“Millennium” is episode four of season seven of The X-Files.
At a funeral parlour in Tallahassee, Florida, on December 21st 199, a man approaches the widow. He introduces himself as Mr Johnson; he worked briefly with her husband. It later sounds as if the dead man, Raymond Crouch, killed himself. After everyone has left, Johnson is revealed to be hiding there. He opens the coffin whilst repeating what sounds like a Biblical verse and removes Crouch’s shirt, jacket and tie, including what looks like an FBI tie pin, and removing his own to wear the dead man’s. Finally, he places a mobile phone in the corpse’s hand and closes the coffin. On December 29th, Johnson is waiting in a car in a cemetery when his phone rings. He gets out with a spade.
Scully arrives at the cemetery where there is an extensive police presence and a funeral director upset about being accused of burying a live man. Mulder is in the grave. He says it’s grave robbery with a twist; it looks like someone was trying to get out of the coffin. It’s the local police spreading the rumours. There are prints on the outside of the coffin and on the tombstone which match the dead man’s. Mulder thinks one man dug up the grave; Scully that whoever exhumed the body faked evidence. Mulder spots what looks like blood on the ground.
Johnson is in his car, still repeating the phrase. In the rear-view mirror, a hand rises up.
At a meeting in the FBI, it seems Crouch retired in 1993 and killed himself earlier in the month. Nothing suggests the gunshot wasn’t self-inflicted and there was nothing odd in his personal or former professional life. Mulder thinks it was necromancy; the summoning of the dead. A magic circle was drawn around the grave in goat’s blood; the necromancer may have even worn the clothes of the dead man to create a bond. Scully agrees to the ritualistic nature but asks why Crouch. Mulder agrees that is the question.
Skinner wants a private word with the two of them. He asks Mulder if the symbol could have been an ouroboros. It could. Skinner says that it was also the symbol of the Millennium Group, former FBI agents who consulted with law enforcement though there were rumours about some of their methods. Mulder says they believed in the Judaeo-Christian end times prophecies. Skinner says the group dissolved several months ago, and there have been three similar grave desecrations in the last six months, all former FBI agents, all suicides. This needs a low profile. Mulder thinks he knows where to start.
That being Hartwell Psychiatric Hospital. Mulder has never met the man they came to see; he left VICAP before Mulder arrived. He’s also checked himself in for 30-day observation. Used to consult for the Millennium Group, then fought to bring them down. Frank Black. Frank doesn’t want to help them; he’s retired. Mulder says they don’t have long until January 1st, a significant date for these people. Frank isn’t interested. He’s watching an American football game, but gives the wrong score.
A deputy comes across Johnson changing a tyre. Johnson’s car smells as if it has a dead man in it. Johnson rings himself with what looks like salt – often a protection against the supernatural – as the deputy opens the truck.
Mulder has found the salt when Scully arrives. He says it was done to protect someone. Another deputy has found the dead officer, buried, his mouth stapled shut, filled with salt and with a piece of paper inside, and what look like human bitemarks on him. The paper has a Biblical verse on it. One of the deputies identifies it. Revelations, Chapter 1, Verse 18. The same numbers Frank Black gave.
They return to see Frank. Scully checks with his doctor; Frank is in a custody battle with the parents of his late wife to keep his daughter and he’s worried about losing her. That’s why he doesn’t want to get involved, and why Frank checked himself in. Frank says he was said to be unfit to be a father, obsessed with end of the world conspiracies and more interested in his work than his daughter. And those saying it were right. He doesn’t’ want to deal with the Millennium Group again.
There were members of the Millennium Group who wanted to bring about the end of days, and believed humans had to start it (worryingly, there are people trying to do just that). With Millennium cancelled, this episode is meant to function as a finale for the series. Going by the opinions of most fans of that series, it didn’t do a very good job of it.