40 Years Ago Today: Link (1986)

Although relegated to limited theatrical release and near obscurity afterwards, director Richard Franklin’s Link (1986) is an effectively made and ingenious horror film that deserves to be better-remembered and, indeed, championed.  

The film depicts a tense battle for superiority, pitting man (or woman…) against ape in a remote English estate.  A sort of simian version of Psycho (1960), Link ponders a very specific question:  Does possessing “civilization” make man inherently superior to apes? 

Or, contrarily, is civilization a mere construct that can be picked up or put down as easily as one takes off a dinner jacket? 

Is civilization a strength, or a weakness?

Throughout the Franklin film, when the titular chimp (played by an orangutan…) prepares to commit murder, he removes his tasteful jacket, as though noting that, simply, civilization has its limitations, and therefore, at times, must be ignored. 

Link the ape wears civilization as if is a suit, but does not internalize its value.

Cleverly, Link presents three important “rules” that -- according to Terence Stamp’s anthropologist, Dr. Phillips -- must dominate man’s interaction with chimpanzees.  But then the film diagrams, in harrowing detail, what problems those rules can cause for both man and beast.  

After all, rules or laws are part and parcel of “civilization.” And yet by the same token rules, to some degree, establish boundaries that demand testing. Link tests those boundaries in his human “friends” and masters, and possesses a tactical advantage in the sense that he can avoid civilization all together simply by taking off the aforementioned jacket.

Humans, it seems, have a much more difficult time shedding this construct.

Buttressed by a superb final act which features a climax (and chase) of virtually unbearable suspense, Link explores man’s perpetual fascination or obsession with simians, and at the same time notes that civilization is both man’s greatest handicap and greatest virtue.

“The little monster’s been getting out at night…”

A zoology student in London named Jane (Elisabeth Shue) petitions Professor Phillips (Stamp), a prominent anthropologist, to serve as his assistant. With a semester break coming up, Phillips agrees that Jane can work at his remote estate, on the sea, as his assistant.  

There -- over the objections of her boyfriend, David -- she will prepare his meals, clean the house, and help him look after his chimps, including old Voodoo, baby Imp, and the intelligent “domestic,” Link.

Upon her arrival at the house in the country, Jane is unprepared for Phillips’ hostility and cruelty towards the animals. He plans to euthanize both Voodoo and Link, and tells Jane the hard and fast rules for dealing with the apes.  

However, Link soon turns the tables on Professor Phillips.

While Jane attempts to understand, precisely, the simian politics of the house, Link goes on a killing spree, and lays siege to the house and its occupants.

“You just have to let them know that they are forgiven…”

Writer Everett De Roche, Richard Franklin’s frequent creative collaborator, sets down three rules for man/ape interaction in Link.  

These are: 

1. Man is the dominant species, so he must never treat the apes as equals.

2. Man’s anger must never escalate. He must always forgive the apes, no matter what they do. The apes must know that they are forgiven.

And, finally…

3 Man must not get involved in inter-ape squabbles, instead letting them work matters out for themselves.

Notice that, in a curious way, all three rules establish the same thing: man is in charge, and ape is subservient, inferior. 

Rule one establishes dominance, but so does rule two, in more nuanced terms, because it is man who has the capacity (and responsibility) to forgive, not the apes. 

The third rule, meanwhile, establishes that ape matters are beneath the interest of man and therefore to be ignored. Their affairs are not man’s concern.

Phillip’s Laws as we might call them overrule the law of the jungle, and demand that man act, constantly, as a deliberate superior to his ape friends.  

Amazingly, clever Link develops a way around these rules. He kills Voodoo (settling a squabble his own way), and is constantly seen demanding forgiveness, no matter how radically he transgresses, or what crimes he commits.  

If humans must always forgive, then Link can always simply extend his hand in supplication, no matter his trespass. Link realizes he has an out for any act that could get him in trouble: Rule #2.  He doesn’t realize that Dr. Phillip can break his own rule by offering not forgiveness, but a final solution: murder of the transgressor.

