Nine years later and I'm still waiting.

I spent most of December 31st, 1999 sitting in my room listening to Quartet for the End of Time with the lights turned off, pondering exactly how all existence would cease at the stroke of twelve.  Around ten o’clock my friends convinced me to go out to some New Year’s party, arguing that the apocalypse would be better experienced communally.  We were all gonna die together anyway, so why not hear each others’ screams as the heavens split in twain?

Then the ball dropped.  Dick Clark’s face was not melted off by a hydrogen bomb.  I was fucking pissed.

A little over three years earlier, FOX premiered a greatly hyped, highly anticipated show called Millennium. It featured much of the same creative team as The X-Files (most notably executive producer Chris Carter), but promised to be a darker, grittier show.  (Its tagline was “his curse is your salvation.”  Way cooler than “the truth is out there,” right?)  Millennium almost was the crazy, terrifying super X-Files it aspired to be, but (just like the real millennium) it came up short in the end.

The show followed retired FBI profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen, not the dude from the Pixies) as he hunted down serial killers, cultists and terrorists whose crimes seemed to portend a coming millennial apocalypse.  Millennium aired during the notoriously difficult Friday night spot and suffered on the ratings front from early on.  The show’s creative team tried damn near everything to get people to watch (often with disastrous results), but I think most of the series’ ills can simply be traced to how the show began.  Observe this real, unaltered frame from the title sequence:

Like, WTF?  It’s Friday night.  You have the option of sitting at home alone to watch a serial killer show or going to your local roller rink for some make-out action.  I’m no TV genius, but putting the words “who cares” in there was probably not the best idea.  However, if somehow you resisted the urge to lace up your skates, you would often be treated to a pretty rad show.

The show's filled with shit like this.

The pilot episode, about a prophecy-obsessed killer who passes judgment on prostitutes, strippers and other sinners, remains one of the scariest, coolest things ever shown on TV.  The grimy shots of a seedy, decaying city framed by perpetually rainy exteriors was television for kids raised on Doom, Se7en and Nine Inch Nails.  In it, Frank combines a preternatural profiling ability (he can “see what the killer sees,” though he asserts that he’s not psychic) with old fashioned detective work and a deep knowledge of prophetic hokum to find the killer.  There’s a surprising amount of action and a healthy serving of blood and gore.  It rocks.  But with a tighter budget and faster shooting schedule the series had difficulty sustaining what the pilot had established.  Many episodes struggle to find their voice.

Some of Millennium‘s problems come from the ways it tried to set itself apart from The X-Files. For one thing, there were no funny episodes (in the first season at least), but more dangerously, they gave the main character a life.

Oh wait, that's Roy Scheider.

While all we know about Agent Mulder revolves around porno, Frank Black is a family man with a wife and child.  He even has real, non-phone-sex-related friends.  Friend and family time in Millennium is usually a drag though, and Frank’s conversations with his amazingly supportive wife seem like bland filler compared to Mulder and Scully’s semi-flirty argue-fests.  Frank’s wife was even given her own episode, an emo mope-athon about child molestation that’s easily the worst thing in the first season.

There are still plenty of episodes that managed to translate The X-Files’ monster-of-the-week formula into a non-supernatural killer-of-the-week show.  My favorite is “Broken World,” where Frank teams up with a plucky female veterinarian (who just happens to be a redhead…) to stop a slaughterhouse worker who’s switched from killing horses to people.  Unfortunately, instead of cranking out more episodes like this one, by season’s end the show switched to supernatural storylines and heavy handed, make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythologies.  Millennium was doomed to the same fate as X-Files.

That's him, right? Okay good.

More and more supernatural eschatological bullshit crept into Millennium until the show was unceremoniously dumped at the end of its third season.  The ersatz series finale can be found jammed into a boring, late season X-Files about New Year’s Eve, 1999 where Mulder tracks down Frank for some reason or another.  Whatever.

What makes the apocalypse mythology episodes of Millennium so frustrating (aside from being generally crappy) is that, you know, the apocalypse didn’t happen.  It was all bullshit.  When the Millennium Group (the nerdy Phoenix Foundation sans duct tape to which Frank belongs) talks about fighting the “rising violence in society,” I can’t help but laugh.  Remember World War II?  On average, fewer and fewer people have died per year since that shit ended.  Gah, whatever.  This was still a cool show.  Maybe I’m just still bitter about that New Year’s party.

Before I go, I want to clear up something I may have implied in a previous post.  I love Lance Henriksen.  I love that he stars in a billion damn movies a year.  He was the sole redeeming factor of Alien vs. Predator, and I hope that if they ever make a movie out of Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator they find a way to cram him in it.  I don’t care if he comes back as Bishop, Weyland or Detective Hal Vukovich.  Put him in the damn thing and it will be awesome.

This week’s AVQ&A is “What movie/TV show/album/whatever would you like to be able to see/hear again for the first time?” There’s the usual smattering of the slightly pretentious and the heart-warmingly sweet, but no one gave my answer. So I’m going to rectify that.

