New Mythology In Season 3

[vain68]

Quick question here after watching Collateral Damage; In Season II, we are clearly led to beleive that Watts and his family reside in the Seatlle area, as Frank is there during MNOC; however, here, we see Watts' family in what what seem to be the Metro-DC area (probably VA); so, did he too move back to the DC metro area after the Seattle climax of things?

-or did i simply miss something easy

Vv

[Guest OfRedEarth]

I think he moved to DC to keep an eye on Frank.

[The Old Man]

This is something I've never thought about before.

[Libby]

The kidnapping took place in Williamsburg, Virginia - Taylor is a student at William and Mary - so all the action took place around that area.

The last scene, of the Watts family, must have taken place a little while later, given that Taylor is mostly recovered, so there would have been enough time for her and Watts to travel back to Seattle.

That's not to say that the Watts family haven't relocated to the west coast by this time. It does get a bit more confusing in the last episode because if the Watts family still lives in Seattle then Frank must have travelled across the continent to their house. Maybe he used the 1013 Magic Transportation System - Mulder and Scully often did!

[The Old Man]

LOL!

[Guest Post - 2001]

Sorry for not returning to the discussion earlier! Been busy.

Again, I think the key thing is just because the demons became more literal, and the globe traveling aspects were added do not instantly make the show less complex, but added new complexities. For example, the group made more sense: if you were trying to combat evil towards the end of the century, wouldn’t you be looking for a bigger scope of power than the individual one on one threats that mainly were in year one? The new direction for the group brought in more of the religious complexities at the root of the show.

Indeed, if there was a theme to the season, it was a matter of trying to keep a sense of control in situations where the world is constantly working against that. Yes, season one introduced ambiguity in the evil early on, but it gave us mainly situations where evil was more combatable, more understandable than it was incomprehensible. Hence the static in the final of season two and the restoration to a more limited version of Frank’s gift in year three: he’d burned through and came out with more focus. By killing the Polaroid man, Frank effectively “broke” through to the other side: hence, why his gift took on new realms of perceiving evil. By breaking his own ethical code, he was given somewhat more insight, allowing him to have more of a perception of evil than merely man.

Furthermore, the more connected story line of the season provided chances for more complex story telling, for the paralleling of Lara Means to Frank Black’s journey, and amplified by the story added to Peter Watts. All three are good people searching for the answers they need, and Lara and Peter offer the alternate directions Frank needed to be careful of: Lara, who self imploded, and Peter, who allowed himself to step off from path he thought he was following. The show blurred the line between the past and present, between religion and science, etc.

It was no longer about that baby boy of his. It also finally introduced Frank to the absolute limits of his power. He may want his wife to believe that he can paint away the darkness, but in year two he ultimately can’t: his father will die, his family break apart, etc. The Catherine/Frank relationship did have an arc, but the arc that didn’t necessarily mean rejoining. It was about Frank’s refusal to let go of his need for control: that is why Catherine tells Frank that the way he feels about the group is the way she feels about him. His need for control blinds him.

About all I can do for now. Enjoy!

[Guest ModernDayMoriarty]

There is no doubt that S2 had many fine ideas but it executed them very badly in my opinion. The sense of dread and fear of S1 was almost completely lost. Despite being opened up to a new dimension of reality, Frank sees very, very little evidence of this overarching evil in this Season. Instead the season is clogged with ill-advised humour and often quite preposterous plots. The idea of Frank always needing control over his life is a good one but it is so rarely visited. Frank is important in very few of the Season's episodes as M+W spend more and more time focusing on Lara and the Group. The great cycle, the rock jouneying through space towards the yellow sun/house theme of the beginning is all but forgotten.

