Waiting for the end of the world "Millennium" and other fin de siècle nightmares By JOYCE MILLMAN angels. Serial killers. Space aliens. Lethal viruses. The end of the century — the end of the millennium — is near, and TV, the national divining rod, has hit upon a deep, rich store of superstition, anxiety and nuttiness. The new season is awash with apocalyptic themes, chief among them the notion that extinction will come from within. There are the deadly emerging viruses of UPN's "The Burning Zone"; the evil, slimy body-snatching extraterrestrials of NBC's "Dark Skies"; the mysterious DNA markers injected into baby boomers under the guise of childhood smallpox vaccinations on "The X-Files"; the haunted FBI agents who can take the thoughts of brutal sociopaths into their own heads on Fox's "Millennium" and NBC's "Profiler." Everywhere on TV this year, somebody is being violated. But even Ebola and the probing fingers of little gray space people aren't the worst of it. On these shows, there's a bogeyman even more shadowy and intimate; you don't know you're snared until it's too late. This is the Conspiracy Monster, our greatest fin de siecle fear, and it goes like this: "The government" knows "the truth" (oh, it's out there, you betcha) about everything from AIDS to alien abductions, but it's keeping us in the dark because somebody made a deal. Call it the legacy of Ollie North. Such paranoia would be comical, if not for credence-lending revelations about the government's secret radiation experiments on unsuspecting Americans during World War II. Or allegations that the CIA dealt crack for the Contras. Or the Army's flip-flop over whether Gulf War syndrome really exists. So UPN's "The Burning Zone," about a Mod Squad of virologists (one white, one black, one babe) covertly battling outbreaks of doomsday bugs the government doesn't want you to know about, can't quite be dismissed as a far-fetched goof. Conspiracy theories aren't just for crackpots anymore. Except in the case of NBC's new sci-fi drama "Dark Skies." This "Independence Day" for the small screen has a cloddish charm that wouldn't be out of place on "Mystery Science Theatre 3000." In the show's cheerfully insane premise, every major historical event of the past 50 years is a direct result of the Roswell incident — the alleged 1947 crash-landing of a UFO near the Army's nuclear base in Roswell, New Mexico. For UFOlogists and aliens-are-among-us conspiracy buffs, Roswell is Ground Zero. Last month's "Dark Skies" pilot depicted the UFO landing at Roswell. A little gray alien (looking exactly like the ones on "The X-Files") demanded President Truman's unconditional surrender, then the Army blew the spacecraft to smithereens. Somehow, though, the aliens managed to insert squid-like organisms into the brains of many humans, thus putting them under the command of the Big Giant Head (or something) who sends orders to the Earthling-disguised troops via radio waves. The hero and heroine of "Dark Skies," which is set (for now) in Washington, D.C. in the early '60s, are two JFK and Jackie-worshipping kids who get jobs as aides to their idols and end up entangled with a super-secret group founded by President Eisenhower to cover up the alien invasion. The JFK assassination? Yep, he knew too much. And so did Bobby. And Lee Harvey Oswald. And Jack Ruby. And presumably, Marilyn Monroe, Martin Luther King, Jimi Hendrix, Karen Carpenter and Vincent Foster, but we're getting ahead of the writers here. "Dark Skies" is not quite skillful or knowing enough to succeed as camp, but it's enjoyably inept all the same. It's like "The Wonder Years" by Oliver Stone, if Oliver Stone was a screaming lunatic wearing a tin foil hat in the park. (And who's to say he isn't?) Yet America's love/fear relationship with conspiracies is real. As much as we like to scare ourselves with depictions of sinister aliens walking among us, we're also quick to turn to conspiracy theories when the logical explanation is too hard to swallow. Beloved football hero hacks up two people? Must be a police conspiracy. Federal building blown to pieces? Must be foreign terrorists. There are times, though, when events are too monstrously tragic to absorb. They sap our energy to play the sinister conspiracy theory game. And this is when the "conspiracy of goodness" theories come into play. The collective response to the Oklahoma City bombing (oddly, one of the few events that actually qualifies as a conspiracy) and the slaughter of schoolkids in Dunblane, Scotland was to proclaim the little victims "angels." There was a news photo of a mourner at a memorial service for victims of TWA Flight 800 holding up a sign reading, "Flight 800 — Destination: Heaven." And this desire to explain why horrific, random things happen to innocent people — even if the explanation only amounts to "It was God's will" — is fueling the biggest influx of religious programming in TV history. There are the religious cable channels, of course, like Trinity Broadcasting and the Faith and Values Channel. But religious, or more accurately, mystical programming is also showing up in prime time on, for example, NBC (those awful "Ancient Prophecies" specials) and A&E (the weekly "Mysteries of the Bible"). Much of this stuff is screwy, dangerous pseudo-science fronting for