S01 E08 - Probing Deep Dark Corners

On this latest episode Dylan is joined by Artfully Liam to look at the expanded universe of Chris Carters Millennium. First up they look at the 2015 comic book sequel to the series and then they discuss the documentary 'Millennium After the Millennium'.  

Artwork provided by Artfully Liam https://www.instagram.com/artfullyliam/

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Hello, Dylan here. Just before we jump into this episode, I just wanted to say this episode was recorded in a pub. As such, there is some external noise. I've done my best to get rid of it all, but the quality of the audio isn't quite as high as it normally is. Do not adjust your sets. Liam, welcome. Well, afternoon to the audio listeners of the general Too Hot for Time at VV annex. It's a wonder, it's a delight to be here. I apologize for anything that I'm probably going to say in the next 90 minutes, which puts you off humanity, but uh it's really a delight to be here. So today we're going to be looking at the expanded universe, the expanded media of Millennium. Millennium was an American television series created by Chris Carter, the X-Files Phone, which aired on Fox from October 25th, 1996 to May 21st, 1999. The series follows the investigations of ex-FBI agent Frank Black, played by Lance Henrickson, now a consultant with the ability to see inside the minds of criminals working for a mysterious organization known as the Millennium Group. So, presumably, you're a big Millennium fan, or you wouldn't be here. Well, yeah, absolutely. As much as you're uh as you're tasting coffee and scampy fries is uh anything to draw even the most ardent of Millennium fans in. I I love this. This is my jam. And I thought to myself, who better to probe the niche dark corners of a once forgotten and terribly underrated television series than the uh corridors of Tsuha TV. So it's seen the perfect player. Excellent. Well, look, I'm glad that we've uh had to jump into it. But before we jumped into it, I had to jump into the show itself because it was something I was aware of. So I think I've definitely seen the pilot before. Okay. Back in my murky youth, I get I used to go to uh like a local group and meet up of fans, right? And we'd gather in a function room above a pub. They'd show us like rare treats, and inevitably at the time, a lot of that was stuff that was on in America that wouldn't reach the UK for six months to a year. That it's like the eight months before we got to see what's thought. So I'm pretty sure as a 12-year-old, and I think it was it was the strip club moments right at the beginning that that uh stirred a memory from 12-year-old. Dark in loved it. So I had to jump in and watch some choice episodes to just sort of get a feel for the universe of it before I looked at anything beyond the TV show. But presumably you've seen it all, love it all. I've seen it all. Um, yeah, I mean, what can I say about Millennia? We'll get into it, but it's I I do I understand your perspective from Eagle, because Millennia is effectively here from the discount of you know, 30 years on in 2026, is practically a forgotten kernel corner, an annex of the American television landscape. And it's amazing to me that it is, because it's such a progenitor in many ways of a lot of modern television. Things like Breaking Bad, David Fincher's Mind Hunter, Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story, that sort of visceral kind of uh take on uh on serial killers and supernatural and the occult and procedural television, even the way down to Jerry Brooklyn CSO iPhone choice of Mark Tipper. There's so much that's an antethodist of today's television in millennia. Yeah. And it's such a crime damn shape that it's not readily available for people like yourself. You the bop sets on DVD are extraordinary expensive on uh the bay that is referred to as Ernest. There you can't get it on Blu-ray, it's never been released off Blu-ray due to our load of issues which I'll solve the game through later. It's never been put on streaming, right? And not for want to try it by various parts of these adjacent I found choice. It is a tremendously forgotten television series. And for me, that's not only part of its tragedy, but part of its allure, because it seems like you have to really dig this out. But if you do, my god, it's it's rewarded. Yeah, I I mean it is that era of television. Like I think if you're a sci-fi fan and grew up in that era, whether you watched it or not, you'll have some memory of it being around, being talked about in the genre press. But to you know, the average person, uh not we, they will have no memory of it whatsoever because it's just it was on in the UK probably once or twice and then it was gone. Well, I I generally introduce it in conversation when I talk to people about it. As I'd say, you know, everybody is aware of the X-files. Everybody loves the X-files. Yeah. Uh again, it stirred in memory for particularly generation. It was seminal. Uh, I think people underestimate how much Chris Carter 1013 collocks has changed the television landscape in the early days of the night. And a lot of that was due to the fact that um as we approached the millennia, ironically enough, there's a very much human instinct for closure and a desire for revelation and kind of context. There was a lot of unanswered questions, and people kind of started to look heavenly skywards for revelation and answers. And so that vote for mysteries and myths and folklore, it came around again. And unlike its sister shot, Millennium, uh, a lot of the X-Files' coded success, in my opinion, was that it married that classic folklore, that classic supernatural tales, with a very host moonlighting, where they won't play uh relationship between the two leagues. Millennium didn't have that. Millennium is a lot more uh mature in many ways, it's a lot more measured, it's a lot more uh methodical in its approach. Whereas it has the trappings of procedural crime investigative television, yeah. The creative letters she that was afforded to Chris Carter host of success in the X-Fire, yeah, meant that this was released onto an unsuspecting of improving myself as a young man in the early 1990s. And I think it it it shows a sort of creative frissard that he was allowed scope and a breath and a depth to develop ideas that I don't think, honestly, I don't think you'd be allowed that freedom until it is today. No, but also like if he'd had pitched Millennium before the X-Files, I don't think he would have gone away with it. No way. Um it's it's such a darker version of the Chris Carter universe that I just don't think I don't think anybody would have picked it up. It's only because the X-Files took episodes and seasons to go to those places that they proved it sort of could work. And I I it's very much, and Chris has set on record that he was very much influenced by David Fincher's 1995 Seminal Movie 7. Yeah, there's a lot of that, especially in that first episode. You know, I think that they actually hired the assistant DOP, the director of photography, for that pilot. It's astonishing. The palette is so grainy and rain so it is, it is again, it's astonishing. I don't think it would have been allowed on television uh prior to the X-Files, and I think that even a few years post its release, I don't think Chris Carter's name had the heavyweight influence in television circles that it did when the X-Files was at its zenith. Yeah. And so for that, for me, there's something very pure and very artistic about Hellenium, is that it seems to be immediately tapping into something that Chris was preoccupied with telling, at least in its early stages, there's very little genre traffic to it. Yeah. So absolutely. But we'll get into it. Yeah. So the first thing we're gonna look at today is Millennium, a five-issue comic book series published by IDW from January to August of 2015, based on the TV series of the same name, obviously. The series was written by Joe Harris with artwork by Colin Lorimer. IDW is a name I'm familiar with. But I wanted to have a look at what IDW were doing in 2015. Yeah. And they are very much the place, they do a lot of original titles, but they are very much the place to go if you have a franchise that that has an expanded universe worth exploring. So a couple of titles that they had going for them at the time included Airwolf, Andre the Giant, Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Edward Scissorhands, A Fly, Ghostbusters, Judge Dread, Miami Vice, Orphan Black, Star Trek, multiple iterations of Star Trek, Transformers, and the X-Files. So some of those like started life as comics, some of them sprawled out into television, into films, but ultimately there is a spin-off world for all of those things that exists and has a home at IVW, which I think is fucking brilliant. It's amazing. And I again, the landscape there, we're looking at 2015, 2014, and a lot of these, we've we're far enough away from that telefantasy software like Hulk Boom of the late 1990s. Yeah. That a lot of these properties have been dormant for several years. And as we've seen in multiple fandoms, namely the the time world that we're showing up then, uh, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. And it had moved far enough away for these properties to commercially violently, and for people's memories to be so rose-tinted. And yeah, you talked you talked on it briefly there. Joel Harris had enjoyed tremendous success uh with relaunching the X-Files, season 10 of The X-Files, which is presented as a 26 comic-issued series in the vein of a novel series far and on cancellation of the original one. This was prior to revival from A Battle Chris Carrier in 2016. So to our intent and processes at this time, uh, this was the unritable continuation