Yet if Link sees a way around the rules, he is not exactly deceitful in nature. By contrast, Phillips’ stock and trade is cruelty, and he plans to kill Link essentially because the animal has grown too smart; too knowing. 

At least Link has the decency to remove his jacket when he gets down to murder, an affectation that Phillips doesn’t observe. He never casts off the face of civilization, though his act (homicide) qualifies as barbaric.

But Link is a clever movie, in part, because it establishes a film-long conflict between man and ape on all fronts. One early scene sees Jane pitted against Imp in an IQ test, and she nearly loses. The message is that intelligence is not the sole purview of man.  Intelligence is not the thing that separates us, then, and Link’s dialogue informs us that some apes have IQs as high as 85.

Another scene suggests that man is separated from ape by his capacity to make war. The movie undercuts that notion as well, and tells a story of a chimp “war” in Tanzania in 1979.

In the finale, Jane realizes that the only way to defeat Link is to trick him, and she does so by exploiting his understanding of Phillip’s Laws…of civilization itself. Link knows that he will be forgiven for his trespasses, including smoking.  

So Jane starts to discipline him, pre-emptively, for smoking a cigar near a lit gas pilot light in the kitchen.  Knowing he won’t face permanent anger or discipline, Link lights up the cigar, demonstrating his belief in his own superiority.  

Instead, he blows up the house and loses the war.

Watching Link again for the first time since 2005, I was struck by how similar the film is, in a sense, to Hitchcock’s Psycho.  

The setting is an isolated house with a very similar interior on the first floor, and the murderous individual (in this case Link, not Norman Bates) has an established routine for disposing of visitors (dumping cars not in a swamp, but over a rocky cliff, Oceanside).  

Furthermore, the villain is psychotic, one might surmise, due to a betrayal from a parental figure. Norman poisoned and killed his own Mother when she turned her affection away from him.  Link kills his father when he recognizes Phillip’s betrayal.  There’s even a bathroom scene here, with Link peeping at Jane as she is about to take a bath.

Link is more straightforward a film than Psycho is, in many respects, but both films trade on the notion that not everything is what it seems on the surface.  Phillips boasts a darkness to him that seems to bring about Link’s violent fit, and so a key question remains: is Link acting out of self-defense, or out of blood-thirstiness when he commits murder?  Norman’s activities, likewise, come out of the need and desire to emotionally protect himself from his mother’s death.  His murders are a form of mental self-defense, you might say.

One innocent figure in Link is the baby chimp, Imp. He is carried about on Shue’s shoulders throughout the film.  She reads him bedtime stories, and he is treated, essentially, like a human baby.  

This innocent is unencumbered by rules or knowledge of them, and suggests a blunt course of action.  “Kill Link,” Imp types into a computer.  

Jane responds that murder is “is not the way civilized people behave,” but ultimately, Imp is right.  Imp suggests the same course of action as Dr. Phillips does, but Imp gains audience sympathy because of his innocence, and because of his nature as an animal…one who understands instinctively what Link is capable of. Link, who has figured out how to game the rules, must die, because he keeps crossing lines of decorum or civilized behavior (murder, primarily). 

Link is a great horror film, dominated by a number of great, almost sub-textual touches.  Early on, the film Blonde Venus (1932) is seen on a television, and shows footage of humans dancing with a gorilla (or a person in a gorilla suit).  Underneath the suit, Marlene Dietrich is revealed at one point.  So Dietrich removes her “costume” as a beast to reveal her civilized, human self.  This act is the precise opposite of Link’s in the film. He takes off his human suit to reveal his murderous, uncivilized, animal side.

Similarly, the lead character here is named “Jane,” and we associate that name explicitly with Jane in the Tarzan stories, and Jane Goodall, a famous primatologist and anthropologist.  In all these cases, Jane is a figure who is something of a go-between, moving between the human world and the ape world.  That is, not coincidentally, the role that Shue’s Jane plays here.

Finally, I love that Jane reads Imp the story of The Three Little Pigs in the film, because the last act literalizes the story, with Link as the Big Bad Wolf outside, trying very hard to make his way inside the house.  

