User Reviews

Normally, i watch series season by season. I watch lots of series, so it takes long time to come back again to series i watched.

I would not come season 2 of this series for a long time but i needed to choose fast after finishing office (UK) series on 23121.

I really like season 1.

I am curious about season 2 and what happened to Catherine and other interesting things like bad unnatural forces.

I will edit here watching some episodes i hope. I will copy this to episode 1 review also.

AFTER FINISHING EPISODE I could not understand why group did not give photo of the killer after he kidnapped catherine. They could recognize him and could save catherine.

And i think we first time saw the leader, near pete. Said " we should have done very long ago". He meant to kill that killer.

Those are mysterous. According to that, millennium is bigger and deeper than just a consultant company. They have strong roots and maybe dark roots. I am suspicious about it now.

Frank first time sensed wrong, he sensed wrong house.

And first time used violence as i remember.

If the killer was so smart, why did he let himself die? He could kill easily frank by trapping or ambushing. I think he wanted to be killed but i dont know why.

And in last episode, he gave the photo to woods man to kill catherine at first. Those can be nonsense of scenario or we will see later about it.

S2 of "Millennium" was overseen by Glen Morgan and James Wong, after Chris Carter left to film the first "X-Files" movie.

They completely overhauled the show. Gone is the "serial killer of the week". Gone is Carter's Manichean view of the world. More humor. More pop rock in the soundtracks. More conspiracies and apocalyptic events. More philosophical musings. The Millennium Group goes from a vaguely defined plot device to a fanatical, seemingly omnipresent and omniscient cult with obscure goals.

The biggest difference is that in S1, evil was an external force. Frank Black was stable and serene, a heroic bulwark against encroaching darkness. He had a perfect family life, symbolized by the yellow house, his refuge from the darkness.

In S2, evil comes from within. In this episode, we see it's even within Frank Black himself, as he brutally kills Catherine Black's kidnapper. The act tears apart his marriage and exiles him from the yellow house. No longer happy and secure in the love of his family, he's now unmoored and desperate.

In S1 an approaching apocalypse was continuously hinted at, but it was never really imminent. Black could never decisively overcome the darkness, but neither was he seriously affected by it. Even when Bletch was murdered in his house, it didn't make a lasting impact on him or his family. There were stakes for others, but never really for him.

In S2, Morgan and Wong follow through with these promises: the apocalypse is coming. "The time is near," the title sequence promises. A countdown to the millennium now pops up every time Black logs in to his computer. In the opener of this episode Black muses about how comets meet different ends (some traveling through space forever, others disintegrating, others crashing into the sun) and then asks explicitly: "which am I?" How will his story end? This is not a question the Frank Black of S1 would have ever asked. Now it's his own fate that is at stake, that he has to fight for.

S1 was great, but IMO Carter had gone as far as he could go with that approach and a Carter-run S2 would have merely been repeating himself. One can only tease the impending apocalypse so many times, eventually you have to go through with it. And Morgan and Wong do so, going all-out and leaning into the eschatological, conspiratorial elements in gonzo fashion. By making Frank Black a participant in the action, and not just an observer, they revitalize the show.

This episode did a good job of ending the cliff-hanger that the first season closed on, but unfortunately, it didn't end itself very well. The villain is a bit overdone and Catherine is a cliché damsel in distress, but it's a TV show, so alright. Unfortunately, it ends on the absurd idea that Catherine can't live with the man who saved her life, which is absurd. I guess they were trying to say that he was too much of a monster, or something, but it didn't work, since his killing of the villain was the result of a battle for his life with the guy. Rather than offering an interesting bit of tension in the life of a man surrounded by and drawn too closely into violence, it played as a contrived excuse for writing her into a smaller role in the series.

Catherine is kidnapped at the airport. Despite Frank's attempt to find the man responsible before he leaves, the kidnapper escapes, hiding his identity by ripping off his fake facial hair. A roadblock fails because the kidnapper hides Catherine in a cage under his car. The implausibility of that scenario is only the beginning of the problems with this episode. Writers Glen Morgan and James Wong fill it with way too many expository monologues, making the villain seem almost laughable. The confusing and boring expository monologues would continue throughout Season Two, which is part of the reason the show deteriorated in quality until finally Morgan and Wong left the show at the end of the season. It may sound like I am being harsh on the two, but I actually do like their movies. I think the two FINAL DESTINATION films that they did are two of the best horror films that have come out in the 2000s so far. I just never found their work on "Millenium" or "The X Files" to be up to par. It's too bad, with the right show-runners, Season Two could have great like the first.

Episode Grade: C-

The Beginning and the End doesn't much register for me. The very unique and wonderful X-Files character, Eugene Tooms plays our villain here. He gets away and tells of how Frank won't be able to profile him in order to find him, yet helps him without any explanation as to why. I don't get the ending either, Frank leaves so she doesn't have to, but regardless of whether they're together or not, Catherine's and Jordan's lives will always be in danger. Of course Frank killed him, why wouldn't he. Peter's story is good, but hardly comforting as he never found the culprit.