of the original Inventions of Mobile Scholars. And it's the success of that that allows, I believe, IGW and Joel Harris to go off narcissists in the 1013 universe, such as Millennium. Yeah. Because it was convinced even a short would be financially violent. Absolutely. So 15 years after the Millennium event was supposedly adverted, Millennium follows former FBI profiler Frank Black as he's drawn back into the orbit of the mysterious Millennium Group. Frank has tried to distance himself from the darkness that once consumed his life, but a string of unsettling events, including the release and death of a serial killer connected to the group, forces him to investigate again. Along the way, he reunites with FBI agent Fox Molder, who becomes entangled in a growing conspiracy involving demonic forces, hidden cult activity, and signs that the apocalypse may never truly have been prevented. As Frank pursues the resurging Millennium Group, he discovers his estranged daughter Jordan has become deeply involved with the organization and has inherited psychic abilities similar to his own. Their investigation leads them from Washington, DC to Seattle, where supernatural manifestations intensify and the demonic entity, Lucy Butler, re-emerges as a central threat. Frank, Mulder, and Jordan are ultimately forced into a confrontation with both the group and the forces manipulating it, culminating in a battle over Jordan's powers and humanity's future. Although the immediate danger is contained, the story ends with the suggestion that the struggle between human evil and supernatural darkness is far from over. So does comics feel like the natural place for the series to go at this point? Because it's a strange one. Millennium is very much a visual show. Even down to the it was so innovative in small dramatic flourishes and things were it's elaborated like Frank Black's digits of seeing inside the mind of the killer. And those are presented, and bear in mind we're talking late 1990s television, as very fast-cut, hallucinatory, strippy, LSD sort of interjections into the narrative with five-picked kind of october intonations. Seeing that translating to the Prince of Hague, it's very much a thought at the time and natural estaphalation of that. Harris and Laura might do some wonderful things with it. They tend to soak individual large panels, it's very much red and bold imagery, bold colours, as opposed to the procedural train, which are very much soaked to the monoclonal tiny palette of the show. So yeah, I think that they really make the goods of the media as it was presented to you to the show's benefit. And what why do you why did they wait so long before jumping back into the universe? Well, the character had appeared elsewhere beforehand, the flat flag. So I mean I touched on it briefly. So Joel Howard had enjoyed tremendous success with the X-File season 10. And midway through that year, a two-part halfway issue story, so bear in mind with 16 pages per issue, 16 pages, two six two issues was pretty much equivalent to about a 42-minute episode on television. Right. And they done a one shot across two issues called Immaculate, which was about where a million scholarly investigates uh the mysterious problem of an abortion. Right. Discover that there is more supranatural and folklore that's not at play that they might immediately assume. And that the open the cold open uh of second issue features the return of our favourite criminal profiler, uh FBI agent Frank Blatt, as played by Lance Hebertson. And he's reintroduced in a wonderful way. Lorimer was carried over with Joe Harris from the ex-File season 10 to the millennium five issues. And uh her reintroduction of Frank is wonderful. I can see it in my mind's eye where the emotion they're talking about, building all the same, well, they need somebody with special accessibilities and this stuff. And then you see a full panel uh of the reintroduction of Frank, uh Eddie Schulger's quarters. And instead of having the actual titles that you have for television, they just have a single uh single bar at the end of the page with the X-Fozos. Funnily enough, in the Millennium version of that, we have a similar thing with the R barred snake, yeah. Which, as listeners who may want to delve into the live or extended world, would realize it's actually the symbol of the Millennium group and itself. It was for many sort of things uh in the denominators store. So, yeah, making great visible use in the medium. And X-Files and Millennium have history, right? They do. I mean, this character was actually very vocal when he launched Millennium in October 6th. He didn't want it to be. And this is pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is pre-kind of crossover pollination of the Arrowverse. Uh, he didn't want it, he emphatically rejected that he did not want a shared universe. He wanted Millennium to be its own show, at least in the beginning, he wanted it to be almost devoid of supernatural elements. There was some question you yourself have seen in the pilot about whether Frank's gifts is psychically nature or just some vendor criminal insult, yeah, that evolved over the parts of the three sox very much wanted Millennium to be on its own. You want it to be honestly a straight show, and as the series developed, and a multitude of factors, shall we say the uh involvement of the network, a desire to marry horse with its sister show, uh let's even say perhaps I don't know, ratings that were falling beyond what pale of what Fox expected beyond that initial island. First, then they very slowly introduce the X-Res universe into millennials. Whereas a first season episode of Lamentation, which was a seminal-looking show, which uh featured a wonderful twiny scene where Frank back passes uh two very familiar-looking FBI agents on the staircase, one with Filey Red there and one with a lasonic dead hand smile, which were actually played by David DePoffinny and Julian Ernest and stuff covers. Nice. But then that evolves, and in the second season, one of the ex-Files' most infamous for one of the reasons, writes it, a guy called Darren Morgan, who did these wonderful kind of irreverent satires on the industry, the format. Uh he wrote an episode called Jose Chun's students labor fellas, which is a very thinly veiled parody of many things, chiefly amongst them or Church of Scientology, but it's a tremendous episode. It's one of Millennium's press, but the character of Jose Chun himself was a mistake. So yes, right, okay. Um so his appearance in Millennium totally works with the product and comes up with one of the most famous phrases uh of Millennium, which is where he turns sternly to Low Sanders and then says, don't be dark, right? A phrase we could all learn from. So how does this comic pick up from the end of the series? So Millennium ended rather ignominiously and and truly before the actual turn of the real Millennium. It ended in May 1991. There is a larger story to this, ironically, the season was primarily cancelled due to the intervention of what Chris Carter. Really? Chris Carter wanted to launch a his new product, his new baby, uh, in the fall of that year in a change in Fuss network, but wanted a slightly more lighter, fussier uh lineup, especially that on a Friday night, which is where Millennium and the X-Files before us. Uh uh, he wanted to launch uh an adaptation of a property called Harsh Rel. Okay. Uh, with the wonderful Millennium alumni when onto you lost at Way John Locterio 2. And he wanted to launch that as his new baby, as his new product. Uh, he was really excited about missing uh co-adziptic disease attract spotted. Uh, unfortunately, they got to a point where they thought they wanted to travel with their eggs in the basket of that, and it became necessary for them. Of course, they didn't really want to dilute their time as they had due when millennium had originally launched, and they were basically involved in the part cancellation of Millennium. Right. And I think if you watch the last few episodes of season three, you can see certainly thematically the writing was on the wall there. It is a tremendous shame because I think that that executive producer, Chip Joe Hanson, who worked on season three, was actually gearing some of what would have been a great complaint for a final year of the show. But to spin it back to your original question, Frank's journey ends in the last episode of season three entitled Goodbye to All That, where he discovers that his former employers in the Millennium Group were at least partly involved in attempting to embark upon an apocalypse of their own creation. Right. And marrying two narratives transformed the show, i.e., the apocalyptic predilections of the Millennium Group and the investigation of serial killers, it's revealed that the Millennium Group is in part trying to manufacture serial killers to legitimise their own political existence in the FBI, and so that they can function and move towards their own goal. Frank is understandably horrified with this and takes his daughter out of school, his uh eight, nine-year-old daughter, and they effectively go on the run as fugitives to the new light again. The final shot of the series is Frank's Cherokee Red Jeep spinning off in the distance over Sunset Hill towards a new and uncertain future. Much unlike the ending of Block to Here in 1989 by Sebastian McCoy wandered over the hill. But so here, him and his daughter along the strange, although ultimately she does show up. Yeah. So it it's moved the character on, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And you pick up some 14-15 years of in real time, Frank Back is now a stranger's daughter, who at least in part blames him uh and the Millennium Brute, which is an interesting thing, but we shall talk to that. Uh, for