MILLENNIUM Season 2 DVD Reviews (1 Viewer)

[David_Blackwell]

S3 on June 14th- Excellent!

 

[Jonathan_Clarke]

I'm almost finished with Season 2 and I will buy Season 3.

IMO, the show does work better in Season 2. At some point during Season 1 I started thinking "Are there really THIS many serial killers?" It was right on the border of becoming formulaiac. Season 2 gave it an overall arc.

It's not perfect of course. The Poloroid killer could have lasted longer than one episode and I never really saw the point in splitting Frank off from Catherine and Jordan.
I definitely felt Lara Means was forced on the audience with a ready made catch phrase and an actress who was out of her depth.

But Terry O'Quinn really shines here. It's easy to see why he continues to work (recently on "Lost").

 

[Todd Terwilliger]

I didn't feel that way about the Lara Means character. I liked her and thought she added a different perspective, being someone else with a gift but with one different than Frank's.

 

[Jonathan_Clarke]

Wish I felt like you Todd. She just got on my wife's and my nerves every appearance.

Did Season 3 ever get into the Poloroid Killer after finishing season 2 it seemed clear that he was another member of the Millennium Group that went psychotic after his initiation. Many of the things he said to catherine echoed what Lara said to Frank and it would explain why the Group did not want to expose him. Also in 'Amanesis' the girl said the Poloroid Killer came and talked to her so he may have been a candidate then.


Or am I way off?

 

[Mike Graham]

Wow, Jonathan, interesting idea...

 

[TravisR]

EDIT: spoiler text didn't appear so I just deleted it.

 

[Kyle Smith]

That's a interesting theory, Jonathan. I had never thought of that before but it make perfect sense.

I have to be in the group that feels that season 2 is the best of the three. I almost gave up on the first season until Lamentation aired, which completely blew me away and renew my interest in the show. I didn't think it was bad per se, it was definitely well crafted, but always felt bland. I couldn't relate to Frank Black because he was ALWAYS right about the crimes he was investigating. I liked how Morgan and Wong made Frank a real character by giving him faults and crisis to deal with through out the season. They made the show much more interesting. It's too bad they didn't return for the third season. As it is, I pretend it doesn't exist.

It's also unfortunate that none of Morgan and Wong's theatrical work comes close to the writing they did for Millennium, The X-Files or The Others. Final Destination and Willard were fun but we all know they're capable of much more.

With all the obscure, failed shows popping up on DVD, I hold out hope that The Others will show up eventually. I seems that nobody ever watched it except me. I've seen it mentioned a couple times on this site but that's about it.

I'm going to watch my old tapes of the show to make sure I still like it and start a thread devoted to educating people about The Others, so that it may generate enough interest to warrant a DVD release.

 

[Mike Graham]

I wholeheartedly agree - especially since Jim Wong directed the X-Files' "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" so beautifully. If these two were given the right idea, they could easily make several genre classics.

 

[TravisR]

I didn't think anyone else in the world remembered The Others.

Final Destination and especially Willard aren't too bad. I could have lived the rest of my life without seeing The One though.

 

[Lloyd White]

Season 3 getting a bad rap, I say I have to disagree. It was such a heavy show, that during its first run, I just taped the episodes to watch later, after filling a tapes of 8 episodes a piece, I watched them back to back and could not stop watching them. It's a very high quality show all the way till the end, and deserved a 4th season (to at least make to the real Millennium).

 

[Brad Grenz]

Yeah. I kinda wish they'd return to television. I think their work really benefits from that kind of room to fully develop an idea. And I'd really like for them to have a chance to pay off their cliffhangers with another season. Millenium S2, Space: Above and Beyond and The Others all really leave you hanging at the end. And while they are pretty much responsible for everything that was good about the X-Files, they never got a chance to pay off their own story threads. They moved on and we got to watch Chris Carter fuck it up for another 5 years.

The sad fact is that M&W just don't have the Hollywood cache needed to get the stuff we're looking for made. They've made a pretty successful slasher mover, a crappy Jet Li vehicle and an esoteric remake starring Christian Glover. No one's breaking their door down... One interesting thing, I listened to the commentary on the first episode of Angel: Season 5 last week and Joss Whedon mentioned an episode of Space: AAB in connection to Rodney Rowland's guest appearance. Specifically he paid homage to Who Monitors the Birds for doing the whole mostly silent episode thing before him. So at least cool people know what the score is!

 

[David_Blackwell]

I love the Others. I taped every episode. I wish it would get a DVD Release.

 

[GuruAskew]

Is anyone else here starting to doubt that Season 3 will be released on June 14? The release is just over two months away and no online retailers are taking preorders. The official Fox website that revealed the release date in the first place now has no mention of it, their new release list for TV shows only goes through the next couple of weeks.

 

[TravisR]

Eventhough Fox's own TV site put up that date (and for a few other titles as well), a few days later they said the dates were incorrect and they removed them. It's good that Fox can't even get their own site right.

The link below only directly mentions The Simpsons having the wrong date but I would assume that it pertained to Millennium as well.

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/newsitem.cfm?NewsID=2823

If it makes you feel any better the booklets in Fox TV sets still list Millennium: Season Three as coming tentatively in June. I figure we'll see an announcement soon for either June or July.

