Search the Community

Chasing the Dragon The Academy Group, Inc. (AGI) was founded by Dr. Roger L. Depue, former Chief of the FBI's famed Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI National Academy, Quantico, Virginia. AGI's staff of former career law enforcement professionals use their combined 300 years of experience to assist Fortune 500 corporations, public institutions, individuals and law enforcement agencies in solving many types of cases. AGI is the model for the "Millennium Group" in Chris Carter's television show "Millennium". ---- Roger L. Depue, Ph.D. President & Founder [Former FBI (21 years) Supervisory Special Agent, Chief of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (Pioneer), FBI Academy. Administrator of the FBI's National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC)] In June of 1974, I was assigned to the FBI Academy at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit. So that's where my career began as far as the Behavioral Science Unit is concerned. I worked there as an agent, instructor and researcher until about 1979. In 1980, I was promoted I was promoted to the Chief of Behavioral Sciences and worked there until my retirement in 1989. I said, "I don't see anything that's like this in the private sector. I don't see anything for private security or industrial security officers. I don't see anything for law firms." Now, they have this thing called forensic psychology, but we're not talking about that. We became very proficient at looking at crime scenes and interpreting them and drawing out of them personality characteristics and descriptive characteristics of the killer. Robert L. Hazelwood, M.S.: The Academy Group is actually a group of retired FBI and other law enforcement agents from a variety of agencies. And basically we're a forensic behavioral science unit. Michael R. Napier, B.S.E. [Former FBI (27 yrs) Supervisory Special Agent, field office program manager and violent crime assessor with the FBI's NCAVC.] One of the things that is unique about the Academy Group is that we came from a research perspective based on how law enforcement can use the product. There is a law enforcement culture, a way of thinking and way of doing things. And so we've adapted that material to the corporate world. Peter A. Smerick, M.Ed.: For a while, in the Behavioral Science Unit, I was the program manager of the threat assessment Statement Analysis Unit. And at the same time, I taught the other guys how to analyze statements from a forensic-stylistic point of view. Larry E. McCann: [Former Virginia State Police (26 yrs) Senior Special Agent. Founder of the Virginia State Police Behavioral Sciences section of the Violent Crime Investigative Unit. Graduate FBI Police Fellowship Program.] Letters that come into corporations, telephone calls, emails that come in. So we look at the threats to determine is it a threat, what is the nature of the threat, what are we going to do about this, how can we help the corporation deal with this situation, and number four, hey, who wrote this, who composed this? Who is inside the corporation or outside the corporation that is so angry that they would do such a thing. Peter A. Smerick [Former FBI (24 yrs) Supervisory Special Agent for the FBI's National Centre for Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). FBI laboratory examiner of questioned documents and photographic evidence; FBI Academy Forensic Science Instructor.] So that was, to a certain extent, my specialty. But in reality, when you were assigned to the Investigator Support Unit as a profiler, you were not specialized at that time in any one area exclusively. You had the responsibility of doing it all. Richard L. Ault, Jr. Ph.D. [Former FBI (24 yrs) Supervisory Special Agent, former Deputy Chief of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, FBI Academy.] In the unit, I was always the cleanup man. I always handled a broad variety of cases. But my avocation, my real love, was in the mind games that go with what I call indirect assessment in foreign counterintelligence cases and back then, of course, in the domestic and international terrorist cases. Robert L. Hazelwood [Former FBI (22 yrs) Supervisory Special Agent, FBI's Academy Behavioral Science Unit, FBI Academy. Nationally recognized violent crime expert.] I work a variety of types of cases but my specialty, if you would call it that, would be sexual violence. I've done a lot of research on sexual violence, interviewing offenders, talking to victims and testifying in court. Michael R. Napier: My particular area of expertise is in the area of sexual violence, and my area of specialization is interviewing and interrogating suspects, but also interviewing witnesses and victims. R. Stephen Mardigian: [Former FBI (31 yrs) Supervisory Special Agent, regional field office program manager, violent crime assessor and administrator with the FBI's NCAVC.] I work with corporations dealing with workplace violence issues, behavioral problems in the workplace, termination or separation strategies when someone has to be released for cause. I also continue to work with local law enforcement in a program we call C-Cap, the Cold Case Analysis Program, where we still help local law enforcement deal with unsolved cases. Martin Rehburg Vice President & COO If there is an enquiry or a problem, the access is that you can't just pick up a phone and get one guy, because you need to screen it out and figure out exactly what the need is and what needs to be done. We've harnessed the very best in this industry I think, in terms of what we're able to accomplish. They're the who's who of law enforcement. These are the guys. Robert L. Hazelwood: By the way, just for your information, my wife is the one who named the Academy Group. We had debated for a number of meetings what to call ourselves. My wife said to me one day, "What's the big debate. You're all from the FBI Academy, why don't you just call yourselves the Academy Group?" And I brought that up at the meeting. Everyone thought that was a very good idea. The Red Dragon is our logo. It comes from Thomas Harris' first book about the Behavioral Science Unit called The Red Dragon, which was recently made into a film. [The first film made from the book was Michael Mann's Manhunter, in 1986.] Forensic Behavioral Science Michael R. Napier: Behavioral science refers to the methodical research into and understanding of behavior. Richard L. Ault: What we do, the analysis is not based on magic, it's based on observation of human behavior. Larry E. McCann: Everything you do in your life is a reflection of who you are. So if you've left physical evidence at a crime scene, you've also left a reflection there of who you are. Michael R. Napier: Behavior comes from thought, which takes us into the mind of the criminal. The thought always precedes the deed. You'll look at a crime that looks totally spontaneous and it's not. The person who did it has had those thoughts many, many times before, sometimes developed very elaborately in fantasy. Roger L. Depue: The fantasy is very important. Many times in a crime scene, you can see the fantasy. Many times these people with intense fantasies would draw victimizations – a woman hanging, and things like that. You go into the prisons and you do that search where you're looking for contraband, and you'll find all kinds of drawings where the fantasy is still alive, and they're remembering, and they're drawing these pictures. I've coined a term called "leakage", which basically says that your fantasy will leak out of you. If I'm around you long enough and we have conversations, I will be able to see the things that you feel intensely about because that's what drives us, that's what's important. Profiling Larry E. McCann: Criminal investigative analysis, psychological profiling, criminal profiling, whatever you want to call it, it's not magic. Peter A. Smerick: It's an analysis of the facts of a case, so it's fact-driven, number one. Michael R. Napier: But then it's also getting inside the mind of the offender because he controls all the scenarios, he determines when he is going to strike and who he's going to select as a victim, what he's going to do. And when you look at a crime scene you can almost sometimes know the words that he spoke to the victim and see the interplay, the resulting behavior on her part, and then the mixing of their behaviors. Peter A. Smerick: Profiling is not a science. It's more of an art form, as far as I'm concerned. Roger L. Depue: It's basically a step-by-step process and we use these words to discuss it. First of all, what exists? What is the crime scene? That's the question of what. What do you have to examine? What is there? Now you have not only the crime scene itself and all the crime scene photographs, but you have the autopsy report and the autopsy photographs, the pathologist's opinion. You have the toxicology reports, all the forensic examinations and reports. You have the interviews of the witnesses and all of that kind of thing. And from there you move to, how did this crime scene come to be this way? What we're talking about here is the reconstruction – looking at the crime scene and working backwards and working forwards, and saying this is how the perpetrator arrived at the scene. This is where the confrontation took place, this is how the fight ensued. This is how he took her down. This is how he dragged her into the living room. This is how he finally killed her. This is where the sexual assault took place. This is what he did with the weapon. This is how he left and if you have an aerial photograph you might be able to say where he came from and where he went to. After you do what and how, then you're ready to start talking about motive. You start saying, why did he do it, what was his motive, what was his fantasy. So you begin to see emotions and you begin to be able to say, he stabbed her 40 times, this is overkill. We see rage, we see other kinds of things. If we want to extrapolate that onto a person, though, we might say, here's a person who has trouble in his daily life, controlling his emotions. If he gets very angry, he may lose it from time to time. That's valuable if you can go into a community and say those kinds of things. From why, you then move to who. Then you begin to paint the picture of the person. You say, this is what I've looked at, this is how I reconstruct it, this is the motive and the fantasy, this is why he did what he did. That means he is this kind of person. So then you begin to draw that. And then I like to add one more thing, and that's where. Where is he? So you might be able to say some things then about where he's likely to be. Did he walk to the scene or did he drive to the scene? Did he show familiarity with the area? Did he study the victim, was it a targeted victim or was it a victim of opportunity? R. Stephen Mardigian: The objective, of course, is to help narrow the focus of the police's effort into a smaller suspect population in the hopes to identify the offender quicker. Peter A. Smerick: But understand that even as profilers we have been wrong. Because we have, in fact, misinterpreted the information that we're seeing at that crime scene. Larry E. McCann: No, we're not psychic. Some of the guys have crystal balls I see on their desks but in a joking manner they are displayed. Pretenders Richard L. Ault: Profiling has a lot of imitators. A lot of what I would call cheap imitations. Robert L. Hazelwood: Well, we spend a lot of time training and gathering experience and conducting research through out interviews in order to be prepared as criminal profilers. But you have a lot of people who spend a day or two on a course or have read all the articles and say, "Well, I can do that. That's no big deal." Richard L. Ault: There are some out there who have even written books that are just based on a very shallow level of experience. R. Stephen Mardigian: Unfortunately, they misrepresent what this process really is. Peter A. Smerick: Profiling can not be learned by reading the books. It can not be learned by taking college courses or courses over the internet. From my own biased perspective, the only way you can learn how to "profile" a case is by becoming an investigator. Robert L. Hazelwood: For example, during the sniper shootings, they called us over 150 times, "they" being the media throughout the United States. We refused to comment on the sniper shootings. Why? Because we felt, we told the media "We will talk to you if you get permission from the investigative agency in charge." And of course, they can't do that. Because we feel we could harm the investigation, we may harm the survivors, by something we say. We may alert the bad people to what might be helpful information to them. So we declined. Michael R. Napier: You will find there's people who are willing to put their name on the TV screen, claim to be a profiler and put out all kinds of insights about these people, will never have had access to any crime scene that they're talking about. They will never have had access to law enforcement personnel. They will never have seen an autopsy. They will never have seen any of the physical or laboratory evidence. And so basically, they're firing blanks. Robert L. Hazelwood: If the networks declare a person to be a profiler, they're a profiler. Simple as that. Evil Richard L. Ault: I have a certain basic belief in the depravity of mankind, and I've never been disappointed. R. Stephen Mardigian: When you deal with the nature of the problems that we deal with and the violence that we've seen, there is no question that evil exists in society. It never ceases to amaze me the things that a man can do to his fellow man. Michael R. Napier: There are some people who are best described as evil. They are evil in the sense that their core being is dead. They have no appreciation for the agony and suffering that they cause people to go through. Their deviant thinking, their deviant planning, their deviant behaviors, is just not adequately addressed through any other terms other than they are evil. Larry E. McCann: I believe that there are some people out here that are just no-good, rotten SOBs, and that's the bottom line. Robert L. Hazelwood: I don't think we've ever really been able to explain it to everybody's satisfaction. And I'll be honest with you, I don't think we ever will be able. In fact, there is a forensic research project under way in an attempt to quantify evil for the courts. Peter A. Smerick: As far as pure evil goes, you have to look at guys like any of the serial killers who are operating out there, individuals who are willing to snuff out the life of another individual, to put their hands around the throat of a young girl and see the life go out of their eyes. To me, that's pure evil. That's pure evil. This Job Can Hurt You Roger L. Depue: I don't think anybody could say that the job doesn't affect them, that it doesn't change them. It does, in fact, change you. It does make you much more careful, much more of a pain in the ass to your children. Peter A. Smerick: When you get into the profiling unit, you're now seeing the worst of the worst. And when you're trying to walk inside the shoes of both the victim and the offender, to understand why something went down, you have a tendency of becoming a little more paranoid. And you have a tendency of wanting the circle the wagons around your family. And the one thing that was hardest for me is having a teenaged daughter and knowing that there were so many different types of predators out there. Roger L. Depue: You get angry in church when a little girl comes out of the pew and go down and you know she's going to the bathroom and she's going alone. You know, you just get angry and you watch her. You watch other people and see if they're looking at her. So it does in fact change your life, no doubt about it. Larry E. McCann: The way I deal with this kind of thing is I draw a very bright line between work and home. Robert L. Hazelwood: My life consists of religious beliefs and family and grandkids and neighbors and schools and friends. This is my job, and so I try to keep those two things separate. I think that's very, very important. Roger L. Depue: I've always enjoyed exercise and working out, running, to clear your mind. That kind of thing has been good for me. Michael R. Napier: When you delve into violence and see the human toll, sometimes the human carnage, of what one person does to another, if you are going to survive intact, not only physically but psychologically, it's necessary to find a way to compartmentalize what you're immersed in. It's like walking in toxic waste. You better not have hip waders, but you'd better have shoulder waders so that toxic waste doesn't eat into you, or it will eat you alive, literally. Peter A. Smerick: On one hand, you're supposed to walk in the shoes of the offender. On the other hand, you're supposed to maintain your objectivity. Maybe it's because of being in Vietnam, I don't know, I mean, I've certainly seen my share of death and mayhem in my life. Perhaps I've grown a shell where I'm able to do this type of work, and yet not have it get to the point where it has destroyed me. Roger L. Depue: When I was chief of the Behavioral Science Unit, I used to say to my agents, "You want to do some research at home?" It violated the Bureau rules, I could have been in trouble. You're supposed to come in and sign in every morning. These people … I had some creative geniuses. If they wanted to spend a couple of days at home, do it, because when they come back they're recharged. In this kind of work, you need to have all your energies focused. I always used to say to someone when they came to work for us, and I still do now – I just interviewed a young woman – I used to say, "This job can hurt you. You're going to see things that you've probably never seen before, and it can hurt you." Rewards R. Stephen Mardigian: Our objective is to identify the criminal and remove them from society and make society better. And when we're successful at that, that's where the satisfaction comes back to you. It works both ways, not only catching the bad guy – but I was fortunate to be involved in a case where we actually were able to help have a man released from jail because he wasn't involved in a series of homicides. The truth is what we look for, and when you find that mistakes have been made and you're in a position to help be involved in correcting that, it's a real accomplishment. Larry E. McCann: There are so many nice people in the world and the number of nice people in the world, the number of wholesome people in the world, far outweigh the number of slimeballs. So I'm not particularly worried. I'm not foolhardy, but yet I'm not particularly worried about the bad guys, so to speak, because there are so many good guys out here.