the death of her mate's other Catholic, yeah, who actually died the conclusion of the second season of the Millennium, and she blames Frank, at least in huge part, for the death of her mother and for the events that unfolded over the course of the three year series. That estrangement uh and the dynamics that are played out for that are a huge part of Paratal's five art series. It's interesting because Millennium, for as much as it investigates serial colours, supernatural, apocalyptic prophecy, and very Fringe of camera associated with that. Millennium is effectively a very different show through each of its three seasons. Right. And that is primarily due to the fact of production issues beyond its control during the first season. And this is incredible when you consider that Russell T. Davis and Bad Wolf had trouble banging out eight episodes a year of Group J. But in that first year of Millennium Dillards, people listen to some podcasts, 1013 Productions produced 22 episodes of Millennium, 24 episodes of the X-Files, and a two and a half hour feature film, X-Files Fight the Future. That's in one production year. You yourself working television production. I can only imagine you from a production standpoint, as you can imagine rock was being produced at that year. It's wild. At different times, that's astonishing. They almost had a crazy breakdown. So at the end of the first season, Chris Carter enlisted his long-term producer associates, Gwen Morgan and James Wall, to take over the reins of the show. Millennium then enjoyed a 23-episode second season at their home, which became a lot more preoccupied with the apocalypse of profiting. More than one departed for show at the end of a second season, which ended with a worldwide play, playing with results of huge amounts of the world population, a burst of static and apocalyptic distress called. Now that you may think, Dylan, could be a serious finale, but you'd be fucking wrong. Because Fox, against the old odds, commissioned it for a third and final year, and wanted it to be built back more of a procedure, which is a bit difficult when you've decimated half the world's population. So Millennium then re-invents itself to high-hour two in the third year, becoming a weird mixture of FBI procedural, it's some work for the FBI. Right. And uh the general reintroduction of slightly opaque and elliptic deliverance rule. Why do I mention this when talking about the real history? Well, poor old Joe Harris on 2015 had to effectively marry three different versions of the same form. Cohesently rattle them on in a whole new story, make it attractive enough for casual viewers that were related by the exfiles public, and bring a whole new audience in. And to be honest with you, I think he does the best fucking job that he could have done. Because it is a marriage of all three different versions of millennia. Um but it also gets ex-files are fans over because, from lack of a better term, fentat from planning for this five-episode mini-series is none other than special agent Fox Holger of Jason Cosmic. Yeah. So how does he fit into it? Well, I've just talked about making things open and making things transparent. The miniseries opens with special agent Fox Holder, the perordia of one serial killer called Monty Cross. Right. And now Monty Cross was featured in the original run of the X-Files in one line of dialogue in the pilot episode. Right. Where they mentioned casually of Scully's introduction that Mulder was responsible for getting Monty Cross set down in 1988 as a result of his penis multi-hall murder. Yeah. It's a throwaway line of dialogue. It's one line of dialogue with Joe Harris, Stratellates, to launch an entire new spin-off version of a spin-off show that was never intended to be connected to the X-Files universe. Yeah. That's one hand. Hell of a trend general sort of late star. I'm here for it. But it works. Yeah. Mongolism plots is hearing. Strangely enough, the role on the board thinking of a FBI agent turning up, talking about apocalyptic party, serial killer imagery, and a man whose things preoccupation is a little green men and hunting his abducted sister. Not really thinking that this man is the uh primary force of trust and logic to be uh recommended on. Commodity crops walks free. And that's where special agent Front Black got to stir. And do they make a good team? Yeah, it's it's amazing because whilst Fred Black is a very different, and Joel Harris captures Large Hemis and taking that out to melt. Fred Black is a very different character to mold or the model stoly Decoffney and some dynamic is a huge part of why the X-Files success. Yeah. Uh the X-Files has got a huge fat base, which is very diverse, but there's a huge part of that fat base that are shippers that just wanted Molder and Stollies to get it on. Well, that was the mainstream appeal of it, wasn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. It was the it was the Sibyl Shepherd Bruce Police Moonlight that making a force again. It's part of the reason why the show succeeded. Fred Blank is a very different character. He's much more subdued, he's much more melancholy by necessity. Coming into a media series in 2015, you were dealing with a man who's left the FBI, had a nervous breakdown, been estranged to his border, lost his wife to a plane, remote his former employers were in charge of orchestrating a plane, but uh wiped out what it turns out was just the last part of the Seattle outbreak, but originally you'd think it was made world. Yeah. And uh Henrikly responsible for trying to engineer apocalyptic entire. Naturally, he's not in the best manifest state of mind when the City Francis. So Moldova is a great counterforce of Frank's kind of slightly dower and the silent delivery. Yeah. And they do, they make a great thing. You can actually hear Coffee and Henrik's in the small delivery. Yeah. And what do you think about how Frank White is handled in this? I think that when you consider the in-universe devolution, it's actually a very probably accurate extrapolation of where Frank was towards the end of season three. While Arch Henderson has gone on record saying he always liked the original Chris Carter portrayal of Frank Blackness, it's very cool, farms, and detached. So you're all mobs looking at one of these kind of Sergio Leone-es kind of bunfire white into town, so salty issues, and leaves again, you know, the mysterious man in black. But it's very necessity. The in-universe uh evolution of Sarkish really blew that, like in the third season. Yeah. And I think what Carter, Johansson, and M. Horton, the producers on the show in that last year, did was marry the two visions together in a way that Hendrixon found it much more happy and creative. And actually, he developed his own strike kit in that last year. Uh, the wonderful Claire Scott, who played FBI agent Emma Hollis, who effectively is Frank's it's a weird hybrid of Dana Stully and almost a protege. So while it's devoid of that sexual attention, yeah, it's very, very much more englosing for me in that Emma Hollis almost takes his son of a daughter goal. So watching how Frank evolves in this is five issue miniseries and deals with the estrangement from Jordan, his Goethe, uh, is one of the primary motivations and motors of this story. In many ways, equal to the supernatural threat that on Bowl Submonty Quats. Yeah. And I think that's one of the key successes that Harris takes. He's taken that father-daughter relationship and behind it the heart of the story, and that is what makes it relatable to people who yourself might not necessarily be versed in apocalyptic head types. The story's an interesting one, isn't it? Because it's it doesn't feel, at least to me, like it's trying to set up we're gonna just continue this forever and ever in a comic. Yeah, absolutely. And it works on a base level of like this is an interesting enough story if you don't know the series in and out. But I guess there's probably more mythology there that I'm not I'm not aware of. Absolutely. And I think what Harriet did, uh, and there are some wonderful, wonderful little nods in there that you know even you might not be aware of. So, as I mentioned, you touched upon earlier, Chris Carson is emotionally very resistant about making it share of June Guides for the export. By the end of the second season, Margaret and Watt have got uh, you know, Frank Frack, sometime ally, sometimes faux millennium group member Peter Watt discovering a discarded packet of Morley cigarettes. He ran favoured by the famous cigarette smoking man. Harris continues that in this mini-series, there is a number of scenes where you see the shadowy machinations of the Millennium Group itself, who uh for a shadowy cult that really don't want to draw attention to themselves, it's somewhat interesting that they have a lot of their meetings uh in an old tape, very grand ballroom with a large fucking aerotorus on the tape. But this is comics, it's imagery, it works as like pornography. But there is a wonderful scene there where contemporaneous to this five-issue miniseries, we said before that the X-Files season's head was running. Yeah. And the main antagonist of that X-Files miniseries was one of Mulder and Scully's former allies, the child chess prodigy, Gibson Praise. Right. And Gibson Praise is only noticeable by the glasses of this round glasses silhouette. And funnily enough, one of the Millennium Group members that you see in silhouette, Jules Harris has it was wearing round glasses. Right. You could put the pieces together because somebody like yourself, who is not a rabin fussing fanboy like me, you just look at it and go, can we figure it's dark and broke? 