User Reviews

...From "Powers, Principalities, Thrones, and Dominions", S1E19.

Sammael, spelled "Samiel" here.

He's wearing the same exact clothes...

Also spelled "Samael", Wikipedia has this to say about this Angel:

"He is considered in Midrashic texts to be a member of the heavenly host with often grim and destructive duties."

Grim and destructive duties, like killing Alistair Pepper with a lightning bolt (perceived as a gunshot by everybody else).

But Frank did not recognize him as the same entity he had met previously, who he wanted to talk to again. And Samiel certainly is not giving Frank any information in this encounter. He won't even tell Frank who he is. In fact the original body that this angel wore, of "the kid", probably doesn't exist anymore, if Oregon had a death penalty back in 1996 or so. Remember, in that form, Samael was caused great pain. But he was also the suspect in a murder and probably was dealt with accordingly by the law.

In this body, of the slightly older young man, he is responsible for accounting for extra time given to people who had been the recipient of miraculous stays from death. Unfortunately, one of these was Jordan Black.

And so once again I must school these Millennium commentators who hand out one star ratings arbitrarily to things they could not possibly understand. But the writer of this episode, Chip Johansson, understood the character of this angel as pertaining to the millennium series, and his previous appearance as "the kid". And using that material, created this episode showing a different aspect of that angel and also that this angel was not unreasonable, he actually listened to Frank's pleas, especially when Frank made the point about Catherine being given a choice about her fate.

Just like the writers of Millennium third season episodes understood the characters of The Judge and Alastair Pepper, in relation to Lucy Butler and Mabius. And possibly Selwyn Wassenaar, from "Antipas".

These are all different bodies worn by entities that can change their shape at will. They look as real as me or you, but they have the tendency to vanish and then reappear 3000 miles away instantaneously. They have even pretended to be Frank when they were fooling Emma Hollis, before changing into a dog right in front of her face. They have used Frank's voice to fool Franks' friend Mike Atkins, and this did not have a very good outcome for Mike.

But there is probably some kind of rule book for these angelic/daemonic beings. Remember in "beware of dog", when you shot one dog another dog appeared so that there were always five dogs. It appears that they are subject to some of the laws of thermodynamics, so even if they cannot be killed by being run over by a car, they can certainly choose to trade their lives for somebody else's lives.

You may recognize the little girl from the X-Files episode "Chinga", but she has a lot more to say here than "Mommy I want more cherries!". One wonders what happened to this child actress, she was very good in both of these episodes, X-Files and Millennium.

This is one instance where Emma Hollis must think Frank has gone totally bugsputz, whack, out of his mind. But she herself has seen everything that he has seen. In a way she is a worse skeptic than Dana Skully, she sees these things that Frank sees and she even believes that they have happened but she refuses to give Frank Black her support especially when it comes to writing these things down in a report for the FBI which would have her name on it, which might even back up some of the things that he has claimed about the Millennium group that she knows to be true. Like in the first S3 episode where she appears, she definitely saw Mabius driving the car that forced the blue eyed woman and child off of the bridge. But she flatly refused to write that in her report.

And with Frank's former friend Peter Watts no longer there for Frank to talk about these supernatural elements, he is stuck with Emma Hollis. Remember, Peter was the first one to ever see this particular angel. As good as Emma was schooling Frank about 80s horror movies, she's not of much help comforting Frank in a situation like this.

This episode actually deals with something that happened to Jordan Black in more than one episode, One of those being the pilot episode: she had become very sick with a fever but at the time they did not identify what this disease was. They do so in this episode, Samantha Carter from SG-1 plays the doctor that discusses this (Excuse me, Amanda Tapping). Jordan had also had a lapse of this disease in the season one episode "Sacrament".

I believe this episode here deals with these unexplained illnesses, once and for all. And Frank gets a reward at the end of this ordeal when Jordan finally starts speaking again... wait for it, it is at the very end.

It is too bad that Rodney Eastman could not reprise his role as "the kid", he was another very good child actor that grew up to be in some great shows.

It's too bad the writing became so poor in the third season. I always wondered why they canceled the show after this (other than of course the millennium having arrived with little to no fanfare.) I must have selectively blocked from my memory this season's episodes.

In any event, the subject material for this episode is actually quite good and somewhat less cryptic than many others of the series, but the writing is horribly cliched. Furthermore, along the same lines, I don't even know who this Frank Black is any more. It's understandable why he would become such an overwrought and hysterical character with all that he's been through, but that doesn't make his emotional and irrational inclinations more enjoyable. In the end, this isn't quite as bad as some episodes of the third season, but still nearly everything I've seen so far is worth a hard pass.