1x14 The Thin White Line
Millennium (1996)
1x14 The Thin White Line, written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, directed by Thomas J. Wright.
quote
A man's past is not simply a dead history... it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.
-- George Eliot
This is a hard one for Frank, taking him back 20 years to an encounter with a serial killer that left other FBI agents dead and Frank with a knife scar on his palm. It's happening again, although the killer is still in prison.
Young FBI Frank looks much like Millennium Frank, with slightly longer hair. Young Frank carries a gun. I suppose we don't see the scar again.
This episode begins a dark path for Frank. He wonders if he shouldn't have just executed the killer back then, saving lives in the future. Which is what Bletcher would have done, and does do in the end: "Maybe in this case it's better just to end it. Here. Now".
Frank waking up in the night:
quote
Frank: I've been questioning myself on my actions. We think we're doing our job putting these guys away. All we do is put them in jails and prisons. We're hiding them from sight.
Catherine: You've taken away their ability to harm any others.
Frank: You think so? Four people have died because of my inaction.
Catherine: Your inaction?
Frank: Twenty years ago I could have destroyed a cancer. Instead of killing it, I allowed it to spread.
Catherine: Richard Hance. That cancer was a man under your custody. You could no more kill him than you could kill Jordan or me. Frank, I believe in the goodness that's in you. You have to find a way to believe in it again.
We are coming to a time when Frank goes the other way and it costs him. Maybe that's the "thin white line" of the title: not just the scar on his palm, but a moral line.
Visiting the serial killer in prison has become a common trope, but it is done well here. Jeremy Roberts has worked a lot, although I don't remember him from anything else. He says they keep the fluorescent lights on to torture him: that 60 cycle hum, which I understand completely.
And yet, he says "For every second these lights burn, that tells me that's another second that he's out there. That's not murder -- that's love". In the last scene, the lights are finally turned off, which I thought was Frank's gift to the killer.
This time I noticed he turns his face to the mattress and sobs.