This was supposed to be a show about one man's struggle to find meaning in a world that seemed to have none. Too often, S2 abandoned Frank's viewpoint to concentrate on these others. Look at the care and attention lavished on producing the Frank-lite 'Owls/Roosters' and the slapdash last-minute effort that was 'Siren'. That latter episode should have been a major episode of the season with Frank nearing mental and physical breakdown because of his problems balancing the emerging sinister undercurrents of the Group with the need to keep his family safe. Basically it should have had the power of the earlier episode 'The Curse of Frank Black' which I think it was intended to be a sister episode to until it turned out so terribly.

Like TJ Wright says on the DVD, M+W had some great ideas and everyone seemed up for it - at first. But they seem to completely lose the plot after 'The Hand of Saint Sebastian'. Do a Peter Watts episode sure but nazis? And then to have they reprise it in the appalling 'Owls/Roosters'... criminal. Those two episodes were great to look at, had excellent scores but lacked any kind of credibility. Odessa were a ridiculous organisation and I cannot watch the scenes at Aerotech because they are simply too preposterous.

We had Darin Morgan dropping in to offer us the unusual but not terrible 'Jose Chung's DD' and the extremely poor 'Somehow, Satan got Behind Me'. There simply wasn't time for this kind of noodling. And then there were episode that were almost good but lacked depth. 'The Pest Hpuse' for example has a completely abysmal start and crawls along at a slow, silly pace with teen slasher in-jokes and villains with hooks for hands japes. And then in the final 15 minutes it wakes up and becomes a tense, interesting episode about how evil can come from the best of intentions, how the soul no matter how diseased is so integral to a man that he cannot lose it even to cleanse himself. There is 'Beware of the Dog' which is a silly sub X-Files episode for the first part with awful jokes until it suddenly turns into a fascinating study on the need to be possessed of and in touch with your own capacity for evil if you ever hope to combat it.

S2 is a huge wasted opportunity for me. Early good ideas dry up in favour of quests to find fabled relics and combat Nazis. The humour elements are clumsy and rarely welcome. There is the bizarrely pointless offering from Maher and Reindl - 'A Single Blade of Grass', 'Midnight of the Century' and 'Anamesis' are amongst my least fovourite of all Millennium episodes. There are too many episodes where Frank's involvement is periphral at best (19:19, The Hand of Saint Sebastian, Goodbye Charlie, The Pest House, Owl, Roosters, Anamesis, Somehow, Satan got behind Me). Of the remaining, many Frank centered episodes are handled badly past the first half of the Season (Siren, A Room with No View, The Time is Now). The new characters add very little for me, particularly Lara who I was forced to concoct various conspiracies around to glean any excitement from at all.

It could have been great. Alas, it wasn't and M+W's refusal to compromise on the colour, humour and in-jokes, along with a fundamental dislike for Frank Black (I can't see why else they first changed him to look more 'hip' and then practically ignored him) alienated the S1 writers to the extent they left or simply wrote about different topics to those M+W did.

[Guest ZeusFaber]

I entirely agree. Those are my thoughts of S2 entirely. After reading your old thread deconstructing "The Hand of Saint Sebastian", I find there is someone who does an excellent job of clearly and pointedly expounding on a strong viewpoint that I very much share. For that, I thank you.

[Guest casshern]

I'm new to this forum after about a 8 year absence in the community after the show was cancelled but I participated a lot back in the old days on a few boards. I've been reviewing the whole series thanks to the DVD sets for the first time since i originally watched them. I have to say my opinion has changed, espcially after watching the "making of season 2" on the DVD. In 97' I was a big fan and huge supporter of what S2 was doing and I really felt the season finale was amazing but troubling at the same time. Looking back on it now I really feel like Season 2 misfired and never got to say what it was trying to say in the beginning. You had some great episodes like the Curse of FB that really tried to foreshadow something dark and interesting over the horizon but religion took a front seat and it soon became this silly jumbled mess. Even rewatching the finale I was surprised by how much distaste I had for it now.

There were so many conspiracy episodes in S2 regarding shadowy religious groups, MLM group sects to the point it was turning into a less serious and more religious version of the Xfiles. I agree that it had some great ideas but it really just lost directing by the scond half of the season. It's a pity.

