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"Never Say Die!" by Stuart Servetar
The fourth season of Millennium opens with a gripping, tightly written episode called "Genesis." Unusually subdued, it is rife with biblical themes. There is no shooting and no sexual frisson, just a tough ex-FBI agent named Frank Black able to see into the darkest minds as he protects himself, his family, and, yes, the world from a doomsday organization he once worked for.
There's only one problem with the season premiere. No one will see it -- because Millennium is no longer on TV. Season four exists only in cyberspace -- and is no longer produced by The X-Files creator Chris Carter but by Matt Asendorf, 18, and Dan Owen, 20, two guys who don't even live on the same continent.
When Fox canceled Millennium last spring, the show's small but rabid fan base reacted in typical fashion: with bitter cynicism. "Fox had a seriously intelligent show, didn't promote it, reinvented the concept twice, and expected better ratings?" rails Asendorf, the American of the twosome and a freshman at Ohio University. (Owen, an Englishman, works for the British Ministry of Defence.)
Before the Internet, disgruntled fans of prematurely canceled programs had few options. They could flood the network switchboard or don velour shirts and pointy ears and hang out at dimly lit convention halls. For those who had a little creativity and enough brains to work a pencil, there was "fan fiction," the long-standing art of taking characters and plowing ahead with your own stories and plotlines. Asendorf and Owen chose the last course -- only they chose do it stronger, faster, and better. Theirs would be authentic, not twisted or sexual (no Xena or riding crop, for instance).
Asendorf partnered with Owen after hooking up in online Millennium chat forums and agreeing that they weren't ready to let Millennium go. Together, they organized a team of writers -- 10 other men and women aficionados of the show -- and then solicited scripts that would not only maintain the integrity of the original program's story lines and characters but also proceed in a logical arc to a grand multipart finale just in time for Y2k. In doing so, Asendorf and Owen determined to resolve what they felt was the confused trajectory of a once-promising show.
By all accounts they're succeeding.
Unlike Trekkies and other ne'er-say-die fans of yesteryear, the men and women of the Millennium Compendium (www.millennium-compendium.com), as the virtual team calls itself, are getting noticed. And one former writer from the real show is publicly giving them their props... sort of. "The people working on the virtual season are expanding on what was done on the show, and they're even trying to incorporate and make sense of three disparate seasons," says ex-Millennium scribe Kay Reindl. "It's certainly a tribute to their tenacity."
Frank Black himself is right there with her and slightly more enthusiastic about it. Lance Henriksen, the gravel voice behind the character, was thrilled to hear that the show he loved lives on. "I've already told Owen and Asendorf I'm impressed with what they're doing," Henriksen says, calling in from an X-Files shoot in which he guest stars to reprise his role as Black one last time. "They have an opportunity to tell Fox, 'This is what you could have done.' If they stay fearless about it, they really have a chance to start something."
Which is saying a lot, considering fan fiction's humble origins. The practice appears to have come of age in the 1930s, when devotees lifted characters like Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian from pulp fiction and sent them off in new directions, but it really hit bottom when Star Trek fans begat homoerotic "slash" fiction, in which a common scenario involved Kirk and Spock going, well, where no man had apparently gone before. Pre-Internet, this fan-generated was published in zines, which typically had a readership a one-armed man could count on his fingers.
The Web changed that. Beginning with fans' dismay at the cancellation of the show American Gothic, a sort of laconic Southerner's take on The Twilight Zone, the genre spawned more-focused online "executive producers" who wanted to take a step-away from the free-form fan fiction and carry on what they felt was the actual creator's intended path. That effort, begun in 1997 by a lone pioneering woman, gave Asendorf an idea. And "virtual TV," the online continuation of dead programming, took one small step toward reality.
The writing process for the Millennium Compendium is not unlike the actual TV process. Says Owen, "It's hard to bark orders in cyberspace. But the general plan is that we discuss story ideas in our staff forum, pick out the best idea, assign writers, and get them to send a detailed synopsis of their episode. If we like it, we'll green-light a full script." Unlike most fan fiction, which is trotted out in simple prose form, virtual Millennium episodes are formatted as TV scripts.
"A script is done in three to six weeks," continues Owen, who spends 15 to 20 hours per week on the show. "Matt and I read and comment on it, do necessary rewrites, and hopefully the finished product is ready to put online." Shows are posted on Fridays -- the same day on which the real program aired.
What does this all mean? It means that all the "every user a producer" crap Internet sages have been clucking about is finally coming true. It means tha instead of having to write letters to uncaring execs, the rankled fan has the possibility of a virtual answer, and, quite possible, respect. Instead of being treated like the obsessed Trekkies, Owen and Asendorf are getting noticed -- even if they can't afford Web tracking to see how many "viewers" are actually tuning in.
Besides his own interest in the project, Henriksen says, "Chris Carter's well aware of it." Carter chose not to comment but did note in a recent online chat that he was "curious to see how the characters are treated and in what direction they take the show so I can nitpick them."
The X-Files episode Henriksen just wrapped is an attempt to put a good-night kiss on Millennium's troubled brow. "This is definitely the end of Millennium," he says. "It will bring closure to the program in a very real sense."
The show is set to air November 28... just as the virtual Millennium folks will be prepping to orchestrate their finale. It's the kind of coincidence geeks live for.
Not surprisingly, Owen and Asendorf are disappointed with Carter's attempt at resolution. "Lance told me, as I had assumed, that the crossover episode doesn't resolve anything," Asendorf says. "How could three seasons of story arcs be concluded in one episode of The X-Files? Not at all or badly. The X-Files is science fiction; Aliens and monsters belie the seriousness and realism of Millennium." These guys take the show very seriously.
Which ending is better, the virtual or the video, will undoubtly remain the subject of intense fan forum debate for eons to come. What may be important, though, is not how fans react to the studio's fare, but rather, how the studio reacts to what's been going on among fans. "The new condition for big media is that the fan base now has a way of reaching itself," says NYU journalism professor and media analyst Jay Rosen. "The real question becomes, Will the parent company have any part to play at all?"
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