In typing this commentary I did make use of Maria Vitale's excellent transcript, and I have to say that her scene descriptions are probably the best I have ever read. On the couple of occasions where the scene descriptions are particularly vivid - you know who to thank. ----------------------------------- DVD Pilot commentary The city of Vancouver, like in the X-Files, played a very important part in the look of Millennium, which was supposed to be gray and bleak. We shot this in the time of year when it's grayest and bleakest, the early spring. (A man going into a peep-show club.) The peep-show club here, which we called the Ruby Tip, was inspired by a Seattle institution which is called the Lusty Lady which is on Main Street in Seattle, which is where the pilot is set and the show is set. We got a chance to cast beautiful women for a change. On The X-Files so much of our casting was of character actors, this was I think a pleasure for everybody involved. And so it was easy to cast Kate Luyben and April Telek in these parts. They were terrific actresses and beautiful to look at. Kate would appear later in at least one X-Files episode, and she had a larger part in Harsh Realm. I know that director David Nutter went down to Seattle also to see how this peep-show worked. Working with Gary Wisner who was on the production of the pilot I think we re-created almost exactly what was in Seattle. (The Frenchman holding up a piece of paper in the booth window.) This idea of the Frenchman played by Paul Dillon really came from the Nostradamus prophecy which had a lot to do with the idea of the series, the idea that there is something approaching at the millennium, this series being produced I think four years before the end of the century, that we were headed toward something grave and foreboding. The idea was that Frank Black who we've yet to meet knew something and felt something that others didn't know about this oncoming evil. (The Frenchman: I want to see you dance on the blood-dimmed tide.) We spent a long time trying to figure out what was the proper way to do this which is really a point of view of this strange dance, this effect of the blood running down the walls, how real it should be, how much of a sort of imagining it should be. (The Frenchman: This is the second death. Calamity: Tell me what you want. The Frenchman: You'll have your part in the lake. In the great plague in the maritime city.) This is the Frenchman reading from a William B Yeats poem about the apocalypse that foretells the blood-dimmed tide at the end of the millennium. The editing done here is I think a work of art by Stephen Mark who was a very important part of the X-Files for the first few seasons. (Main titles) Ramsey McDaniel, a woman who had done some work on the X-Files early on, came in and did a beautiful job on the opening credits of Millennium, which I think are evocative and they set the mood and the theme for the show. The idea was to make a murder mystery each week but to give it a millennial feel. The idea that it was all part of the oncoming disaster or apocalypse at the end of the millennium, to use the fear that everyone seemed to have about Y2K, to bring it to life on this TV series each week. (The Black family arriving outside their yellow house.) The character, Frank Black, cares more than anyone else, that he actually feels responsibility, the weight of the world, he is the sort of super adult. Everyone else who doesn't want to face the horror to come. Brittany Tiplady who played his daughter - she was a choice of one, there was no other kid who even came close. She was a bit of luck. The same with Megan Gallagher, she was just perfect for the part. She seems like such a hopeful optimistic person and yet she had the quality that you could feel, the weight that she carried of her husband's burden of being able to see the darkness. Lance Henriksen was my, really my first and only choice for this part, and I wrote it with him in mind. I ended up slipping him a note under his hotel room door asking him if he would please read the pilot and consider it because he had not done television before. It was really fortunate for me that we were able to get somebody who for me embodied this character of Frank Black, a person who has the weight of the world on his shoulders, who loves his family, who loves his wife and his daughter, who wants to start a new life in Seattle with them, leaving the FBI, with the idea that he could leave this past and this darkness behind. But who ultimately was unable to and it begins with picking up the morning newspaper. (Jack Meredith) Jack Meredith was my neighbor when growing up, my across the street neighbor. He was like this fellow, he was as nice as could be. I don't know why people took this guy as being a sort of nosy, busybody, but I just saw him as the quintessential caring super-nice neighbor. (Jack: What kind of work do you do, Frank? Frank: Well, I do some consulting. Jack: Ah, good. Look, can we invite you folks over for dinner this week. I see you have a little girl. Frank: Thank you. I'll talk to my wife. Jack: Good. They walk off back toward their respective homes. Jack pauses. Jack: Say, Frank. You couldn't have picked a nicer place to come back to.) The idea of the yellow house was that you can try to paint away the darkness, that you can create an environment where you can try to deny that which you know to be real and true and frightening about the world. (Frank goes to Bob Bletcher's office. Bletcher: I think I've just seen a ghost. Frank: Hey, Bletch.) 'Bob Bletcher' was actually an attorney who did some work for me, just some legal work. He lives in Santa Barbara. But he's a big, masculine guy with a very outgoing personality and I like him very much, and I like the name and it stuck. 'Giebelhouse', played by Stephen Lang here, was another name from my childhood. The Giebelhouse family were the cousins of another very good friend of mine. This idea of the hard-boiled detective is a kind of cliché but whenever you go and meet detectives in any police precinct, department, whatever, it's just as hard-boiled as people imagine them to be, or conceptualize them. I think that these characters are very real to life, who live in and work in this police department. (Bletcher and Frank walk through the department.) This work was all done on stage, shot beautifully by Peter Wunstorf, directed beautifully by David Nutter who added to the project in so many ways, even as it came on, things that he saw visually that were able to actually change and make the script more concise. (Bletcher: Yeah. I heard you took early retirement. Frank: Any chance you could take me down to see the body?) Michael Puttonen also had been on the X-Files before so I was familiar with his work, he was easy to cast. (Downstairs morgue.) All this lighting and production design to make this dark and forbidding were thought through very completely and talked about as really setting a tone for the show. (Frank's vision.) I had the idea for these visions and then there was another show on the same year, that premiered, called Profiler starring a woman but she had visions just like Frank Black did here. It was funny to see that someone else would have the same exact idea in the same subject matter, same genre. (Bletcher: A carving knife was missing from a kitchen set. Frank: She was clothed. A vision. Frank: There was no evidence of sexual assault. Bletcher: What else? Frank: He cut off her fingers.) What worked with Bill Smitrovich and Lance Henriksen as far as casting goes - they'd never been in the room together before this - was that they're both very powerful personalities and there was a sort of competition going on between the two of them both on-screen and off and it worked, it created a nice tension between the two of them. (Frank leaves the morgue and Bletcher follows up the stairs.) Doing scenes like this in stairwells are very difficult because the sound is very difficult, it bounces around and you've got a crew that's basically leading people up stairs, so there's lots of noise bouncing around, and I think this scene was done without any looping or dubbing, which was pretty amazing. (Frank: I don't know yet. I'm working with a consulting group. These guys have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. They could take a look.) The actual Millennium Group, which is what Frank is referring to here, were a group of retired FBI agents who I came into contact with, spent some time with, out in Virginia, who were very helpful with giving me a real life idea of what guys who have left the FBI do, how they make their living. And even though what I imagine is not in fact reality, the idea that there are group of people with special knowledge about crime in the world and criminals in the world and a certain horror – it was not such a far-fetched idea, that there were men out there with certain skills who are able to work extra-legally. (Frank has gone to the peep-show club. Frank: I just want to talk. Tuesday: Talk to me. Tell me what you want. Frank hold up a newspaper clipping with Calamity's photo. Frank: You knew her, didn't you? Tuesday: This isn't an interrogation booth. Frank: I'm not a cop. Tuesday: I've already given my statement. Frank: I might be able to figure out who killed her.) Music played an important part, Portishead here, earlier you heard a White Zombie song, both big take-offs from work that I'd done earlier on the X-Files, which was really all score. This was a show that wanted to use songs, including the theme song, or theme music, which is very important. It actually came from, was inspired by a Kylie Minogue song – not something you'd think of as associated with this genre, but there was a certain violin lead in that Kylie Minogue song that I think tonally set the mood from Mark Snow, gave him something to go on when I played that piece of music for him. (Frank: Can you think of any reason someone might have killed her? Tuesday: A reason? Men don't need reasons. All they need is an excuse. Frank's vision. Frank: I'm sorry. Thanks for your time. He starts to leave. Tuesday: There's a guy.) Lance has this sort of lean, dangerous look. He looks like he has the weight of the world on him and I think that plays such an important part in what my ideas was, the idea of Frank Black, a person who was always suffering in a way. I give them this instruction, and he said it was one of the hardest things for him to do, which was never to use his hands, to keep his hands at his side, that this was a character that didn't have any salesmanship in him, that a person who uses his hands is actually a person who has a lesser ability or an inability to communicate in language or with his voice or with his person. Lance wanted to use his hands, it had been a way he'd worked before. It was important to me that he did not, and I think it helped the character, helped to create the character. (Night. In the woods, a cruising area for gay men. The Frenchman walks through the woods, seeing young men, but they have their eyes and mouths sewn shut.) Once again, we are in this killer's point of view, the Frenchman, here seeing his visions, and Lance, the character of Frank Black, was able to to get into the head of the killer, that was his ability, to see the darkness through the killer's eyes. That's his blessing and his curse, as he'll say. Paul Dillon has a great look for this character. He happens to be a terrific actor, very, very smart guy, a playwright, somebody who stepped in here and did a great job for us, but probably was completely under-used. (The Frenchman is sat in his car. A young man knocks on the window of the Frenchman's car and then goes round to the passenger side and gets in. The car is parked on a hillside next to a metal bridge support and overlooking the city.) This is a shot under the Lions Gate bridge on a very, very crystal-clear night, cold, crystal-clear night. (The car driving on the bridge.) This is the Lions Gate bridge. There's such beautiful shots of Vancouver. I think the filmic quality of the work is something that we were very proud of when we were finished. Peter Wunstorf came from Edmonton and had an idea to shoot this all with tungsten, I believe, which would be something he would correct for in post-production, so it was a very smart, creative way to create this dark, dark mood that we wanted. Something that I think is going away to a certain extent on television now, which worked with the X-Files and is working for Millennium and other shows, and now watching shows like CSI, I see that they're dealing with the same subject matter but sometimes in, I believe, a less dark and filmic way as we did, but that's a factor of so many things including time and money. They're doing so many things right where we made mistakes, but I still think the look of this show was so beautiful. (The yellow house. Frank awake in bed, he and Jordan looking at the newspaper ads for puppies, while Catherine pretends to be asleep.) The contrast here – you get the Black house which is bright and sunny, in opposition to the world outside. (Frank and Bletcher and other officers at the crime scene in the woods.) The big idea for me was a guy who wants to have a normal life but he sees the world differently than everyone else and can't ignore this ability. I think it's something that talented people do, geniuses often do – they see the world in a different way. I think it's something that artists aspire to do, scientists do – they're able to push our concepts of the world forward by looking at things and then communicating them in different and new ways. That was the kind of idea behind this character of Frank Black – somebody who doesn't necessarily have an inborn gift but something he's developed through his hard work with catching criminals, seeing how they operate, knowing them and ultimately being able to see like them. (A burned body, covered by a sheet.) The men surrounding Frank here, they represent those of us who can't or won't see the world like he sees it. Bill Smitrovich's character, Bob Bletcher, plays a man who struggles to understand and ultimately comes to Frank's point of view to an extent. (Frank's vision of a burning man. Bletcher: Frank. Frank: It's the same killer. Bletcher: What? Frank: He did it here. The victim was set on fire here in the woods. How far to the river? Bletcher: Four miles. Frank: That's where they came from. Helicopter search.) It's also our idea to cast this with real men, with adults, not with beautiful actors or soapy starts, that these are people who were real, who were working to protect us. Maybe aspire to be too real in some ways. (The discovery of the coffin. Later, Frank's jeep driving in the pouring rain.) There were times when we had to create rain in Vancouver (laughs). It was very, very cold, I remember, during the shooting of this but there were very clear days sometimes and so the idea that you'd actually have to bring out rain machines in Vancouver in the wintertime was ironic. (In the car, Bletcher and Frank. Bletcher: He told them he was part of something called The Millennium Group. Frank: Yeah. Bletcher: Is that who you're doing this consulting for? Frank: Mm-hm.) David Nutter makes interesting choices here in his camera angles. In the X-Files, the camera angles are much more tight on the eyelines, but I think that David made a proper choice here by keeping the camera wider in certain instances. You create a TV pilot, you are choosing things that will stick with the series: cars, wardrobe, hair, make-up, all these things require a tremendous amount of thought, and argument sometimes, and the decision-making process is critical because you're going to end up setting sail with so many of these choices. (Frank drives his jeep into the driveway of the yellow house. Just as he walks up the steps, another car stops on the street. A man gets out and calls to him. It's Peter Watts.) Casting Terry O'Quin here was a no-brainer. He had done a wonderful job for us on an X-Files episode. I remember talking to him on the set this night, thanking him for doing the job – I'd cast him without ever talking to him, just on the basis of his good work – and he came up to me and we shook hands, and he thanked me and said, "I love the words." That was, of course, music to my ears because I wanted to write a character who had a very dry, matter-of-fact and articulate way of communicating with Frank. Terry O'Quin just nailed that character for me and so it made him fun to write as the series progressed. (Frank: The killer was covering his tracks. The victim may have scratched or bitten him. He may not have gone down there to kill her. Watts: The kitchen knife was convenient but he knew what he was doing. And with real sang froid, judging by his tidy clean-up. Frank: What does the Group think? Watts: That your instincts were right. The killer's being compelled by an extraneous stressor. He's out of control. Frank: Anything else? Watts: That you're the right man for this. All our resources will be available to you. Watts leaves.) This yellow house which we spent a lot of time making into the sort of perfect house – we re-shingled the house, we painted it a particular color of yellow. When we went to start the series after the pilot had been picked up, we were no longer able to shoot at the house. It was a very expensive set to lose. I think the biggest beneficiary was the family that lived there who basically had a remodeled house. (Catherine: I can handle imposition, Frank. What I can't handle is secrecy. The beautiful saturated color here is Peter Wunstorf with really a clear idea of how he wanted this film to look. I think it was a cut above your usual television