1993 is the third, love it. Yeah, but if you know, you know. Yeah, it does a good job of balancing it. But what about the central mystery then with the Millennium Group? Because obviously I know a bit about the Millennium Group, but I'm not uber versed into it. And I sort of got the gist of it. But do you uh did do you think that all comes together cohesively? I do, and I think it's interesting for your trade here's got as somebody that's relatively walked back into the franchise and the extended universe again. Do you serve what's in the pilot? The Millennium group in that island, Chris Carter very much introduces as a mirror of the real life academy group, who are a group of former FGI agents and profilers who assist with the current administration in catching heinous killers. Now, we fast forward to the end of season three and Joe Harris's five issue coming. Yeah. We've got the Millennium Group of Season 1 is then revealed to be an apocalyptic cult bent on the end times that in one episode of season two are attempting to find partially the cross of Jesus' fucking crucifixion. And by the third season, they've become this shadowy cable nestled within the corridor of my power and have infiltrated the FDI. So we've got very much a marriage of those two principles. We pick up in 2015. The millennium Greek Joe Harris depict has continued that that they're they're infiltrated law enforcement and law agencies and almost that culture at almost every level. So perhaps not unalike the certain morally dubious and shadowy figures of the Trump administration, so to speak. Just to take a random analogy out of the air. So what about Frank's daughters brought back in this? Yeah. So what does it do to their relationship? Because she's part of the Millennium group at this point. It's interesting. I mean, we touched upon how she disgraced from her father and holds him responsible for the death of their mother, Catherine, in the second season finale. Jordan, in the interview with Years, hers in the in the original season is very a child with cipher. She represents the purity, the innocence, but oh one of the famous phrases of Millennium is in the open titles is that he says, who cares? The answer is Fred Quack cares. Fred Quack wants an idealistic, he wants a better world for himself, his family. He wants to create this fortress, this magical yellow house that's an oasis of serenity and calm away from the evils of the world. He wants to protect Jordan. Jordan, through a period of statement for her father, has come to represent him as a flaw of European that impacts almost that he failed at that task. And she's allowed herself to become seduced by the imagery and the um seductive, almost like Eden, snake-like nature of the millennium Greek, which is ironically you consider their symbol of Eulogulas. Jordan represents very much a fallen ideal. She is somebody who, in fact, strove to protect her purity in her innocent, and sacrificed everything to make sure his family was safe. The tragedy is that Jordan now considers his actions to have been the very actions that caused their family's undoing. So it's a heartbreaking point when we begin this series and we realise that Jordan has aligned for itself within Millennium Group. It also provides one of the most poignant moments in the entire run where those two characters are coming back together. And in a particularly shocking moment for myself, watching the stoic, unflappable calm nature of Frank and the edition, he slaps his daughter because she blames in it. She says, you know, you are to blame for Catherine's death, you offend me and are killing my mother. And Frank, as portrayed by Joe Harris, who's writing this, is a mixture of both horrifying, appall, and heartbrokenness. Yeah. It has puncted it. And I think that's really the local for both of their characters. And the rest of the story is effectively a Joseph Campbell-esque heart of artists, as we rediscover that eternal bog, and we rediscover what made Frank and Jordan such a positive and dynamic team in the original run. Towards the very end of season three, it's hinted that Jordan experiences a gift, if not to say, more powerful than her father. Joe Harris takes the idea, he runs with that idea, and in fact, that is much central, unified nature of the finale. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So where does this leave the character of Frank, his daughter, and the Millennium Group? So Frank was beset by a variety of evil folk throughout the three seasons of the show. One of the most fascinating ways of looking at the very disparate natures of each season is they attempted retrospectively, at least in the fan coaches, to unify the evils that Frank faced into a collective being in titled Legions. Now, Legion is only mentioned once by a character in the judge in an episode of the first season. It has, as with most season millennium, a global allegorical state and origin. Legion is supposed to be a name given to a multifaceted manifestation of evil in its purest form. It seems to be a nature and a force that emerges every millennium, that tries to get a foothold in society and in the hearts and minds of humans and humanity. As with all things in life, there is nothing more frightening, although the X-Files would have, you think, liberate mutants at Flukranston, slightly more scary. But I would agree with the statement that there's nothing more frightening than the evil within itself than we are capable of as human beings. Legion is the antagonist of this story, perhaps even more than the millennial group. It wants to draw apart the entire, it wants to cause chaos, it wants to cause despair, it wants to enclose fractions, it wants to enclose fractions of nature and hatred in divisions of society. It very much, I mean, to be honest with you, Donald Trump, uh, my fence could probably be agents of Ethan if we were to be doing a version of millennials today. But Legion is hell bent on establishing itself and getting a foothold in the world. Now, Frank knows Legion. Frank has fought faced Legion in its many forms over the series and over this coming, most notably in a seductive female guise into called Lucy Butler, which is what an original name if you consider the biblical allergic of that. Lucy was a seductive femme fatale in the original series, as portrayed wonderfully by the actress Sarah Jane Redburn. And uh she appears intermittently over the three seasons of the show to Bedevil, if you ardent part of Frank, and um to try and distract him from his mission and lure him to the side of evil. Legion and Lucy reappear in this five-epode mini-series. They are determined to draw Jordan to their side. They are vengeful towards Frank for the FLC's latest walkman over the previous 15 years, previously to the show, and in this career. And they also almost managed to kill Special Agent Fox and Lobby. I mean, that would have been a shock if that's where we go. Absolutely. I mean, that's what happens when Julian Ernest and Mary Jesus bought Eric saved it. Does it feel true to the show and where you think you would find the characters today? Yeah, I think that Harris had a really difficult job because I mean I said that he had to reintroduce Millennia to a new audience that I've watched, the original Run of the Up Sides, that may have followed the X-Fares in its relaunch of season 10, that might have seen Freak's reintroduction in Immaculate, and he had to introduce a whole share of universes. So I think it was an absolute necessity to anchor Mulder in this store. Yeah. Because he is a centralized force to gently bring Freck Black's world and marry it with the milieu of what he would be, temporary will see in the X-File universe in that times. Do I think it succeeded? Yes. Well I think the story was by its very nature somewhat fan-heavy and continuity heavy. Yes, but I think that they were skewering some words the fact that this would probably be a very niche product. It may sell less than the F-File Season 10. It may only have a more limited appeal. But those fans had campaigned for the return of Millennium over nearly two decades at that point. Um were clamoring for the return of Frank in Song 4. And there were various efforts made to bring the franchise back. You know, it we touch upon it, but the second X-Files movie in 2008, I Once Believe, is very much in Boya. I don't know if you've seen it, you may well. It's very much a millennium story. It's about serial killer, it's about mutilation of the dead and uh Edophile Priest, played weirdly but wonderfully by Billy Connolly. Uh, it's very much a millennialistic story. So I think that attempting to bring that brand back, I think Joel Harris's five episode millennia is very much an antecedent of the themes of I Love to Believe. That it it draws upon that and it says, you know, this is a shared universe, it's a hell of a lot of mythology, and you need to draw people like yourself in that are going to be able to appreciate this as a holder and a story on its own merits, rather than feeling you're being absolutely suffocated under the weight of your franchise that you don't know. Yeah, absolutely, and it does that very well. There's a sort of unique visual style to the TV show Millennium, just the stuff I've seen about the artwork here, is it evocative of that or is it trying to do something different? So, I mean, I, as you know, and as as listeners from the uh your sister pop class, no, I'm extending up enough. So I come from an artistic background myself. I love my style is uh photorealism, I deal photoreality. Her mama's work is not obsessed with photorealism. No. But what it does wonderfully and authorively is it's helpful to recreate the mood uh and the visual colour of millennials. It does this, I think, fabulously, because it has that sort of monochromatic, range, so uh noisylistic seed gear view of the world that is so prevalent in the original running as soul. Yeah. And whereas the X-Files, you know, as a forehand, we can have an episode about the serials because next week, Dylan, we might have a livery to mutant, but we have to that we might be able to turn back time in a ground called prostitution bank probably. Millennium doesn't have that, it's much more of a clones show. In many ways, it's much more of a traditional show, which is ironic considering how broad it won't from its original premise of serial killer of the week as it is originally uh and perhaps unfair, you said in the trade press. But I think that Lorima manages to capture is essentially three different shows branded under one show's title. And with a trinity of formats that you are attempting to unify the boat and say, we think we've hoped this story may continue. We suspect that it probably won't, because it's a niche ordinance, it's a love letter to the fans, it has cushions to the past for it, but I think it attempts to not only provide a full stop, but give you an element of what I think was five-point millennium, which is that that's important to even the darkest of worlds and the darkest of circumstances, there is always hope. Yeah. And I think that's a sexual when you're doing a format as dark and cynical as this is. I think that you know, there's a reason that in the original show Frank's ideal dream house was painted bright, canary, yellow. Yeah. It is a big bit of hope. Yeah, absolutely. I like the grainy mutedness of the visuals that suits the show. But then there's occasional sort of visceral pops of red and things like that that work really, really well. Frank's vision, what we spoke about with the massive kind of flourishes of colour and devil red of apocalyptic imagery. But we are seeing the, and towards the end of it, we've seen the action returns to uh the black families, long dilapidated family home, which has once again been painted yellow. And in fact, that is where the climatic denouement takes place with Agent Mulder, Frank Black, Juven Black, and the Legious. Yeah. So I think that, yeah, absolutely. You've hit the nail on the head there, and it makes me tremendously happier for you as a casual uh reader to have grasped that this is effectively we are vanquishing the forces of an ancient even probably, as we know, will never really truly die. Yeah. But we are doing it. And the fact that we can do that, that we have done that, and that we've unified a father and a daughter to do that tells me that we've got an element of hope. Who cares? Is there much more you want to say on this? No, I think that it is a very, I think it is a niche product. I think that it is, as a fan of the X5, you could easily parachute into this uh contemporaneous with the ongoing comics of season 10. Yeah. I think you could appreciate it just purely for Molders involvement. I think it's been very cleverly and intricately crafted to allow a casual reader to come into that. However, I think that if you were to track down the original series of Millennium, and fuck me, that's hard to who, for reasons that we'll get into later, I think it's wondrously rewarding. And I think until hopefully we see the adventures of Frank Ratur, for me, it's a wonderful Nicola to Frank and Jordan Blash's story. Amazing. So is it a clanger, a banger, or an average meander? Well, leisure, sorry, get sick. Oh fuck yourself. It's a fanger. A clanger? No, it's a banger. Of course it's a banger. Excellent. Uh I really enjoyed it. I'm gonna go average meando. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not in that upper echelon of tie in comic that I've experienced. And I perhaps would have got more from it and had more towards the banger. Yeah, but it is accessible, it's an enjoyable read, and like colour me intrigued with Millennium in general because of this and because of the show itself. Well, if you manage to uh if you manage to track down these couple of it, please let me know because uh and if it keeps going the way like this, you're gonna have to borrow my box. They're a time stamped on what those one before. So there's not a huge amount of expanded universe for Millennium, but what there is is a brilliant documentary called Millennium after the millennium, although I believe it's had a couple of different titles and different versions. After the millennium. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, which was originally released March 22nd, 2019, directed and produced by Jason D. Morris, written by Joseph Madri and produced by Shoney Elise Cook, Troy Foreman, and Joseph Madri. There weren't a huge amount of like science fiction documentaries or anything like that, so there isn't really anything we can talk about as for the kept contemporaneous to the time, except it was a time of big franchises, nostalgia was in, so everything, there was new Star Wars films, new Terminator films, endless um, you know, bits of Star Trek, all these things. So perhaps it was a good time for somebody to come along and basically revisit the world of Millennium and sort of do a retrospective of it. So this was the thing actually, before we even talked about the comic, I think that you wanted to cover. Um, why was this? So to give listeners some context to this, when Millennium was capped in 1999, I've got it clear, I'd say, for the actual millennium, uh, it garnered a very small but very good volume fan base. And several of those four foremost scholars and aficionados of the round were in many ways industry professionals itself. And in the 2000, 2007, 2008, a campaign was bought entitled Battle to Frankfurt. And it was the brain trial of a wonderful gentleman called James McLean and Troy L. Thornan, who came aboard. And uh, this campaign was primarily concerned with bringing the role of Millennium back in some form or another to the cultural sphere again. And the end result would have been, the dream result would have been the return of millennium as an ongoing television series. Realised that that would be a tall order. So throughout the years of the campaign, they set themselves small goals which would be immeasurable to achieve and keep the show in the public consciousness. They started the Millennium Group Sessions podcast, you've got to with their attempts to keep Millennium in the public high, bringing the show back. It garnered the attention of executives at French Central Fox, as it was then. It was probably instrumental in keeping the show alive in the media sphere enough to walk bringing the Millennia back as the IBW 5 episode in a series of 2015. But in the interacting between there, Troy and James did many things. They managed to get Chris Carter on the show to introduce the creator of Millennium, Lance Hegripson himself, Frank Black. Amazing. And small goals like this every year to keep the show alive. Now, Troy and Jason, sorry, Troy James, wanted to originally uh produce a Millennium comic for themselves. Oh nice. Uh however, through various ideas, various uh intervention to fate reality, uh, they decided that it wouldn't be the best group to go upon. And it was Troy's innovative idea that he said he wanted to do a documentary, and thus Millennium After the Millennium was born. And they said, You've obviously seen this before. I'm watching it for the first time. How do you think it handles the show's history? I think one of the things that really struck me about Millennium After the Millennium is that they wanted, and this is a core phrase, my interpretation of it. Although it's a documentary for fans of the millennials, it does not come across as a fan documentary. Yeah. Performance Jason Miller Claim and the people associated with it, are in large part industry adjacent or industry professionals. Yeah. They look at their subject matter with a detached eye that allows the casual viewer to come in and appreciate Millennia as a core piece of culture industry adjacent to the tremendous global world life success of its OVX worlds. Yeah. That allows the viewer and in to enjoy the product and appreciate the story and the history of Millennium as presented in the documentary, and what cultural importance this particular part of the Chris Carter's work universe has on fans, fandom, and the general order. I think it does a great job at that because there are different types of documentary you get within popular culture, and especially within Geekdom. There are the very niche ones that are often DVD extras, and they're fine to be, we're talking about a very particular subject matter because it's for X amount of people who are going to buy it, and nobody who is not a fan is going to um dip into it. But this needs to have a broader appeal. And a good documentary maker can make will find the story in anything can make it interesting for you as a big fan, me as a novice, and somebody else who doesn't give a fuck about it and will ultimately make you intrigue, care, and tell a story. Like I there was a documentary about boy bands recently. Brilliant documentary. I don't care about boy bands, but because you find the story invested in the story. I'm a big fan of documentaries as a general rule of thumb, and I'm talking about a range of things as esoteric, elliptical as looking at uh Jonathan Frex's Unsolved Mysteries as a light fluffy or classical as strange but true. To the other end of the spectrum, to watch a true crime series, like the wonderful uh Netflix examination of the disappearance of Maverick and concept of reality, and then to kind of look at a bit more pop pocket. Uh the five-episode series they did on uh the story of Vince McMahon, the story of the WWE promoter and his fall from Brace. So I'm a big fan of documentary card safe. As a as a sort of sidestep there, my partner has no interest in wrestling, interest, but she loves a wrestling documentary because she likes the world around it more