Television: Millennium
Anime: Gunbuster, Vol. 1

This ain't The X-Files

Our pick:
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• Millennium
• Starring Lance Henricksen, Megan Gallagher
• Fox
• Premieres Friday, Oct. 25
• 9:00 p.m. ET/PT

rank Black (Henricksen) has moved back to Seattle, Wash., with his wife and daughter after retiring from the FBI. Possessing the ability to see what a killer sees, Frank begins to "consult" for a mysterious organization known as The Millennium Group. The Group believes that violence in the world is not random. According to Frank, "They believe we can't just sit back and hope for a happy ending."

After a stripper is murdered, Frank quickly gets involved. With the help of the Group and his own unique gift, Frank begins to track the killer, who strippers have labeled The Frenchman (because he holds up a poem in French as he watches them dance).

With the reluctant help of the police, Frank begins to close in on the murderer. However, even as Frank works toward getting this murderer off the street, he can't help but wonder how long he can protect his family from the evil he sees in the outside world.

Dark and disturbing, Millennium is scarier than Executive Producer Chris Carter's The X-Files. While The X-Files is steeped in unexplained phenomena, Millennium comes from a much more real place. There are terrible people out there who do terrible things to other people.

With his beat-up-by-life face, Henricksen was an excellent choice for Frank. Whether Frank watches his wife happily walk out the door for a job interview or his daughter laying unconscious in a hospital bed, Henricksen's soulful eyes express the pain of feeling powerless to protect his loved ones from the outside world. No matter how many bad guys Henricksen's Frank takes off the street, he'll never be able to make sure his family is entirely safe.

As Carter has done with The X-Files, Millennium promises its own mythology (this time based on prophecy). There are hints that perhaps one of the reasons Frank is so desperate to stop these violent murderers is because his special "sight" has allowed him to see something in the future which terrifies him.

With excellent production values and a quality supporting cast, Millennium promises to take viewers to that scary place each week. This is not a show for the faint of heart. Seldom has network television been more graphic. While much of the horror is not shown, there is enough on the screen to disturb.

The real question will be whether the average viewer will want to enter Carter's own version of The Silence of the Lambs every week. Millennium is scary, and perhaps, just a little too close to home. -- Kathie

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Bouncy babes in and out of battle suits bat .500

Our pick:
1 2 3 4 5

• Gunbuster, Vol. 1
• Manga Entertainment
• 55 minutes
• Subtitled $19.95
• August 1996

enerally speaking, giant battle robots and cute schoolgirls with romantic problems are common but mutually exclusive genres in Japanese animation. While most battle-suit teams have a token girl or two along for the ride, series still tend to be either strongly mecha-driven or strongly emotion-driven, not both.

Gunbuster attempts to walk the fine line between the two with the story of Noriko Takaya, a bouncy female freshman pilot-in-training. Noriko is neither skilled nor confident, but she feels she has to make it into space because of her father, a heroic space captain whose ship went down in an alien attack. This tragic heritage draws contemptuous jeers from some of her bratty older classmates, but also attracts the kindly attentions of gorgeous senior pilot Kazumi Amano.

Noriko's past also gets her a free ride into space with Kazumi, as the two girls are chosen as Japan's representative pilots despite Noriko's lack of training and clear ineptitude with her battle-suit. It turns out Noriko's coach served under her father, and he apparently assumes she has potential she just doesn't show. And perhaps she does. But considering she can barely even persuade her training suit to stand upright, her promotion still seems patently unfair to the girls who have years more training than she does...not to mention the millions of Earthlings depending on the Space Force to protect them from alien invasion.

Gunbuster's opening episode is by turns funny, touching, cute and dramatic. It successfully fuses a large-scale mecha-oriented space opera and a high-school shojo (girl-stories) love drama. Even if the plot occasionally seems mawkish, as Noriko moons over Kazumi and a jealous but underdeveloped third girl hauls out the heavy weaponry to force the two apart, Gunbuster's strong beginning still suggests a powerful series to come.

Unfortunately, it simultaneously shows signs that the series could just disintegrate instead. Volume I's second of two episodes is a confusing welter of incomplete and unrelated stories involving a rogue ship, a Russian girl named Jung-Freud, Noriko's childhood memories and the theory of relativity. None of these threads seem to be going in the same direction, and no coherent fabric ever emerges from them.

Incomplete translation might possibly be at fault. Certainly it's clear Manga Entertainment is lying down on the job when it comes to subtitling written Japanese words that the characters don't vocalize -- no matter how prominently placed the text, or how important to the plotline it becomes. This is an awfully petty annoyance, but it's an annoyance that raises the automatic question, "What else aren't they translating?"

With one episode this good and one this confusing, it's difficult to tell where the rest of Gunbuster is going to go. Is the first episode a template or an anomaly? At the moment, all viewers know is that they're batting .500.

Am I ever going to get used to all the casual female nudity in anime? Probably not. -- Tasha

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