film, but you do get a greater chance, more time, more money, more chance to work artistically on a television pilot and hope that you have the ability to set a tone that the people who do it on a weekly basis during the TV series can recreate. (Catherine: You can't stop it. Frank: I want you to make believe that I can. Fade to black. Frank's basement office.) The idea was that Frank had his place in the house where he'd go, in the basement, where he could keep his work and his thoughts and his life, and his previous life, and his now undeniable life, away from his family. He's obsessed in this way, he's born to this. He can't deny it. (Frank, checking the video from the peep-show club, writing notes: BLOOD _____ TIDE, etc.) There were inspirations, of course. The movie Se7en was a big inspiration. In fact, Gary Wissner, the production designer worked as an art director on that movie, and he was so helpful to us. They had has o much more time and money than we had and he was able to take a lot of lessons that he learned working on that movie and apply them on a much more television budget for us. We had the good fortune of having Brent O'Connor come and work with us as producer on the pilot and he had done many features in Vancouver and was able to pull in the right crew. I had been in Vancouver, working, for three years and thought I knew everyone but Brent was able to really facilitate a lot of great work. (Frank in the woods, the gay cruising area.) I lived in an apartment building in Vancouver for about five years and I was able to look out of my 15th floor window and watch men moving in the bushes – there's a certain area where men congregate – which is what inspired this scene and the scenes involving the Frenchman in the woods here. (Frank senses something. The Frenchman comes into view, sees Frank, recognizes who he is, and runs. Frank takes chase.) This chase was certainly inspired by the movie Se7en because I wanted it to be as much a point of view as possible, keeping the camera moving and kinetic. There was a very well shot chase scene in there, done by David Fencher and his team. (The chase through the woods and up on to the bridge. Frank continues the chase through the traffic.) This scene on the Burrard bridge, which was also right down below my apartment building, was very complicated to do, working on a bridge. I had never done this before, where you have to shut down the bridge and shoot in one direction, then shoot in another direction – requires logistical forethought that I had never imagined. You're stuck on a bridge and there's no place to hide your equipment or your crew or your team, and so when you have to turn around and shoot in another direction, it requires you to move everyone en masse. (The Frenchman has disappeared. Frank moves through the grid-locked traffic, but there's no sign. A driver calls out, "he jumped", pointing to the side of the bridge. Frank goes over and looks – no sign. The Frenchman is hanging on to a strut below the bridge, out of sight.) This scene was actually shot twice, because I felt that the first time we shot it, it just didn't work with the killer hanging, as you'll see here, below Lance – that he wasn't hanging in a believable way, so we went back at some great expense. It was a lot of, what I would call it, had feelings from the studio about re-shooting this because it was costly, but because it didn't work and I felt we were doing such great work elsewhere on the piece, I thought it was worth it. I think in the end they saw the beauty of it but it was expensive. (Frank briefing the detectives.) This scene was actually shot fairly early on, where I had asked Lance to try not to use his hands, to keep his hands at his side, out of his pockets, to give him a very centred quality which is what I was looking for, for this character generally. Diane Widas did the costume design. I have to say I was very particular about what I wanted Lance to wear, what his range of clothing was. I wanted it to be very simple and basic and I think that as the series went on this is something that, for whatever reason, sort of disappeared. Lance started to look different and I think it changed the character and made him something that I didn't recognize from the pilot. I'm sure it wasn't Diane's fault but these are choices that are made by either the actors and other producers about what they see and think as we got into year 3 of the series that it had been revolutionized, the idea of Lance's wardrobe. (Giebelhouse: So, what's he trying to say? Bletcher: He's preaching. Frank: He's prohesizing. Giebelhouse: The end of the world? Frank: The great plague of the maritime city.) There's a mistake in this scene when Lance says he's prophesizing, it actually should be prophesying and that's my mistake, it was wrong in the script. Actually, Paul Dillon, who was on the set this evening for some other reason - he actually played the Frenchman, not in this scene – had corrected me but it was too late. (Frank: Seattle, the maritime city. AIDS, the great plague. Death avenged by a just man, taken and condemned for no crime. Kamm: So the killer thinks he's righteous, a just man. Bletcher: Who's the great lady, and why is she outraged. Frank: The killer is confused about his sexuality. He feels guilt, quite possible from his mother. So he goes to peep shows to try to feel something toward women but all he feels is anger – anger that fuels his psychosis, that distorts his view of reality. Giebelhouse: Twists it to fit some screwy French poetry? Frank: The killer doesn't see the world like everyone else.) Randy Stone did the casting. He did the original X-Files casting and I think that as important as anything for a pilot is to have the right mix, the right blend of people, and Randy who had talked David Duchovny into doing the X-Files after he had agreed to do it then dropped out, came through once again in helping to get Lance, Megan, the starring cast. Coreen Mayrs who had been working on X-Files for a number of years did the Vancouver casting along with Lisa Ratke who was our X-Files extras casting person who did a great job. (Giebelhouse: We're not the FBI. We got limited resources. We go chasing after the wrong guy we could end up with more victims. I don't think we have time to waste, do you? Bletcher: No. Frank takes out the video. Frank: I've got to get home to my family. Frank leaves. Frank driving through the basement car park. Bletcher stops him. Bletcher: Tell me why I'm wrong. Why should I listen to you?) Lance's character here, Frank Black, stands out because of his conviction, his centeredness, his calmness, in the face of a lot of opposition, hostile opposition. (Frank: I see what the killer sees. Bletcher: What? Like a psychic? Frank: No. I put myself in his head. I become the thing we fear the most. Bletcher: How? Frank: I become capability, I become the horror. What we know we can become only in our heart of darkness. It's my gift. It's my curse. That's why I retired.) This was a scene that was actually parodied on MadTV, they did a skit called "Suddenly Millennium" which was a sort of combination of "Suddenly Susan" and "Millennium", (laughs) and this line "It's my blessing, it's my curse" which Frank Black says here, was made fun of, I thought in a great way. (Frank arriving at home and dashing through the pouring rain to the front door. The door is open – he warily goes inside. He searches the house, calling Catherine's name. He goes outside again where Jack Meredith calls to him.) This was beautifully shot, light shining through both men's very clear eyes, the lines on Lance's face tell the story. Sometimes he doesn't have to speak, he can just be. (The hospital. Frank: What happened? Catherine: I found her on the floor in the bathroom. She'd passed out and hit her head. They're running tests. Frank: Where is she? Catherine: Sleeping. They sedated her. She's got a very high fever.) Color played an important part in this show because every time he came home to the house or every time Lance stepped into that car, you saw the trappings or the effects of his wishes that he could paint the darkness away. (Frank and Catherine at Jordan's bedside. Frank: So fragile.) Which, of course, he can't. (Catherine and Frank asleep in Jordan's room. A nurse enters to take blood from Jordan.) David Nutter was very instrumental in making this scene real. I had written it, there were too many words, certainly as you came into the hospital room. And David and I talked about it. He had ideas about this playing with feeling and with silence, particularly in this section. (Frank, now awake, watching as the nurse draws up blood in a syringe.) Instead of talking about it, just letting it play. (Catherine awakes and notices Frank watching intently. Catherine: What is it, Frank? Frank: He's taking blood. Catherine: Who? Frank: The killer. He's got more bodies.) Mark Snow's music here is just so subtle and quiet and right. This is a sort of idealised wife, the idea that she understands her husband's need and what he can't deny about himself and she has to live with it along with him. (Search in the dark woods – flashlights.) Of course, Frank sees things differently than the rest of us. He's able to make connections which I guess is a sort of mark of genius, the idea of seeing patterns and things that other people don't see. (Bletcher: We'll come back in the light of day. Frank: They could be dead by then.) (By the river.) This was a very, very cold night, in a place they call the GBRD, which is the Greater Vancouver Reclamation District, a place that is used time and time again for forests and wilderness. I don't believe there's a time of year when it's not cold at night there, but this time of year it was particularly cold. (Frank wades across the shallow river and Bletcher begins to follow.) Going into the water like this was just an extra degree of difficulty. (Bletcher: Oh! It's a good thing I already got a family.) (Searching through the woods. Bletcher steps on something wooden, hollow. Bletcher: Frank! They scrape away the leaves. Yells from inside. "La Grande Dame" scratched on the top of the coffin.) I think this scene is very successful, the urgency created. What plays so well without dialogue, with just good direction, editing, music and something that I think that is everyone's nightmare, which is being buried alive. (Bletcher calling for paramedics. The rest of the officers on the far bank of the river, starting wading across.) That shot ended up being the poster shot, or at least one poster shot, for Millennium, those men standing on the river bank with those flashlights. (Frank supporting the victim.) I think that David Nutter actually helped this area so much too, with Lance holding the victim here, with the emotional part of the scene which was not in the script. (Bletcher holds up the plastic bag with the severed head. Frank: There may be others.) This was, needless to say, not your usual television fare. (Office. Giebelhouse hands Frank a mug of coffee. Giebelhouse: They found two more coffins. Both of them were empty. Bletcher: He just gave us a description of the suspect. White male, early 30s, wearing a ball cap. He was taking blood from the victim. Giebelhouse: I'll put it out on the air. Frank: The killer's passing judgment. He's probably testing the blood, carrying out his death sentences on the afflicted. Check in with any medical facility that handles blood. Bletcher: We got the word out to the labs. Frank: I've got to call Catherine. Bletcher: 18 years, Frank. 18 years, I don't think I've ever seen anything as terrifying as what I saw tonight. Frank: You ever see your kid lying on a bed in an emergency ward?) I guess you could say that this is, strangely, a family show (laughs) in the most peverse sense, in that it really is about a man trying to conduct two lives – his family life and his professional life – which he tries his best to separate but can't. (Bletcher: Made sense to me out there. What it does to you. Why you quit. Frank: The cruelty, the unspeakable crimes. It all becomes numbing, depersonalized common. Bletcher: What was it then? Frank: I was on a serial case in Minnesota. The killer's name was Ed Cuffle. He would choose a neighborhood and he would go up to a door. If he found it unlicked he considered that an invitation to in and kill anybody home. He would take polaroids of his victims which he'd send to the police. Took us months, but we caught him. He's serving triple life sentences. Bletcher: And that was it? Frank: A year later, I reach into my mail box and I take out the mail and there's a letter addressed to me – no return. Inside are polaroids of Catherine at the supermarket, Catherine at the school. Suddenly the psychic novocaine wore off. The numbness became paralyzing fear. Bletcher: You ever find who sent them? Frank: No. But I couldn't leave the house. Why should I go to work when I can't even protect my own family.) This became the theme for the show, or the idea behind the show was that there was one man who was terrorizing Frank Black and his family and that he couldn't find him and until he found him he couldn't stop, he couldn't let down his guard, or he could never feel safe at night in that house. Of course, he never would tell his family and we start to learn more about the character here and what drives him and it makes sense because that's everyone's nightmare. (Bletcher: This Millennium Group. They really believe all that stuff? Nostradamus and Revelations? The destruction of the world. Frank: They believe we can't just sit back and hope for a happy ending.) It's interesting to look at Millennium at this remove now, after the year 2001 when we quit looking at the world the way we did before 9/11, and see that maybe there was something to prophecy, to some of the foreboding. A lot of the millennial prophecies had said that the millennium did not start until 2001 and not on the turn of the century, which makes this show in a weird way look prescient, but of course not exactly on the mark. (Frank has picked up Bletcher's phone – taking a message from one of the labs about the blood samples. Frank: Where were they sent from? Caller: Ah, that's just it. They were sent through the same channel – intra-office. Frank puts down the phone and call for Bob. Basement. Frank exits lift. Speaks to morgue assistant. Frank: Excuse me, I'm looking for the pathologist. Asst: Sorry. He's not here.) This is a scene that plays well, I think, because of its suspense. We know before the protagonist here, Frank Black knows, that this is the killer. (The Assistant – the Frenchman – turns and looks at Frank.) Now it's what will happen. (The Frenchman picks up knife. Frenchman: Who are you to condemn me? They're the guilty. I took responsibility. You see them out there where Satan has them all. Frank: Drop the knife! Frenchman: The great plague! Frank: Then we'll talk! Frenchman: They don't ask who take responsibility! He slashes at Frank with the knife and pushes the stretcher over on its side. It knocks Frank down onto the floor and he's trapped by the weight of the corpse on top of him. Frenchman: This is prophecy! The final judgment and victory! This is the way it ends! But you know that. You can see it – just like I do. You know the end is coming! The thousand years is over! He thrusts his knife at Frank who manages to pull up the corpse in front of him which absorbs the blow. As The Frenchman struggles to pull the knife out of the corpse, Frank finally frees himself of the weight and crawls backwards toward a column as the Frenchman advances on him. Frenchman: But you think you're the one to stop it! You think it can be stopped! A gun shot rings out just as The Frenchman raises his knife to stab Frank. He collapses to the ground, dropping his knife. Bletcher can be seen, gun in his out-stretched right hand, approaching. The Frenchman lies mortally wounded on the ground. With his dying breath, he says – Frenchman: You can't stop it.) And Bill Smitrovich's character here, who was in the middle, between his men, in between his friend, Frank Black, comes to his rescue, because he becomes a believer. (Frank driving his jeep up to the yellow house. The rain has stopped and the sun is shining. He enters the house and whispers to Catherine. Catherine: Oh, I'm glad you're home. I'm going to be late for my interview. What are you doing? Frank: Where's Jordan? Catherine: She's up in her room. What are you doing, Frank?) This is one of my best casting moments. (Frank shows Catherine the puppy he's been hiding inside his jacket. Then Jordan's bedroom – she has her fingers over her eyes, not supposed to be peeking, and Frank puts the puppy on the bed on top of her.) So we get killers and violent men and puppies and kids all in the same package. (Jordan: Can I name him? Frank: He's your puppy, isn't he? Jordan: Oh, I love him so much. The puppy reciprocates the affection by licking her face.) (Downstairs, letters are posted through the letterbox in the front door.) Everything you see, usually from license plates to addresses, has an important role. That was the idea at least – Frank's address would come to play a very important part later on the series – Ezekiel Drive. (Frank tears open one particular envelope and feels inside. Catherine comes downstairs. Catherine: You've already got a mess to clean up up there.. Frank: Right. Catherine: Wish me luck. Frank doesn't/can't respond. Catherine: What? Frank: Nothing. Be careful, OK. She leaves.) Of course he can't stop the horror. He knows what's in the letter. He knows what he's going to pull from the package. (Frank takes out the contents of the envelope: Polaroids of Catherine and Jordan – taken in Seattle.)

Endgame: The Making of Millennium Season 3 [Transcribed by Libby] (Jordan: Bless us, Father, for this food, and keep our family safe and together always.) Chris Carter Creator/Writer/Exec. Producer Season three, for me, was a chance to come back to the show and try to remember what it is that I originally wanted to accomplish and see if I could tell stories that I was interested in telling with the show that had been handed to me after season two. (Catherine's father: If you're so good at what you do, Frank, you'd have caught who did it.) Chris Carter: It was a different show by that time. In some ways better, in some ways, I didn't, I wasn't quite understanding how we had gotten to where we got. But we wanted to add some new writers, we wanted to add a new character, we wanted to go back to telling some standalone stories, but using some of the things that had been incorporated into the show during, I guess, the second season. So stepping back in, I wanted to take a strong hand, but I realized that there were certain realities and things that had changed and I had to go with what I was given. (Watts: So I looked and, behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hell followed with him.) Michael Perry Writer/Co-Producer The final episode of season two of Millennium, Jim and Glen destroyed 80% of the world with a virus. So I read that script in March or February, and I said: I'm out of a job come May, 'cos this show's not getting renewed. You can't wipe out the Earth. And so I'd go on job interviews for other shows, 'cos I thought: We're not going to have another season after they've done this. And they killed a major character as well. And it's all on paper and nobody said, 'You can't do that.' So, I was interviewing for all these others shows and they'd go, 'Michael, aren't you under contract to Millennium?' And I'd say: No, they're going to kill everybody. It can't possibly come back. And so then May came and, boom, it's on the Fox schedule, a full year's order. Robert McLachlan ASC CSC Cinematographer Instead of taking a couple of months off to get themselves physically recovered so that they could do another of these eight-month marathons of 70-hour work weeks, everybody went and did a movie or a TV movie or something like that, then the show got picked up and none of us could resist going back. So we all kind of went into it dragging our asses a little bit. In the third season we were kind of back to the original guys, like Chip and Horton and some of those guys. They were in the first season. Ken Horton Co-Executive Producer Year three, we chose to make them – it became much more personal. Now it was: Frank was out of the Group, but he was still doing what he was doing and he was trying to do what he did in year one, which is, he was trying to go back to fight evil on a one-on-one basis. But there were larger issues. We gave him a partner who was incredibly skeptical. Klea Scott "Emma Hollis" They needed a chick and I walked in. I never know, if this is – in the casting process if that was the mind behind not seeing black actresses for this part, but they were pretty certain that they wanted a white actress. This happens a lot in Hollywood. And I have a great agent who saw past the character description and thought, 'Klea would be really right for this.' and campaigned, really lobbied really hard to get me in the door, and guaranteed he would never send this casting director, I think, another actor if she felt it was a waste of time. So very much my gratitude towards my agent for doing that. I remember the other actresses, I think there were two redheads, two blondes, and me. And so, as I went along the casting process, I thought either I'm a token so that they can say they looked and they can cover their butts with the NAACP, or they're thinking about doing something really different. Chip Johannessen Writer/Co-Producer Klea came in and was just so – she's great, she's amazing and she's also physical in a really wonderful way. She is just an amazing physical presence and we just loved her and we knew that maybe in a slow-burn, indie film kind of way, she would catch on and get word of mouth. But she wasn't quite what network was looking for. You know, they wanted Heather Locklear or something to come. That was kind of how that went down. Klea Scott: They took a leap outside the box for some reason and cast me. And then I was in Vancouver pretty much – I think I had about a week and a half between the time I started auditioning to being on a plane to Vancouver. (Episode 1 "The Innocents" Airdate: 10/02/98 Writer: Michael Duggan / Director: Thomas J Wright Hollis: Special Agent Emma Hollis, Critical Incident Response group. Frank: Frank Black Hollis: I think you were at the Bureau when it was all still called the Behavioral Science Unit. Frank: Yes, I was.) Lance Henriksen "Frank Black" Another talented actress. She was young and really excited about doing this thing. And again – I watched her go through what I went through in the first year. So she was like: 'Where am I? What do we do now?' We started staring into some of these cases, I think the first show that she did was a plane crash. And they had made the debris feel so real, in the woods. It was just – really you could almost smell it. And that was our first scene together. She was this young cop. (laughs) She's a wonderful person, really. I miss these people. I really do. (Episode 5 "... Thirteen Years Later" Airdate: 10/30/98 Writer: Michael L Perry / Director: Thomas J Wright (Hollis: Bite mark analysis was inconclusive. He was wearing dental prostheses commonly used in motion pictures. Frank: Whoever is doing this is trying to drive me insane, for the third time in my life.) Klea Scott: We did an episode for Hallowe'en where Kiss was on. And we had a blast. Oh, we had a good time. And I just loved his devilish sense of humor. And I wish that there was actually more of that allowed to come through in the writing. (Frank and Hollis sat on the sofa watching horror videos. Frank; He's her brother. He kills teenagers. That's it? No twists? No mystery? Hollis: It's supposed to be scary.) Michael Perry: The production of "Thirteen Years Later" was one of the most grueling they ever had. It's filled with stunts. There's people getting hanged. There's tons of gore every place. The whole beginning is crazy. It has references to Psycho in it. I don't know how Tom shot that on our regular schedule. Just the music concert, there's murders in a music hall while there's a Kiss concert going on. It's very elaborately directed. Tons of shots. It doesn't at all look like something from television. It looks like something from a feature film. (Kiss: "Psycho Circus) Thomas Wright: I shot a whole music video with Kiss during that episode. We were going to cut it as a music video. In fact, Kiss wanted it done as a music video for them. The material that we shot – it was terrific. Lance Henriksen (1998 interview) This was a powerhouse show, this one. It really is. Can you imagine these guys being in your show? I mean, it's pretty wild. They even gave me a pick, look. (He holds up a guitar pick, with "Kiss" written on it.) Thomas Wright: We shot it in half a day, their music number, and it was pretty wild, but it was fun. It was a lot of fun. They were great. (Lance and lead singer of Kiss, the latter in full makeup and costume. He has his arm around Lance, who is laughing. Singer: Lance is a powerful and attractive man as you can plainly see. And we have an announcement to the world. Lance laughs. Singer: Oh, you're not going to tell them? Lance: No, I'm not going to tell them. Singer: Ok. Lance: I'm going on tour with them. They both laugh.) Kiss: We thought it would be a great idea to be seen as the band, Kiss, but then also they said they were crazy enough to let us do cameo roles. And part of the fun of the show is figuring out who we are in the show outside of our characters. Michael Perry: I went up for pre-production and stayed for the first four days of production, then came down because it all seemed to be going so well. One night I was at home, having dinner with a friend from out of town and my wife, and Chris called. Chris said, 'Michael, there's a problem up on the set with Kiss. Can you deal with it?' I said, 'Sure, I'd love to.' Then I called the production office and in this episode each member of the band Kiss appears in makeup but they also appear at some other point during the episode as a character. (Leachman: I'm Hector Leachman. I did it. Frank: This is not your man.) Michael Perry: Ace Frehley plays one of the two sheriffs. He was furious because Paul Stanley had a lot of lines. He gets killed in the teaser and is covered in blood. He wanted to have parity of lines with the other members of Kiss. So, I said, OK, let's work on it. We'll do this. Not knowing if we'd use him or not, but we've got to get the guy to come out of his trailer. So I start saying, 'Well, we can add this line and add that line.' Then he stops and says, 'You know, I really don't want to play a white southern sheriff at all. I said, 'OK.' He said, 'What I really want to play, I'd like to be a black guy who weighs 300 pounds.' I said, 'OK.' And he said, 'Like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. I want to be like that.' I'm hearing him slur a bit and I think that either it's late, or there might be an alternative explanation. And I had to get him out of his trailer. And I'm on the phone in LA and they're all up there having another late night on the Millennium set. So I said, 'That's a great idea. I wish we had thought of that a month ago, 'cos it takes a lot of time to make one of those suits. And if only we had talked a while back – but we can't do that because we need to shoot tonight.' So I made up five more lines for him, then faxed them up to the production office. And then they shot them, they got him to come out and he did his extra scene. I think ultimately it doesn't wind up in the show at all, he winds up with the same lines he had before. (Sheriff #1: Hey, Frank, it's good to see you. Frank: Thank you. Sheriff #2: Glad to have you back with us, Frank. Frank: Thank you.) Robert McLachlan: Vancouver probably had the best light in the world for shooting a show like this, because any time you got out in harsh sunlight it was just very contra to the mood that most of the time we were trying to create. So when you have very soft overcast, you can do anything with it. You can make it look like a sunny day if you have to, but it's very easy to pull it down and make it more somber. I remember one particular episode, I think it was called 'Skull and Bones', we had the scene where they're creating a highway and they're digging up all these bones. And it's very grisly, but it was a beautiful sunny day. So we anticipated the sun and we got as many smoke machines out as we could, and we created a very heavy fog to fog the whole thing in and got rid of all the happy, warm sunshine and created this very mysterious, moody atmosphere. Chip Johannessen: Episode six was called 'Skull and Bones', that Ken and I did together, that in a way I think for the first time in season three got back to what was so cool about the pilot in a way. It had this really kick-ass, grisly story where they unearth a whole bunch of bodies under a freeway that's under construction, and it leads to kind of a cool place. (Frank: He witness the murder and it shook him. It changed his life. Since then he's been obsessively recording everything about everybody he's come across.) Ken Horton: 'Skull and Bones' in year three was defined by people except for myself, like the network, as really being the start of season three. We'd gotten past plagues and things like that and now we had got into how and why. It was the first out-and-out statement that the Millennium Group was bad. (Frank: Victim 38. Her name was Cheryl Andrews. She was a doctor. Peter Watts is there to find her remains and keep them a secret. Hollis: From who? Frank: From me. ) Thomas Wright: Lance was a little upset about it. He was a little upset. He, Lance likes, you know, the norm, that he knows where he's going. He likes to be quiet and sort of set, and he would get upset once in a while, particularly about the character, because everybody was trying to send the character somewhere else, and he had a definite, fixed, idea on the character that Chris had given him, and that they had talked about long and hard. Lance at times just felt that it was disappearing. And he'd come in sometimes: 'Who is this guy? What is this scene? I can't ... Tom you have to explain this, I can't do this. What is this?' Episode 6 "Skull and Bones" Airdate: 11/06/98 Writers: Chip Johannessen & Ken Horton / Director: Paul Shapiro (Watts: Frank has had a lot of good years, but paranoid delusions reinforce themselves. Every new fact tends to confirm the conviction. I don't care if you're talking about space aliens or JFK or the Millennium Group.) Lance Henriksen: When the show changed in the third year, when the Millennium Group became evil, I think it only happened because one of the scripts came in where suddenly Terry O'Quinn's character was no longer my friend. He was, like, 'Something's wrong with our relationship.' And I thought it was a big throwaway. I can't say it was a mistake, I don't know what the fourth year would have brought, but I think it was the beginning of the end, the beginning of the wrap-up of the show, because once you make the Millennium Group – that would be like calling the Academy Group evil all of a sudden after years of devotion. How could they be evil? I think the problem was that they didn't – the Millennium Group was not defined enough, which is different than the Academy Group, the real Academy Group. (Episode 8 "Omerta" Airdate: 12/18/98 Writer: Michael R. Perry / Director: Ken Fink) Michael Perry: If season two had a conspiratorial, masonic quality, I would say season three had, because the show was called 'Millennium', 'cos we're dealing with big changes in the world, it should have a kind of hope that isn't specific, but is more of a tone, more of something we're reaching for. (Eddie: Come on, already. Mafia men: Aw, hell. They fire repeatedly at him.) Michael Perry: "Omerta" – that's an example of an episode where Chip had some influence on the spiritual, ethereal quality of it. My original pitch was, hit man gets whacked and is found by creatures who not only revive him, but also he has an awakening from what he's done. (Prosecutor: Your friends pinned 51 murders on you. Eddie: Those guys! It's more like 27. I made a list for you. I apologize in advance about the spelling. Prosecutor: Has he been Mirandized? Sheriff: Several times. Prosecutor: And you don't want a lawyer? Eddie: He would just tell me to keep my mouth shut.) Michael Perry: The addition Chip said is, you have a little girl who's Mom has died – Frank Black's daughter. You have to have her tied into the story because she's thinking, 'Can we bring Mom back to life if we can bring this guy back to life.' (Frank: Honey. Jordan: I told them about Mommy, what happened to her. Frank: Yeah? What did they say? Jordan: They don't talk much. I'm not sure they understood. ) Michael Perry: I thought that was a nice grace note. It was like a nice addition to the whole thing. (Eddie: I'm going to miss you girls. I really am. ) Michael Perry: Then you see Jon Polito, who knocks it out of the park. Polito does a great job. We were so thrilled to get him. His agent was playing agent, and so Chip said, 'Let's call him.' So we just called him on the phone and said, 'We really want you for this part.' And that was enough to make him turn around and come up and do the episode. (Eddie: What do you want? Frank: Oh. Eddie: Come on, you can tell me Frank: The same. I want things to be the way they were. My daughter, my wife, and me. Eddie: Merry Christmas. Frank: Maybe it will be.) Michael Perry: When you're making a Millennium episode, the very last thing you do is go over to Mark Snow's house. Mark has in his backyard a huge studio. He has all those Emmys and stuff on the walls. And you sit down and he plays you the ten or twelve musical cues. You go through the episode and he plays them for you. And on that one, he said, 'This is a different kind of episode. I'm trying out some things.' He has this whole angelic leitmotif that goes with the two women, who are healers, the two women who live in the woods. And the score really elevates the whole show. Mark Snow Composer That show, there was a sweetness to it, but couched in the Millennium subplot. But I really thought the sweetness really needed to be exaggerated a little bit. I was able to find some samples of solo soprano singers doing, like, 'Aaah, aaah.' And somehow I incorporated it into the scores and it seemed to work just great. I was so excited about that when everyone came over to listen. I just couldn't wait for them to hear it. I turned around and they were just, 'Oh, man, that was just great.' That was very, very satisfying for me and I had a lot of fun with that. Chip Johannessen: I had always wondered, like, how would you put Jordan into jeopardy? What's a cool thing to do? So I did one that involved a kind of weird karmic return and an angel and a train going underwater. That she had come near to death, and had been given the grant of additional life from some cosmic force, and now it was coming to take it back. Episode 10 "Borrowed Time" Airdate: 01/15/99 Writer: Chip Johannessen / Director: Dwight Little Chip Johannessen: And so, Frank Black had to defend her against that kind of thing. That seemed like a cool way to put Jordan into jeopardy and to get to some cosmic place. (Frank: Stay away from my daughter! Hollis: It's not him! Frank: Yes, it is. This is him. You stay away from my daughter!) Chip Johannessen: We always, like, on the one hand mass murder, on the other hand redemption, so we're always wrestling with those two things. Mark Freeborn Production Designer The writers' idiosyncrasies brought to us some very interesting potential for sets we could not find elsewhere. For instance, in season three we had an amazing set that Bob Comer, the special effects coordinator, had a major hand in designing, which was a submersed railway car, where a good ten pages of the script took place. We did a show called 'The Sound of Snow' where there was a situation where a woman is hit by a car. Bob Comer, our practical special effects coordinator, created a situation where we used a mirror, a truck and a car. And at the point of impact, I defy you to find a viewer who wasn't lifted out of their seat. On the same show, we did a cracking ice field on the stage. We had a problem because it was in the middle of summer and she was supposed to be in a raging blizzard driving down the highway, so we put our heads together and Mike Rennison, my construction coordinator, engineered a roll-up highway that we used roofing paper for. We painted dotted lines on the highway and pulled it up underneath the car. That was fun. From a creative point of view, I could go on for an hour. Episode 22 "Goodbye to All That" Airdate: 05/21/99 Writers: K Horton & C Johannessen / Director: J Coblentz (Frank smashes his way into Peter Watts' house. Points his gun at Watts. Frank: This is on your head.) Ken Horton: The final episode Chip and I wrote together of year three sort of came about, I guess that we came back from Christmas vacation and we were in the office. When you're running a show you have these little boards up there and you have all these names of your episodes, and then there's all of these blanks that add up to 22. And I guess we were somewhere around 13 or 14 and Chip came in and said to me, 'Over the vacation did you come up with any good ideas?' I said, 'Nothing. I was hoping you would.' And he goes, 'I didn't have any thoughts either.' (Watts: Man has made a mess of Eden. Our greed is only eclipsed by our tribal stupidity and our brutality. We are rushing toward an apocalypse of our own creation. Frank: This is cult propaganda. Watts: No, fact, Frank.) Chip Johannessen: What we were trying to do later on was go to something that was a little more – we had a secret manifesto, actually. The first one was mankind is racing toward an