Watching the season 3 making of was very interesting. It was troubling to see how M&W kinda stomped all over what Chris Carter had envisioned and turned it into some silly strange religious nut of the week type thing. Again at the time I thought M&W were doing the right thing but in hindsight I really missed what season 1 had and s3 really tried to bring that back and make it more interesting. It would have been itneresting to see where it went if a S4 had been produced. Losing what the MLM group was and turning it into a cult was a bad idea and I would have liked to see what could have been. On the otehr had Carter has himself to thank for this as well. He allowed M&W to run his show and completly ignored what they were doing from what I can tell. Does anyone know if Carter and M&W are still on speaking terms after that? I noticed they were absent from the DVD.

[Guest ModernDayMoriarty]

I have no proof of this but purely on what is said on the DVD I think there is no bad blood from Carter himself but there probably is from M+W. I feel I must say at this point that we must not allow ourselves to fly from one post to another as a community regarding the merits of the Seasons. By this I mean only that critical evaluation and revaluation are always welcome and necessary but we must not forget the good that was done in the various seasons.

Chris Carter's overall contribution to Millennium is just as problematic as that of Morgan and Wong's in my opinion. I love S1 and it is still probably my favourite of all the Seasons but there were very marked problems with a show that Carter was running so closely. The DVDs make numerous references to how closely Carter was involved in everything on the first Season and it shows in the mood, feel, look and in how the stories pan out. But is that a good thing for a program that wants to succeed on TV? I would argue that Carter may be inspired at times but he has fundemental flaws that need to be complemented by a strong team to make his visions appeal to mass audiences.

Millennium's first Season is like a hidden treasure squirming to be released from a locked chest. There is so much potential in the character of Frank Black, so much mileage in the gritty world the shows presents, mystique from the Millennium Group, a human heart that is the family unit of the Blacks etc etc. Carter establishes all of these in his first 2 episodes, 'Pilot' and 'Gehenna'. But after setting these boundaries, he does not then expand on them until very late in the Season - in 'Lamentation'. In between we have many fascinating studies on evil but also a good degree of repetition and filler. Many episodes follow the format of Frank connecting with the criminal mind and rereating to his family for solace and warmth before foraging back out to do what has to be done. The Group are hardly even mentioned after 'Gehenna' and particularly in the first half of the Season, Frank's partners from the Group seem to just be people there to nod and agree with him. These problems can be traced back to Chris Carter. The DVD of Season One makes it clear that Carter was very, very vague when he explained to others what the Series was about. He worked closely ensuring everything fitted in with what he wanted to see and I think people like M+W found that difficult to swallow. It was very much a series written in Carter's own image - it told stories that matched up with his interests which unfortunately are rather narrow.

To explain this, look at the X-Files. Carter wrote a huge amount of episodes for that show and is credited with creating one of the most sucessful shows of recent times. However, he also gained a reputation as a rather 2-D writer. He seemed to only concentrate on 1 or 2 topics and write about them ad infinitum. He was interested in the mistrust of authority and abuse of power which formed the basis for practically all of the mythology episodes. However, it is as a writer of standalone episodes that he drew most fire because of their very variable quality and narrow focus. Carter only seemed interested in writing episodes that dealt with evil as a force that existed and inhabited or was personified in people. So many of his episodes are of evil killers who come back from the dead, killers or monsters that cannot die as evil never truly dies. His monsters always represent this idea of a greater evil that perpetuates itself. 'Fire', 'Young at Heart', 'Darkness Falls', 'Irresistable', 'The Host'... the list goes on and on and on.

So Millennium was caged by this limited focus. The rules set down in 'Pilot' became set in stone and for a long while there was little or no variation on this. This causes problems as many critics dislike Carter's Black and White views on the world and also cast suspicious glances at things like the yellow house and super-sylised version of reality that Carter was offering. From Frank's shabby clothes, his pitch dark basement, the fact he never smiled or showed much emotion of any kind... all this was viewed by many as being too polished, too self-consciously 'important'. S1 is mesmerising to look at on occasion, it has a wonderfully foreboding sense of dread and you can feel the terror and the sadness but it lacked warmth, felt too preachy to many and was far too narrowly conceived.