fundamentalist Biblical literalism — it's the sideshow to the end of the world. The highest-profile network series dealing with matters of faith are CBS's "Touched by an Angel" and "Promised Land," both of which pick up where "Highway to Heaven" left off. In "Touched," a comely young angel goes around the country helping troubled folks get in touch with their inner spirituality 'n' stuff. It's curio-cabinet Christianity, a misty New Age Hallmark blessing for angelphiles. (On "Touched by an Angel," would Judgment Day be, like, Nonjudgmental Day?) The more manly "Promised Land," from the same producer, stars Gerald McRaney, TV's "Major Dad," as a stoic family man who drives across America in a mobile home scolding people into righteousness. Both shows are steeped in the notion that everything is pre-ordained, nothing is random. Life isn't like a Whitman Sampler — it's like a needlepoint sampler, with every stitch set down according to a higher pattern. For some people, that's comforting. Fox's "Millennium," the heavily anticipated new show from "X-Files" creator Chris Carter, puts a darker spin on this "master plan" theme. In "Millennium," FBI agent Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) retires from the Bureau to join a clandestine organization of former law-enforcement personnel waging holy war against the murderous scum of society. Frank is a grim angel, protector of the weak and innocent; ironically, he's powerless to shield his wife and child from a psycho stalker. In the October 25 pilot, Frank tracks a messianic serial killer who quotes Yeats' "The Second Coming" in French while ritually slaughtering exotic dancers and gay hustlers. It's Travis Bickle vs. Travis Bickle. "Millennium" crosses conspiratorial murkiness with the old internalized-evil bit -- in order to catch the bad guys, Frank becomes "the thing we fear the most." He stares at a piece of evidence and "sees" flashes of the crime. He's like a receiver that's always on, picking up gory signals from the stinking world outside when all he wants to do is cuddle with his family in his wholesome yellow clapboard fortress. In the pilot, Frank explains why he retired from the FBI and fled to verdant Seattle: "The cruelty... the unspeakable crimes. It all becomes numbing, depersonalized, common." With "Millennium," Carter tries to restore feeling to viewers desensitized by TV violence. And, oh boy, does he succeed. The pilot contains the most awful, grisly scene of victimization in a long, long time. Will viewers want to follow Frank Black down into these depths every week? Carnage aside, "Millennium" is as spiritual a show as "Touched by an Angel" in its own way — a hair shirt and vision quest sort of way. Somber, bleak and rainy, "Millennium" takes no pleasure in shocking you the way "The X-Files" does. Naming his main character after the eccentric, alien-obsessed singer Frank Black is as impish as Carter gets here. "Millennium" is overwhelmingly sad; you can't enjoy the idyllic family scenes between Frank, his wife, Catherine (Megan Gallagher, warmer and more compliant than she was in the cancelled paranoia-fest "Nowhere Man"), and their little girl because you dread — and resent — what's probably going to happen to them come May sweeps. And it's only Henriksen's sympathetic, martyr-in-the-making presence (those mournful eyes, those deep grooves in his weathered cheeks, that gentle rumble of a voice) that saves "Millennium" from embarrassing white-male-under-siege bluster. "We're raising a daughter, Frank. The real world seeps in. You can't stop it," says Catherine. "I want you to make believe that I can," Frank rumbles, pulling her into a daddy's-home clinch. Students of serial killer fiction will immediately recognize that Frank's deductive gift is second-hand -- it's lifted out of Thomas Harris's "Red Dragon" (which became Michael Mann's film "Manhunter"). Not to mention the fact that NBC has a new show, "Profiler," with an identical premise, save for a gender reversal of the lead. But, tempting as it is to give Harris all the credit, "Millennium" and "Profiler," and the rest, owe more to Caleb Carr's historical novel "The Alienist." Carr took what we think of as elements unique to modern life -- serial killers, pedophiles, gang violence, political conspiracies -- and set them in New York City at the end of the 19th century. (The title refers not to extraterrestrials but to an old-fashioned synonym for psychiatrist.) Pervaded by the sense that the world is rotting and we're all going to hell, "The Alienist" shows us the present through the fogged mirror of the past; it depicts the cyclical struggle of humans facing the big What If? to find a safe place to deposit their faith. And the same thing is going on in the joyless, vengeful "Millennium," the reassuring "Touched by an Angel," the defiantly paranoid "X-Files," the endearingly delusional "Dark Skies." All of these shows are grounded in a millennial longing for a safe haven, for an answer to the hard questions, for The Truth. These characters want to believe, and it almost doesn't matter in what. "Millennium" (premiering Friday, October 25, 9 p.m., Fox) "Dark Skies" (8 p.m. Saturdays, NBC) "Profiler" (10 p.m. Saturdays, NBC) "The Burning Zone" (9 p.m. Tuesdays, UPN) "Touched by an Angel" (8 p.m. Sundays, CBS)