A formalist like Hitchcock, Franklin surpasses his earlier film work in Link by staging some remarkable and expressive shots during the movie’s final battle. After Jane picks up a shot-gun and shoots at Link, Franklin stages a gorgeous shot through the bullet hole in the kitchen door.  

Later, he stages an extreme high-angle shot from above the second floor balcony, and follows Link’s pursuit of Jane, Imp and David up the stairs, around the ledge, and into a locked room.  The effect is exhilarating, as the long-shot provides viewers the full terrain of the battle, and offers no fakery or trickery.  A sense of space and time -- and therefore danger -- is brilliantly preserved. While so many films sort of wind-down or creatively peter out in the third act (see: Explorers [1985]), Link delivers the thrills.

For some reason, audiences got a lot of “ape”-based horror movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Link, Monkey Shines (1988), and Shakma (1990).  

I’m a big fan of Romero’s Monkey Shines, but even so Link remains, in my eyes, top banana.

50 Years Ago: Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976)

Well -- look indeed -- at what has happened here.

Basically, a brilliant, disturbing horror film about a woman who feels she doesn’t control her own life has been transformed into a cheap-jack, shlocky 1970’s horror TV-movie.

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby aired originally on ABC, on October 29, 1976, and attempted to continue the story of Rosemary and her son, Adrian/Andy. But the effort is mostly forgotten by modern audiences.

At the very least, this telefilm isn’t often considered a worthy heir to the 1968 film.

If you’re like me, however, you may have -- at times -- wished for a sequel to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). That film ended with several important questions unanswered.  

For example: what would Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) do next, having mothered the Anti-Christ? 

Would she kill her child, or would she raise him, and attempt to impart some humanity to him via her maternal drive? Or would Rosemary simply steal the child and run away, attempting to escape the Coven run by the Castavets?

And what of the boy? Would he follow the path of nature (following in his father’s footsteps), or the path of nurture (represented by his Mom?)

Ira Levin, author of the novel, Rosemary’s Baby, wrote a sequel to his story in 1997 called Son of Rosemary, to offer some answers. 

And then you have this TV movie, which dramatizes a different story all together.

Neither sequel quite lives up to the feelings of sheer paranoia and helplessness transmitted in the original Polanski film. The core problem with Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby is that it blatantly lacks the artistry of its predecessor, and -- because of its low-budget -- can’t take advantage of the inherently intriguing aspects of the story. Wouldn't you like to see what a grown up Anti-Christ can do to his enemies?

I know I would.

In the case of this film, however, Andrew/Adrian causes a few road accidents, and that's about it.

So if we “look” at “what’s happened” to Rosemary’s Baby, we can see that the source material has been degraded in virtually all regards. 

“They want to be turned on by the far out.”

Rosemary Woodhouse (Patti Duke Astin) cares of her young son, eight-year old Andrew -- the Anti-Christ, -- under the watchful eyes of the Coven, led by Minnie Castavet (Ruth Gordon) and her husband, Roman (Ray Milland). 

The boy is sensitive and, boasts the capacity to do both good, and evil. Seeing that -- at least to some extent -- Andrew possesses free will, Rosemary flees the coven with him.  Unfortunately, one of his first acts outside the Coven’s care is to murder a group of children who torment him.

Meanwhile, the Castavets use Rosemary’s ex-husband, movie star Guy Woodhouse (George Maharis) to track the fugitives down, and re-capture the boy.  In Nevada, Rosemary ends up trapped on a bus while a hooker named Marjean (Tina Louise) now in league with the Coven, raises the boy in her absence

The years pass, and Andrew becomes a young man. He has only one friend, a drop-out from divinity school named Peter (David Huffman). Andrew is into music, but is often in trouble with law too. As his 21^st birthday, the Coven plans a ritual in which -- if Andrew is evil enough -- Satan will take his body and soul, and become manifest on Earth.

That doesn’t happen, however, and sometime later, an amnesiac Andrew tells his story to a nurse (Donna Mills).  Although Andrew doesn’t know it, she is the grand-daughter of the Castavets. She seduces Andrew so she can carry his seed -- the seed of the Anti-Christ -- to term.

