Millennium Episode Review of Dead Letters by David

Reviewed: Dead Letters

Contributor: David

Sympathy; Empathy; Fellowship; Humanity - and the Soulful beseeching of a human being aching for peace in a tormenting world. To whom are these qualities attributed? To Frank Black, James Horn, The Killer? This is the triumvirate dilemma of MLM-102_Dead Letters, which again shows there is a sophisticated, multi-layered process at work in the MillenniuM scripting.

James Horn, a potential MillenniuM Group Candidate is in many ways the Frank Black we have only heard about; the one which exists in the past where his family was at risk and his mental health was collapsing. As Frank himself says “I've been there”. He has also been in the mind of the killer and hence there is an inter-linked-trinity of characters here, each one but a shift of the dial away from being that which he is currently not, and for Frank Black neither of them is desirable to him.

The killer might wish to move from being himself to being Frank or James, and James might wish to move from being himself to Frank, but it is only Frank who seems to inhabit the position that seems superior to the others; the one in which being one's self is difficult but preferable. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. Yet there is also an emerging fourth character that belongs in this fellowship. Frank's daughter Jordan appears to be having visceral dreams of approaching madness (symbolized by a ceiling-creeping, spine-inverted, spider-like clown). Dead letters leads us into the kaleidoscopic, generational nature of evil and those who would enter into its clutches or the battle against it. As an episode it is pivotal in the series as a whole. This is because it centers on the absolute need of a human being to have an identity with which he can live and which allows him to know why he is living. As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how."

It is also about the struggle not to become a human being who has an identity with which he cannot live. This is evidenced by the opening quote from JOB 3:25,26 which talks of man's fear of failure to thrive, instead becoming “the thing I greatly feared...dreaded”. Dead Letters is more than an interesting police procedural, it is a deep philosophical meditation upon human survival at the spiritual level and alludes to the that vision that Frank has seen; the vision in which he has “seen the future—where the battle between good and evil...is fought to conclusion.” The question is, in that conclusion is it human beings like the killer, like Frank, Like James or is it children like Jordan that will prevail? It is essentially this question which makes MillenniuM worth visiting again and again.