Millennium 4C03: “Kingdom Come”
The Millennial Abyss | Episodes | Season One
“Kingdom Come” (4C03)
Written by Jorge Zamacona
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Edited by George R. Potter
Aired November 29, 1996
Summary
A crisis of faith figures in the motive for the slayings of clerics by a grief-stricken killer tracked by Frank Black and the Millennium Group.
Epigraph
“And there will be such intense darkness that one can feel it.”
Synopsis
A man (ultimately revealed as Galen Calloway) burns a Catholic priest at the stake outside his church. At the crime scene, Frank reunites with Millennium Group member Ardis Cohen. They had worked together on a case four years ago when three men of the cloth were murdered in a similar ritualistic fashion.
In his research, Frank identifies a similarity between these modern crimes and the Christian tortures of church heretics during the Middle Ages. His assumption is confirmed when the killer grotesquely drowns a Wyoming minister in an imitation of another medieval torture. At the scene of the crime, the police retrieve two clues. A man's wedding ring is found inside the victim's stomach. Near the corpse is a woman's wedding/engagement band, engraved JWM.
At a Rockford, Illinois church, the killer is interrupted while rifling through its files. He was searching for something so important he acted without his usual thoroughness, and left bloody fingerprints behind. All along Frank has been receiving glimpses inside the killer's mind. A sudden illumination strikes him. He realizes the murderer is not killing men—he's killing faith. The victims must have some religious significance in the killer's life. He stole the files in order to choose his next victim. Frank now believes that the killer experienced an emotionally catastrophic event — a loss devastating enough to have destroyed his faith, and transformed him into a homicidal monster.
Frank and the police are close on the killer's trail, but too late to save the life of Reverend Harned, whom Calloway has cruelly tortured. But Frank realizes that the killer has returned to the place where his life was destroyed. When Frank sees visions of a woman and child trapped in a house fire, he has the Rockford police search their records, and they find their man: Galen Calloway, a high school religious teacher who was the only survivor of a 1989 fire that killed his wife and daughter. Frank knows Calloway's next stop: the church that held his family's funeral.
His body wired with explosives, Calloway invades the church, and takes the everyone inside hostage. He preaches his loss of faith to the terrified congregation while SWAT teams and media swarm outside.
Frank is convinced he can reach Calloway, and risks his life by going in to face him. Calloway holds Frank at gunpoint, but Frank calmly tells Calloway he can help him because he knows what Calloway wants. Calloway believes his pain will end when he kills his faith. Yet despite everything he has done, Frank points out, Calloway has never lost his faith in God.
Calloway knows what Frank is saying is true, but he's never understood it himself before this moment. Yet instead of embracing his faith as Frank had hoped, Calloway kills his faith the only way he knows how—and turns the gun on himself.
Starring
Lance Henriksen as Frank Black
Megan Gallagher as Catherine Black
Brittany Tiplady as Jordan Black
Guest Starring
Lindsay Crouse as Ardis Cohen
Michael Zelniker as Galen Calloway
Tom McBeath as Detective Romero
Terence Kelly as Detective Kerney
Jan Burrell as Jill Harned
Laurie Murdoch as Father Schultz
Peter Haworth as Reverend Jack Harned
Ed Harrington as Reverend Marcus Crane
Arnie Walters as Father Silas Brown
Roger Allford as Golfing Man
Brad Wattum as Reverend
Ralph J. Alderman as Motel Manager
Wanda Wilkinson as Sister Beatrice Crowly
Alan Lehros as John Matewon
Production Credits
Production #4C03
Music by Mark Snow
Production Designer Sheila Haley
Director of Photography Robert McLachlan
Associate Producer Jon-Michael Preece
Consulting Producer Ted Mann
Consulting Producer James Wong
Consulting Producer Glen Morgan
Co-Producer Ken Dennis
Co-Producer Chip Johannessen
Co-Producer Frank Spotnitz
Co-Executive Producer Jorge Zamacona
Co-Executive Producer Ken Horton
Co-Executive Producer John Peter Kousakis
Executive Producer Chris Carter
Location
Book Excerpt
“In ‘Kingdom Come,’ a first season episode of Millennium, writer Jorge Zamacona dances around the question of whether or not Frank’s altruism is based on Christian belief... It becomes clear, over the course of the series, that Frank’s quarrel is not with God but with organized and fanatical religion. The hero, as written by Chris Carter, has an essential faith that is continually challenged and continually strengthened by the horrors of the everyday world. ”
—Joseph Maddrey
Back to Frank Black
REVIEWS
“Gripping stuff. By seeing the strength of Galen's faith, Black recovers his faith—in faith... In the American religious climate it intimates that Black has put some flesh on the ghost of Christianity within him; a ghost that novelist Flannery O'Connor says haunts so many Americans. The whole episode serves as something of a metaphor for how Western society's decision to kill off God has to have consequences for how the fabric of that society holds together. As Leonard Cohen sang, ‘I have seen the future, baby, it is murder.’”
—Paul Mitchell
Shoot the Messenger