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The Time is Now!

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Guest MSandt

No season 3?!!!   :crying_big:  That would have been a crime!  There is just too much amazing return of MLM to its subtlety.  And I thought it took the story of Frank Black/Job to the next level!

........i thank the heavens above several times per year that MM did not end with "THE TIME IS NOW". I know for a fact that if it had ended my appreciation for the show would not be as obssesively intense and wonderfull as it is.

      ...for me,S3 "redeemed" MM for me as a series when M&W thankfully left 1013.

Don't get me wrong. Season 3 was okay. And it's a masterpiece if you compare it to 9th season of The X-Files. However the finale (s3) never had impact on me. This whole Marburg-never-killed-anyone thing which they revealed in the beginning of S3 was a disaster. No episode (of any serie) has ever had bigger impact on me than 'The Fourth Horseman' & 'The Time Is Now'. I was about fourteen when I first time saw those episodes. They were aired during the same night as a 1hour 28min episode here in Finland and I was totally horrified after seeing it. The end of the world was so well done. And the fact that it came so suddenly without a warning was one damn smart decision.

And where they got that seventy victims? Hadn't it infected at least some village in China and some town in the northern America? Didn't the radio say that there were over 500 dead only in America? This kind of virus just doesn't suddenly stop. Its death rate was almost 100% and it was highly infectious.

So two reasons why season 3 shouldn't have existed in its current form - The way they handled the outbreak during that season was extremely poor and the finale was nowhere near the quality of s2 finale (although it was pretty good).

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  • 5 weeks later...
Guest Polaroid Stalker

Laura,

You said in one post that "A Horse With No Name" played during the scene where Mr. Lott was giving his "responsibility" speech.

I must clarify that "A Horse With No Name" was the song that played during Gordon Johnston's death scene where Helmut Gunsche (the ODESSA assassin) forced a gas hose down his throat and set him ablaze. I don't think any music was playing when Lott was speaking.

Furthermore, Lott's appearance was in "The Time is Now"--which is the best hour of TV I have ever seen.

Sorry to be such a nitpicker, but this is my life!

-- Stephen :Ouro_Large:  :Owls_Ouro_Large:  :Ouro_Large:

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Guest amnesic
I love this ep, and the vision sequence is one of my favourite pieces of TV.  As a critic one wrote of it, if this is jumping the shark then what a way to do it.  Personally, I think that Lara's visions are probably the most interesting expression of a psychotic break ever to appear on TV.  Not very accurate, given that psychotic hallucinations tend not to be visual, but it definetly conveyed the feeling of breaking from reality.  And its always great to hear Patti Smith on TV too....
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Guest rockville
Yes, I too view the Patti Smith-themed Lara Means breakdown in that episode as one of the greatest single moments in television history as well as in the context of Millennium. Beautifully done, really challenging the way TV is done these days. And yes, I am a Patti Smith fan, but that's not the point :)
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I'd just like to add to this discussion a quote, if I may.  

On December 8th, 1999 a National Public Radio broadcast during the Morning Edition program presented a news story entitled "Doomsday Predictions."  This broadcast represents one of a handful of times that NPR has referenced Millennium while discuss art and pop culture.  (A full description of the program, featuring more extensive quotes, is available at the Abyss.)  In this particular segement, NPR's Barbara Bradley chose to focus exclusively on Lara Means' plunge into insanity during "The Time is Now."  Patti Smith's "Horses" played in the background while the sequence was described and film scholar Mick Broderick was interviewed regarding its imagery...

"Ideas that were once relegated to sci-fi books are on primetime. The X-Files, for example, or another program, Millennium.  In a gripping eight minute sequence, one of the show’s main characters, [Lara Means], experiences an apocalyptic vision to the beat of Patti Smith's song 'Horses.'  Her vision careens through images of natural apocalypse, fires and hurricanes and floods, then lurches through scenes of man-made destruction, an atomic plume, black helicopters and SWAT teams, the scream of a monkey with Ebola virus.  'The sequence from Millennium is extraordinary.'  Mick Broderick works for the Australian Film Commission and wrote the book Nuclear Movies.   'It's a retelling of the book of Revelation and John's scriptural text while it's being transposed onto what’s current in the society, the apocalyptic fears.  You have images from Waco, atomic tests, there's hurricanes, there's earthquakes, material off the TV news.  It's essentially our daily lives that's being recast and retold to us as modern revolutionary mythology of the apocalypse.'"

While I believe that Bradley and Broderick's comments may be appropriate for the series as a whole they might be overstating the matter a bit concerning the images conveyed during this particular sequence.  Nonetheless, it's food for thought.

I've always considered Morgan, Wong, and Wright's music-driven sequence to be one of the most remarkable storytelling experiments dreamed up during their work on Millennium.  I was enthralled and pleasantly astonished by the sequence when I first saw it and it grabs me strongly still each time I view it.  Like Broderick, I would say that it's extraordinary.  There's nothing quite like it.  Lara Means was driven insane, and we all felt it as it happened while simultaneously seeing what it is that drove her there.  Millennium certainly stands proudly apart from your standard primetime dramas.  I've always considered this sequence, and others like it, to be brave attempts to prove that true.

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Thanks for the quote, Dix.  And you made good point about this sequence being experiemental.  I had seen anything on TV quite like that until this episode, nor have I seen anything like it since.  I think it is truly unique in the annals of television.  The only thing that I had seen that remotely resemble it, was a film the was released, about 2 years before MLM first aired.  The Lara vision is somewhat similar to certain visual/musical sequences from "Natural Born Killers."  I have mentioned this similarity before - I believe toward the beginning of this thread, and at the MoV, where there was a bit of a discussion on the topic.

However, I don't think anyone else has commented on this at TIWWA.  I was wondering if anyone else sees the similarities....?

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