In your site's review of the season one box set of Millennium, the reviewer picked up on some things that had also been bugging me.

First of all, Frank Black's ability to see into the minds of psychopaths is very inconsistent - sometimes he appears to know everything, while at other times he misses the obvious. He can often spot things that no other cop can (because the leap he has to make to deduce what he does is way too over the top for a regular cop). Sometimes he manages to deduce things that the perpetrator isn't even aware of doing.

Yet in other episodes Frank is stumped as to what the villain's motive might be. In Weeds, for example, he takes ages to work out why the kidnapper is killing some of his victims but freeing others, when there is a very clear reason for this that the kidnapper has premeditated, which is pretty obvious to the viewer long before the end of the episode.

Staying on the subject of the Weeds episode, how did the kidnapper discover the guilty secrets of each of his kidnap victims' parents?

And in the case of the man who was the perpetrator of a hit-and-run incident, why did the kidnapper not alert the authorities to the driver's awful crime instead of making him pay in other ways? But then, I guess the guy's a little loopy.

Yours,

Alec Aitkin

Johnny Fanboy replies:

First of all, I have never considered Frank's gift to be an exact science, and I don't think the producers did either. It's not a superpower that he can turn on and off at will, like Superman's heat vision. It's more akin to Phoebe's premonitions in Charmed or Cordy's visions in Angel - his inspiration comes to him unbidden. Sometimes insight is forthcoming, but at other times it eludes him.

The reason why Frank is often able to deduce things that the culprits are not consciously aware of is probably because, as well as possessing his mental gift, Frank is a formidable criminal profiler in his own right. He can read between the lines and make informed guesses about the villains' subconscious motivations.

But when the answer doesn't strike him right away, you must bear in mind that the 40-odd minutes of television we see in each episode often represent hours or days of time for Frank. Most of what is said and done on screen is the stuff that is relevant to the case, so don't judge Frank too harshly for not immediately seeing the connections that you see in the "edited highlights" of his cases.

As for the kidnapper discovering all those guilty secrets, maybe he just happened to be in the right places at the right times to see the adulterer leaving the hotel with his mistress, to see the hit-and-run vehicle and later connect it with its owner, etc.

As to why he didn't simply inform the police about the hit-and-run, the kidnapper was firmly of the belief that the punishment should fit the crime - i.e. that the driver should die. Not the kind of sentence the criminal justice system would be likely to mete out. And as you say, he's nuttier than a jumbo pack of nuts!

Return to: