Millennium rant - Series 2 eps 20-23

Right, in the past few days and weeks I've finally got round to watching my Millennium DVDs. I finished the last disk of Season 2 just a few seconds ago and I felt compelled to jump right onto my blogging client.

WTF??????????????????????????????????????????????

The last four episodes of Millennium Season 2 are the worst TV episodes I've EVER seen. What was going through the mind of the writers? The producers? The actors? Anyone involved in the series at all? There's no coherance, there's little link to the rest of the series, there's little plot and it is all just so crap!

One episode "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me" featured four devils sitting around the table in a donought shop, discussing how they'd influenced mankind and grabbed souls for hell. I was intrigued by this idea, really I was, but it just didn't work. The episode fell flat on its face. For starters, the devils in question were old men (or at least, they started the episode as old men). I've got no problem with that really, and if they had stayed like that then the whole thing would've been fine. BUT... 10 minutes into the episode and the camera panned around the room and when it returned to the table there were 4 red devils sitting there. With the voices of old men and the crap make-up associated with a low budget Channel 5 show. This just DID not work for me. It looked tacky. Quick flashes of the devils inside the human outer would've been fine but spending the whole episode with a group of OAP satanic devils sitting around a table drinking coffee? It fell flat on its face. The stories they told reminded me of those X-Files episodes were the show was taking the piss out of itself, you know the ones, there's at least one per series. It was just the most boring 45 minutes of televison that I can remember sitting through.

This was followed by an episode called "The Fourth Horseman". Good, an episode at the apocyalypse, the end of the world, the book of Revelations and loads of other good stuff I can sink my teeth into...Er....no...not exactly. Loads of cloak and dagger conspiratorial nonsense where nothing is explained, loads of ideas are offered but none resolved and the plot, the SUBSTANCE of the ep, just doesn't exist. I watched it and it was just bland. Nothing there at all. It WAS cool to see my favourite ginger-haired bit actor (the guy who played the Sheriff in CSI Season 1) in another role and I LIKED the idea of "The Trust" who Frank could've turned to, but that turned out to be a damp squib too. The Millennium groups reasons for wanting to wipe out the entire planet are unclear and their logic is flawed. Why not innoculate members families? Gak.

"The Time Is Now" was slightly better. There were explosions, events, important discussions and passages of well written dialouge. However, there were also scenes that just seemed to be there as filler and it just didn't fit together as neatly as other episodes have done. It's impossible to show a world crisis by focussing on a man and his daughter in a hut in the woods. That's a serene image, not one of chaos and anarchy which I'm sure would've suited the writer's purpose in describing the plauge much better. And why did the writers see fit to include a 6 minute rock music video in the middle of the episode that wouldn't look out of place on Kerrang? The audience got the message that Lara had lost it when she was filling sheet after sheet of paper with the numbers produced by dice rolls. And crying a lot. This 6 minute segment (13.3% of the episodes total running time) seemed like REALLY desperate filler. It did not move the plot along at all, instead the whole plot ground to a halt whilst this series of random images flashed across the screen. I'm sure they were all meant to show the madness in Lara's head and if it had been a short scene then it would've worked. Instead, though, with the rock music being pushed to the foreground and the randomness and lack of liner logic to the scenes that were displayed, it just looked like a really bad music video. A music video. Slap bang in the middle of an episode that's meant to be discussing the end of the world (590 odd days early too) and you get this 6 minutes of random rubbish. Oh I'm sure that if I REALLY pushed I could find something that links this scene in with the rest of the series. My problem is I can't be bothered as I don't think it will be worth the effort.

The only thing I can surmise is that the writers were on drugs. What a waste of my, limited, relaxation time. I'm going to progress with Season 3 purely because I feel duty bound to do so, but I'm not impressed with the episodes I've just watched. The last good one was "Anamnesis". I hope Season 3 is better.

[Listening to: Head Over Feet (MTV Unplugged) - Alanis Morissette - MTV Unplugged (4:22)]