apocalypse of its own making, so it was going to become more political. And we never got there because, even though it would have made all the sense in the world to have something called 'Millennium' actually get to the millennium, we ended up some months shy of that. Ken Horton: We always in the back of our mind knew that it was possibly the end of the series, and we didn't want to do what season two did, which was to absolutely define where you were and where the series was. But at the same time we wanted some closure, we wanted some meaning, if, in fact, that was it. (Watts: (to Hollis) As regards your father, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who share his condition. The difference is, he has a cure available. Our offer still stands. It's up to you.) Klea Scott: I was actually a little hurt when I saw that Emma Hollis, personally hurt, that Emma Hollis had accepted membership into the Millennium Group. (Frank: (to Hollis) What did they promise you? McClaren: Hey, hey, hey. Frank: Your father. Is that it? Did they say they could fix him?) Klea Scott: We didn't have a lot to say to the creators or writers about what would happen to us. We would read the scripts and find out. (Hollis: What was I supposed to do? He's my father. Frank: Do what you have to do. ) Klea Scott: I was so ashamed! (laughs) You want to talk about feelings of shame just bubbling to the surface. But that was why I loved it, because it was subtle and it was to me very believable and real that this could happen between these two people. (Hollis: Daddy, are you all right? Hollis' father: You shouldn't have done it, Emma. You shouldn't have done what they asked. ) Klea Scott: The man she did it for has no gratitude or acknowledgement for her, and the man she betrayed is gone from her life as a result. So, yeah, it was really, really f***ed. Really f***ed. And, for that reason, interesting and exciting for an actor to get to play all that. Ken Horton: We ended up doing that, and that was the start of it, and then it just picked up from there and eventually, we felt, put Frank in an interesting place. Not good, not bad. He was safe with his daughter, she was safe with him. And we thought that was an undefined safe. We didn't know whether, when they went over that hill and there was a little valley over there, you didn't know whether there was more Millennium people waiting for them, or that they were going to start a new life. You didn't know exactly. But you got the feeling that they were going to do something and that they were happy with each other, and that was – I don't want to speak for Chip, but I think he wanted that same kind of feeling, I know I did too. He wanted to leave the characters in a difficult but good place. Klea Scott: And then we were cancelled. (laughs) You know, again I have no idea. I don't know what was going on. But I just thought, 'Give us 13 more and take us to New Year's Eve. Frank Spotnitz Writer/Co-Producer In its final season the show ratings-wise had plateaud. And I think that while it wasn't doing badly, it was clearly not going to be a monster hit for the network. And I think it was a calculation on their part: 'Do we bring the show back? It's got a certain audience, it's got a certain level of critical estimation. Or do we roll the dice and hope we're going to come up with a big hit in that time slot?' And I actually think, looking back now, we realize that the audiences for network television were in the process of eroding, and nobody was quite aware of it yet. And the fact that 'Millennium' was able to hold its audience to the degree it was, was in fact quite a success. But nobody, at that time, really saw it that way, so I can't really blame them for hoping they could do better with something else. Six months later .... The X-Files Episode 7 "Millennium" Airdate: 11/28/99 Season 5 Writers: V Gilligan & F Spotnitz / Director: T J Wright (Skinner: This magic circle you mentioned, what if it looked something like this? Mulder: It's an ouroboros, possibly. Definitely a mystical symbol. The alchemists favored it. They believed that it represented all of existence. Skinner: I'm thinking more the Millennium Group. It was their symbol as well. Are you familiar with them?) Thomas Wright: I remember we'd been away a while after the show went down, and I was doing an X-Files which had Lance in it as Frank Black. (Mulder: Well, if there's anybody that can tell us about the Millennium Group, it's him. He used to consult for them. Later, he fought to bring them down at the expense of his own career and reputation. Scully: Single-minded. Sounds like someone I know. Mulder: Frank Black? Hi, my name is Fox Mulder. This is my partner, Dana Scully. It's a pleasure to meet you. Do you mind if we sit down?) Frank Spotnitz: When Millennium shot its final episode, no one knew for sure whether it was the end of the series. We had not officially gotten the cancellation. And so there was no sense of closure. And so, very badly, I wanted to bring back Frank Black and Lance Henriksen for a farewell, for a goodbye. And I sort of sold everybody on the idea and then found myself in the deeply uncomfortable position of trying to figure out how to make that work, because it was only when I actually sat down to break the story - and, again, I wanted to bring Frank Black back for the millennium, which he had not made in the series, had not reached it since the show got cancelled before the turn of the millennium. And it proved to be extremely difficult because not only was the mythology of Millennium something completely apart from the mythology of The X-Files, but you had three heroes you had to service. And ultimately you had to make it work as an X-Files episode, because that's the series you were servicing, that was the audience you were servicing. (Mulder: Shoot for the head. That seems to stop them.) Chris Carter: Frank Black appeared in The X-Files after Millennium's demise, and really it was done with a wink. I don't think it was a reason or a chance to give his character closure. And you don't want to say that when you create a character - you never want to give your character closure. But it was a chance to work with Lance again, to do it in an interesting way. And with X-Files we were always tying to figure out new ways to tell stories. It was bold in a certain respect in that it was asking X-Files viewers to accept this sort of hybrid idea that you could - maybe they didn't watch Millennium, I don't know - accept this character into The X-Files as a kind of equal in the story that was told. (Frank: What? Scully: There's someone here to see you. Jordan: Hi, Daddy! Frank: Hiya, little one. They hug. Frank: Oh, I missed you, sweetheart. Jordan: I missed you too, Daddy.) Thomas Wright: Brittany came back to be in one of the scenes, and of course she'd grown, like, another two feet or something. And it was really kind of fun seeing her again and working with her, really grown-up. (Mulder: Good luck with everything. Frank: Agent Mulder, Agent Scully. I guess this is it. Scully: You're not going to stay and watch? Frank: No, just want to go home. Take care of yourselves.) Frank Spotnitz: It ended up not in fact owing very much at all to what had happened in the Millennium TV series. It ended up being an excuse for bringing Frank back and for seeing him with his daughter, and for telling people what became of him after the show ended. But that was really all it did in terms of bringing closure to Millennium. I think maybe that was enough, but I'm sure that, for Lance and for die-hard fans of the show, it wasn't answering all the questions they might have had. Chip Johannessen: Honestly, I must say, Fox was so supportive about this show and there were a lot of people loved this show. I think it frustrated them in the same way it was kind of frustrating to us that the audience was not as big as we were hoping, ultimately. Especially because some of the episodes were so great. Frank Spotnitz: It was very, very dark, and I think to the extent people really loved Millennium, those are the people who really connected with that darkness and wanted to be scared on that level. I think that's a very specific certain audience, which is why Millennium worked with a core audience and then didn't reach a lot of other people who didn't want to watch that in their homes. Chris Carter: The network and the studio got frightened that we were too scary, too dark, too frightening. And I think now when you see shows that are succeeding on television now - this is six, seven, eight years later - they are what Millennium should probably have aspired to be, which was really good murder mysteries that stood alone, that had, in this case, a millennial quality, which was, I think, the signature aspect of the show. Lance Henriksen: I just think that Chris Carter is sitting right on the edge of a gold mine to do a Millennium film. Me too. I mean, it would be an incredible thing. I've done a lot of movies over the years, but that one just still haunts me. It really does. Mark Freeborn: I think that ... I think that ... (laughs) John Peter Kousakis Co-Executive Producer (appears from stage left and puts his arm around Mark Freeborn) All we'd like say is we had the best years of our lives on a show like Millennium. Mark Freeborn: We did. Klea Scott: It was a family experience for me that I haven't – you know, it was unusual because it was intense just to be with Lance and myself, just one actor. And if that was a bad combination, that could have been a really miserable experience. But - I speak for myself - I really liked working with Lance and respected him. John Kousakis: I think the most rewarding thing about the show for me, is that it brings back some great memories. It brings back some not-so-great memories. It brings back a sense of working on something that, as again I've said ad nauseam, something that I can be so proud of and something that stands up today to, I would say very, very safely and confidently, 90% of the feature films in the same genre. Thomas Wright: Of all the shows I've done - and I've done quite a few - to be on a series, do a series day in and day out, it's been my most enjoyable and, I feel, some of my best work. (Frank and Jordan running down the school corridor.) Thomas Wright: Everybody I know that worked on the show - it was always fun. It was just a great experience. Klea Scott: If you get the combination of: you like doing it and people like it - wow. Those are gems. They don't come along very often. And then you use them as a golden mean by which you measure all the things that come along after that. And Millennium was one of the ones - I could have done Millennium for a very long time. Lance Henriksen: Looking back at it again, I could have gone on another year and see where it led. But I do know that I needed ... I had some ... Listen, I had some ideas about how that show could have gone on. But again, it's like talking about a romance that you had five years ago and how you could have made that work, you know? It's all second-guessing and it's all what you've learned from it. I wouldn't change anything. I was very proud to have done that show. (Jordan: Which side wins, Daddy? Frank: That's what I'm saying. It's up to us. Jordan: We are all shepherds. Frank: Yes, honey. Yes, we are.) -end-

Order in Chaos: Making Millennium Season One (transcribed by Libby) Chris Carter Creator/Writer/Exec. Producer The original idea for Millennium actually took shape over time. Fox wanted to do another series and I’d done an episode of the X-Files which I liked a lot. It involved a serial killer. It didn’t actually have a paranormal element. It had a kind of supernatural element but it wasn’t the paranormal. And it got me to thinking about the sort of monsters that surround us, the people that are in the supermarket checkout line with us, at the post office with us. You just never know about someone. I had this idea for a character in mind that became Frank Black and it took shape over time but I was under the gun. I was in Seattle doing research for this project. I knew I wanted it to take place in Seattle but I didn’t quite know what it was even though I told the network and the studio that I did know what it was. A retired FBI agent and the idea of the prophecies, Nostradamus, taking the poetry, the millennial, apocalyptic poetry. Those things were sort of added on to this idea of this character, a person who wanted to retire from something but could not. And that basically was the long and short of that. It didn’t require a lot of research. I wanted it to be a murder mystery each week, but I wanted it to have some kind of cohesive idea. Something that I think was in the air, which was a foreboding for the end of the millennium, that something was going to happen and everyone felt it. I thought I could capitalise on it and do a murder mystery with a millennial feel. Ken Horton Co-Executive Producer I was involved in the pilot as much as anyone was involved with the pilot. It was a very interesting process, because Chris had such juice at that point. And everyone so trusted him that he skirted the normal pilot process. Which is - if you talk to anybody, it’s - your elephant gets eaten by mice on a regular basis. Because Chris had the power to basically conceive this project as he wanted to do it, there was very, very, very little input along the way. David Nutter Director With X-Files, there was always the slight conceit of the paranormal. But with Millennium we didn’t want to have that conceit at all, we wanted to basically take that rug out from under people and make it feel very, very real. And also the fact that this television show was really the first show to deal with profiling and FBI and serial killer situations in stories. And I think the more I read, the more I realised that truth is so much stranger than fiction. And you can never make this stuff up. Ken Horton: Both the studio and the network were wary of Chris and how to handle him. And because he and I got along and because I seemed to be a pretty good interpreter of his vision, I was designated for both of the corporations, because they’re different companies, to go over and sort of find out what was going on. So I would go over periodically and go, “Chris, what is this show exactly? What do you conceive it to be?” And, as he does, he goes, kind of cryptically, “Seven. I like the movie Seven.” And that was basically it. So I’d go back and there’d be a room full of suits. They go, “So, what is this project about?” And I’d go, “It’s basically Seven.” And there’d be a blank stare, and they go “What else?” And I’d go, “That’s basically it.” David Nutter: Chris and I spoke about what the story would be and so forth. And then Chris went away over the holiday and wrote a script and handed it to me. And it was perfection. It was exactly everything he had spoken to me about and more. And something that I actually saw in my head when I read the script. It was one of the situations as a director, if you can begin to see the scenes as you’re reading the story, it’s working and it plays for you. Frank Spotnitz: I think Chris had the idea that evil as a concept had been degraded in our society by secularism, by science, and he still believed in evil as a real force. So he wanted to make the scariest possible show he could, and that was what Millennium was. Chris Carter: I think, you know, like a good - like Shane, like any cowboy, any good movie, Western movie, the hero is always very self-reliant. Quiet, capable, dangerous. That’s what I saw Frank Black as. There was a moment when Bill Hurt’s name was mentioned, and I think it was one of those ideas that everyone gets excited about without thinking about the reality of it. So, while his name may have been mentioned, I doubt Bill Hurt ever knew that he was even up for this role. So Lance Henriksen really was the first and last choice. David Nutter: Chris had come to me with the name of Lance Henriksen and I jumped up and down and said, “Absolutely. That’s exactly the guy you want.” You want that everyman, but also you want someone as far as Frank Black is concerned that has lived life, and has seen hell, and has reached for heaven but not often had it. Lance Henriksen: My agent sent me a script. And he said, “Read it. But I’m not going to tell you anything about it. About how it’s being done or what it is.” So I read it and it was powerful - this is the pilot for Millennium. A very powerful piece and the character was, I thought, really exciting, cos it’s a new idea, a new kind of person. And then after I read it, I got excited as hell, cos I thought it was a movie. And they said, “No, it’s a television series.” I said, “No, that’s not possible. Nobody can make a series on that script.” It was a very vivid and edgy script. And he says, “No, it’s definitely the pilot.” And it was the pilot that we shot. But the thing is, then I said, “You know, I got some questions about this.” Ken Horton: Lance didn’t want to do TV, and to be honest, there was a whole studio network worry about Lance. We’re on Fox network, right? I mean, this is Simpsons, and, they wanted somebody hot, in his thirties. At worst, in his early thirties. David Nutter: Chris and I, we had lunch with Lance at an Italian restaurant near the Fox lot. We began to speak about Frank Black, and how important this character was and how great the script was, and how unlike any other private detective on television. This was not going to be Magnum or things like that. It was going to be something very different. Lance Henriksen: My first question to Chris was, “How are you going to make this hero a hero? I mean, it is so dark, how are you going to handle this?” And he said that the fact that the guy is a stand-up guy through all of this is what makes him a hero. Not that I was looking for a hero role, but I knew you had to care about this guy. And where is the light in this show? Where is it going to come from? Cos it was so dark. And he said, “The yellow house.” I said, “What are you talking about? The yellow house.” But he meant it, and I understood later. But he was very, very convincing. All the questions I had, he answered. The way it all went down was pretty outrageous. David Nutter: I remember the moment where we were talking about other interests, and so forth, and Lance began to speak about how he like to - he deals with clay in making pots and so forth, and he has a spinning wheel. And Chris said, “I do the same thing.” And so these two guys have a background in - with clay and spinning wheels and hand-worked pots and so forth. At that moment, I said, “We’re in. We got him.” Chris Carter: Megan Gallagher came to me as a result of Ken Horton, who was a studio executive at the time. He said, “You’ve got to look at this person.” Ken Horton: I had seen Megan on a Larry Sanders Show, a couple of nights before we were talking about it, about that character. And she seemed exactly right. I’d seen her before in a number of things, but she struck me - I don’t know why such a different character than with our show, but she struck me as physically the right person. Chris Carter: She has a softness, an intelligence. She’s a Julliard-schooled artist. So she brings a level, I think, of sophistication to the part as an actor and a person, that I think was what we were looking for. Megan Gallagher: There was a lot of hush-hush stuff about the script. They didn’t want anybody reading it and they didn’t want it getting out. So I was sent this very secretive numbered script the night before. A very X-Files kind of situation around this whole project. And I read it and, you know, he’s just an amazing writer. And I was told I had a meeting with him and David Nutter, the fabulous David Nutter, the next day at Fox. So I went and met them, and it was a very, very quick meeting, where Chris said - he was apparently a big fan of the Larry Sanders show and some other things that I’d done. He asked me if I had any questions, and I said, “No.” And I said, “Do you have any questions?” and he said, “Well, yes, I do. Why did you sleep with Hank Kingsley?” Which I just thought was - which really made me laugh. David Nutter: My attitude with the camera, especially with Millennium, was the fact that it’s all