YMMV / Millennium (1996)

• Awesome Music: Mark Snow provides a beautiful opening score and the Soundtrack boasts the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Portishead — provided you're not watching the DVD releases that replace them with soundalikes over licensing issues.
• Broken Base: Many fans were understandably upset that the Fully Absorbed Finale featured Frank having a very small role while Mulder and Scully solved all his problems for him. Others say that seeing him get a happy ending is such a relief that they could overlook it.
• Complete Monster: Frank Black has faced many killers and other villains. These are the absolute worst:
  • "522666": Raymond Dees is a Mad Bomber who derives sexual pleasure from the numerous deaths he causes. He initially blows up a crowded bar while watching the scene from afar. He later plants bombs in an office building, killing dozens more, and then participates in the rescue of the wounded simply so he can be hailed as a hero by the community. When Frank Black eventually discovers his true identity, Dees realizes that his game is up and arranges to be killed by the Feds so he can become notorious as a criminal instead, but not before taunting Frank with the possibility that he's rigged Frank's car to explode.
  • "Maranatha": Yaponchik (aka Sergei Stepanovich, real name unknown) is a mass murderer who sees himself as an Antichrist figure whose mission it is to spread evil in the world. Taking inspiration from the Book of Revelation, he causes the Chernobyl disaster to kill many people and poison the land. A decade later in the United States, he kills a police officer and several people who tried to appease him, to re-establish his status as The Dreaded to the Russian community. He kills one of the two Russian officers who had been tracking him ever since Chernobyl by shooting him in public. He later goes on a killing spree in a bathhouse, before using religious fear to convince his nemesis Surova to help him escape so that he can continue his rampage elsewhere.
  • "The Mikado": Avatar is a Serial Killer who terrorized the streets of San Francisco in the 1980s, claiming nineteen victims before eluding the authorities. He eventually returns to broadcast his latest murders over the internet, kidnapping several women and presenting them on a website with a counter indicating the time until their deaths. He leads the cops to a remote trailer, planting deadly boobytraps after killing the previous occupant. When Frank Black finds Avatar's new lair, he tries to kill Black as well before disguising his latest victim as himself in the hopes that Black will shoot her by mistake. Avatar never speaks, but his huge body count and his sadistic games make him one of the show's most heinous villains.
• The Chris Carter Effect: If The X-Files gave birth to the Trope Name, then Millennium can surely be considered its godfather. The show got increasingly bizarre and difficult to follow as it went on, and the end of the third season (the last one filmed, and for good reason) provided no closure at all. Each season had a different show runner(s), each with a very different idea of what the show should be (Are Frank Black's flashes simply a visualization of his deductive skills or psychic visions? What is the Millennium group's agenda?) and no one from above willing to set boundaries. After the cancellation, the whole thing was put into the laps of The X-Files team. This resulted in a Fully Absorbed Finale for Millennium within The X-Files-verse that also failed to resolve anything.
• Funny Moments: It comes with the territory of Darin Morgan's two episodes taking the piss out of this show like he did with The X-Files.
  • "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"
    • There's a funny bit of actor allusion in Jose's self-serving intro to Goopta and Selfosophy:
    Chung: Why, I made an award-winning appearance at a film in Cannes!
    Cue Horatio J. HooDoo taking off in his top-hat ship.
    Horatio J. Hoodoo: (aside) Nobody ever comes out of there alive! MWUH-HUH-HUH-HUH-HUH!
    • Detectives Giebelhouse and Twohey speculate on who killed Joseph Ratfinkovich, whose death by electrocution left him smiling in rictus surrounded by copies of Playpen magazine. Giebelhouse pins an "anti-porn feminist lesbian" who seduced Ratfinkovich and zapped him with a cattle prod hidden under her trenchcoat.
    Frank: To know that profile reveals less about the perp than it does about the profiler. Scares me.
    • After Chung turns up at the crime scene, Frank gushes about his books.
    Frank: In high school, I read your book A Lapful of Severed Tongues, about ten times.
    Chung: (flattered) Ah. That's the worst book I ever wrote.
    • We see Ratfinkovich's real cause of death is electrocution by a faulty Onan-o-graph, a lie detector ("with a cassette player!") administered by Mr. Smooth. Smooth gives a cartoonish "whoopsie" shrug as he packs up the machine and pats Ratfinkovich on the back.
    • Frank and Giebelhouse go to a Selfosophy office to speak with one of their directors: a high-strung Stepford Smiler who grills them on their "negativity" and kindly threatens to sue objectionable people "to the fullest extent of-uh,but-in full accordance with-the law."
    • David Duchovny's uncredited cameo as "Bobby Wingood." It turns out Wingood would beat up paparazzi for not taking his photograph. It helps that there are two movie posters of his: one of a Mulder publicity photo, the other of "Bobby" smiling with a gun in "Mr. Ne'er Do Well."
    • We see a day in the life of Mr. Smooth, who's painfully cheerful despite the daily grind and getting stuck in traffic. That is until he sees Chung's damning story in Playpen magazine and trashes a newsstand.
    • Chung gets pissed over no one showing up for his book-signing aside from Frank.
    Chung: At the start of The '90s, they predicted new breakthroughs in the neurosciences. "The Decade of the Brain," it was supposed to be. Instead, it was the decade of...body-piercing.
    • Frank takes time to read one of Goopta's godawful detective novels featuring the cocky lothario detective Rocket McGrain, complete with dramatization. Life is incomplete without seeing Lance Henriksen in a Rod Stewart wig cackling like a deranged used-car salesman at a crime scene while reaffirming his "upbeatness."
    Rocket McGrain: This case is a piece of cake with ice cream on the side! (chuckles)
    Detective: Are you going to use your special profiling powers?
    McGrain: I don't need to! I know what killed this writer: his own bad writing! He wrote downbeat stories about depressed people doing dark things. Who wants that?
  • "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me": perhaps the greatest use of Suicide as Comedy on television.
    • The episode starts off with a kick in the nads to the "angels and demons" iconography with Abum beheading a tacky fountain angel gets with a newspaper, followed by a hail of papers sending the dogs, cats, and car alarms into a frenzy.
    • Abum meets with his buddies at the coffee shop, where he gripes to the kid at the counter about coffee and apple fritters. He and his friends are in demon form as gets his order, and...
    Abum: That kid [[Main/Squick peed]] in my coffee!
    Long beat, then all four cackle, well, demonically.
    • Poor Waylon Figgleif, the overzealous ANT censor.

