thing, the monster is just ridiculous. It is, apparently, some sort of man that evolved from a bat, instead of from an ape. The show has had far stupider monsters on a conceptual level that, nonetheless, made for pretty great episodes of TV, thanks to how well the show used them.
Frank "Where Is My Mind" Black could've been a tiresome leading man, but Henriksen invests his world-weariness with a soothing, almost beautiful patience, and those few moments of delight he's allowed on the show almost always centered on his wife and his daughter are sincere instead of cloying.
The rest of the cast is okay Megan Gallagher does what she can with what she's given, and at least in "Dead Letters," her presence doesn't feel quite so extraneous , but Henriksen is what holds it together.
But he isn't everything. I think one of the reasons I'm so eager to come back is that there's something so intimately personal about the series that I can appreciate its honesty, even when I don't necessarily agree with the form that honesty takes. Todd and I have both talked about how the show feels prescient, at least in terms of the modern television landscape; its view of a world where the home is a castle that must be defended at all costs, and where every step beyond your doors risks violent, and permanent, departure, fits in well with a certain sort of procedural that's popular today.
It's that paranoia of the Other, that desperate desire to find some kind of pure morality that can protect us from all threats of dissolution and harm.
The despair and misery that pervades this series is gothic; ornate; majestic. Yes, it's tremendously silly, and yes, there were plenty of times during this episode that I couldn't help laughing at the complete lack of finesse, but I also find that intensity mesmerizing. It's not art, not yet, but it is deeply personal, and any time something so personal finds its way into the mainstream, it's reason to celebrate. Really, I gave up on resisting after that absolutely terrifying dream sequence at the start of "Dead Letters," with its bled-out colors, strange weather, and evil, evil clowns.
This is flat-out Lynchian nightmare territory, and it suggests at madness and possibility that the rest of the episode can't help but fail to live up to. There's nothing else connected to the dream, beyond the reminder of Jordan's importance in Frank's world, and suggesting that she might be in danger from the forces that Frank is working so hard to combat.
Yet it sets a certain tone, and the overheated main storyline—another profiler, James Horn James Morrison, who had regular roles on Space: Above And Beyond and the later seasons of 24 , loses his detachment from a case while in the middle of a difficult divorce—gains a little weight it might not otherwise have had.
So far, none of the killers on this show have been outright supernatural, but the dream, and the general tone, has a way of making you wonder what really is going on here. Maybe these things that we accept as normal—damaged loners doing horrible things to people they've never met—aren't really that normal after all.
Still, while Glenn Morgan and James Wong's first episode on the show is also probably the best episode so far, and gets me even more excited for next season, we're still not entirely solid yet. The main problem here is that there's no really elegance to the writing. Characterization and plot should come across as happy accidents; we know that what we're watching was created with a purpose in mind, but the more we can pretend that all this is natural, the easier it is to fall under the story's spell.
I'm not saying I need realism. The further away from realism Millennium gets, I think the better off we'll all be. But there is a lot of flat expository dialog here that really harshes my buzz, so to speak, drawing attention to themes that were already plastered across the screen in blinding red and black.
It's not enough that James is on edge. He has to keep telling us he's on edge like how he immediately thinks the killer may be motivated by "divorce" , and how important his son is to him, and how his son is a symbol of all that's good in the world, and how every time he works on a case now, he takes it personally.
All of this is obvious, and the lectures wear thin. It's also unfortunate when James's ex-wife brings their son to his office. The son gets a glimpse of Jame's work, and freaks out—then James freaks out, because he's trying to protect his son from this sort of thing—then his wife freaks out because James is freaking out, and because she doesn't want their son exposed to crime scene photos.
This is ridiculous. His wife knows what James does for a living, so she'd have to know that surprise visits are maybe not a good idea. It makes her look like an idiot, or worse, and it tries too hard to demonstrate the toll James's work is taking on his personal life.
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