MillenniuM: A Retrospective on the Series at this Time of Cultural Chaos and Social Anomie.
"We adore chaos because we love to produce order."-- M.C. Escher (1898-1972), Dutch artist, mathematician
In my quest to find something novel to opine about while also remaining faithful to the substantive focus of The Multilevel Mailer, my instincts kept pushing me in the direction of writing an essay that reviewed a television series that captivated my attention at the time and which I have returned to several times in the years since for insights, wisdom, and more generally to critique and make sense of the show’s 3-season existence. Enter MillenniuM.
MillenniuM was a three-season crime drama of the serial killer genre that show creator Chris Carter envisioned in the mold of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en and based loosely on the real-life Academy Group, a group of former FBI behavioral scientists and law enforcement personnel who specialized in criminal profiling and the the investigation of violent crime, most specifically serial sexual homicide. For Carter, it was the little sister of the X-Files, yet meant to be a distinctive show on its own. MillenniuM presaged much modern-day crime drama and similar television offerings, including Criminal Profiler, CSI, CSI SVU and Dexter. Indeed, MillenniuM’s influence on True Detective Season 1 seemed apparent to me on my latest rewatch of the series.
In the course of my rewatch process, I convinced myself that the arc of MillenniuM is relevant to our cultural chaos in a way that is unique and profound. Indeed, I think the show’s creators and writers were prescient in their foreshadowing of the current crisis of meaning that pervades our culture. Whether this prescience was intentional or a serendipitous outcome of the different production teams across the three seasons makes the prescience all the more remarkable. The eternal psychic and cultural conflict between good and evil, as revealed in human behavior and chronicled in religious metaphysical tradition and ritual, is at the heart of the show’s myth arc. This conflict, revealed in a world that tends towards entropy and darkness, reflects our need for personal and cultural narrative coherence; a meaning for our existence; a purpose. In short, the need for order in chaos. It is this narrative coherence that the protagonist of the series, Frank Black, seeks to produce by understanding evil and preventing its intrusion into the world. It is his causi sui project.
It is this conflict that I believe characterizes the cultural milieu we are living amidst in the West, with the decline of traditional religion and increasing secularization. Woke ideology is the contemporary avatar of Evil. Its looming specter reflects the apocalypse of Western civilization. As I discuss below, Woke ideology is symbolized in the character of Lucy Butler, the recurring motif that links each season of MillenniuM and provides the narrative arc to the show.
“Chris had the idea the concept of evil in society had been degraded by secularism, by science and he still believed in evil as a real force [in society]. ” —Frank Spotnitz, writer/co-producer as recounted in ‘Order in Chaos’: The Making of Season 1 Documentary.
“I’ve always said the X-Files is about extreme possibility. Conversely, MillenniuM, you could say, is about possible extremes. And, ultimately, it’s about evil. And it’s something that people can think about. Evil is greater than us and, in its own way, something spiritual too.” —Chris Carter, as recounted to David Lipsky - Rolling Stone 2.20.97
Lucy Butler as Camille Paglia’s “Chthonic Deity” from the Underworld.
If one were to find a common thread and narrative ‘myth arc’ linking all three seasons of MilllenniuM it would no doubt be the character of Lucy (read Lucifer; Legion) Butler. Butler, played by the actress Sarah-Jane Redmond, reflects the evil that Frank is fighting. Both in the form of serial sexual killers and more broadly in the form of what is an apocalyptic millennial dread (a hysteroidal period) that was percolating in the cultural milieu at the time. Applied to contemporary times, this millennial dread is existential dread. Existential dread as a product of increasing secularism, loss of religion, the failure of the therapeutic regime to replace religion to provide a sense of meaning (you can’t Zoloft yourself to a coherent identity), and a more general, widespread social anomie. Today, Butler reflects radical progressivism aka Woke ideology; the internalizing and cluster B crisis of our time. She is Satan; Paglia’s daemonic ‘chthonic’ deity from the underworld, seeking to destabilize order, create chaos, and provide false promises of Utopian rapture. Freud’s Devouring Mother.