“Win a few, lose a few…”

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby is, most intriguing, perhaps, for its unusual three part structure.  Each of the three pieces of the film are titled like the Bible, with a specific person’s name (think: The Book of Ruth, The Book of Joshua, etc). 

In this case, we get The Book of Rosemary first, then the Book of Adrian, and finally, the Book of Andrew. The obvioius inference here is that we are reading/watching/learning from the Evil Holy Book, (well-after Roman’s Year One, no doubt…), and that it’s a mirror image of The Bible.  Light has had its day (2000 years), and now Darkness, and its messiah, shall have its span.

The down-side of the intriguing structure involves character and time.  We don't spend enough time with Rosemary to get effectively re-acquainted with her. And we don't meet Andrew/Adrian as an adult until the second act.

Beyond the original structural conceit, this TV movie sadly has very little to recommend it, alas. The only cast member from the Polanski film who returns is Ruth Gordon, playing quirky Minnie Castavet.  All the other replacements are mostly inferior selections. 

Ray Milland is much more overtly sinister in the role of Roman Castavet than quirky Sydney Blackmer was, in the 1968 version for instance.  The result is that a level of nuance is lost, and the character seems more cartoon-like in this iteration.  There's menace, but no subtlety to the menace.

Patti Duke Astin doesn’t connect well as Rosemary, either, playing mostly hysteria and panic. Her best moment as Rosemary involves the story she tells to her son, about a prince who has two fathers. Her dramatic line reading (which recurs in the epilogue) is, at least, soulful.  Frankly, Patti Duke Astin isn't in the telefilm long enough to make the role her own, and successfully erase the memory of Mia Farrow.

The character of Guy Woodhouse -- who peddled his wife's flesh to the devil -- undergoes a major development in this film, essentially redeeming himself in the last act, but the teleplay provides George Maharis no key moment to explore the motivations behind this change of heart.  One moment Guy is killing an innocent (Peter) in service of the Coven, and the next he is seeking to murder the Castavets’ grand-daughter, the new receptacle/vessel for the Anti-Christ. Why the change of heart?

Of all the performances, Stephen McHattie’s -- as Andrew -- fares best, perhaps because he musn't contend with invidious comparisons to other actors in famous roles. McHattie does a solid job of excavating Andrew’s central conflict, and choice.  Andrew is a man who is lost, and uncertain of which road to take.

It’s just a shame that McHattie must undergo a scene here in which he is made-up to look like a mime, and then undergo a seductive kind of dance (on the night of his birthday) in white pancake make-up. It’s impossible to escape how strange the slow-motion casino dance sequence in mime make-up is, even forty years later.  I readily admit I don't know much about devil worship, but I wager that mime make-up isn't an essential ingredient.

The movie has other problems too. First, Rosemary gives birth in 1969, or thereabouts, and so Andrew can’t turn 18 or 21, until the late 1980's or early 1990's. 

However, there is no visual indication of time passing at all. The whole movie -- which encompasses decades -- is set in the seventies, at least in terms of fashion, cars, hair-cuts, and so forth. And folks who were elderly in 1968 -- Castavets -- look exactly the same in what would be the mid 1990's.  A deal with the Devil, I guess?

Another, perhaps larger problem, is that Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby features no elaborate death scenes or set-pieces.  The whole thing is such a low-budget, low-intensity affair that the most response is boredom. The movie is slow-going, with very little to recommend it in terms of meaningful action.  Now, I am currently reviewing all of these TV-movies because they prove, on many occasions, that imagination can trump budgetary concerns.  But this telefilm doesn't find any creative visuals or symbolism with which to vet its tale.

In 1976, just a few months before this TV movie aired, a new horror franchise about the Anti-Christ was dawning.  It began with Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976).  This sequel to the Polanski classic feels very much like as thought it is trying to cash in on the popularity of that film. The Omen, however, was renowned for its graphic violence and death scenes.  This movie may feature the Anti-Christ, but he doesn’t use his powers very often, except to kill bikers and bullies. He's an under-whelming presence.

To treat the rich, layered world of Rosemary Woodhouse -- so memorably imagined by Polanski and Levin -- as just another devilish cash cow to compete with The Omen is, perhaps, the ultimate betrayal of Rosemary’s Baby’s legacy.

Deep Focus Episode 5: The Hunger (1983)

 

60 Years Ago: Star Trek: "Miri" (October 27, 1966)

Stardate: 2713.5

The Enterprise encounters an Earth-style distress S.O.S. and traces its origin to the third planet of a system hundreds of light years from Earth.  The planet is an exact duplicate of Earth as it existed in the 1960s. The planet, however is sparsely populated.

A landing party beams down to the planet and discover that all the adults on the planet are long-dead.  Strangely, there are packs of wild children still alive; children who are actually 300 years old, but who contract a deadly disease upon the onset of puberty

As Kirk (William Shatner) and the others learn, piecing together information from a teenage girl name Miri (Kim Darby), this strange set of circumstances came about when scientists on the parallel Earth undertook a project in “life prolongation.”

When Kirk, Bones (De Forest Kelley), Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) and the other humans in the landing party contract the disease, they realize they have only days left before the onset of dementia and an agonizing death.  

And unfortunately, Miri’s friends have stolen their communicators as part of a game, because these ancient children don’t like “grups” (grown-ups). Now they can’t even contact the ship for help in determining if an antidote is fatal.

Finally, Kirk must confront the children about the truth of their existence, and a disease that extends childhood…but never allows one to grow up.

“Miri” is a strange and affecting Peter Pan story. It acknowledges that there’s a strange duality in being young. 

For a time, it seems that childhood lasts forever…and we want it to do so There is nothing more like paradise than the first day of summer vacation…the promise of so many days ahead filled with endless play and games. 

But then, as adolescence looms, it seems we can’t grow up and be independent fast enough. Childhood seems like a prison at that point, not the ultimate freedom. We count the days until we can escape curfews and house rules, and chart our own destiny.

What once seemed like paradise now seems like damnation.

This episode of Star Trek (1966 – 1969) takes as the title character a young woman, played beautifully by Kim Darby, who has half-crossed that bridge from childhood to adulthood. Childish things are now behind Miri, and she longs for an adult life. But because of the disease on her planet, she will never reach that threshold. 

When Miri grows up, she dies. She has waited quite a long time to reach a destination that she will never see, at least for any length of time. This is her tragedy, though the good people of the Enterprise help her escape the trap.  Her dilemma, however, is haunting.  Miri is very much alone when Kirk and the others first meet her, an outcast who doesn't belong to the world of adults or the world of children.

In a way, Miri is the female counterpart for Charlie Evans ("Charlie X"), and so this segment is thus the second episode in Trek's first season that contends with adolescence as a time of great capriciousness. 

The notion of children running a society on their own, often quite cruelly, is a science fiction and literary trope. We saw the concept play out in William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, for example. After Trek, the idea appeared on other science fiction series, including The Starlost (1973) and the episode "The Children of Methuselah."

This situation encountered by the Enterprise in “Miri” could be a metaphor for many things, but it seems a perfect reflection of human life. 

What children don’t always recognize in their longing to “grow up” is that adulthood -- while freeing in terms of decision-making and independence, at least for a while -- is also about shackling one’s self to a certain set of variables or responsibilities. 

You need a job. You need a place to live. You need a car. 

The freedom you imagined is, instead, a kind of soul death where your childhood dreams go to curl up and die.  This is especially true for those with an artistic bent. Want to be a musician, a writer, or an actor?  Be prepared to do a lot of lousy jobs to support your dream. Few kids imagine that truth.

Similarly, the Grups in “Miri” are combative, delusional monsters who just want to fight with another. This seems to suggest that brand of the freedom represented by adulthood is wasted on grown-ups. 

Once ensconced in maturity, grown-ups long for the childhood they once had -- like the disfigured Grup with his broken tricycle -- and now spend their days acting like raving maniacs. 

Miri describes Grups as people who burn, yell and hurt people, a good indictment of some bitter grown-ups, especially today. When one looks at the anger seething right now in this country, one has to wonder what our children make of the so-called "adults."

Like last week’s story, “What Are Little Girls Made Of,” there is a distinctly conservative bent to this episode of Star Trek. 

The people of Miri’s planet made a grave mistake when they sought to change nature; to pursue immortality through their life prolongation project. They showed hubris or pride in believing that they could over-write nature’s plan, and for their folly the planet was destroyed.  They thought they could substitute their wisdom for the wisdom of God or Mother Nature.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy provide an antidote that restores the previous status-quo; giving the children a natural life-span to live out, rather than the dreamed-of immortality.  In other words, they re-boot in the society in terms of its original design.

The message is quite explicitly that science, medicine and technology can go too far, and so should be viewed warily.  It’s funny for a show about the future -- one that depends so fully on advanced technology -- to take this view, but I understand it.  

Star Trek is about human beings learning to face the mysteries of the final frontier while maintaining their essential human nature.  And that nature, episodes such as “Miri” remind us, is mortal.  The fact that we grow old and die is part of our essential make-up.  Indeed, we count our lives as worth living in part because we realize they won’t last forever. What drives us is the need to achieve great things in the time given us.

Still, I wouldn’t be averse to living for 200 years or so, assuming no plague is created by doctors in giving me that opportunity…

“Miri” is also a kind of second (or is it third?) pilot for Star Trek, in that it is the first in an intended series of “Parallel Earth” stories. 

In these (projected) money-saving type stories, the Enterprise encounters planets that are duplicates of Earth, but ones that veered off of our “chosen” destiny in some key way. 

In “Miri,” the quest for immortality releases a deadly plague that is a “veritable soup of bacteria” destroying the human race, mostly, at a 1960s level of technological development.  

From a production standpoint, these stories are cheap to do because they utilize standing studio sets.

However, I think we can be grateful that no other “Parallel Earth” stories are told in quite this fashion, with the Enterprise encountering exact duplicates of our planet in the distant heavens.  

“A Piece of the Action” and “Patterns of Force” are about alien worlds contaminated by contact with Earth culture, rather than planetary duplicates that spontaneously exist in other solar systems. 

“Bread and Circuses” isn’t set on a duplicate Earth, but rather an alien planet that mirrors the rise of human culture on Earth. Perhaps that’s splitting hairs, but I think it would be awful if Star Trek featured every few weeks, a duplicate Earth. I'm glad the series didn't go that way.

“Miri” does set a trend in Star Trek storytelling in terms of another factor: language.  

In this episode, Kirk and his crew encounter children who have adopted their own slang or vocabulary.  Not merely “Grups,” but “Onlies” and Foolies” too.  The crew must decipher these words as part of their method of understanding another culture.  This notion recurs in “The Omega Glory” with the Yangs (Yankees) and Kohms (Communists), and even in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) with V’ger (Voyager).  

The answer to each story’s particular riddle involves an understanding of language, in all cases, a mangled “code” that no longer functions entirely as it should. The key is to crack the code.

Abnormal Fixation Season Three Trailer - Prepare for Chaos!

 

30 Years Ago: Chris Carter's Millennium (October 25, 1996)

Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), his wife, Catherine (Meghan Gallagher) and their daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady) move into a beautiful yellow house in Seattle.  

Frank, a former FBI agent who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, is now consulting with an organization of like-minded law-enforcement officials, the Millennium Group.  He helps the Group solve cases of an especially difficult nature utilizing his gift of “insight.”  Specifically, Frank becomes “capability,” seeing what the “killer sees.”

This ability, Frank notes, is both his gift and his curse.

Frank’s unusual brand of insight is put to the test almost at once, when a peep-show stripper is murdered by a deviant, poetry-reciting killer, “The Frenchman” (Paul Dillon). Frank tracks the killer, hoping to catch him before he strikes again.

But the Frenchman -- who is punishing sins against God in what he considers a Godless time and place -- commits another sexual homicide before he can be stopped.

As the case grows more difficult, Frank is distracted when Jordan contracts an unknown malady and is rushed to a Seattle hospital…

The pilot for Millennium (1996-1999) represents, perhaps, Chris Carter’s finest writing contribution to television in the 1990s. With seemingly effortless grace and literacy, this hour-long drama sets up the three central dramatic pillars of the cult-TV series.  

