Frank Black

Lead character of the TV series Millennium. Played by Lance Henriksen.

Frank Black was a FBI agent and criminal profiler who suffered a mental breakdown, which forced him to retire. He stopped being able to compartmentalise his work and his private life when, after a case in which a killer, whom Frank had helped capture, used to send Polaroids of his victims to the police, Frank began receiving Polaroids of his wife in the mail. Frank's fear for his family, combined with the knowledge he'd acquired in his line of work, made him unable to leave the house, until he was approached by the Millennium Group, who helped him to recover his sanity.

At the start of the series, Frank and his wife, Catherine, a clinical social worker, moved with their daughter to a yellow house in Seattle to start a new life, and Frank Black began working as a consultant for the police, in conjunction with the Millennium Group, profiling serial killers or offering insight during difficult investigations.

Frank's particular talent, which contributed both to his breakdown and to his investigative skills, is his ability to put himself in the killer's place, to perceive the world the way a killer sees it.

Frank: I see what the killer sees.

Bletcher: What, like a psychic?

Frank: No. I put myself in his head. I become the thing we fear the most.

Bletcher: How?

Frank: I become capability. I become the horror -- what we know we can become only in our heart of darkness. It's my gift. It's my curse. That's why I retired.

(from the pilot)

Series creator Chris Carter originally intended this gift to be a natural extension of Frank's knowledge of criminal psychology, his imagination and empathy, but as the series took on a more fantastic bent in its exploration of evil, Frank's gift became more akin to a supernatural psychic ability. The gift also appeared hereditary: Frank having inherited it from his mother, and passed it on to his young daughter, Jordan Black.

The nature of the Millennium Group also changed, and manifestations of evil in more supernatural forms, which pushed the series from naturalistic crime drama/horror to a more fantastical genre hybrid, began to disrupt Frank's life and his work.

Frank's character was defined by his profound decency and integrity, his compassion and his care for human life, as well as his knowledge of evil. As played by Lance Henriksen, Frank Black was portrayed as world-weary and marked by the years, a White man well into middle age but still physically strong, competent but uninterested in showing off, and devoted to his family.

The series did follow the sexist trope of using a man's wife and child as his motivation, using their yellow house as a symbol of purity and goodness, though it allowed Catherine and Jordan Black character growth and value of their own, humanising them beyond their importance as Frank's motivation. However, though she was shown in the credits as Henriksen's co-star, Megan Gallagher's Catherine Black was underused for most of her time on the show, and her character appeared more often in domestic circumstances than in her own line of work.

The fact that Frank and Catherine had a daughter as their only child also carries different meanings, good and bad. Her vulnerability is redoubled by her being very young and female in a world of male predators, and thus her being a girl played a part in her significance as an object to be protected by her father. But the absence of sons also means that a greater emphasis was placed on this father-daughter relationship, and that it never became secondary to a relationship to a boy. Interacting with Jordan humanises Frank, and it does so without transmitting patriarchal power to a new generation. The hints that Jordan possesses the same gift as Frank also connect the two characters on a symbolic level, meaning that Frank's abilities are not tied to his gender.

Frank's relationships with other female characters were also blessedly free of patriarchal posturing, and of unnecessary sexualisation. He was unwaveringly faithful to his wife, and they strived towards equality in their marriage, which, however, was compromised by his very attempts to protect her from the darkness in the world as much as by that darkness itself.

Frank treated his female partners with respect, both for their competence at their jobs and as human beings, and, as a rule, never tried to dominate them. See: Cheryl Andrews, Lara Means, Emma Hollis. (There were rare exceptions, such as in Season 3, when Frank took over an investigation lead by Emma, which he thought bore the marks of his nemesis, Lucy Butler, driving him to act out of character.)

It is also interesting to note Frank's mental condition, the recurring episodes of madness that affect him throughout the series, and underpin the character's overt mental stability, as well as his borderline outsider status relative to the establishment, both of which impaired Frank's elevation as a figure of patriarchal power, despite his being a heterosexual, middle-class White male living in the United States.

And yet, without a heterosexual, White male as the lead, it is doubtful that Millennium would have been made in the first place, because those qualities were both implicit in the character's creation, as the center of the series, and requirements for most commercial television projects. The mere casting of Lance Henriksen, an actor much older than the typical 30-something White male protagonist, rested with Chris Carter's insistence and clout as a television producer.