Morgan and Wong quit halfway through the first season and have stated in interviews readily available on the Internet that they found it hard to work on such a show. Carter's vision was of a dark, serious show and that was not what M+W were in the game for. They cared about quality and they were good at creating it as their work on the X-Files showed. It is a mark of the respect Carter had for their commitment and competance that he gave them S2 to work with. However, it is also likely that Carter simply had burned out as regards Millennium at this time. He has stated many times of his despair that Millennium never really took off, lamented on the DVDs that it should have been different, done different. He is someone who has confessed to never really watching the work of others in Sci-Fi and TV entertainment too much for fear of losing his own ideas. This is a tenat of people who believe in the genius of writing. That you should write for yourself, write what you would want to see and trust it is good enough for others to want to see. These people trust their own ability implicitly and don't want to be influnced by outside ideas. They don't want to feel like they are taking other people's ideas. The problem with this kind of pure writing is that it does tend to narrow your scope considerably and that is what happened with Carter on both TXF and MLM.

In the XF however, Carter had help and a more concrete vision to sell to people. TXF's first season has three principal writing teams - Carter himself, Morgan+Wong and Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Carter brought the original idea and characters but without M+W and G+G, the show would never have taken off in my opinion in anything like the fashion it did. M+W were able to bring wonder, the 'wow' factor into the show with a wonderful grasp of science fiction stories and also gave warmth to the bleakness on offer from Carter. G+G brought their superb technical skills to the show. After a few misteps as they worked out what kind of shows they were asked to write, they started to produce polished, technically excellent episodes - they had been writing for TV for years and knew how to make shows that flowed well in the time available. They were often maligned for not engaging with the supernatural enough but I always considered them very proficient writers - Gordon in particular is very skilled at writing 'human' scenes and episodes.

But Millennium didn't have that backup team in place. M+W were all at sea trying just to co-exist with Carter on a show they felt was too dark and narrow in focus. Other writers like Chip J had not found their voice yet writing flawed stories with interesting stories - 'Force Majeure' and 'Walkabout' for instance. Chip J has stated he found the pace very hard to cope with indeed and part of this must be down to his wanting to write non standard stories - his episodes are amongst the mpst adventerous of S1 and deviate from the template laid by the 'Pilot' more than most. So it was pretty much Carter's show for better or worse. He produces what is in my opinion a wonderful , thoughful experience that is sadly too underdeveloped to appeal far beyond people who really like his chosen themes (I do obviously).

Something had to change - Millennium would probably not have been allowed to finsish screening if S2 had been like S1. I therefore applaud M+W for their own vision; they knew Millennium need to make itself a more attractive program if it was to continue. Their sheer workrate is testament to how passionately they wanted Millennium to suceed and they produce some fine episode and excellent ideas. The Hero's journey in a circle to find the wonder of his hearth and home as if seeing it for the first time is a great idea for the series. It harks back to he work of TS Eliot and Little Gidding as Eliot realises that the answers and happiness he was searching for, he already had. But as I have said, they lose track of this and lose discipline - I suspect they became desperate when ratings started to fall. Again, I think problems of communication between writers was partially to blame. They need other writers to enforce their vision more forcefully - Chip J should really have made his case more strongly if he felt M+W were going wrong. Carter indeed should really have kept an eye on what was going on but I suspect he no longer cared at that point and only regained his interest when it looked like MLM might be cancelled.

Anyway, let's not be too hard on M+W. They made mistakes but so did Chris Carter. As you said, it is somewhat rich of him to swan off back to the big-time X-Files, make his film and then come back and complain. Where was he when MLM needed him eh? It is sad but that's life. People are people and they don't listen to each other and never will.