about point of view. Chris really instilled in me the sensibility of point of view in story-telling. Whose point of view is this? What do we need to tell? Where’s this scene going? So I think those are the things I really, really focus on as much as possible as far as what the work was concerned. Chris Carter: I remember certain things about the filming of the pilot, but they’re the oddest things. I remember having to apply bruises to one of the victims’ arms and being called into the make-up trailer to comment on a bruise. I’m sure that there were far greater and more important events, but there are just these little moments. I remember it was very, very cold weather in Vancouver when we shot the show. And when we had police officers the river and it was cold and time-consuming and tiring, and people were not happy. I remember reshooting a scene on the Burrard Bridge which is a big, old, beautiful bridge in Vancouver and having shot a scene there that did not work. It was not shot right and the physical effects did not work because we had to have a character hanging from a pipe underneath the bridge and it looked phony. We actually had to put him under there and film him. It wasn’t a trick. It was a trick just to get the camera to look down under the bridge and make the character look like he was really holding on instead of, like he was, harnessed underneath the bridge. David Nutter: I remember shooting, I think maybe the final day of the pilot. And Lance basically had to stand in front of this roomful of gentlemen, and describe the Frenchman’s world and how he saw it. Chris Carter: In playing some of his other movie parts, he had fallen into some habits. And I asked him to take some of those things away which may have been applicable to other roles. But for what I was looking for, I wanted a very still, quiet and powerful character. David Nutter: One thing Chris Carter once told me was, when people speak with their hands and so forth, they’re selling something. And so, basically, I took that very, very seriously and wanted Lance to not do that. Ken Horton: When he came in, he was all prepared, and he starts doing his thing. And he talks this way and does all these things [Ken waves his hands around]. And the director, David Nutter, slowed him down and said, “What I want you to do is I want you to come up and I want you to calmly, as calmly as you possibly can, tell these people what they need to know.” And he goes, “Then all I’d be doing is putting my face and my voice on film. There’d be no me.” And David Nutter says, “No, no, it’ll be all you.” David Nutter: It was a really tough scene for Lance, but when he fought through that, and fought through those things he felt he needed to do, there was a beautiful honesty that was revealed. Ken Horton: Lance goes, “I was so nervous, but I trusted him.” And he said, “It’s the best scene I have ever done in anything.” And he said, “From that moment, I understood the character completely. I understood what he was doing. He’s not a hard-sell guy. He’s a guy who says what he has to say. If you buy his sh*t, great. If you don’t, he moves on.” And he got it. Lance Henriksen: Shooting the pilot was like shooting a movie. We shot the pilot for a month. And I said, “Chris, this is phenomenal. Are we going to be doing this every show?” And he says, “No, we shoot every show in eight days.” I said, “Wait a minute.” This is the same page count that we’re talking about for the pilot. And I thought, “Eight days?” I didn’t even know what I was facing. I had no idea. Frank Spotnitz: Well, I wasn’t formally working on the show at that point. But I was around, doing the X-Files with Chris. I was reading the script as he was writing it, and I was watching the dailies as it was coming in. And actually, interestingly, he did not have the rights to the title Millennium at that point. And so the dailies were coming in, they were slated “2000” because he thought he might have to fall back on that title. He very much wanted to call it Millennium but it wasn’t clear at that point. But I was watching the dailies, which were quite good. It was clear from the beginning they were quite good. But he wouldn’t let me watch a cut of it until quite late. He worked on it many, many days with the editor and the director, David Nutter. And I was just blown away. Instantly I thought it was one of the best things he’d done up to that point. David Nutter: When we showed the pilot to the woman from Standards and Practices, she watched the pilot and felt it was fine. There was nothing exorbitant and/or gratuitous about it. But the problem was this: that night, she went home and she had nightmares. And the next morning she called Chris Carter up and said, “You know, you gotta cut some stuff, cos it’s really, it’s really, it’s too aggressive and it’s not correct.” And Chris really held her to task saying, “Listen, do not penalise us for getting under your skin. Do not penalise us for doing it in a way that affects you emotionally after the fact. Do not penalise us in a way that will cause us not to want to reach higher and to reach deeper into someone’s soul.” And we didn’t really have to change anything in the pilot, which was a great thing. Frank Spotnitz: Fox was also equally high on the pilot and they had a big premiere event for it which was screened in several theatres across the country. We got to see it in a theatre in Westwood and there was a big party afterwards. And seeing it on a big screen, it played beautifully. It was genuinely scary, and that’s so rare to experience something genuinely scary in a theatre, let alone for television. Megan Gallagher: I was one of those kids that got terribly bad dreams. I had to be very careful when I was a little girl about what I watched, because it just seemed to sort of soak into my imagination and would haunt me for a while. And that image of that guy being in the box, with his mouth sewn shut, was so chilling. Not to mention the idea of somebody photographing you loved ones. And now that I have a family - not that I didn’t understand it then - but there were so many deeply disturbing, chilling elements in that pilot. I didn’t appreciate it, even having read it, I didn’t appreciate it until I saw it. And I was really glad! I said to my friends - I brought, like, ten people to the screening - “I’m really glad we’re going out afterwards, because I need to shake it off.” Mark Snow: When we were talking about doing the Millennium theme, David Nutter was also involved, with Chris. They were very collaborative about it. They sent me a piece of music from an Irish band. There was solo violin and a Celtic sound with a cool rhythm. And they said, “You know, maybe this is something to go with.” And the piece I wrote I thought sort of captured that in a way. It had a mournful, Celtic, medieval combination. And they really liked percussion, and I added these big percussion hits, which became in themselves the signature for some of the act-ins or act breaks. These two hits, boom boom, very ambient drums. It was really a thrill, knowing that they loved it right from the get-go. Millennium was a hole in one, right off the bat. Ken Horton: I remember Chris telling me the first time, this was before the pilot. I said, “What are you envisioning as a thought process.” And he goes, “If I could do it, I’d have a man sitting on a front porch rocking in a rocking chair. And in front of him would be a group of kids playing on the lawn. That’s what we would see. If we turned the camera round and you saw him on the porch, that’s what you would see. If you turned his viewpoint around, he’d be seeing skeletons and grass growing at a foot a second.” And it was a completely screwed-up world yet everything was completely normal. So that’s what year one was, two views of good and evil. Frank Spotnitz: Chris loved Silence of the Lambs and Seven. And I think, as scary as The X-Files was, to him the scariest things are things that really do happen. And while some people could argue whether monsters are real or whether extraterrestrials are real, it’s sort of undeniable human monsters prey upon innocence. He wanted to do a show that was that scary on television every week. And that’s what Millennium started out to be. David Nutter: Gehenna was the first episode outside the pilot that we needed to, in less time and less money, create that exact same world and that quality and calibre that we were able to create in the pilot. John Peter Kousakis Co-Executive Producer We were shooting a dark show, we were shooting a show that had the overtones of a Seven and a Silence of the Lambs, and those were the templates that we were following. So, of course, with the dark skies in the winter and the rainy season, did nothing but just add to that palette and really set a nice foundation for us to work in. Mark Freeborn Production Designer One of the things that intrigued me about Millennium was, coming from mainly a feature background, that one of Chris Carter’s prime concerns was that they maintain a feature-film quality to the show. Robert McLachlan Cinematographer We had a very minimalist lighting approach, and part of that was helped by the fact that we were under no constraints from the producers to make everybody look really gorgeous. So the lighting, whatever they were standing in, wherever they were, usually came out of the location. We let that dictate how they were going to be lit. And we would take what was in a location and add to it as minimally as we could , which helped us speed up a lot. The fact that Lance Henriksen’s face is so fantastic, and he’s got these amazing eyes, it didn’t matter where in a room you put a light, it would always seem to catch in his eyes. So I never really needed to have that much there. Frank Spotnitz: Millennium tried to be visual in its storytelling every week. So much of television - and this is not to knock it in any way, it’s just practical, it’s just the nature of the medium - so much of television is people talking. So they’re filmed plays. Millennium tried to tell stories with pictures. And really Frank’s gift, his ability to see through the eyes of the killer, is a prime example of that. David Nutter: Millennium was one of the first shows to really utilise the sensibility of flashbacks, flash cuts, character points of view and so forth, long before CSI or a lot of these other shows were involved in that type of stuff. And that was really a huge, important part of the show for Chris Carter and I. John Peter Kousakis: Frank Black was not a psychic. It’s misconception on the audience’s part and a lot of the critics, because when Frank would investigate a crime, his character would, there would be flashes. And we used a technical device on film to try and manifest that, to try and somehow interpret for the audience what he was going through. Lance Henricksen: We never, ever, used the term, “Frank was psychic.” That came from the outside. I thought of him as anything but. I thought he was a forensic profiler, but he was also like a brilliant chess player. He saw the outcome, and when something would happen, he would see a larger picture and a larger outcome down the road. Chip Johannessen Writer/Co-Producer For me, the Frank gift thing, it was like he would get an accumulation of details, of facts about something that would allow him to glimpse something almost physically, like it was inevitable then that the place where the next murder would happen would look like this. Or the place where the guy lives would look like this, or the street the guy must have grown up on looked like this. Frank Spotnitz: I can see why people thought there was a psychic component to it. Because it was certainly hinted that his daughter, Jordan, had the same “gift”, if you will. Early on, there was a Morgan and Wong episode, very effective, where it was hinted that Jordan had the same ability. And then it was expanded upon in an episode that I wrote later in the first season, called “Sacrament”. At least for me, and I think for Chris, we never wanted to cross the line into the supernatural with any of that. It was more about an exquisite sensitivity to the way some people think, to the monstrous way some people think. David Nutter: We had gone out, actually early in the process and we even spoke with Hank Corwin, who was a famous commercial editor, who cut JFK, that was quite impressive, and did a lot of great commercials. Hank and I sat down and spoke about the work that Robert Richards had done with him, and the various techniques that were used to really create an organic mental picture as far as the characters were concerned. Robert McLachlan: Frank’s flashbacks came out of some experiments that we did. They did a few things in the pilot where they turned the camera on and off. And a few things that we’d seen before. But we were playing around, and one of the camera rental houses has these strobe lights that are normally used to get super-sharp images of beer being poured or milk being poured, and any kind of actions, bubbles coming out of a pop bottle being opened. But they give you a super, super sharp image because they fire at a 50,000th of a second. And what we did was we combined lighting a scene and some of those images, some of those violent images, the killer’s point of view. We lit that with a combination of those strobes and normal light and then shot them at six frames a second, which is much slower than you normally film at, and then printed them back to normal. And what you got was an image that was both blurry and extremely sharp at the same time. And then added to that we played with the stop on the camera, and turned the camera on and off. It was sort of a mixed bag of things all being done at once. And then we pulled most of the colour out of it most of the time, maybe we’d leave just the red in if there was a lot of blood or whatever, or not. And it created a really unique look. Thomas J. Wright Director I think it was sort of a device for the audience particularly. Because that show was so strong, and such a tough show, and a hard show and a dark show. You actually hold on some of the images like you would like to. Of course the network wouldn’t let you. So another way to get those images across to the audience would be this multiple quick cuts of the images, or pieces of them. And you get the sense of it without actually holding on it. Brittany Tiplady: When the show comes on, I’m allowed to watch it. The parts that I’m in are not scary. And that’s the only parts that I’m allowed to watch. Ken Horton: Year one, we had to deal with the fact that we were doing a show that we knew would turn off a certain amount of audience. That we were excluding ourselves from certain people’s homes. Thomas J. Wright: I would shoot the scene the way it was written. In all its gore, all its blood. The crews walking off the stage, going home, “My God, I can’t watch this.” John Peter Kousakis: And it did become overbearing at times, for the crew and for everybody involved. Particularly that first season, when you would see severed body parts on a set. And I might add that Toby Lindala, who did our make-up effects at the time, did a fabulous job of replicating these bodies, as gruelling as that sounds, and as despicable as it sounds. He did a fabulous job in replicating those parts. I can remember one instance where I walked in to a set. It was episode two of season one, and I walked into a local location here, downtown. It was way into the deep part of the day, maybe 12th hour, maybe 13th hour of the day. Pouring rain outside. Dreary, cold winter day. And there in an elevator, where a camera was set up on the ground, at ground level, were quartered body parts. At that point, that was the first time, even with the pilot, that was the first time I looked at it and said, “We’re doing something special, but we’re doing something pretty outrageous right now. Thomas J. Wright: Even Lance, I remember, in “Dead Letters”, the first time he walked onto the elevator, and we had the pieces there, he was going, “Oh, my god.” Now this was coming from Lance, who we always see, you know, “Yeah, get them out of the way.” Tough guy. Big guy. But he was like, “Holy moly, what’s going on here.” And it affected the crew, because we were very graphic. Even though you didn’t see everything in the show, but it was there, and we shot it. And the crew would get very upset sometimes. Very upset. I had a script supervisor who wouldn’t come back because they were so upset. She finally said, “I love you, Tom, I love this show, but I just can’t do this every day.” She would get quite emotional about it. John Peter Kousakis: I felt that when Chris laid out his plan of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to approach this show, it was always from a non-gratuitous standpoint. I didn’t feel we were doing anything gratuitous in the heinous crimes and the violence that was on the outside being perceived by the industry that didn’t really know what we were doing and how we were doing it. The crime had already taken place by the time we’d gotten to where we needed to be in the story. Chris Carter: The truth is, I don’t like gunplay. I don’t like to see blood. Personally, I don’t. I don’t think you need to show that stuff. And it’s scarier when you don’t, when you see things obliquely. It’s always more frightening. And so I think that was the approach. Sometimes what my intention was gets lost in the telling. You’ve got different directors, different writers, different producers, working on the show from year to year, from episode to episode. And so - did we go too far sometimes? Maybe we went too far in the sense that we lingered too long. But that was the nature of the stories. And what makes murder mysteries frightening is what could happen to you. Chip Johannessen: I have a favourite clue in the whole series, which was a Morgan and Wong clue, which to me was a perfect thing about where Millennium kind of would come in. Because it was a clue that told you everything about this guy, in a kind of profiley way. You really thought you’d got this guy, but you had no idea where he was or what he was going to do next. And so it was a perfect clue. It was in an episode called “Dead Letters”. And at the end of the first act, they’re staring at this human hair that somehow Frank Black knew was going to be there. He knew there was going to be a clue that would be hard to see. He just knew this about this guy. I think it’s like “Hair today, gone tomorrow” something like that written on this hair. And you know what kind of crazy motherf***er would do that. But where he is or what’s he going to do next, who knows? That’s kind of the way the Academy Group kind of thinking was incorporated in the series. That’s my favourite clue by far. Fantastic. Chris Carter: The Academy Group came to us as a result of our contacts with the FBI. The Academy Group are a group of retired FBI agents who do detective work. They use their FBI skills for corporations, for individuals. For the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, for example. Robert R. Hazelwood Academy Group Profiler Myself and two others went out there and met with Chris Carter and Lance Henriksen and about 20 writers, as I recall - producers, writers, directors - and spent a wonderful two days out there. I mean, the hospitality was fantastic. And they were exactly the opposite of what we anticipated Hollywood would be like. They were very down-to-earth, very commonsense. Lance Henriksen: These guys were so sharp and so focused and so simple about their - well, on the surface it looked simple. But their way of approaching things was very helpful. Because it meant that you didn’t come in with preconceived ideas. You didn’t prejudge anything by material handed to you. And you didn’t want to be told about it by anybody. So they would come in and based on what they saw, and only the facts, they would start opening this case up. Roger L. Depue, Ph.D. Academy Group Founder The fantasy is very important. Many times in a crime scene you can see the fantasy of the perpetrator. Frank Black does this from time to time. He does it in a more dramatic way than we do it. He almost sees it, and you see these splashes and flashes of what he’s seeing. But we do something similar to that. We