Jordan Black's Millennium Character Profile
Profile
Jordan Black is Frank and Catherine Black‘s daughter and their only child. She‘s about five years old at the beginning of the series, and we see her celebrate her 8th birthday in the season 3 episode Seven and One. Jordan has a dog named Benny and, for a quite short time, a parakeet called Kenny.
Although Jordan is an average little girl in many ways, she‘s also considered an exceptional child. In the Pilot her father describes her birth a miracle, since Frank and Catherine weren‘t supposed to be able to have children. Jordan also seems to be intellectually above the average. This comes up in the episode Force Majeure, when Catherine tells Frank that Jordan has been accepted in the Green Valley Day School.
Furthermore, Jordan has certain mental abilities which resemble her father‘s gift. This is suggested for the first time in the episode Sacrament, where Jordan‘s aunt Helen Black is abducted. This intuitive sensitivity, which might be at least partially of supernatural origin, can be traced back to Jordan‘s late grandmother, Linda Black. She contacts Jordan in the season 2 Christmas episode Midnight of the Century.
Jordan‘s role as a seer grows more and more significant as the show goes on. Despite her special ability and smartness, or maybe in particular because of those features, she‘s fragile, just like any child of her age could be. This is indicated right in the first episode, where Jordan falls suddenly ill, and again in the episode Sacrament. The mysterious disease reappears in the season 3 episode Borrowed Time, where she nearly dies.
Jordan, like many children, often poses questions which may sound irrelevant at first but are actually hitting the nail on the head. By her naive curiosity she‘s not only learning about life herself but sometimes also making her parents take a better look at things. "Are you lonely without your mommy and daddy", she asks Frank by her grandparents‘ grave in The Fourth Horseman, for instance. The question is simple and "childish" and yet it manages to be touching and thought-provoking as it brings out the importance of family to any person at any age.
Both parents treasure Jordan and would do anything to keep her safe. Although she has a loving relationship with both Catherine and Frank, the bond between father and child grows constantly stronger. This is partially because of their mutual ability but naturally also because of Catherine‘s death in the season 2 finale The Time Is Now. Jordan‘s grief for her mother is depicted above all in The Innocents where she sets an empty place at the dinner table for Catherine and draws pictures of the three of them together, and the episode Omerta where she believes for a moment that her mother could be brought back to life.
Being a sweet little girl Jordan represents innocence and unconditional love and stands in sparkling contrast to the darkness in the series. As such she‘s self-evidently also a tempting target for evil as well as a means for Frank‘s enemies and tormentors to get to him, like in the episodes Siren, Saturn Dreaming of Mercury and Goodbye to All That. Evil comes chillingly near Jordan already in the season 1 episode Lamentation, when Lucy Butler visits the yellow house of the Black family.
Jordan‘s character is a stunning opposite of lonely, unhappy children of Millennium, as Patricia Highsmith in Wide Open, and children who have apparently fallen into evil, as Danielle Barbakow in Monster, Lucas Sanderson in Saturn Dreaming of Mercury and Divina Saxum in Antipas. In the world of the wicked, Jordan is a messenger of hope and, along with other children like her, could be seen as an answer to the question in the end of the episode Exegesis: Who‘s gonna see a different future?
Profile courtesy of Viivi (TIWWA Profile).
Millennium Cast, Character or Crew Credit
Jordan Black was a character in the television series Millennium.
Mortality Count:
0 Deaths
Violence Markers
No markers identified for Jordan Black.
Millennium Appearances
Jordan Black appeared in the following 39 episode/s of Millennium:
