Millennium – The Complete Third Season

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: C+     Episodes: B

 

 

For its third and final season, creator Chris Carter tried to bring Millennium back from a complicated and screwy second season.  Lance Henriksen back as Frank Black for the last time as a former expert in crime solving whose special psychic-like abilities jump any case ahead, even cold ones, he discovers that his association with The Millennium Group may not be as mutually beneficial as he first thought.  It was they who got him on problematic cases, and if you have not seen the first season, you should stop now and either read my review for the first elsewhere on this site or see that entire season.  The following will give away too much, but that cannot be avoided.

 

Millennium- The Complete Third Season has Black’s wife no longer with the show, while his daughter (Brittany Tiplady) is slowly growing up in the shadow of her father’s shadowy work.  The last season established disastrous attempts at adding humor and lightheartedness to the series, while Frank wants nothing more to do with The Millennium Group.  The show tries to get serious again, but it was too late.  As this series hits the streets, a few weeks before partial inspiration Kolchak: The Night Stalker (reviewed elsewhere on this site) comes to DVD, the same people outside of Carter who made this show possible launch a new Night Stalker.  After only a few episodes, the series has been a critical and commercial disaster.  What I wanted to find out was if the creative problems began in this season or with that revival.

 

Honestly, even though you have to be more forgetful and dumber than Forest Gump to enjoy this final season and forget the better debut season, these shows seem outright ambitious versus the Stuart Townsend Night Stalker.  If that show could be even half as smart, mature and interesting as this, it might not get so much flack on its own.  Forget comparisons to the original.  The new set of episodes for this final season are as follows:

 

1)     The Innocents

2)     Exegesis

3)     Teotwawki

4)     Closure

5)     …Thirteen Years Later

6)     Skull & Bones

7)     Through A Glass, Darkly

8)     Human Essence

9)     Omerta

10)  Borrowed Time

11)  Collateral Damage

12)  The Sound Of Snow

13)  Antipas

14)  Matryoshka

15)  Forcing The End

16)  Saturn Dreaming Of Mercury

17)  Darwin’s Eye

18)  Barbo Thodol

19)  Seven & One

20)  Nostalgia

21)  Via Dolorosa

22)  Goodbye To All That

 

 

Daniel Sackheim and Frank Spotnitz are among those who guided this season and it is not bad considering how problematic the last one was.  However, it is obvious (especially after the new Night Stalker) that Chris Carter was the guiding force and when he gave up any serious control of his franchises, things went bad, as was the case with the first X-Files feature film.  To the credit of all, this series is wrapped up well enough for fans and those following it, with the second season’s troubles beyond repair if not as bad as the meticulously constructed conspiracy on X-Files was suddenly dumped.  This series at least went out with some sense of dignity and never became juvenile, infantilized, idiotic or stupid as most TV fare is and the new Night Stalker has been on arrival.  At least the show had many fine moments and ended with dignity, a quality TV series anywhere rarely have anymore.  Fortunately, the catastrophes the show considered at the start of 2000 never happened.

 

The aspect ratio this time out is again an anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image, versus the exceptional full frame 1.33 X 1 image from the first season set.  The show this time looks the poorest it has from the three sets.  Occasionally, some shots are nice, but though the dark look of the show has color that is again not so ridiculously desaturated as the norm (or is that abnorm), but it does not look as bad as some current digital HD productions (like that new Night Stalker) so enjoy.  Fortunately, they were still shooting on film.  There also continues to be three languages of Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo for each show, all with Pro Logic surrounds that are used better than most shows use them to this day.  The idea of 5.1 remixes were passed on, but we have seen shows have 2.0 to start with, then 5.1 later.  Mark Snow’s scoring is again solid as usual.  The combination is still good, if not as amazing as the previous season.

 

Extras include commentaries on the season’s opener with Henriksen and co-star Klea Scott, who became the female lead for this last season.  You also get the X Files episode entitled Millennium that further wraps up the storyline post 1/1/2000, which is actually anamorphically enhanced!  The quality is equal to the other shows in this set and is an episode with the two original leads, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.  Finally, there is the End Game making of documentary on the final season running about 38 minutes and Between The Lines featurette (concluding the look at the real life inspiration for The Millennium Group at 12:37) that wraps up some good (if not plentiful) extras, but it does cover about all there is to cover.

 

 

 -   Nicholas Sheffo