- Joined
- Mar 6, 2017
Millennium started out as a criminal horror series. It was a true crime book with a pinch of the supernatural, filtered through the "millenniumistic" sense that Something Bad was coming.* It scared me, horrified me, and on rare occasions offered glimpses of such beauty and hope that I felt life is worth living even in the darkest possible world. Then Glen Morgan and James Wong took over in the second season, turned the Millennium Group into a weird cult, made things much goofier, focused too much on TEOTWAWKI, disappeared Frank's wife, and brought in Morgan's fiancee as the de facto second lead. But in their season finale they made an entire act a music video of her going insane, then ended the world, so I give them credit for that. The world was un-ended for the third season, but no one was paying attention by that point. I've made my peace with the second season, but can barely remember the third.
* Carter correctly predicted what that Something Bad was, but in the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen.
It's funny. People seem to disagree on if the second season of Millennium is great or awful. People who loved the first season hated the change in direction, but others thought it was where the show hit its stride and became much more interesting.
Nobody disagrees on the third season being the weakest of the three, though. It actually has some great episodes and isn't that bad, but I think the schizophrenic nature of the show was undeniably a huge hurdle at that point. And since it never got another season, that remains Millennium's legacy: a show that ended prematurely and never settled into a firm identity.
In any case, it was a great show. And Lance Henricksen was truly great in it. The man has never gotten his due as an actor.
(Also, as an aside, I'm pretty sure Megan Gallagher was written out because she was sick of the role. I remember reading some interview with her years ago where she said she was essentially sick of being wallpaper in the bright, yellow house bookending the episodes. Not a very challenging role. They gave her that one episode where she was the star that was pretty damn good, but I guess wasn't enough.
It also occurs to me she had a very similar role in the first season of The Larry Sanders Show... after which she got the fuck out, or was fired, or whatever...)