Sex is daemonic. This term, current in Romantic studies of the past twenty-five years, derives from the Greek daimon, meaning a spirit of lower divinity than the Olympian gods (hence my pronunciation “daimonic”). The outcast Oedipus becomes a daemon at Colonus. The word came to mean a man’s guardian shadow. Christianity turned the daemonic into the demonic. The Greek daemons were not evil—or rather they were both good and evil, like nature itself, in which they dwelled. Freud’s unconscious is a daemonic realm.
…What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means “of the earth”—but earth’s bowels, not its surface. Jane Harrison uses the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and the ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form.
(Paglia, 1990, Sexual Personae).
Butler makes her initial appearance in MilleniuM’s first season in the episode “Lamentation” where she plays the wife (and ultimately widow) of the serial killer Dr. Ephriam Fabricant; the pair wed while he was in prison after the two struck up an online relationship. Yet, it is ultimately Butler who facilitates his escape from a hospital and then tortures him by removing his remaining kidney without anesthetic (the first having been donated via transplant to his sister), as well as murdering a Seattle police department detective who has arrived at the home of Frank Black in Seattle to investigate a possible home intrusion in which Black’s wife, Catherine, found a human kidney in their refrigerator during a violent thunderstorm and power outage. How Butler is able to traverse long distances (Fabricant’s assisted escape and subsequent torture took place in Virginia) and her ability to take on different physical manifestations in the form of a male figure, a wolf-faced demon, and ultimately as herself is entirely a metaphysical depiction of evil, inconsonant with empirical space-time lawful relations and causality as well as linear, factual thinking.
In the second season, she is the central antagonist in “A Room with No View” in which she abducts young adolescent males in order to torture and sexually abuse them in a dungeon. At least this is what the viewer is lead to believe at first blush. However, the motivation is much more nuanced: it is driven by a much more insidious manipulative and psychopathic desire to to degrade and erode from the captives any sense of their own personal identity; to force a belief that their own self-worth is meaningless; their own aspirations and desires are hopeless. In short, to force them to believe in a despair of eternal personal anomie. To destroy agency. It should not be overlooked that Butler is female, the captives are young adolescent males. Butler is attempting to force a mindset of eternal ‘communion’ and purge ‘agency’ from the male characters. The parallels to the encroaching Woke collectivist neo-Marxist and Communist sentiments in our cultural milieu are more salient now than they could have ever been when the episode first appeared. Time and cultural dynamics have sharpened the edges of this episode, so much so that it could almost serve as a visual metaphor of what contemporary Woke collectivism aims to achieve as the ‘utopian society’.
In the third season, Butler is again the central antagonist in “Antipas” in which she again plays a demonic force masquerading as a nanny hired by the rich Saxum family to attend to their daughter named Divina Saxum. During the episode, Butler attempts to seduce both Divina’s father, John, and Frank Black. Reflecting the metaphysical elements of evil, and no doubt a direct reference to the devouring mother archetype, the trailer for this episode portrays Butler in the form of a serpent who symbolically devours Divina. This symbolic ‘devouring’ fundamentally alters Divina, seeming to infuse her with improved physical health, yet more evil metaphysical intentions as she serves to advance Butler’s agenda of breaking the sanctity of the marital relationship between the Saxums.
Though each episode is a ‘stand-alone’ episode within each season, collectively they form the “Mythology of Legion” or the central arc of MillenniuM, which is the exposition of the nature of evil beyond purely scientific or psychological explanations. Butler makes several momentary appearances in a few other episodes which solidify her character as “Legion” or ‘evil personified.’ Collectively, we see (1): a devouring mother or chthonic deity; (2) who seduces or kills male figures; and (3) has the ability to take multiple forms, in addition to the physical human instantiation as Butler.
The Ouroboros: The symbol for the MillenniuM group and its relevance to the Gnostic/Hermetic ‘liberatory transformation’ inherent in Woke Marxism.
In MillenniuM, death and rebirth are symbolized by the the recurring image of the ouroboros that serves as the MilleniuM group’s avatar throughout the series run. Although the MillenniuM group were initially modeled on the now dissolved Academy group, it was evident that the Millennium Group represented something much more than a group of ex-law enforcement officials investigating violent sexual crime.
As the series progressed—even within the first season—hints that the MillenniuM group itself was a group with motivations beyond investigating violent crime were apparent. There was a mysterious, religious, and almost cabalistic feel to the group as episodes—in the form of MillenniuM group member dialogue—began to explore the nature of evil itself rather than solving violent crime per se.
