Millennium Episode Review of Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions by Erin (Raven Wolf)

Reviewed: Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions

Contributor: Erin (Raven Wolf)

Powers, Principalities, Thrones & Dominions

"Paranoia is just a kind of awareness, and awareness is just a form of love."

This episode stands alone like some kind of Gothic Echo to Lamentation. In the opening scene, a mysterious young man, who identifies himself only as Sammael in his eloquent speech to another man in a grocery store parking lot, slowly raises a gun and points it, then fires, as Frank looks on, seeing a bolt of lightning erupting from the disheveled young man's hand, striking the other man dead. As Frank slowly picks up the gun, we see that the gun was never fired. This marks the beginning of Frank's second temptation by Legion.

Frank's feelings of guilt after the death of Bob Bletcher mirrored my own intense feelings of guilt, after my friend Laury was murdered, along with her two sons. When I first saw this episode, it had only been a few weeks since their deaths, and I was still racked with feelings of guilt. The scene that spoke to me the most was the one in which Frank and Catherine are talking in the hallway at home, and Frank is wondering if his ability has left him. Catherine asks, "Is that what you believe?" To which Frank replies, "I think I've lost my faith in it." I am still moved to tears when I see this scene, as this is just how I felt, being used to having a certain "6th sense" of my own, and having it fail to help me save her life, I have now lost my faith in MY "ability". Also, Frank's haunting visions and lingering feelings of cold emptiness remind me of my own experience...The things I saw and heard, feeling cut off from the world, wondering what life was like before...and yet, as Frank said, sometimes forgetting. "Sometimes I forget. Think I'll give him a call. Then I remember. Bob's dead. Murdered here in our home."

Then, I'm snapped back into the momentum of the show, in which Legion, in the guise of Al Pepper (or "Alistair", which was another excellent touch), tries again to play on Frank's fears of something happening to his family, in order to assure his allegiance. Along with the mysterious avenging angel, named Sammael, whom I am still fascinated with, and would have liked to have seen more of. I still puzzle over his conversation with Frank, after he confesses to the murder of Al Pepper.

I wondered what "future actions" Sammael had seen. And why he implied that he had not acted as he had to save Frank's family, since there is "not that kind of action". Still, this gothic mystery had me so wrapped up in emotions that I think it stands on its own, as a stand-alone episode, or as the part two to "Lamentation", which it rounds out effortlessly, ending as it began, with the opening scene, which, now that we understand it, loses none of its intensity. It simply completes the circle, like the Ouroborous that stands as the symbol of "Millennium".