    • Greb appears to him as a demonic version of the infamous dancing baby and gets him to mosh to "My War".
    • Figgleif starts to crack by seeing the long pole of parking signs as "Testicles by Permit Only," "Moist dung will be towed," "Penis Jokes Prohibited," "Display of Butt Crack," and "Use of Word 'Crap'".
    • He even objects to another woman's laundry and hallucinates censor bars on a stripper.
    • Greb pushes him into a murder-suicide where he kills two greys in front of "Mulder" and "Scully".^note  Played by doubles Steve Kiziak and Arlene Pileggi. The network spins the whole thing into a show called When Humans Attack!
• Harsher in Hindsight: In episode 6, Frank and Catherine's young daughter Jordan starts asking about death. Catherine tells her that they will be with her forever. Catherine dies less than two years later.
• Heartwarming Moments: The show had a surprising number of these, which served to balance out the general bleakness of the show and give Frank Black something to lose (and fight for).
  • For instance, at the end of the episode where Frank's daughter Jordan first manifested an ability like her father's, after Frank's sister-in-law (who had been kidnapped) returns home, we see Jordan hiding her eyes in her mother's skirt. Frank reaches down a hand and without looking, she takes it, and they take a walk together, sharing the burden of their mutual gift.
  • In "The Wild and the Innocent", the Travises will send photos of Angel to Maddie, for saving them by shooting her boyfriend Bobby.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One widely known statement of Selfosophy, from "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" is "Don't be Dark". Sounds a lot like Google's motto...
• Narm: "The Well-Worn Lock" is a mostly moving look into Catherine's social work where she organizes a court case against a client's incestuous father. The flashbacks culminate in said father climbing into bed with the client: a skin-crawling scene that's ruined when she drops a toy with the same stock "squeak" found in Spongebob Squarepants.
• Retroactive Recognition: Aaron Pierce helps Frank discover the Millennium Group is evil.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This was one of the biggest reasons the show never caught on. The unrelentingly bleak tone along with the complete lack of levity made it hard to watch. While it earned the respect of the viewers able to handle it, most ended up alienated. Vince Gilligan — who worked on Millennium's parent show The X-Files and wrote the Fully Absorbed Finale "Millennium" — would cite the show as a writing lesson regarding this.
  Vince Gilligan: "I would watch every episode, and afterward, I would just feel like I couldn’t sleep at night, it was so dark. I guess that was instructive to me. That show told me, “Be honest with your show, make it as dark as it needs to go, but you’d better find a way to leaven it with humor, otherwise people are going to want to slit their wrists after they watch it.”
• The Woobie: Maddie Haskel in Season One's "The Wild and the Innocent." Her father abandons her, her abusive stepfather rapes her and is implied to be the father of her child, who he then SELLS to a rich couple so that he can buy himself a TV. Learning about this drives Maddie's mother to suicide. Maddie's abusive boyfriend is willing to take Maddie to find her baby, but in the process murders three people, which she is helpless to stop. She is willing to give the baby back to his adoptive parents once she gets to hold him, but is finally forced to kill her boyfriend to prevent him from killing her baby's adoptive parents and using the baby as a Human Shield against the police, and goes to jail for her part in everything. She describes Frank Black, who prevented the police from shooting her, as "the only man in my life that ever did something nice for me" and requests that her son never be told about her. All of this happens before she even turns 21.

---