These pillars are: Frank Black’s family and home life, his investigations into the most savage and monstrous of criminals, and, finally, the series’ social role as commentator on 1990s America.  All these pillars are interconnected, as you might guess.

The writing is unquestionably sharp in this pilot episode, but its edge is enhanced immeasurably by director David Nutter’s brilliant visualizations. 

Many times throughout the pilot, a central clue or connection is captured merely in terms of canny imagery, with no dialogue to support it. This visual story-telling represents one reason why Millennium endures and is so incredibly smart. Nothing is spoon-fed to us. But the clues are there for us to see, and the connections are there for us to make, just as Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) makes them.

There are two examples to consider, immediately, of this visual storytelling approach. One involves the clue, PESTE, which is written both on a casket and underneath a bridge. Frank connects the graffiti and the epitaph, but the dialogue does not. We are asked, ultimately, to make the connection alongside the investigator.

Secondly, the key climactic event of the episode involves nothing but a look -- and a momentary hesitation -- between protagonist and antagonist. Frank stumbles upon the Frenchman in police headquarters. He takes one look at him, and knows that he has found his man. Creepily, the Frenchman stares back and knows precisely whom he is facing as well.

A look passes between the two men, and then the conflict becomes physical, but again, there’s never a moment in which a character explains his thought process, or how, specifically, he knows or recognizes the identity of his opposite.  This is a powerful approach for two reasons.

First, it validates Frank’s brand of insight. 

He has been in the “head” of the Frenchman, so it makes sense that he would recognize him on sight, after a fashion. But much more frightening is the opposite recognition.  The Frenchman seems to recognize Frank not merely as an investigator, but as a kindred force or person.  He seems to understand, or believe – instinctively – that Frank sees the same things he does.  That means that Frank’s insight is right, but also that the killer possesses some level of insight as well. 

A simpler way to put this is, simply, that Frank has looked into the abyss (the Frenchman), and the abyss has peered back into him (Frank). 

Beyond these terrific visual moments, the episode is also punctuated by gruesome and shocking sights. We see the gay men cruising a park by night, and in the Frenchman’s view their eyes and mouths are sewed up. There’s a psychic jolt when these individuals loom from the darkness, their faces a mockery of what we consider a normal human visage.

Then there is the bracing moment, in the pilot’s prologue, wherein beautiful women strip and dance, only to be drenched in blood and fire.  The Frenchman says “I want to see you dance on the blood-dimmed tide,” and the episode makes that wish a reality, by adopting his (twisted and perverse) perspective. 

Much of Millennium involves what we understand to be reality (based on Frank’s view of the world), and an alternate, corrupted view of reality. That second perspective is how the killer sees the world, and Frank’s key to unlocking each mystery is to tap that horrible (but also imaginatively realized) viewpoint.  In many ways, this episode of Millennium is about the differences between realities, and the way that we all navigate them.

Consider the doomed exotic dancer, Calamity, in the teaser sequence. Before she strips for the killer, becoming his fantasy (or becoming trapped in his fantasy, perhaps), we get a harsh dose of reality. She is not the object of sexuality that customers believe she is. Instead, we see her calling her child on the telephone before starting her shift at the sex shop.  She’s a single mom trying to make a living.  Selling sex is what she does for a living, but sexual arousal is probably the furthest thing from her mind as she goes about her “work.”

The idea of image vs. reality in terms of the stripper’s world, and the killer’s world, also has one more corollary in the episode, in Frank Black himself. He has bought his family the “perfect” yellow-house, and wants to carve out a place in the world for his wife and daughter that is safe and happy.  He wants them to see only the sunshine, not the blackest night.

But Catherine -- a clinical psychologist -- knows all too well that Frank’s reality is constructed, and therefore fragile.  She tells him that he can’t protect them from the darkness.  His answer is that he wants her to pretend that he can.  In other words, he prefers, in this case, not to “see” the truth.  He constructs his reality of the yellow house and asks Catherine and Jordan to share that illusion with him, without acknowledging that it is an illusion.