 

[david_hu]

Kinda disagree about season 2. I felt the show went down the tubes when it seemed to be essentially turned into a second rate X-files.
I understand why Wong and whatsaname were given a bad rap on the DVD extras.
BTW, I got the Region2 3 in 1 boxset which had all three seasons of Millennium.

 

[JediFonger]

hate to bump old threads, but i luv this show very much (never saw much of the original airings due to schedule and busy lives, but because of DVD, i can enjoy it all!)

i've just finished the episode the mikado, which is basically Zodiac killer. even down to the symbol and crypto graphics, San Francisco, the year, the exact cases (cab driver, etc.) and so on. i related all of these because the film Zodiac is coming out soon. i believe this is about halfway through season2.

anyway, i'm in the camp that s2 went downhills. i started with s1 a few weeks ago and just couldn't stop until i finished s1. it was just so riveting and of course i couldn't stop there, had to know what happened. and if you're a XF you'll see MANY of the same guest stars from there on here, like pusher, tooms guy and so on. anyway, series premiere was OK but i felt the tone was definitely off because catherine had gone through so much with frank but to just let it all go and not work it out with him is just uncharacteristic of her. if her character is this way now, why didn't she leave the FIRST time anything strange happens? it's very inconsistent imho. and it's not like their marriage if failing, it was just too sudden.

then for the first 12 episodes (HALF of the seaon) they didn't do ANY EPISODES at all on serial killers. NONE at all. The Mikado was the first real ep that made it back to first season, back to FORM. i liked millennium BECAUSE it is a study about the nature of EVIL and how we can find good/hope from humanity by trying to stop evil. those were the themes/mythologies that were setup in s1. M&M's work is OK the first time around but after watching Chung's outer space and M&M's scripts for XF, it gets tiring. comedy has a difficult time for repeat viewing. i've never watched millennium season2 (only few minutes of s1 when it first aired) but i knew about M&M being handed the series and no one there to stop them. good writing is about revisions, all writers know that. if M&M was given 2much power, the result is a jumbled mess without revisions/edits/rejections. i bet their best works were scrutinized, edited and hammered around by the entire writing staff and carter&spotniz and so on. that's how one produces the best quality content, not just given free reign. i believe that's what happened to s2. free reign for little kidz who need control/editing over their own material. i didn't like the first half of the season at all. just too loose. i don't mind the changes myself, but i think it should be done GRADUALLY not instantly! it's just all 2 sudden. also felt like there were many filler episodes, like the curse of frank black. just feels like there's no POINT to many of these. EVERY SINGLE ep of s1 had a POINT and made it very clearly that this is a show about how depraved man's inhumanity to man is. you felt dirty after you watched it and it helped you contemplated on your own life. that's why i luv s1. s2's first 12 eps didn't give me that at all. i'm dozing off, bored out of mind just watching most of this stuff. this is just a Millennium fan watching s1 all the way through s2's e13 right now. but s13 is a return to form and i hope they keep it up from hereon. i luv the upgrades to 'command central' the new toys and stuff they get to play with now =D.

 

[TravisR]

I don't want to spoil anything for you but The Mikado is definitely not indiciative of the rest of the season. It's a great episode but there's not many S1-style episodes in the second season.

I think S2 kept building up to its finale. Over the course of the year, you see the impact that Frank's work has on life on his life and you see how corrupt the Millennium Group is (which is definitely not what Chris Carter and company intended when they started but I liked it). I think S1 was a lot of "We have to catch this maniac before he kills again". Don't get me wrong, I loved S1 but almost every episode was about f***ed up people doing f***ed up things and Frank stopping them. In my mind, S2 had more diverse stories.

And S3 has just as sudden of a change- it becomes like a cop show. Or in my mind, it's a cross between S1 and a cop show.

 

[JediFonger]

i don'd mind mythology building but do it like the way XF did it during season2, gradually. no RIGHT AWAY!!! =D.

 

[TravisR]

It defintiely blew me away too. The act where there's just music (don't want to spoil for JediFonger) and the end of the episode are some of the most unique things I've ever seen on television.

 

[JediFonger]

the season so far hasn't been stellar because of the way it was handled. again, i don't mind the change but HOW it was changed and how suddenly it was changed.

XF season2 changed as well, from season1's monster of the week. ya started to see more 'mythology' episodes, but they did so organically. scully wasn't gone in s2 premiere, it was done after duanne barry and so on. in millennium s2, s2's premiere ended at a strange place and left black out in the world. threw all that yellow "lighthouse" theme out. without a beacon in his darkness it can and *should* have gotten darker, but instead we have funny episodes? that is what doesn't jive/make sense. when you start to make light of heavy subjects, (the way M&M does it) makes it less compelling. while fine the first time around, the second and third viewings make you feel like watching amatuers at work. don't get me wrong i liked somehow satan got behind me and the allegorical eps, but stuff like jose chung doesn't inspire to go beyond literary masturbation. writing literate for the sake of being literate but doesn't facilitate higher quality stories. meh, just my 2 cents. still haven't advanced beyond mikado (seen satan behind me previously). zodiac is this weekend, so might not get to it at all.