The X-Files. Stay with me now.

It’s the mid-90s and I’m 14 or 15 years old. I’ve got really long, scraggly hair, big ‘ol round glasses, and the requisite acne. I’m also one of the good kids, who reads a lot, avoids all mentions of sex and sin, is really into science, and implicitly trusts all authority figures. My sister and I are two years apart (she’s the younger one) and we’ve never really gotten along. Until.

Until one weekend my sister stayed with our grandparents because our folks were out of town (I think I was with them, and thus missed out on this experience) and came home talking about this new show she’d seen. We didn’t have cable growing up – my dad still doesn’t. Hi, Dad! – but our grandparents did. So she saw the episode “Excelsis Dei” of some FOX show called The X-Files and was hooked. And she hooked me. She hooked me good.

Our grandmother would tape the episodes for us as they aired and we’d be chomping at the bit to go visit grandma and pick up our tapes every few weeks. But in the meantime, there was the internet to keep us entertained. This was back in the heady days of the 90s personal website extravaganza, when everyone had a Geocities or Anglefire page, joke sites were abundant, and I got caught by my English teacher with a printed copy of that “Pooh Goes Apeshit” story. And so we made a website. It’s still there. Well, bits of it are. [Ok, here --- check out the “Signs You’re In X-Files Withdrawal” list that we made. “Three words: Eat. More. Chicken.” Ha ha! Remember that one, guys? Guys?]

No? Ok, moving on.

So it isn’t just the experience of being new to the show that I would love to go through all over again, but also the sensory overload that came with being new to the internet. I didn’t just stumble onto a new and fascinating television show, I was suddenly a member of a community that wasn’t based on geographical location but instead on a shared experience. There were lots of people watching this show! Men, women, teenagers, and grown-ups. And we could communicate with them! It’s a sense of camaraderie that is taken for granted now – this kinship with people you’ve never met over an issue, event, or subject that is (in your group’s opinion) outside of the mainstream. It’s so Web 2.0. We weren’t weirdos for squealing when Mulder and Scully danced at the end of “Post-Modern Prometheus” – lots of other people did the same thing! And then some of them wrote hair-curlingly bad fan fiction about it.

That isn’t to say that the internet community experience trumps the value of the show in my mind. I most definitely do not want to write terrible PG-rated fan fiction again; but I would like to go back to the show and encounter it with an open, adolescent mind that is wholeheartedly in love with everything it sees. These days, I am — as most of us are — a tough audience to please. I expect not only good writing, but good acting, camera movement that isn’t disorienting, and sets and clothing that aren’t totally distracting. The X-Files only gets these right some of the time. The writing? Sometimes not so good, especially in the last few seasons. The whole thing with baby (super-soldier-hybrid-alien-love-child) William was pretty ridiculous. I wasn’t overly fond of Agent Reyes as a character. Mulder really was kind of a dick, wasn’t he? The Lone Gunmen spin-off was superfluous and just not very good. Scully had some really unfortunate pants suits and hair in the early seasons (tapered legs look good on no one). And the mythology is so convoluted that there’s really nothing left to do but laugh at it.

Hi, I’m Samantha Mulder! You may remember me from such storylines as “Help! I’m an Alien-Human Hybrid Clone!" And "Daddy Smokes Morleys."

That said, there is still a lot to love. I find the Gunmen to still be likable and admirable characters even after that spin-off nonsense. Mulder’s porn habit was somehow endearing and not creepy. Baby William was pretty adorable as far as babies go. Skinner was the best boss anyone could hope for (except when he wasn’t). That basement office was pretty damn cool. The storyline with Scully’s cancer was heartbreaking and felt very real. The weekly bit-parts were consistently well-acted and well-cast. “Small Potatoes,” “Bad Blood,” and “Triangle” all had excellent writing. And the relationship between Moose and Squirrel? Someday I will stop hoping for a relationship like that one, but that day has yet to come.

It's not that I don't love you, honey. It's just that you've never flown to Antarctica to rescue me from a secret government laboratory/spaceship. You understand, right?

This show helped me through high school in the way that D&D, Jesus, and alcohol helped other kids. The X-Files gave me a smart and independent female scientist to idolize – one of the first female television characters I can think of who was intelligent, opinionated, and methodical without being cold and bitchy (although that was the rumor ’round the FBI). It was built on science, pseudo-science, and the things we have yet to learn about our world, which I find to be endearingly optimistic. It questioned, teased, commiserated with, and respected its viewers – at least, until the last season or so. It injected teenage me with a healthy dose of cynicism, for which I will always be grateful. And to top it off, it was really fucking weird. I could write so many reviews for so many episodes just because they are really, very odd. Remember the humanoid tapeworm who lived in sewage? Or the inbred, incestuous family with the dismembered, toothless mother? Good times, all of them.

So here’s to oddity, cynicism, and paranoia. Trust no one. Deny everything. Deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. The truth is out there, guys.

(Fight the Future screen cap from http://www.inadream-moviecaps.com/)