than the actual thing. So she'll she'll sit and watch Dark Side of the Ring, the Vincent Man thing, or WWE Unreal. But if I ever said you want to watch SmackDown, she's like, no, yeah, exactly. So that's a testament to NEMA's good documentary makers. A good documentarian. Uh, and I I definitely class Mr. Miller and Mr. Foreman as good documentarian. They've managed to find the everyman relatable story in the history of millennia and extrapolate that to a modern, accessible audience. This was a show born out of global success. The runaway trained success story in the X World, it was a show that 20th Super Fox allowed Chris Carter on precedent to the creative laptop to come up with whatever he wants. Chris Carter was obsessed with coming up with True Quiet, was coming up with the nature of edo, the nature of what is evil, and excitation, where do we get that? How do we look at that? How do we look at those uncomfortable corners of ourselves? That's become very trendy for years with things like Black Fellows Catal. Even on Netflix now, it's proliferation of real life fine documentary podcasts. I love a real choir fine podcast. It wasn't in 1996, it began as a success story, and then through the success of it's just the show and real life financial production, creative, fiscal, factors, it came to an economine conclusion before it should have done. I think there's a real arc creative tragedy and yet heroicism in the determination of that wonderful race created to keep the show going. And I think the fact that it's not as well known as the show, and yet has so many parallels and creative similarities to it, makes it fascinating for the audience. Absolutely. So does it give the right amount of detail for somebody like yourself versus I don't know, say perhaps the more niche stuff that you seek out as a fan? I found a lot to enjoy as a millennia fan. Yeah. I think what Jason Miller and Tor Foreman did so wonderfully was that they managed to create winks and nods for those people who are familiar with O'Ground, obsessive about O'Ground. And those are two very different milieus of all Lucy Butler, aka Sarah, Jane Greg, the antagonist of the show, a demonic, monstrous, evil, devilish entity. Uh her interviews are conducted in a church. Uh, if you know the show, that's there's a wonderful kind of twisted malevolence in that. Uh, if you don't know the show, it's just a wonderful series and great iconography. Looking at it from a production point like yourself, it's very sick of it's kind of polished. That sort of thing adds a sheath and a gloss and a competency to the first product that I don't think the term quote-unquote fan documentary really affords it and respect and the honesty that it deserves. The the production values are broadcast standards, you know? Yeah, absolutely it's not a fan documentary in the sense that someone stuck a video camera in someone's face and asked them their favourite story. It's not bidding ideas. And also, most notably for an unlicensed fan documentary. And by saying fan, I feel like I'm giving it a disservice. It's a bunch of professionals who are fans who are gone to make it, who want to tell a story. But it has licensed clips from the show in it to illustrate its points, which you would never see in so many fan documentaries. And that says that not only do they know what they're doing to be able to get these things licensed, but the copyright owners also go, okay, this is the sort of product that we are willing to license a clip for. I think there's a lot to be said that you said it wonderfully there. I think there's a lot to be said with, you know, we're coming off at this point in the in the in the gestation of the documentary, a bunch of releasing in 2018, 2019, it's the last other millennium. Uh, these boys have been running the back to Frank Black Champaign for a decade before that point. You know, they've they've shown that they are despite, creative, that they're industry professionals who are fans of millennium. Yeah, they're not fans of millennials who have a bent for being industry professional. Yeah. And I think that's a creative distinction that's worth noting. These people have got careers of their own and they've got talents of their own. But yet their shared passion and honesty, humour, and more drive for this IP has garnered the respect of the souls fast and creative. Yeah. And I think that trust, I think that honesty, and I think that respect is not only borne out by the use of life's material, but I think it's borne out by the level of honesty and truthfulness that comes out in the interviews that I've conducted with the Castle and Fruit. I think there's a tremendous uh awareness and acknowledgement to, yeah, praise the show's successes in where it was. But I think there's also a you know a great amount of huge in saying, you know, maybe we didn't play that right. Maybe we were intimate circumstances. In the case of Chris Cartek, he actually admits in the documentary that his desire and sheer will to get past Realm on the air at Fox Network the fall of 1999 was what greatly caused Chris to Millennium's cancellation. I think he is not only aware of that, but I think he's uh ashamed of that to an extent, in the sense that he feels that he robbed the fans of Millennium, the true and cast of Millennium, with their relatively equation they deserve. Is that any thought or claims he put there? No, I think it was just a creative synogy and a and a willfulness and creation powerhouse at the time to want to be a new thing. I don't know if there's any fault or blame to be a site there. I just think it's an unfortunate side effect of the creative landscape of that time. And maybe it's a reflection of, you know, post the launch of Millennium, where press the dissertations were split between a first season of Millennium, the fourth season of the X-File, and a two-hour feature film that he thought, you know, I simply cannot divide myself like that again. I respect that. Yeah. Does it capture all the key figures from the show's history? Uh, 99.9 infinity of people who were involved with Millennium are interviewed in this show and give their two benefits of the show. There are a couple of exceptions. From a purely personal perspective, one of the major players I saw here in Millennium is uh Glenn Morgan and James Wong, who came onto the show in the second season after the cancellation of their own uh series, Space and Bum Beyond. They were invited on with James Wong and Glenn Morgan describe uh slightly sarcastically as a trop load at money uh to uh keep the show afloat for another year while Chris launched his attention on the fifth season, the X-Res and the upcoming release of Fight the Future. They have again just gave them total creative cart launch. Uh, and in that second year, any initial reservations that people may have had about uh an overemphasis on serial killer of the week in the initial imaginary show, if as you will. The second season is much more preoccupied with apocalyptic imagery. I touched on it earlier. There's episodes that involve, and I won't focus on this too much, but uh a feral of dogs that formed one of the harbingers of the apocalypse of the Millennium Group, a reproducible author investigating the cult of self-ophasy. Uh, I wonder what that's a parody of, and four demons in a coffee shop having a coffee and discussing Frank Black over Donuts. My favourite episode that I've seen of Millennium so far, and I said I've only dipped in a bit was that was that particular episode. What was it that attracted you about that particular episode? It's one of the most bizarre, wonderfully bizarre, darkly humorous, gripping bits of television I've ever seen. It's like if I had to do a top 10 of just episodes of a tick different TV series, that I was like, this is pushing not only the format of its own show, but the format of television forward, I'd be like, that is, and it's you know, it's a portmanteau sort of story, but just done with such a late 90s version, such a late 90s version of it that I was just like, wow, this is good shit. I mean, that that particular episode was two episodes before uh the effective end of the world apocalypse at Morgan and Walden at the end of season two. Uh, I think it's a testament to millennium's creative broad church quiet field, as it were, that you can have something as straight and elliptical and wonderful and opaque as that, uh, and then have an episode that's what is actually basically more serial killers. And I think that's part of the tragedy of Millennium, and that's what Troy Foreman and Jason Miller capture so wonderfully in After the Millennium, is that this was a show that, due to various production circumstances and uh changes in narrative, arts, and production crews, uh effectively yes, was a different show for each of the three seasons, but that's got to its detriment. That's actually a major loss point in the yeah, you've got something new and wonderful to enjoy tweak when you watch it. And I think that sort of emphasis of change and uh the importance of unity and the broad themes of the show of uh hope against despair and good against evil. I think that that is wonderfully uh brought out in the documentary where the creative forces behind this uh do emphasize that this was a show that was in many ways a hard sell for the average viewer. Yeah, it was um I and I I was intrigued when you told me your initial thought of having rediscovering the pilot. This is a very dark problem. It is, it is there's there's there's no escaping it. Well, I think that it's so vaunted that that beacon of hope budget, and that is personified by Lar Tangers and Foster, and Brittany Tippy, a child access of superlative who turns in a hearing's performance is draw the black. And it again, the documentary it talks a lot. There's