The X-Files: Millennium Rewatch
July 19, 2020 7:53 PM - Season 7, Episode 4 - Subscribe
When a retired FBI agent commits suicide and then disappears from his grave a week after burial, leaving his fingerprints behind on the lid of his coffin, Mulder and Scully seek out ex-Millennium Group member Frank Black for assistance in finding the man responsible.
I was underwhelmed by the Horsemen. At the time, I called them "The Four Horsemen of the basement rec-room."
posted by acrasis at 3:59 PM on July 20, 2020
posted by acrasis at 3:59 PM on July 20, 2020
I remembered this one mostly as the one where Mulder finally gets to first base with Scully (yes, they kissed in "Triangle", but that was a fantasy/alternate reality of Mulder's that Scully didn't experience, so it doesn't count). Yay Mulder!
Maybe the episode would seem more compelling if I'd seen Millennium? (I saw the pilot and wasn't interested enough in it to continue.)
How did the dead get that putrefied that quickly? The cop that Johnson killed was found the next morning and looked like he'd been dead for days.
It's always a bad sign when a man is into taxidermy as a hobby. (Think Psycho.)
It doesn't seem very realistic that Mulder would have survived being locked in that basement with the four zombies. Wouldn't they all have swarmed him at once? Wouldn't he have run out of bullets?
Looking at my season 7 discs, I don't think this season is so bad. The trouble is the show peaked artistically in season 5 and everyone expected it to stay at that level. It didn't, but it was still pretty watchable, and I prefer this season to the first two seasons.
In the timeline of the show we're now in 2000. Which feels weird to me, because I always think of those original nine seasons as taking place entirely in the nineties, but no, the show went on until 2002, and the look of the show has reached the point of looking pretty current visually because fashion hasn't changed much in the last twenty years.
posted by orange swan at 5:47 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]
Maybe the episode would seem more compelling if I'd seen Millennium? (I saw the pilot and wasn't interested enough in it to continue.)
How did the dead get that putrefied that quickly? The cop that Johnson killed was found the next morning and looked like he'd been dead for days.
It's always a bad sign when a man is into taxidermy as a hobby. (Think Psycho.)
It doesn't seem very realistic that Mulder would have survived being locked in that basement with the four zombies. Wouldn't they all have swarmed him at once? Wouldn't he have run out of bullets?
Looking at my season 7 discs, I don't think this season is so bad. The trouble is the show peaked artistically in season 5 and everyone expected it to stay at that level. It didn't, but it was still pretty watchable, and I prefer this season to the first two seasons.
In the timeline of the show we're now in 2000. Which feels weird to me, because I always think of those original nine seasons as taking place entirely in the nineties, but no, the show went on until 2002, and the look of the show has reached the point of looking pretty current visually because fashion hasn't changed much in the last twenty years.
posted by orange swan at 5:47 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]
Maybe the episode would seem more compelling if I'd seen Millennium?
Nope!
Bias: I really dug the second season of Millennium. That second season fully embraced the occultism/supernatural threads from its first (magickal secret societies clashing, holy-blood-holy-grail business, precessions of the aeons!), and built to a straight-up apocalyptic cliffhanger, and was wholly distinct from X-Files. And then the third season happened, retconned away almost all the cliffhanger, and turned the entire affair into a mostly pointless X-Files also-ran (Frank Black is now with the FBI! He has a skeptical partner!) that meandered to a nothing end.
This crossover episode was basically the third season in microcosm, mostly seeming like a final insult to what could have been.
posted by Drastic at 7:36 AM on July 23, 2020 [1 favorite]
Nope!
Bias: I really dug the second season of Millennium. That second season fully embraced the occultism/supernatural threads from its first (magickal secret societies clashing, holy-blood-holy-grail business, precessions of the aeons!), and built to a straight-up apocalyptic cliffhanger, and was wholly distinct from X-Files. And then the third season happened, retconned away almost all the cliffhanger, and turned the entire affair into a mostly pointless X-Files also-ran (Frank Black is now with the FBI! He has a skeptical partner!) that meandered to a nothing end.
This crossover episode was basically the third season in microcosm, mostly seeming like a final insult to what could have been.
posted by Drastic at 7:36 AM on July 23, 2020 [1 favorite]
I am, to this day, still traumatized by the apocalyptic ending of the second season of Millennium. That was just next level creepy.
posted by Aquifer at 9:31 PM on August 4, 2020
posted by Aquifer at 9:31 PM on August 4, 2020
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iirc, 'Millennium' was cancelled a few years before; this was an unofficial crossover Series Finale for it.
There are a couple of jokey episodes soon, and another couple near the end, but this is a not-good season?
posted by porpoise at 10:01 PM on July 19, 2020