look at the crime scene and we see the behaviour, and we see the evidence of the fantasy. And we say, “I know what this guy is thinking. I’ve seen this before.” Lance Henriksen: When the flashbacks and things would happen in the show, I would get a little embarrassed by it, because I knew that these guys, if they could have flashbacks like that, they would be grateful to have a flashback that was accurate. But it’s a lot of work, it’s a tremendous amount of work and detail, and it takes time and energy. They were telling me there’s a hundred operating serial killers in America right now, and that they’re on all these cases to try to figure them out. Frank Spotnitz: One of the funny things about the show was, as much as the network respected the show, they were afraid of its darkness and sombreness. We had these very nervous network notes meetings after the first few episodes, where they very politely tried to ask us to lighten it up with a little humour. We weren’t unsympathetic but we just shrugged, because the subject matter was so dark and disturbing. It was very hard to find places for humour. And I think you see as some of the shows went on, every once in a while, we’d look for more ways to let the brightness of that yellow house, the lightness, the innocence and the warmth of that house shine through. Chris Carter: This yellow house idea represented Frank Black’s hope, his hope that he could paint away the darkness. And it became an oasis of sorts, where he could be happy with his family, that he could feel that they were protected, that they didn’t have to experience the dark world that he lived so much of his professional life in. Frank Spotnitz: But even that after a while gave way to severed human livers being found in the refrigerator in the house. It’s like, after a while, even that went. Frank Spotnitz: You know, the pilot episode, to me, is still one of the finest things Chris has written. And there’s a scene in the pilot when Catherine says to Frank, “Frank, you can’t block out the outside world,” or words to that effect. And he says, “I want you to make-believe I can.” That’s just a very powerful idea because I think most of us in fact don’t want to look at all the evil that goes on in the world around us. And Millennium was about that world versus the world inside that yellow house. Chris Carter: There’s a beautiful neighbourhood in Vancouver called Shaunessy which is where we filmed this, and they have restrictions on filming. We should have known better than to go there. And there were neighbourhood organisations who probably didn’t want us to be there, I know that they didn’t. But we actually made this house look better. We reshingled the house, we painted the house. We did a major overhaul on this house to make it look the way I wanted it to look. The pilot got picked up for a television series and we went back to use the house that we had created and we were blackballed. Megan Gallagher: The people decided that they didn’t want to do television series in their house. I don’t blame them, by the way. I would never let a camera crew in my house. Ever, ever, ever. I mean, a movie crew or a television crew. Chris Carter: We were shut out and had to go find another house in another neighbourhood, which was actually a house that I had used in the second episode of the X-Files, strangely enough. Megan Gallagher: It was a more diminutive version of the same thing. But it had a wrap-around porch and they could paint it yellow. And the woman who owned that house was actually a flight attendant on Canadian Airlines. And I used to see her all the time on the plane as I was going back and forth from Vancouver to L.A. And they loved it. They loved it because they redid the whole house. They bought themselves a new kitchen. That’s the one thing. A television series can pay well if it’s done in your house. You’re displaced, but you’re making some cash. David Nutter: “Loin like a Hunting Flame” was written by Ted Mann. It was probably the sexiest Millennium episode that I was involved in. It was written with a lot of edge and need to be filmed that way. It was all a situation of what you wouldn’t see in the cutting and so forth was really the secret to it all. And we actually had the woman from Standards and Practices actually flew to Vancouver to watch us shoot it, to see that we didn’t cross any boundaries. It was fascinating because the video tap didn’t work on the camera and she couldn’t really get into the room. So I had a little handheld machine that I’d used for years and I recorded it and got a chance to play it back for her and she said it was OK - what we did and so forth. Ken Horton: Year one was about establishing for the audience what they could expect. Frank Spotnitz: It was a very challenging year because it was the fourth year of The X-Files. So Chris Carter was still running the X-Files and launching this new show, Millennium, with an entirely different staff of writers. There was some great work done that season and there was some other work that missed the mark. But it was a lot of really talented people trying to find the centre of the show. Chip Johannessen: Personally, for me, it was like awful. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to do stories and how hard it was to get them produced. So, like two-thirds of the way through the first season, I was just having the worst time of my life. I said, “I’m not going to do this any more. I don’t care, you can sue me. I’m not coming back next year.” Then I looked around at what else there was, and I realised how lucky I was. Those of us who were writing it were really interested in the kind of millennial aspects of it. If you remember back then, people thought the world was going to end when the clock turned year 2000. There was a lot of anxiety and Chris had chosen this whole big broad palette to tap into that. “Force Majeure” that I did, was episode 12 of the first season. The Noah’s Ark thing was some guy who we’d find in iron lung who’s been preparing for the end of the world for fifty years. It wasn’t executed perfectly, by and large, but it was a pretty cool story. Robert McLachlan: On the episode “Thin White Line”, we did 80 setups one day. That included stuff with huge rigging and power pods, albeit with two cameras, and a relatively long day. It was just one of those days, it was right after the Christmas hiatus. The whole crew was fresh after a bit of a break and we hit the ground running. Sometimes the lighting and everything just clicks. The other big reason we were able to do that was that Thomas Wright was directing. He’s probably the most organised television director I’ve ever worked with. He’s really fabulous. He used to be Hitch****’s storyboard artist. Thomas J. Wright: “Thin White Line” is also one of my favourites. A huge show. A huge show. There were times on that show we were shooting three scenes at the same time, just to get them done. Two on the stage and one outside, all at the same time. We’d run from one set to the other. Lance Henriksen: Imagine the challenges that these shows give you. Because they’re always throwing something at you, like: “Well, in this show, you’re going to be 20 years younger and playing yourself older.” “And it’s like a nightmare, but it’s coming true.” All this stuff. Thomas J. Wright: They’re very hard shows to do, heavily detail-oriented. And you just try not to miss any details, because that’s what a lot of the show is about. And they were tough shows to do. Long, long hours, hard work. Everybody stuck with it. Bad weather, and of course, dark show. A lot of nights, always raining. And if it wasn’t, we made it rain. Megan Gallagher: We started early in the morning, on a Monday, 5.30, 6.00 a.m. calls. And through the week, we got into what they call “splits”, which is, you get called a little bit later in the day later in the week, but then you’re still going to work a 12, 14, 15-hour day. And then you have to have 12 hours from turnaround from the time that you stop shooting until the next time you have to show up in front of the camera. It’s all according to union rules. So by the end of the week we were wrapping at five o’clock, six o’clock in the morning on a Saturday morning. And that’s brutal. Because then you’re this night creature, by the end of the week. But you have to turn around and be a morning creature in a day, in one day. You sleep half of Saturday away because you’ve gone to bed at six o’clock in the morning and so you sleep until at least noon or one o’clock, something like that. But then you have to get to bed early because Sunday night you’ve got to be in bed by nine. So it’s really hard. It’s just - it’s very challenging in that way. I think it’s hard - that kind of schedule’s hard on everybody, it’s hard on the cast, it’s hard on the crew. It’s tough. Lance Henriksen: I would get one script, and then while I was shooting that eight-day script, I would get the second script, and before the same first show was done, I’d get the third script. So now I’m sitting with three scripts, and each one is original. And I’m going, “I don’t know if I have the capacity for this.” I mean, I really didn’t know. You get to a fatigue that is so deep, it feels like despair. And I was doing a very dark character. So besides looking into the abyss, I felt the despair from fatigue and it started working on me a little bit. John Peter Kousakis: In terms of humorous moments and moments of just letting out your frustrations and anxieties, people had fun on the set. They had to. Lance Henriksen: I wasn’t difficult to live with for anybody but my wife. On the weekends she’d say, “Frank Black, can Lance come out and play, please? Leave him at the door.” So, anyway... John Peter Kousakis: Lance found it very difficult at the beginning, and it was difficult for Lance because he had to adjust to a television schedule. And he was the star of the show. He was carrying the weight of the show. He began, after the season got under way, to adjust to it, found it of course at times to be very frustrating, but he was terrific in that role. That role was written for him and there isn’t a person who has viewed that series that doesn’t believe that from the get-go. Frank Spotnitz: Millennium was a very ambitious, difficult show to do. Fortunately we had a fantastic crew in Vancouver, the finest crew Vancouver had to offer. I think the success of The X-Files helped us draw a lot of really talented people there. We had an amazing co-executive producer in John Kousakis, great production designer, great cinematographer. And a lot of fine directors, chief among them Tom Wright, who got amazing footage in an incredibly short period of time, and really carried a lot of the production weight of that show. It looks fantastic. There are so many great, indelible, striking images over the life of the show. David Nutter: I was just so happy to see that when Millennium did come out and the notoriety that Lance got. I know he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor. And the show won the Best New Series on People’s Choice. And that I think was before only one or two episodes had even aired after the pilot. So I was really proud of the fact that we charted that, we went forward and, as I sometimes will say, we walked blindly into the fire but we had a firm step. I was really happy that Lance was able to get the notoriety that he so deserved and so earned. End

Millennium - Season 2 DVD Commentary - Transcribed by Libby (Frank in queue of traffic, looking for Catherine.) Chris Carter Creator/Writer/Exec. Producer Chris Carter: I was really busy during Season 2, I didn't even know that Morgan and Wong were interested in doing Season 2 of the show. I got a call one day saying that a deal had been struck, so it actually came as a surprise. But they had done such great work on The X-Files it seemed like a no-brainer that these were the guys to step in and take the reins -- (Lara Means looking out the aircraft window.) Chris Carter: -- while the rest of us at Ten Thirteen worked on X-Files and on the X-Files movie which was at that point in post-production. Jim and Glen had certain ideas, obviously, about the show, and they wanted to express those ideas, and I think they did. I didn't see all the episodes in Season 2, I just didn't have the time. I would still like to go back and see them. (Frank: I have one question. Is this the beginning of my journey, or the end?) TURN OF THE TIDE: MAKING MILLENNIUM SEASON TWO John Peter Kousakis Co-Executive Producer John Kousakis: The seasons changed quite dramatically from season to season, year to year, in the three years that we produced the show. In the first season, Chris Carter was very much involved in the show and it was his vision of where we were going with it. It was more focused on the crimes and the solving of those crimes through the eyes of Frank Black and through his investigation and through his profiling methods. It was also trying to balance his family life, his life at home, with his re-entry into this crime world that he was trying to escape from. Michael Perry Writer/Co-Producer Michael Perry: Chris and Frank hired me, and soon thereafter Morgan and Wong were hired on to run the show, and they had a very distinct vision. There's was a different vision from Season 1. And I think I was hired because of my kinship with the style of Season 1, and not with the Morgan and Wong vision, which was a substantially different thing - the sort of far-reaching world conspiracies, if not a Masonic conspiracy, you know, something like that. (Polaroid Man: I am the first and I am the last. I am the Alpha and I am the Omega. I am the beginning and I am the end.) Episode 1 "The Beginning and the End" Airdate: 09/19/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Thomas J. Wright Lance Henriksen (1997): The season finale last year was my wife getting kidnapped. They say that when you're in transition is when you're most vulnerable. Lance Henriksen "Frank Black" 1997 Interview Lance Henriksen (1997): And that's what happened. Right at the moment of transition, the worst happened. And this first show of the season will wrap up the issue of somebody that's been hounding me so long - that's the Polaroid Man. Lance Henriksen (1997): Every action has a reaction. So no matter how pure of heart you might be about something, you're going to pay the consequences, or pay for it. The truth definitely shouts out. It's set me off on my own. I mean I not only lost my yellow house, I've lost the relationship with my wife. Now I've got to do everything I can to keep my daughter's relationship healthy. And then I find out the Millennium Group isn't what it appeared to be. And so I'm really alone. Episode 4 "Monster" Airdate: 10/17/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Perry Lang (Cop: Cuff him. Mr Frank Black, you are being taken into custody ... you are being taken into custody for assaulting a minor, and conspiracy to commit child abuse.) Lance Henriksen (1997): In reality, there's a lot more in life than serial killers. There are some out there, and there are some operating and things like that, but I know that on this journey that we're on this year, it's not like we're stopping doing that, but there's a lot of other things to do. (Frank: I've seen monsters. They exist. It's like when you look in a mirror, there are monsters behind it.) Ken Horton Co-Executive Producer Ken Horton: Year two, Glen and Jim wanted to, they felt the serial killer aspect overpowered year one, and they wanted to find a little more meaning to the Millennium Group. So they basically gave it a mythology and it became a sort of sect of knights, or it had a long history. Episode 2 "Beware of the Dog" Airdate: 09/26/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Allen Coulter Ken Horton: And Frank was just beginning to understand what that was and what it meant and that there were struggles within this group itself and those struggles eventually became more personal. So, it was less about outside evil with Frank Black as our knight in shining armor, defending us, and more that there were interstruggles within this group. Episode 14 "Owls" Airdate: 03/06/98 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Thomas J. Wright (Frank: What's this? Car explodes) Ken Horton: If you believe research, there's a whole section of the audience who found the Millennium Group interesting when we never really described them. They were just there and they would drop in as they were needed. And they all had cool stuff. They were kind of like James Bond guys without being James Bond guys. They had gadgets but they didn't have gadgets. They had incredible access to information, things like that. (Frank: Soylent Green is people.) Ken Horton: Jim and Glen took that and they ran with that side of it. (Roedecker: No, the other way. Turn the focus ring the other way. (to Frank and Watts) He zoomed out instead of focusing. Watts: All right, Brian, I still can't program my VCR.) (Frank: You know the identity of the man who stalked my wife. For years.) Episode 14: "Owls" Airdate: 03/06/98 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Thomas J. Wright (Frank: You never told me. That's a lie. You knew that I would kill him. You knew I'd get separated from my family. Watts: You left your family. But you didn't leave us.) Lance Henriksen (1997): It's being revealed to me, as it's revealed to the audience, what this Millennium Group really is. The spectrum can be enormous. Any secret organization that you know something about, you become a danger to them if they want to remain secret. And so I don't know if that's possible. I mean, I don't know what direction it's going in, which is exciting for an actor. (Frank: The fact is I know nothing about the man standing in the darkness of my house. Until I know more, I don't want anything to do with Millennium, or you.) Thomas J. Wright Director Tom Wright: Jim and Glen sort of changed the direction of the show a little bit. It became dealing more with the dark corners of religion and what does it really mean. So there were some interesting ones there, but it did take a bit of a different turn. (Watts: Should a battle - should Armageddon occur, we must have the cross in our possession. ?: There are others in the Millennium Group that know this as well. The Owls have proof.) Mark Snow Composer Mark Snow: There was a group of shows that had a continuous story to it, about the secret society, the Owls and the Roosters, which, uh, I just love that the producers had the guts to think about opera as, you know, as a possible source music, instead of, you know, hip-hop or rock'n'roll. Episode 15: "Roosters" Airdate: 03/13/98 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Thomas J. Wright Lance Henriksen(1997): I look at last year like it was last year. It was like we all have a last year, that's all that was. We were finding our legs and seeing who we were. And I think this year is just an extension of that. I don't think the core quality of the show is ever going to diminish. Chip Johannessen Writer/Co-Producer Chip Johannessen: I don't think the Millennium Group - it just kind of went off in a different direction in the second year. And, you know, the problem was they bought a huge audience with the pilot. It was promoted ... I mean, Chris was nervous about it before it happened because on the one hand it was fun to have all the attention, on the other they were clearly going to get a huge audience a lot of whom probably wouldn't respond to the material. So all you going to do is see a big drop-off from this big audience they'd basically bought. But the effect, after it settled down to what our audience was, I think it was they felt a little jerked around. Things like the Millennium Group were suddenly, "Huh?" Lance Henriksen (now): This is just my opinion now of how the show changed with Morgan and Wong. They got a bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing about it. It became less serious. It became more, kind of ethereal. I don't know how to describe it. In doing the shows, they became shows about, kind of fairy tales rather than very dark cases that had a deep, you know, reality in them. (Frank: Jordan!) Episode 17: "Siren" Airdate: 03/20/98 