a moment where Lards goes, Oh, okay, so I've got this within the documentary, goes, Yeah, so I've got the script, and I'm saying to Chris, like, where's the lightness in this? And Chris says to him, it's the yellow house. And it's like, I think genre fans are often very dismissive of relationships of soapy elements, but that's just that's more of a fault of older genre than a fault of newer genre incorporating relationships and real characters. But it is right there, like there's this family at the core, and sure it's a dysfunctional family because one of them is well, or essentially two of them are these sort of uh criminal psychics. I call that completely. I mean, I personally, um this is only my opinion. Uh I think that the pilot of Hillennia is one of possibly the best hour of television that Chris Carter wrote in the entirety of 1013 production. And I'm including all of this exfiles, it's 2015 reboot, I've included both feature films. I'm even including, God forsake it, Arch Rome, uh, and The X Files Spin of Long Duman. I think the pilot scripted millennium is Supervin setting aside in 46 minutes the themes, the format, the characters, uh, the emphasis and the tonal palette and equilibrium of the universe he sets out to do that. I think it's a wonderful piece of work. And one of my all-time favourite scenes, and again, this is actually utilized in the documentary. So shout out to the guys who chose this quest, it wonderfully embodies Hillennium as a format for me. Uh, there's a scene in the pilot episode where Frank and Catherine, his wife played by Megan Gallagher, are um putting their girls Jordan to sleep, and they're talking about the horrors of Frank's work and the fact and she says, you know, you can build this fortress, you can build this yellow house, you can be but Frank, you can't shut the real world out forever. Sooner or later, the evil and the gods is gonna seep in. And Lon Teberson has a life, and he says, I want me to make belief that I can. Yeah. And that for me is the heart of this show. Amazing. And I think that what Troy Foreman and Jason Miller have done in Millennium After the Millennium is make the Orbies make believe that Millennium could have gone on forever. Because that was that strong an idea. I know what I do get that impression. Do you think there's goodwill towards the show? And does it feel special for the people who are involved in it? I think so. I mean, I get the inter I get the impression from the the parts of the crew that are interviewed, like uh Megan Gallagher, Bill Smith, Brittany Titlady, uh, all the way down to creatives like executive producer Chip Johanson, executive Frank Thomas, Chris Carter himself. There seems to be an overwhelming affection and a unifying love for this show that was critically underappreciated. I don't think he's got the love of his reserve. And I think that there is a unifying sense that this was something special close career. It happened in a sense that they didn't even realise to the extent of at the time. But the really critics, let's not forget most of these people who have gone on to stellar careers with their own shows, with their own productions, with their own branches of media, careers, jobs, work. But there's something about millennium as a concept, a format, an idea, a seed that just speaks to them. And it makes them sound river and their toy on that show. And I think that love and that I'm gonna use the word nostalgia, although it takes it as a concept. I think the word that that love and that nostalgia for that time is so wonderfully avoided that I think that caching for that quadruple translates off the screen. It's a different sort of nostalgia though, if you're involved in it, to the sort of nostalgia farming that we get in terms of uh of IP that I think. In 2026, it's become you know, we're looking at I mean you know yourself, I think we're looking at a vastly different TV landscape now. Yeah, you get things like straight failures that are breakout successes, but most thick on streaming two seasons maybe, no three seasons. Over five or six years. Over five or six years. There's a long and there's short season orders. It's a lot harder to get something made. Yeah, I believe that a pitch document, something like Millennium, I don't genuinely don't think was the get in on television in 2026. I think it would be viewed as too dark, too niche, too secular for one particular section of the audience. There was something very magical about that time. Something as epoch and genre defined uh as this was network television on a Friday night, as one of the core foreign networks in America. Well, and I think that's what the documentarians really get across beautifully here is that this was a creative synergy of circumstance and finance at the time that allowed that latitude to really was quite special. And I think a lot of the creative forces in the show realised that that really was something unlike anything they may have other gone elsewhere in their career. I mean, fucking hell, Lance Emerichon's been in two of the major franchises of whole sci-fi, aliens in the Terminator. And yes, and yet when people go and see Lance Conventions, and I can attest for this because I myself, I mean, as much as I come out in a terrible, heinous rash if I had to go to convention for more than 38 seconds. Fucking I made a special effort to go meet Lance Everton because it wasn't because it's but it wasn't as a paternity, because of the what he did as Frank Black and what millennia did as a program. There's something very special about that show. And I think that's what that's what's really captured in this stuff in the two beautifully. Do you get the impression from the documentary that it was a tough show to make? Oh, 100%. I think that um this was a show that really changed irrevocably over the course of its three years, and I think the fact that it is so uh hugely different in each of its uh three incarnations is uh a visual on screen embodiment of that production up even. I think in many ways it was born out of the success of the X-File, and I think in some ways it suffered production-wise as a result of the success of the X-File. Yeah. Because the production landscape in 1998, 1999 didn't allow the sheer depth and creative synergy of somebody like Chris Carter, who wants to give 110% to each hour at television he produces. That's fine if you're in 2026 and you're the Duffer brothers and you're doing eight episodes made over five years. Chris Carter was doing 24 episodes of each show a year. It was just a nature of I think sometimes, what are we getting out? You know, we're shooting next week. And I think to kind of maintain that huge creative threshold at standard of quality that they did amongst and against advertising, I think speaks to the passion that those people have hold on the show. There's loads of interesting anecdotes and quotables in this documentary, but I don't want to spoil them for people who haven't seen it. I want them to go out there and discover the documentary for themselves. Uh, whether you are a fan or not a fan or a passing, a casual, a casual view or whatever. I know that this this documentary did a festival circuit. And I can see why it would do well. It did SXXW, it's a tellar oid, you know, it did it did the circuit and it did very well at circuit. You know, you'll see the creative uh principal organs speak to quite rightly so because that is the pause, and I'm not gonna sell it shortly, it does introduce the concept. It's not it's not at its heart a niche fan product, it's about a group of creative people who came together as the Jew Sakta Hero special and through adversity managed to create something, which has created a hugely strong, albeit smaller, fan base and existence show that has endured nearly 30 years after its original broadcast. And I think there's some there's an element of heroism, and I think there's an element of hope. I keep returning to that word in that story that can appeal to anybody, even a non-fan, indeed, if they exist. As I said, it's a brilliant documentary, people should go out there and check it out. Is there anything else you want to say on the documentary? Uh I think it sits as a wonderful adjacent to the show. Uh, I don't think you need to be a huge fan of millennials. I think it's hopes if you are, but I think you can just come in and appreciate this at a production level of a well-made, richly told story of a very particular time in the film making industry of Hollywood in the late 1990s. And as much as millennium is actually about a sense of uh existential societal dread and angst as we approach an era of unprecedented change. I think that the documentary captures that this was a time of change, uncertainty, and uh risk taking in the entertainment industry as a whole, as in Los Angeles and Hollywood in particular. I think it was it gave birth to something strange, uh undefinable, and uh magical. And I don't think perhaps we may never see the light stuff again. And there is a reason that one of the key phrases of Millennium is repeated in this documentary is indeed, this is who we are, this is who millennium is, uh, this is what we were, and I would urge listeners to seek it out. I think it's great introduction. It is, and I also think there are certain key shows that, even if they're not the biggest show in the world, are able to capture the pop culture and television landscape at the time, and this documentary does well to chronicle that. So when you're telling the history of American television, Millennium may not be a big point on it, but if you're looking for a case study of an insight into what making shows at that time was like, this documentary is that perfect in from a sort of an academic point of view almost, not to get too sort of foncy about it. We're not