The wonderful folk responsible for The X-Cast have launched another podcast, covering another beloved Chris Carter property, and I’m thrilled to be a guest on it.
Millennium is a massively underrated (and largely underseen) show. It is one of the most striking television series of the late nineties, and a show with an impressive cultural footprint and reach. I’m on record as arguing that the second season of Millennium is one of the best twenty-odd-episode seasons of television ever produced, but the first season also has a lot to recommend it.
Tony has already recorded a primer or introduction to Millennium, but I’m honoured to be the guest invited on to discuss The Pilot. Indeed, The Pilot is a remarkable piece of television, and one of the most striking pieces of television that Carter ever produced. Millennium struggles a bit in the first half of the season to establish a sense of tone and to figure out how to tell the stories within this framework.
You can listen to the episode here, subscribe to the podcast here, or click the link below.
You might be interested in our other reviews of the first season of Millennium:
- Pilot
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Unruhe
- This Is Who We Are: The Time is Now – Season 1, Episode 1
- Gehenna
- Dead Letters
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – The Field Where We Died
- The Judge
- 5-2-2-6-6-6
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man
- Kingdom Come
- Blood Relatives
- The Well-Worn Lock
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Paper Hearts
- Wide Open
- The Wild and the Innocent
- Weeds
- Loin Like a Hunting Flame
- Force Majeure
- The Thin White Line
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Never Again
- Sacrament
- Covenant
- Walkabout
- Lamentation
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Tempus Fugit
- Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Max
- Broken World
- Maranatha
- Paper Dove
- This Is Who We Are: The X-Files – Gethsemane
Filed under: Millennium, Podcasts! | Tagged: chris carter, frank black, millennium, nineties, pilot, podcast, Seattle, serial killers, the time is now |
the m0vie blog 
“Millennium is a massively underrated (and largely underseen) show. It is one of the most striking television series of the late nineties, and a show with an impressive cultural footprint and reach”
Ehh…I disagree. While I did binge the show a few years ago, I largely have forgotten nearly the entire show apart from the Darin Morgan episodes and Goodbye Charlie. Now I’ll admit Goodbye Charlie had an opening that was so insane that the entire episode has been burned into my memory, but most episodes of Millennium suffered from poor writing. A lot of characters didn’t receive much or any development, even Lance Henriksen get written like an idiot sometimes when confronting serial killers. Lance just wasn’t written in a way where he fit into a Serial Killer hunting show. He wasn’t a fighter so he couldn’t directly confront serial killers properly which created problems.
I think Darin Morgan really understood why the show was failing which is why “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me” was so brilliant, because he was lampooning the weaknesses of the show while still telling a very unique and bizarre story. The insanity was the show’s best asset and it didn’t use it enough. This is why, in my opinion, Hannibal had succeeded where Millennium failed, because they committed to the insanity. While both shows ended up mostly under-watched, one show had more capability of being more memorable. Millennium was banking so much on the fear of the year of 2000, that watching the constant countdowns in 2015 made it seem so childish. It honestly reminded me like an episode of Lost, the appeal entirely being “The Mystery Box” fear of the unknown.
Just as the fear the Judgement Day in the year 1000 seems stupid today, the fear of the Apocalypse in the year 2000 feels no less stupid. Part of this show just hasn’t aged well.
I don’t know. Given that we live in a society that is permeated by apocalyptic imagery – whether nuclear war, viral outbreak, climate change, social collapse – the sense of dread and inevitability running through Millennium plays quite well to me today, particularly in the second season when the show explicitly ties into the idea of the apocalypse being a profoundly personal experience rather than a broader societal one; a divorce, a family dissolution, the loss of a loved one, a breakdown.