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Allen Coulter (Frank: Jordan! Monster cradling Jordan.) Chris Carter: I think Millennium was ... the pilot certainly was what I wanted. But, uh, you have a lot of time to work very carefully with everyone involved. And so your ability to shape it is great. Episode 5: "A Single Blade of Grass" Airdate: 10/24/97 Writers: Erin Maher and Kay Reindl / Diector; Rodman Flender Chris Carter: When you work on a TV series and you've got another TV series running over here, your ability to get exactly what you want is lessened. But that's the way of television. (Frank: Breathe, breathe.) Episode 18: "In Arcadia Ego" Airdate: 04/03/98 Writer: Chip Johannessen / Director: Thomas J. Wright (?: Come on, honey. You can do this.) Michael Perry: The non-Morgan/Wong scripts were produced by sort of a different group of people. So we were like, "We'll take care of these six, seven episodes." This other group of people, and Morgan and Wong were going to do, I don't know the exact numbers, but they did a huge number of them. (Boy1: There, that one. "100% Free Nasty Hardcore Coed Teenage Virgins". Boy2: Yeah! That is why Bill Gates should be president.) Episode 13 "The Mikado" Airdate: 02/06/98 Writer: Michael Perry / Director: Roderick Pridy Michael Perry: "The Mikado" was my first produced Millennium episode. It grew out of two premises. How will widespread access to the Internet change the face of crime investigation? What if you had a crime where you don't know where it happened, you don't know who did it? All you know is that it took place. (Roedecker: That's right. Come to papa. Routing information. It's coming from ... Canterbury, England. I don't get it. Frank: He's playing with us. He gave us his internet address because he knew we couldn't trace it. ) Michael Perry: And the second half of the premise was based on the Zodiac killer. The Zodiac Killer was sort of the most notorious serial killer up until Ted Bundy or something. And he would write messages to people, and write messages to the newspaper. And he killed people in and around San Francisco, and then abruptly stopped. When I was thinking about Frank Black, and Frank Black would certainly have been involved in that and it would be a great frustration to him to know that one he came so close to, got away. (Frank: I was with the search team in the park, but I was younger and my instincts weren't as refined. But I felt him. I was too slow to react and he was gone. Roedecker: Oh my god. ) Michael Perry: Then I thought, let's put those two together. What if he's investigating the Zodiac Killer who's now got all these new tools, who now has the Internet. Out of that basis came "The Mikado". And a lot of the details came from the real Zodiac case. (Roedecker: A sound file. Frank: Play it.) Michael Perry: The Mikado was the guy's sort of musical favourite and he would write notes and quote it and stuff. Fox made us change the name, so we changed it to Omega. But Lance Henriksen wore an Omega watch, and I think they sponsored a wrap party or something, so we then changed it to Avatar, but it was a similar kind of case. (Frank: You slaughtered that young girl for no other reason than you wanted to. You hate yourself but you feel like you're God at the same time. But maybe the ***** had it coming. I watched the life drain from her body. And now she's mine for ever. I showed her to the world. And now I have her in a safe place where I can see her any time I want.) Michael Perry: It was a difficult production. You know, it had all the inserts. (Boy1: S&M. Boy2: I don't know. She doesn't look the type. Boy1: As if you'd know. ) Michael Perry: When The Mikado was made, nobody had seen webcams. I mean, we all know now what a webcam looks like. So I'd describe it to them. They'd go, OK, it's like video over the Internet. Well, no, it's nothing like video. It's crappy, grainy still photos that update about every second or half a second. And they'd go, so, it's sort of like slow video. No, no, nothing like that. So I had to show person after person, here's what it looks like. And it's a very good crew and they would always make these beautiful videos of the sort of killing room that was in that thing. And I'd have to say, you've got to make it look worse. And then they'd do another version and I'd go, it has to look even worse. And they started teasing me, cos that would be what I always asked for. No, I want it to look even worse than that. And that was for authenticity, but it was also because it gave a lot of dramatic tension to the scenes. Because if you see what's happening it's not as scary. If you know that stuff is happening between updates, that's very tense and scary. (Boy1: God! Boy2: We gotta tell somebody. Boy1: What are we going to tell them?) Michael Perry: The best input on that thing, on "The Mikado", was in editing. Chris Willingham is a great editor. And I sat in the editing room and it was like almost directing it a whole second time. If you see that episode, the scenes have a real tension and a kind of unease. And they keep you slightly off balance while giving you just enough information to get to the next scene. I think that the end product came out very scary. I think it's a really crackerjack episode. (Frank: You're safe now. Nobody's going to hurt you.) Episode 2 "Beware of the Dog" Airdate: 09/26/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Allen Coulter (Frank listens to Bobby Darin.) Mark Snow: Frank Black and Bobby Darin. I think it was a vehicle simply to make him, you know, as much of everyman as possible, to ground him, to make him seem normal. Episode 3 "Sense and Antisense" Airdate: 10/03/97 Writer: Chip Johannessen / Director: Thomas J. Wright ("Gyp the Cat" by Bobby Darin.) Mark Snow: I think that Morgan and Wong just love Bobby Darin, period. And I think that's, they said, He's gonna like it too. We like it, he likes it. ("Goodbye Charlie" by Bobby Darin.) Episode 4 "Monster" Airdate: 10/17/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Perry Lang Lance Henrikson (now): The Academy Group came back to see us in the second season. The Academy Group, to me, was profoundly moving, because these were men who retired from law enforcement from every walk of life. I mean, from FBI, and all these different things. And they got together to solve crimes that other people needed help with. And it wasn't for money, it was for their duty. Michael Perry: They had this bond of camaraderie, that they all loved each other, they laughed at each other's corny jokes. And you just couldn't help going, I can't believe these are the guys who are solving some of the most gruesome and difficult cases ever. When they first came in for the seminar, we're all, wow, these are real FBI guys - you know, hi, how are you. Then the guy goes, I'd like to start my presentation, talks a little bit about the X-Files. And he goes, you know, on that show they said the behavioral profiling units were really weird guys. And we all thought, yeah, that's right. And then one of them goes, Now, some of the details on X-Files aren't entirely true, they said that they put a microchip in a lot of their employees buttocks. He goes, the truth is we put it in your tooth. And the other three guys are just dead serious. We're not sure - is he kidding? Is he not kidding? And then the other Academy guy started chuckling, and OK, he's having us on, a little bit. Richard Ault Academy Group Profiler Richard Ault: Yeah, We could play. As you know, or as you'll see, Pete has a good sense of humor and so does Roy. It was good fun, that day. A lot of fun. Lance Henriksen (now): They asked us to solve one of the cases. And all they showed me was a body that was covered with a blanket and gave me a list of the people and showed me pictures of the room. And they had four suspects and they asked which one did I think did it. And after about an hour of looking at it, I said it had to be the sailor. Cos the girl's behavior was telling me that she was using people, and that she had used this sailor that was really actually very much in love with her. And when they found the body it was covered with a quilt, she was nude but it was covered with a quilt. And so it had to have been somebody that really loved her, because he didn't want her to be found naked, so he was covering her up. And so I told them and they said, you're right, that's who it was. I had started to use their logic. And maybe they were just being nice to me. Michael Perry: I would call them up. I would absolutely call up those guys all the time. It was one of the fun parts of the job. If you're doing a show about any kind of thing, you'd call them and say, tell me some true stories in which a similar situation arose. Or, tell me a true story about some of the guys you interviewed who might be like a criminal we're gonna have on our show. Or I would also call them and ask, you go and you see terrible things that people do to each other, and then you go and you're gonna go coach your kid's baseball team on Saturday. What does it take to do that? And just let them talk. And it gave you - maybe it wasn't direct research, it's not going to be the CSI thing, where it's exactly the detail of how they pulled out a piece of hair or fiber, but more of an understanding of what makes these guys tick. Robert R. Hazelwood Academy Group Profiler Robert Hazelwood: When they dealt with Lance playing the role of the profiler and looking at a crime and giving opinions, yes, they used the right terms, they had the right connections. Of course, when they started talking about conspiracies and governmental involvement, that's totally out of our bailiwick, we had nothing to do with that. Episode 4 "Monsters" Airdate: 10/17/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Perry Lang (Frank: Lara, do you see, feel images in your mind like I do?) Kristen Cloke "Lara Means" 1997 Interview Kristen Cloke: My character's name is Lara Means, and I'm also a forensic psychologist. Um, but I'm also - I want to say 'afflicted', but I'm not sure that that's necessarily the right word. But I think you're going to learn a lot more about the Millennium Group this season. Episode 19 "Anamnesis" Airdate: 04/17/98 Writers: Erin Maher & Kay Reindl / Director: John P. Kousakis (Lara: Some believe that Clare McKenna is the descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, whom he took as his apostle, his witness and his wife. Catherine: Who believes that?) Megan Gallagher "Catherine Black" Megan Gallagher: You know, what Glen and Jim - we all had dinner one night and they said, look, when you're in an episode we want it to be about something cool. And I have to say, one of my favorite episodes was an episode where the character Lara and I solved a crime together. And it was really - that was really fun. (Girl: Don't you dare touch her!) John Kousakis: I remember I was very excited, because I'd been wanting to direct a Millennium episode. "Anamnesis" was written by two of our writers, Kay Reindl and Erin Maher. And they wrote a very nice script. It was ironically on a show that starred Lance Henriksen, it was a show without Lance Henriksen. Lance Henriksen (now): I was in every show except for one. Megan had a show of her own that I wasn't in. You know, one of the series' shows. I flew immediately to Hawaii and laid on a beach, and then came back. (Girl: I used to be a chronicler like you. Only I believed. Then I got tested, like you. And I didn't believe. Catherine: Tested? Girl: By the man who took all the pictures of you. The one who told you the truth.) John Kousakis: I was excited, very excited about directing that episode. It was challenging because I was also producing the show at the same time, but I was fortunate enough to have a great line producer working with me, Kathy Gilroy-Sereda. But primarily on "Anamnesis" the excitement was getting my hands in more of the creative, totally creative aspect of the show. (Catherine: Why didn't you tell me that the Millennium Group was involved? Woman: I wasn't consulted. I don't even know what the hell the Millennium Group is.) John Kousakis: I had directed other episodes on other series that I had worked on. (Clare: She came to me today.) John Kousakis: But the joy was knowing that I was working on a very high-caliber show, and working on a show that was - I'm, without doubt, the proudest of in my career. (Clare: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners ... Catherine: No! Gun shot. Alex: Does Jesus love her more than me.) Lance Henriksen (1997): I feel like this year there's all kinds of new dimensions possible. I mean, there's, the restraints are coming off, the shackles are coming off to a degree. It's not that I'll trivialize anything, but certainly I have a very wry, crazy sense of humor that lives inside of my head, and I think I'll be able to use some of that. (Voice: Picture in your mind something you've seen recently that disturbed you. It can be a stain on your favorite shirt, or a scratch on your new car.) Episode 9 "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" Airdate: 11/21/97 Writer: Darin Morgan / Director: Darin Morgan (Voice: Just close your eyes and try to picture an unpleasant image. [series of Frank's visions. Frank takes the headset off.] Frank Spotnitz Writer/Co-Producer Frank Spotnitz: The second season of Millennium really became Morgan and Wong's season, and they took the show in a very different direction, did some really amazing, interesting work. One coup that they landed was bringing in Glen Morgan's brother, Darin, who'd written some of the finest episodes of The X-Files. And he wrote and directed two episodes of Millennium that were absolutely atypical of the series and like nothing else done in the series and probably not particularly well received in terms of ratings, but to my mind were two of the finest episodes of the whole run. They're just fantastic. (Frank: Who the hell's this? Jose Chung: The Selfosophy psycho.) Lance Henriksen (now): They would break that barrier. They would go from a kind of comedy into a fairy-tale kind of thing. (Man: Die, you dark b*******.) Lance Henriksen (now): Which was different for me. Again, challenges are a challenge, you know. It's the only shows I think I actually smiled in. Frank Black didn't do a lot of smiling. (McGrain: Boys, boys, boys, lighten up. This is a homicide, not a funeral. Giebelhouse: McGrain. Thank God you're here.) Michael Perry: There's nothing more fun than the day a Darin Morgan script comes out. In the weeks leading up, occasionally you'd cross paths with him and he goes, "It's going to be terrible. It's not going to work. I don't know what I'm doing." And then the script would come out. And we'd be knocking on each other's door - "Have you read it? Have you read his script?" (Selfosophist: Detective, you obviously possess many unique skills, but I sense that your negativity is holding you back. Are you aware how often you use negatively associated words? Giebelhouse: No, I don't, neither.) Mark Snow: The creation of "Jose Chung" and Darin Morgan's direction was really pretty amazing. To inject this oddball character into this dark show, and cast Charles Nelson Reilly, I thought was just brilliant. (Jose Chung: They sent their members out to buy all available copies, so that this blasphemous story could not be read by unsuspecting masturbators. Jose Chung: I'm sorry, I guess I'm a little bitter because nobody came to sign my freakin' books!) (Demon: Well, if you ask me, subtlety is for closet homosexuals.) Episode 21 "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me" Airdate: 05/01/98 Writer: Darin Morgan / Director: Darin Morgan Megan Gallagher: They also did that wacky episode with the devils that Glen's brother wrote, Darin. (Demon: That kid peed in my coffee) Mark Freeborn Production Designer Mark Freeborn: Satan, Get Thee Behind Me (sic), which is the story of four devils talking about their night's work in a doughnut store. On the surface it appeared to be a bit of cartoon, but in reality you could easily see those four people sitting in a doughnut store, talking about their night's work as human beings. (Man: Satan! Save me! Demon: "Satan! Save me!" ) Mark Snow: Darin really wanted me to lay low on these shows. Nothing big, and maybe a little less music than usual, and just a very light touch. He didn't want anything heavy-handed, dishonest or traditional or generic things you might expect. (Demon: Sally, will you m---, will you m---, will you mind if we didn't see each other any more? I'm, I'm really tired of you. In fact, you make me sick, you fat old cow.) Frank Spotnitz: I actually watched them again recently. I just thought they were so witty and so beautifully constructed. So much to say, so much cleverness and so entertaining, but not like the rest of the series. (Frank: I'm sorry I haven't read more of your books. Jose Chung: I'm sorry I had to cut you and your group out of my new book. Frank: You said you weren't going to write about - you cut us out? Jose Chung: I just didn't feel you were millenniumistic enough.) Episode 2 "Beware of the Dog" Airdate: 09/26/97 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Allen Coulter (Catherine: I believe in the point of the house. I really do, honey. But we've lived here for a year and we haven't exactly been racking up the Kodak moments. ) Megan Gallagher: In season 2, it was much more contentious with Frank. I suddenly had straight hair, which brought my character in a whole new direction! And as you see, the hair has stayed straight. It was a good season. And then I died of a horrible Ebola-like flu at the end. Episode 22 "The Fourth Horseman" Airdate: 05/08/98 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Dwight Little Megan Gallagher: (laughs) What can you do? I think Glen and Jim are awesome. But yeah, the show was going - it was trying to find a new direction in certain ways, and that can be rough on an audience to some degree. And I don't know, I don't know if it was wise to kill me. I was OK with being killed, by the way. I was really OK with it. Cos I didn't know where it was going to go. I just didn't know. And I don't believe you can - I just don't believe you can cling to things. You've got to deal with whatever's up next, and it can always be something better. Episode 23 "The Time Is Now" Airdate: 05/15/98 Writers: Glen Morgan & James Wong / Director: Thomas J. Wright (Catherine: We gotta give it to Jordan. Right away. I love you.) Megan Gallagher: The day, the last thing that we shot was a scene where I make this, you know, sacrifice, which of course any mother would make. Where I give the - we had a couple of vials of vaccine and I give one to my daughter. And I know I'm going to die. And it was so sad. I was kind of struck by the intensity of my own emotion about it, because I knew it was coming, I knew I was going to go and do other stuff, and I was cool with it. But it was really - it was sad. I was very, very emotional. Cos it was my family. And Brittany. What a sweetie-pie. She really made me want to have kids. She really did. I was in a kind of no-man's land about that, I think. And then I realized how cool it could be to hang out with a child all day. Because we did, and she was so fun. I just got a Christmas card. You know, we're still in touch. And Tom, I believe, directed that last one. And Tom directed so many for us, and he was great. So it was just this group. Tom Wright: I missed working with Megan. She was great. Very professional. Always knew her stuff. Very smart, you know. Savvy, knows the business, knows what you're talking about. We had a good time. And she loved the show, too. Chris Carter: Season 2, I'd say, was really Jim, Glen, Ken Horton, Chip Johannessen. They really took the show and I think wanted to see what they could do with it, and how they might improve it, boost the ratings, create opportunities that maybe were for success that they saw and I didn't have time to. Executive Producers Glen Morgan and James Wong were invited to participate in this documentary but declined.

Does anyone know whether there were many if any deleted scenes from all three seasons of Millennium? They are my favourite DVD extra and would definitely want to see them on the DVD box sets.