Death and rebirth form the core of the Legion myth arc represented most definitively by Lucy Butler. Season 2 of MillenniuM especially was rich in its exploration of death, rebirth, and the metaphysical-religious aspects of evil and human nature. While many saw this second season as an unfortunate estrangement from the serial crime procedural formation of season 1 (as did I during my original viewing of the series) the second season contained some of the most profound episodes including those focusing on religious themes and motifs (In Arcadio Ego & Anamnesis) and self-understanding or individual rebirth (Luminary).
"The image that appears on the main title of the show which is a snake eating its tail, a circular snake, the snake is a classic and ancient image. I think it's come from several different cultures, it's called the Ouroboros and it has many different meanings. One is eternal return, everything being circular, everything recurring and also of a snake eating its tail, of it devouring itself, which is a more negative context. I thought for Millennium it had equal parts of each and left some then to the imagination of what it might mean. But it's a very powerful image and I think it's really perfectly representative of the show."
-Chris Carter
In present times, the ouroboros has been associated the encroaching neo-Marxism percolating in our cultural Zeitgeist (aka ‘Woke ideology’).
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel introduced the dialectical process of philosophical exposition which is hermeticism for the modern era: For Hegel, freedom is not a static state but a dynamic process—the dialectic that propels consciousness forward, synthesizing the contradictions of thesis and antithesis into higher forms of understanding, much like the ouroboros suggests a continual renewal and evolution. Hegel's dialectical process can be seen as a modern embodiment of Hermeticism because it represents a method of understanding and transformation that aligns with the Hermetic principles of interconnectedness and evolution. Specifically, Hermeticism’s roots in alchemical traditions such as the notion of "as above, so below” is formalized as the Principle of Correspondence.
In Hegelian dialectics, this interconnectedness is reflected in the way thesis and antithesis— (really abstract ->negation -> concrete )seemingly opposing forces or ideas-are not separate and static but are instead inherently linked. The dialectic is the dynamic tension and resolution between these opposites, which drives the progression of ideas, history, and consciousness itself forward.
This process mirrors Hermetic transformation in that it involves the resolution of opposites into a synthesis (concrete) representing a new “higher” level of understanding or being. It suggests a kind of philosophical alchemy where the conflict between ideas (the 'lead') is transformed into a new, higher state of understanding (the (the 'gold').
As James Lindsay has argued, Karl Marx was the first to realize that the principle of correspondence must be applied from the bottom. Working on the world (as below) to change it (so above), and then the world (as above), changed, will socialize and condition people (so below) to accept the changes and make them “actual.” Marx called these two dynamics “praxis” and the “inversion of praxis.” It is this mechanism, Lindsay argues, that is behind the activism in many evils, including Marxism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and feminism.
Darwin’s Eye & Seeing Things: Millennium & True Detective
It is, I believe, also insightful to note the thematic and atmospheric similarity between MillenniuM and that in the first season of True Detective. One example that particularly came to mind in my rewatch of MillenniuM, was the relevance and similarity between the season 3 MillenniuM episode “Darwin’s Eye” and the episode “Seeing Things” in the first season of True Detective stood out.
In Darwin’s Eye, a sanitarium ward, Cass Doyle, violently murders and beheads a staff orderly. Cass had been institutionalized her for the murder of her parents and beheading of her father several years previously. She escapes and is assisted in her flee from authorities by a police deputy whom she convinces that she was not responsible for the murder of her parents and that malevolent authorities (the FBI) are seeking to kill her. Ultimately, Cass also beheads the policy deputy following the two having sexual relations in a hotel room. The deputy had come to believe her story and then had fallen for her sexually. A quasi Stockholm Syndrome. Here again we see the portrayal of Paglia’s chthonic daemon: Cass is cast as the embodiment of the sexually aggressive castrating monster from the underworld.
A key focal point in the episode is the cryptic writings that Cass had scrawled on her asylum room wall and the attempts to decipher their meaning by Frank and Emma Hollis, an FBI agent who is featured alongside Frank through the bulk of season 3. For Cass, the writings are an attempt to make sense of likely sexually abusive experiences at the hands of her father. To make sense of why things happen. To find a coherent self narrative amidst her presumed psychotic, trauma-induced mental illness. Viewed from the proper vantage point and lighting in the asylum room, Emma and Frank see that the writings form a mosaic of Cass’s face.