going to be a professors of uh no, but if you are like, if you're somebody telling, doing a degree on the history of television, the history of American television, and you want an insight into what it's like making a show at that point, you could do a lot worse than this documentary to sort of give you the highs and the lows and the what the day-to-day sort of production cycle is like. The X-Fives. I think American television is driven upon the idea that a committee of writers and a writer's book was the way to birth in Genesis a lot by series. I think that previously previously to Chris Carter, probably the only antecedent to him before that would have been uh Stephen Blochard on Hill Street Blues. But I think uh America Television realized with the birth of the X-Files in September 1903 that a single driven creator at the helm was the best way to birth a unique idea, the series. I think Chris Carter in a massive way, I think the X-File in a major way, and I think Millennium in an integral but smaller way, I think changed American television. And I think that's what gave birth to Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad. I think it's what gave birth to things like the Duffer Brothers on Strake, I think. I think it's what gave birth to Ryan Fuller on Annabelle, all of those things, and many more owe millenniums a huge debt for the role that it's played within the creative hoover of American television at the tail end of the 20th century. Amazing. So this documentary, is it a clanger, a banger, or an average meander? Well, you know what? This is who we are, and this is how we bang. It's a banger for me, too. Brilliantly put together documentary. You could show this to someone who doesn't know what Millennium is. It's a good primer, and as I said, I'll be watching more Millennium as a result of this and the episodes that I've seen. So, Liam, we've discussed this. This has come up a few times during our chat. Why can't I find Millennium easily? So uh Chris Toxin called this in the documentary, but Millennium, unfortunately, is a victim of several factors. One of those factors uh being the fact that it never really achieved the crossover mainstream success of the X Fall. So, retrospectively, as a grand property, may not have the capacity um to translate well into streaming that perhaps it's just a show gear. Another thing that some of your listeners may know is that for syndication reasons, uh a show is usually hope to get to 100 episodes to make it more of a sellable prospect of the world. Millennium only ever got to 67. So in many ways, it actually fell short of reaching the millennium where it may well have awesome achievement. But the primary reason, and for listeners who want to check out more on this, uh, I would say just to check out Chris Carter's wonderful panel that he did at the 25th anniversary of Millennium at the File Fest in 2025, is that Millennium contains, especially second season, an awful lot of use of pop music to tell a story. Now, not contemporaneous time, but uh more than one to give one example, we're very much fan of uh counterbalancing horror of certain scenarios uh of the uh horrors of Frank's life, serial killers and wrath in matrices, violence and imagery, and offsetting that to make it truly on set. Like in Ogre with No View, or Type, or Johnny Mathis's wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, and the use of that licensed music has made it incredibly difficult for them to use and get that with the rights holders because it is so integral to the show can put that and stream it later on. So unfortunately, as a result of the heavy crisis that would be incurred, that licensing of that music, does it make it for an HB viable to have millennials streamers? That's such a shame. And also a shame that those things weren't licensed out for like a longer duration. And I guess because it's a niche show, there isn't like a team there that's going, oh, we could redub them with this generic, that this generic song, or change this or change that. So that's such a shame. It is, and it's I think it's an unfortunate consequence of the fact that in 2026, in a streamer landscape, factors like that that are smaller robots, just mean that from a streamer's point of view, it makes it not financially expeditious to life put something like that now. Yeah, because it's financially not viable to there's entire episodes that are named after Johnny Mathis' song, uh good by Charlie, with no view. Unfortunately, it's uh it's a consequence of the fact that it is very much predicated on that cultural landscape toy. And I think to siphon and remove that music would effectively take out a lot of millennium songs. Yeah. So yeah, it becomes uh a lost, a lost piece of television nostalgia, which I think is very unfair, and I think it deserves to be seen in equally by regard to define industry movement such as breaking bag or the epine. But uh, yeah, here we are. Do you think there's life on the show? Do you think be it as a rebooth, a follower, comics, audios, whatever, like where is there anything there realistically 30 years on? I think the time may have passed. Do I think that they're creating avenues for alternative media such as Big Finis to take up the realm of telling Frank Story? Absolutely, I think it'd be wonderful. Do I think that having a property that was at least partly now owned by Disney is like? No, I don't. But I think that it's a small consequence, and I think that we may see Frank return. I don't think it'll be an on-screen iteration. Do I think that, as I've just said, big finish or any call, all the old adaptation take up maybe potential? Do I think that the proxy has lighted it? Absolutely. I suspect that were we to bring millennia back now in any form, I suspect the story may well be that I've drawn on that. With Frank as a guest side character, integral to the narrative, but not the heart of the narrative. Made sense. In many ways that we see that we're on this bus, and I couldn't be more excited by why Hooper's reimagining the ex-file, it's coming early soon, at the time of recording at this particular episode. Uh, I think that there is tremendous mileage to be done in a similar reimagining of millennia. Do I think that it's attractive as a process and a prospect for an uh investor? No. No. Uh, but I think that were somebody to take a risk when it looks like the Fox Network did in the fall of 96. Yeah, I think it would lead its own reward, I really would. I think it's the sort of thing that maybe six or seven years ago, when they were mining all IP for what it's worth, there must have been a conversation somewhere about can we get anything else out of this? But in the current landscape, I just can't see it's not a big enough proposition, I don't think, which is a shame. But I like I think it's a good world to tell stories in, as you say, whether it's with Jordan or whether it's something a bit more niche, like a comic or something like that. I think there's there's more stories to be told there, but I don't know whether with the best will in the world there's a a large enough sort of global wing for it to happen. I mean, you touched upon it there at the risk of kind of concluding our meandering and musing on a slightly down the low. I think in a 2026 host post-Etsy, post-factual lying landscape, you know, we're now dealing with a uh a world where fact has been and truth has been deprioritized by political agents and agencies. I think we're now in a landscape where instead of feeling and honesty, times has proven to be considered to be a negative politic. Now deal in a world without mentioning any names where presidents can be named on international lists of various uh predatory people and yet still be in positions of power. I think in that world, in a negative, nibblistic and cynical world that always seemed to be on the brink of such sort of global drama, I think a hero such as Frank Clack would represent cruelty and honesty, integrity, and um stoic heroism in the fight against evil forces. I think that sort of character is more important than ever. I think it's a vital story to tell. And I think just were somebody to take a risk, a grand like millennium, David find that it really triumphed in a 2025, which for me is part of the whole tragedy about why it's uh yeah not given the respecting television hours of history that it preserves. Yeah. It's a shame. But look, it's been great to jump into the world of it today, comic-wise, documentary-wise, and the show itself. If people want to find you on the internet, where can they find you? So I am primarily uh on I'm on a few forums. I decided to dip my tools into the animals with social media, even at my advanced and better days. As I mentioned to you before, I am primarily an artist who deals with frontal realistic uh art and imagery. I have it bent towards IPs in the cult television and genre. Uh, I also have a personal interrupt um which translates into a professional production for Rosswink, which I love. Yeah. The world of WWE and AEW. And you can find me on Instagram and TikTok as hard for. That's Arcfully as in gratefully and Liam as in the eponymous hero of Gene Rodham Grease Earth title on set. That's a story for another day. Ha ha ha. Amazing. Uh, it's been a blast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as it helps people to find the pod. Look for Too Hot for TV on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at TooHotTheNumber4 Pod. That's Too Hot the number four pod for the latest updates and additional content. Both me and Liam will be back next week, and we're going to be talking to Troy L. Foreman, one of the producers of the documentary after the millennium. But until then, I've been Dylan. Uh I have been Liam. And this has been too hot for TV. It's just who we are.