Frank paints away the darkness with the yellow house, as Chris Carter told me in an interview in 2009, but he too -- like the Frenchman -- erects a world that isn’t quite real.

In terms of Frank’s family and the relationships between members, this pilot is the starting point for several story-arcs.  The first involves Catherine. She tells Frank, explicitly, that she can handle his job. What she can’t handle is him keeping secrets from her.  “I can handle imposition, Frank,” she says directly. “What I can’t handle is secrecy.”

Frank, however, is unable to be completely truthful and open with Catherine, despite her admonition that he should be.  Why?  I believe the answer is encoded in the reality he creates.  He will not be the one to shatter the sanctuary of the yellow house. If he tells Catherine everything he sees, everything he knows, she -- like him -- won’t be able to live in the world he has created.

The pilot also gives us the first instance of Jordan mysteriously falling ill or having unexplained wounds This plot device recurs on at least two other occasions in the series (“Monster” and “Borrowed Time.”) 

These dangerous events always remind Frank where his priorities should be, but also suggest that Jordan is incredibly fragile and not a “normal” child. As stories such as “Walkabout” suggest, she may possess Frank’s gift of insight…and something beyond it too.

In terms of the second dramatic pillar, Millennium’s pilot introduces to a killer who views others as sinners, and yet has sinned himself. He judges others, and condemns them to (horrible) deaths, without addressing his behavior.

The first time we see the killer in the pilot is in a rain-soaked, gray world, as he stalks it in near silhouette. 

The Frenchman is depicted under an arch, and the visual suggestion is that he is being crushed by the world; being crushed by his vision of the world, which he believes requires him to act. The world around him is dead, is slate gray, and the trees are devoid of life and color. 

He does act, to murder sinners, and Frank connects his crimes, in particular to “The Second Coming,” a 1920 poem by W.B. Yeats about, not surprisingly, apocalypse, and historical cycles. Specifically, Yeats apparently envisioned a doomsday coming roughly two thousand years after the death of Jesus Christ.

That would be right about 1996 -- the epoch of this story -- give or take a couple of years. So in some twisted way, the Frenchman is working on the assumption that he is living through Yeats’ apocalypse, which he sees as one of moral depravity. 

He talks about the “great plague in the maritime city,” and this reference may carry two meanings. The episode links the line from Yeats to AIDS, and the Frenchman’s gay victims (and also, apparent inclination).  

But given what we know of Millennium as a series, the “maritime” city of Seattle does suffer an outbreak in 1998, or a plague, in the two-part second season story “The Fourth Horseman”/”The Time is Now.’

Taken by itself, the pilot is the story of a sick serial killer who dwells in his own reality of judgment and wrath. But if we look at the series as a whole, we might even view him as one more person who seems “gifted” or “cursed” by an insight the rest of us don’t possess.  In this case, The Frenchman adopts the telltale “anticipatory anxiety” of Chris Carter’s 1990s programs, fearing that he knows what God’s judgment will be, come the turn of the century. Or, perhaps he knows what the Millennium Group is actually up to…

The third dramatic pillar I mentioned above is social commentary, and for me this is a key artistic aspect of Millennium. This episode points out the hypocrisy of those who judge others, and we certainly saw much of that in the 1990s.  But more than that, I think the episode gazes at people who walk among us and yet dwell in  their own separate realities.  Today, we are more divided, even, then we were in the 1990s.  

Frank’s answer to the anxiety he feels when reckoning with the real world is to create a sanctuary for his family. And that in a way is part of the problem. A sanctuary is a place to hide after all, not to engage the darkness.  A key aspect of Yeat’s The Second Coming is “turning inward,” and I think the episode demonstrates that in regards to both Frank and the Frenchman.  The episode encourages us to compare and contrast the two characters in terms of their world view, and their insight.

I’ve written this before, and I continue to stand by this assessment: Millennium opens with one of the five best pilots in TV history.  

One would be hard-pressed to pinpoint another premiere episode that achieves so much, so well. It is smart and literate, engrossing, and terrifying.