Ah, Millennium. One of the reasons why I can’t completely trust TV shows.
Because there’s that constant threat that they will end before the larger story has been fully told. In the 90s, particularly on FOX, this was something you just had to keep in mind.
At least in my childhood, on into early adulthood, FOX seemed to start and cancel more shows than CBS, ABC, NBC, and UPN combined.
Millennium, a highly-anticipated new series from Chris Carter, released at the height of the popularity of his other show The X-Files, fared better than most. Premiering on October 25th, 1996, it ran for three years. When the show ended prematurely, fans received some mangled closure in the form of an X-Files crossover. That’s a lot better than a lot of other shows get.
Still, 20+ years on, I’m still mad that Millennium was never embraced in the same way X-Files had been. What started as a grim, character-driven procedural about a man named Frank Black, played by the legendary Lance Henriksen, and his ability to see what a killer saw at the crime scene, quickly became far darker and more supernatural than anything The X-Files has ever summoned.
By the end of Millennium’s third season, which saw Frank dealing with literal demons, as well as the realization that the private investigative firm he had joined was leading a massive conspiracy to control the world, the show had a lot of strange boats in the sea.
None of them would be resolved. Fans have led a number of projects that pick up where the series ended. There have been documentaries, a book of essays, and even a comic book series from IDW. At the end of the day, it’s hard to complain.
Still, 20 years later, and I still think about episodes like “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me.”
The third-to-last episode of the second season, the story took a much-needed break from the various ongoing threads that were running through the series by that point. No Millennium Group. No serial killers. Nothing about psychics. Not even Frank’s estrangement from his wife (an outstanding Megan Gallagher). Rather, the episode aspired to be a deeper look into the soul of Frank himself.
However, “Somehow”, written by Darrin Morgan (an essential director and writer of both X-Files and Millennium), went about doing that while featuring as little of Frank on screen as possible. In total, Frank is physically in the episode for maybe five minutes. Even with this in mind, we are still talking about one of the best episodes from one of the best TV shows ever made, depicting a powerful understanding of one of the best TV characters ever made.
That’s a tall order for what essentially functions as an anthology horror piece. “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me” begins and ends with four men meeting for coffee. Early on, we discover that these men are in fact demons. We’ve just happened to come by their routine get-together at their favorite place. These demons are old. Despite their disgust of humans, we all apparently share the trait of hanging out in our dotage to drink coffee and talk shit.
Which they do. Their stories give way to brief narratives from each about recent efforts at corrupting the souls of humanity. They also spend a sizable amount of time bitching about the current state of the world.
The setup is charming, with the show casting four veteran character actors (including the great Bill Macy, who passed away just last year at age 97). The mini-stories themselves offer a rare opportunity for the show to play with the humorous elements of material that was frequently focused on the notion of a biblical apocalypse. In particular, the story about a TV network censor who goes ballistic (based on Morgan’s experiences writing for The X-Files).
Not only does it offer some humorous observations, but it emphasizes one of the key themes of the episode and series as a whole. That is the idea that we are as deranged as we are hopeless. Not even demons can keep up with what we live with every single day. That theme is certainly relatable today, which is another reason why I love it so much.
Yet are we utterly, completely hopeless? Millennium as a show put forth the idea that this in fact not true. We are not simply architects of an empire of greed and despair. Most of us are just doing the best we can to understand, to help, and to stand against what we believe to be evil. Millennium created a powerful ideal for that idea in Frank Black.
This is a very human man, who must face and feel daily the overwhelming evidence of what humans can do under the most monstrous dreams imaginable. The show frequently pits Frank against the most hideous of human or supernatural forces. His morality, although not pure, provided him with a compass that allowed him to endure extraordinary degrees of physical, emotional, and even psychic torment. His desperate belief in the power of good made him fight these things and beings, even at constant personal expense.
Lance Henriksen embodied those qualities in Frank to the extent that in a career filled with villains and sympathetic antagonists, it is as Frank Black that Henriksen has done his best work as an actor. You don’t get to really see that in this episode, of course, but it appears in even the brief moments in which Frank interacts with these four demons.
Because these stories told by the demons all share one common trait. As the stories continue, the demons all eventually realize that their peculiar interactions with a human who saw them in their “true essence” all involve the same person. In the last of the demon stories, this point is driven home in the saddest of the four anecdotes.
A demon, despondent and insecure over the fact that he no longer has the power to corrupt, meets an aging stripper. Their brief relationship includes a moment in which the woman sees him in his true form, yet accepts him anyway. With a sorrow he has seemingly never experienced before, the demon uses this to convince the woman to commit suicide. He calls her a “cow”, and asks that she never see him again.
Later, as he returns to the scene of his pitiful success, he sits on the toilet, while police buzz uselessly about. His words to his buddies at the coffee shop are a stark contrast to what he actually did. Overwhelmed by sadness, he hangs his head.
For a moment, he looks up, seeing Frank among the cops. They regard each other. There is no fear in the eyes or heart of Frank. He simply looks at the demon with disgust, mutters “You must be so lonely”, and walks away.
This is a perfect episode of one of the most underrated TV shows of all time. Frank doesn’t fight the demon head-on. He looks at him, tells him exactly what he is, and turns away to the world of the living. There are times when Frank would fight with considerably more force. That would not be necessary here.
Over just a handful of moments, I believe you learn more about one of television’s most compelling and heroic antagonists in the history of the medium than you will from any other episode.
Obviously, if you’ve never seen the show, I hope you’ll check out the rest of it.
Because it is a fucking headache and a half to watch this show in any format these days, click here to watch “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me” in its entirety.
Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His books Love and Quarters and Bondage Night are available through Moran Press, in addition to A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press) and Clouds of Hungry Dogs (Kleft Jaw Press). He is also a writer, performer, and producer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions. He lives on a horrible place called Long Island.