Perhaps serendipitously, as I had recently read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez at the time, I could not help drawing links between Darwin’s Eye and these passages:
“…a helpless little bird; who was a self-professed ‘crazy woman from the insane asylum’…”
“She could not have been more than twenty years old, and she did not seem to share the spirit of Carnival, unless she was disguised as an invalid…Florenino Ariza invited her to have an ice with him…She said: ‘I am happy to accept, but I warn you that I am crazy.’…she danced like a professional, she was imaginative and daring in her revelry, and she had devastating charm.”
“...They (two guards and a nurse) had been looking for since her escape at three o’clock that afternoon—they and the entire police force. She had decapitated a guard and seriously wounded two others with a machete that she had snatched away from the gardener because she wanted to go dancing at Carnival. It had not occurred to anyone that she might be dancing in the streets; they thought she would be hiding in one of the many houses where they had even searched the cisterns.”
(Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, 1985, Love in the Time of Cholera)
Oddly enough, in working my way through archival interview material from the shows creators, writers, and producers, I came across this quote from writer Patrick Harbinson who wrote the episode Darwin’s Eye:
“If any TV series could be said to have aspired to magic realism it was Millennium.”
Indeed, Márquez was considered a pioneer of the literary style of magic realism.
And rewatching Darwin’s Eye in 2024, the thematic imagery and metaphysical similarities with True Detective Season 1 also seemed to jump out at me so vividly that as I contemplated the similarities with increasing focus, I wondered to myself whether Nic Pizzolatto himself had watched MillenniuM when it originally aired or had in any way been influenced by the show in his creation of the first season of True Detective. The use of cryptic writing and art to facilitate the metaphysical elements of evil as manifest in the work of killers is shared between the two television creations.
The cryptic writings on the asylum wall in Darwin’s Eye and the iconographic painting of the female figure with a crown of deer antlers on the wall of the burned out church in the second episode of True Detective season 1 (Seeing Things) both serve to develop both the mythology and motivation of the killers; the metaphysical evil or dark forces that drive the killers serve to move the viewer beyond simply contemplating the murderous acts themselves. Indeed, the infusion of religion into the plot in True Detective season 1 is made explicitly clear when it is revealed that the victim, Dora Lange, had recently found religion and had once attended the burned out church where she presumably had crossed paths with the killer.
MillenniuM was a television series well ahead of its time. A time we are presently living through as institutional authority has been degraded, empirical Truth itself has been polluted by intersectionality, and questions of the metaphysical nature of good vs. evil (Israel vs. Hamas) confront us daily. Existential despair, climate alarmism, Woke ideology, as well as continually increasing secularization and loss of traditional religion that have thrown the cultural Zeitgeist into chaos seem to me much more ‘real life’ apocalyptic concerns than the stroke of midnight ushering in the year 2000 did. All this to say: if you haven’t watched MillenniuM, it’s well worth your time to view for the first time this gem of a television series. It will provide not only welcome distraction during this time of cultural upheaval, but it will provide keen insight to navigating the upheaval when that time invariably comes each day whether at work, at school, in the news, or anywhere else.
Thank you for reading my lengthy and discursive thoughts on MillenniuM and its relevance to our current social-cultural moment. As I was writing this piece, I found myself drawing links between the show and several other forms of literary art and television entertainment. It was, somewhat to my surprise, a deep learning experience for me integrating several thematic elements across different mediums of knowledge and entertainment . If you found insight and value here, please
for all the good it will do, amidst the social media platform wars. Even more importantly, please consider
You can draw a straight line from the show’s apocalyptic vision to what we’re living through now. The metaphors have become real. I remember reading something the other day about how all of this was post-Christian writing. It was interesting because it used Christian themes, but relies heavily on breaking the norms. Once there are no taboos left to break, it turns into modern art, which is mostly directionless nonsense.
MillenniuM is a great show, sad how the characters that begin as a close knit & loving family get destroyed by Frank Black's forays into the heart of darkness... The show goes down a melancholic rabbit hole where the psychic ability of an ex-FBI agent to tap into the minds of serial killers brings about the sad undoing of Frank Black's family.