2x01 The Beginning and the End
Millennium (1996)
2x01 The Beginning and the End, written by Glen Morgan, James Wong and Michael R. Perry, directed by Thomas J. Wright.
A new season. Chris Carter is away and Morgan and Wong will produce the entire second season. Characters and stories become more quirky and even in the darkness we have glimmers of levity. And yet the Black Family tragedy is allowed to unfold.
Even though this continues the cliffhanger from last season's close, we see the differences immediately. Polaroid Man plays Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime" as he escapes with abducted Catherine. He can't do that: it's my getaway music. (See a clip in Stop Making Sense (1984)).
This is an excruciating sequence: Frank is just a few steps behind, missing them by seconds. His gift is not working well enough during his turmoil. And he has to care for Jordan. Good thing he left her in the car, right?
The Group is on the scene early. How did they know? We begin to suspect more secrets. Peter tells Frank that the stalker's "interest in you is because of our interest in you. That's all I can tell you right now". And that the Group is operating in an "unprecedented arena".
This is the episode where Frank crosses the line and the cord binding his marriage is snapped. When rescuing Catherine he kills the stalker when he didn't have to. She's grateful and wanted him dead, but with his knifing savagery Frank has killed a part of himself, a self-sacrifice. She asks him to move out and he does. He understands but is bitter.
The episode is something of a meditation on sacrifice. Frank is talking to Peter:
quote
Frank: I guess that deep down I knew this hour would come. Thought I did everything I could to stop this from happening. What did I overlook? What could I have done? And now, what must I sacrifice to have her back safe?
Then Peter relates some history we will revisit in later episodes, of finding a dismembered baby in a cooler. How he made a deal with God to sacrifice his own hopes for a son if he could find the killer, which he never did. About the pact with God:
quote
Peter: I'm still keeping up my end. I can't speak for who I made it with. But I'm starting to wonder if you can sacrifice one thing to get another. I know there's a price to be paid.
Even the psycho understands:
quote
Polaroid Man: You are so lucky, Cathy, to have someone who loves you. I think, no, I know Frank would die for you. You think? Cathy? Would you die for him? [...] If I told you, Cathy, that I know that Frank will know it is all true, would you die, be beheaded, for your witness to the word of – God? So that your little daughter, your beautiful little daughter... Would you die for God then?
Beheaded: the death of St Catherine of Alexandria.
At the end:
quote
Catherine: I feel like you lost something. Sacrificed – something, for the safety of Jordan and me. And I need time. You need time, and distance, to know if we can ever get it back again.
We fear the yellow house, once a symbol of hope, will become one of sorrow.
Notes:
The stalker is Doug Hutchison, memorable as the awful guard in The Green Mile and as Tooms in The X-Files.
While her mother is missing Jordan sees angels in the bedroom. (We don't). They vanish when she returns.
Peter has three daughters. No son.
First appearance of the Millennium countdown clock on Frank's computer.
First appearance of Dicky Bird and Roedecker, Group hackers. They seem goofy, but maybe quality geeks are hard to find.
Roedecker calls Soylent Green (1973) the "last great American film" (ouch) and makes Frank's computer passphrase "soylent green is people".
Like everyone in this series the psycho knows Revelation.
Struggling with Frank for the knife, he says "You think you know me, Frank, But you don't them". We can guess who "them" might be.
Finally, we seem to be done with the opening epigrams featured in every episode of season one. Here we open with Frank after the fight, bloody and holding a gun, looking up at a two-tailed comet. His thoughts, envisioning an asteroid field deep in space:
quote
In number, there is one for every life which ever was, or ever will be. And like most lives, they wait for a moment, the moment, when it will be sent on its journey back toward the yellow sun.
Approaching the sun brings definitive change. It will never again be the same.
Appearing in our skies, it is believed to be the prophecy of extraordinary. The birth of kings. The death of empires.
After centuries, or millennia, the journey must end.
Perhaps smothered by its own dust, the dark, soulless body continues eternally through space and time.
It may disintegrate and crumble into inconsequential rubble. Or it may be lost forever, crashing, burning, into the yellow sun.
And as I look into the sky and it looks back on me, I want to know, which am I? I need to know. Is this the beginning of a journey – or the end.
