Season two of Millennium, and what was to be the series finale, is up this week on the blog, and it raises some questions (not to mention that the retcon that happens at the beginning of the third season to adjust for the series return). Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, the season came to a dark and troubling ending on 15 May, 1998, but to their credit, despite suggestions at the end of the episode that it’s worldwide, a lot of the reports that the characters are hearing are from the immediate area.

Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) and Peter Watts (Terry O’Quinn) have both been vaccinated from the the coming pandemic from the Millennium Group, who both characters now believe are attempting to bring about a holocaust in an attempt to garner more power, though who would be left should they succeed is a bit of a question.

Peter tracks down Lara Means (Kristen Cloke) by breaking into the Millennium Group’s archives, where he comes across a familiar cigarette butt (more on that in a few paragraphs), and attempts to rescue her, as she comes closer and closer to insanity thanks to her visions and complete induction into the Group.

Frank is able to get Lara to a mental institution, but that is the last we see of her, as Frank takes his wife, Catherine (Megan Gallagher) and daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady) to a remote mountain cabin his father left him, and prepare for the worst, as news comes in of a spreading, lethal infection, from a genetically manipulated virus.

Lara has left a package for Frank, it’s a vial of the vaccine, just enough for one dose, and he and Catherine immediately elect to give it to Jordan, while Catherine, in the middle of the night, after exhibiting symptoms, goes off into the woods, to die alone.

Morning dawns, intercut with images of static as things start to fall apart, and Jordan finds her mother gone, and Franks’ hair has turned white overnight. We leave the two of them, huddled in a cabin, as the static becomes stronger and stronger with announcements of death and destruction…

Is this it?

Well, we know it’s not, as it came back for one more season, so they retcon the ending a bit, but also, lets go back to the cigarette… It’s a Morley, and fans know of one character that smokes those prolifically. Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) of The X-Files. And this isn’t the first connection we’ve had to tie the two shows together, the agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) were briefly glimpsed in the background of an episode, Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) has made an appearance, but they have also taken shots at the same show in mocking fashion (Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me). And then, of course there’s The X-Files episode, in the seventh season, that features Frank Black, Millennium.

So if both shows exist in the same universe we know that it wasn’t a worldwide pandemic that wiped out countless souls, and was kept strictly local. But if they do exist in the same universe, that raises all kinds of questions about Peter Watts, Darius Michaud (Fight the Future), Brian Tillman (Aubrey) and Shadow Man (Trust No 1) – are they clones?

This is something never hinted at in either series, but he must be…