TEOTWAWKI is much better than the season double opener, with a solid premise regarding the Y2K bug. Hollis doesn't annoy as much here as well. I get that without any of the technology in place chaos would ensue, people doing as they please, without laws and morals and you won't be able stop anyone without guns, but that doesn't really explain why the student kills all his friends. I do like it though. I wonder if there's a film about this playing out, that'd be interesting.
3 Reviews
Would have made a better series finale.
corbettc-232599 July 2022
A definite improvement over the two-part opener but I think the show should have waited and used the storyline of the Y2K bug for the series finale. It certainly would have been better then the serial killer of the week Manhunter rip-off that we got.
after the collapse
quinoble18 July 2021
Warning: Spoilers
After S2 culminated in the dual apocalypse of a world-engulfing viral pandemic and the final disintegration of Frank Black's family in the magisterial finale, "The Time Is Now," Glen Morgan and James Wong departed, having created one of the greatest seasons of TV of the last forty years, and Chris Carter returned to oversee the show.
He tried to recapture the feel of S1 and go back to the days when "Millennium" was an atmospheric crime procedural, but as he found out, you can't go home again. In S1 Black could always return to the yellow house and the loving embrace of his family; in S3 Catherine's gone, the yellow house just a memory. The apocalypse he feared and fought has happened.
Consequently the show feels colder, it's missing something vital, even its reason for being. If Black's family has been irrevocably sundered, if he's no longer desperately battling with all his might to keep the evil he sees in his visions from consuming his yellow house and all he loves, then what's "Millennium" really about?
In his first script for the show since S1's "Lamentation," Carter struggles with this question, and he doesn't seem to find an answer. What he comes up with is a very conventional procedural, albeit with some interesting supernatural touches (the voiceovers about the nature of evil that open and close the episode are a typical Carter trademark). The ideas explored in the script don't cohere--it's a mishmash of the Y2K bug, school shootings, and paranoid survival militias, each of which would have taken a whole episode to develop fully. Thrown together into one plot, it becomes a mess.
The marvelous atmosphere of brooding, incipient menace that pervaded S1 is gone. What remains feels flat and dull. At one point I noticed an obvious plot hole (somehow a suspect breaks into Frank Black's hotel room despite having no way of knowing where it is or even who Black is) and I realized the show had lost something crucial.
No doubt there were such holes in the first two seasons, and I overlooked them, carried along on the magical suspension of disbelief created by the showrunners' supreme artistry. That magic is gone.
Carter tried to go back to the S1 well and found it empty. What he should have done was start the third season off where S2 ended--with Frank and Jordan Black wandering the post-apocalypse, trying to survive--and hand the production over to Chip Johannesen, writer of some of the best and most surreal episodes like "Force Majeure" and "Luminary", and a showrunner who really understood what "Millennium" was about. Then we would have had a season 3 that was the equal of the first two.
Unfortunately, we have to make do with the S3 we have; the later episodes, I am told, improve considerably. But it's still tough to watch and not wonder what could have been.
He tried to recapture the feel of S1 and go back to the days when "Millennium" was an atmospheric crime procedural, but as he found out, you can't go home again. In S1 Black could always return to the yellow house and the loving embrace of his family; in S3 Catherine's gone, the yellow house just a memory. The apocalypse he feared and fought has happened.
Consequently the show feels colder, it's missing something vital, even its reason for being. If Black's family has been irrevocably sundered, if he's no longer desperately battling with all his might to keep the evil he sees in his visions from consuming his yellow house and all he loves, then what's "Millennium" really about?
In his first script for the show since S1's "Lamentation," Carter struggles with this question, and he doesn't seem to find an answer. What he comes up with is a very conventional procedural, albeit with some interesting supernatural touches (the voiceovers about the nature of evil that open and close the episode are a typical Carter trademark). The ideas explored in the script don't cohere--it's a mishmash of the Y2K bug, school shootings, and paranoid survival militias, each of which would have taken a whole episode to develop fully. Thrown together into one plot, it becomes a mess.
The marvelous atmosphere of brooding, incipient menace that pervaded S1 is gone. What remains feels flat and dull. At one point I noticed an obvious plot hole (somehow a suspect breaks into Frank Black's hotel room despite having no way of knowing where it is or even who Black is) and I realized the show had lost something crucial.
No doubt there were such holes in the first two seasons, and I overlooked them, carried along on the magical suspension of disbelief created by the showrunners' supreme artistry. That magic is gone.
Carter tried to go back to the S1 well and found it empty. What he should have done was start the third season off where S2 ended--with Frank and Jordan Black wandering the post-apocalypse, trying to survive--and hand the production over to Chip Johannesen, writer of some of the best and most surreal episodes like "Force Majeure" and "Luminary", and a showrunner who really understood what "Millennium" was about. Then we would have had a season 3 that was the equal of the first two.
Unfortunately, we have to make do with the S3 we have; the later episodes, I am told, improve considerably. But it's still tough to watch and not wonder what could have been.
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