Millennium (TV Series) The Judge (1996) User Reviews

A Bleak Episode

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 19 May 2024]

In Seattle, the mechanic Jonathan Mellen is killed in his garage by his coworker Carl Nearman. Soon an old widow, Annie Tisman, receives a tongue by mail from a bogus sender. Lt. Bob 'Bletch' Bletcher summons Frank Black to help in the investigation and he learns that pieces of other victims have been mailed to unrelated people along a couple of years, but the bodies have not been found. Meanwhile, a man named The Judge hires the criminal Mike Bardale, who has just been released from the prison, to help him to promote justice and offering protection to him. His first assignment is to kill Carl Nearman, who worked with The Judge, but failed in his last mission since remove the tongue from Jonathan Mellen when he was dead. Bletch and Frank go to the morgue where the body of Mellen is and Frank says that the body of the John Doe close to Mellen is related to the case. The further investigation of the police find the relation between the cases and Bletch and Frank goes to a bar where low-life in probation uses to go, and they suspect of Bardale.

"The Judge" is a bleak episode of Millennium, with the story of a vigilante that uses the laws to protect himself. The episode is very dark, in the style of "Se7en", and the conclusion is gruesome. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "The Judge"

Don't Make the Conventional Assumptions

[XweAponX · 10/10 · 12 April 2012]

Marshall Bell is "The Judge" - The first incarnation of what we have become to understand as "Legion" - A recurring evil in the Millennium Mythos.

This is no Lucy Butler - Here, "The Judge," seems genuinely interested and intrigued by Frank Black. Knows all about him, knows his deep concerns. Knows "The Group" which it will later infest in the form of "Mabius" in S3.

We can almost even applaud what "The Judge" does, as a form of "Vigilante Justice" - He seems to be genuinely righting wrongs that have been the result of manipulations of The Justice System.

So. Why does Frank get a Huge Red Flag? On one hand, The Judge is finding these people who have used Legal Loopholes and using these as nooses to deliver Justice to those people who have performed these manipulations, but The Judge himself uses the same legal maneuverings to tie Frank and "Blech" in knots! If This guy is ultimately doing good, why shouldn't Frank work for him? "Here is My Thing" - The Judge is not really doing anything good.

This is the first time Legion offers Frank a Job, a Job that will "Alleviate his family problems?" We must assume, Legion then is the source of the problems.

On one hand, the guy does good, hes a superhero right? But people are becoming irreversibly mangled if not killed in horrible ways.

What is really truly frightening, is that THERE WILL BE PEOPLE who cannot see that what The Judge is doing is wrong, very wrong.

Throw the word "Justice" into a sentence, and it seems to validate some of the most horrific acts imaginable.

This is not the last or the least we see of this thing which names itself "Legion" in this 'sode - It is merely the first incarnation. In the end, it takes a joint effort of Jordan and Frank to ward off an attack by this thing. All through the series, we want to know the motivation of Legion/The Judge/Mabius/Lucy Butler/Al Pepper/etc - Each incarnation has an agenda of it's own, but in the long run they all want one thing: Frank Black!

In the end, it becomes a contest between Legion and Frank, and the only way Frank can win such a contest is to not compete.

The Judge in this form, showed that he can hold all the cards and Kick Frank's Ass in any Legal Arena. Frank is initially frustrated, he's legally blocked at all avenues, until he realises there is a Hole card The Judge knows not wot of - In the form of recent former Prisoner Mike Bardale (John Hawkes) - Who, in a way, sees through The Judge's Facade and performs a little Vigilante Justice of his own,

Bardale, has no aspirations of being "free in the world" - He explains to Frank the difference between a Convict and an Inmate. We can give Bardale a better character reference than we can The Judge - Because, although Bardale was a Prisoner, a Convict and a Murderer, he never represents himself to be anything other than that. That is what he is, and by being what he is, can do one good thing: Rid the world of The Judge.

The Judge said: Don't make the conventional assumptions. Meaning, that the Job Offer is Closed simply because The Judge is Pig Fodder: No, it snot. But did we understand this at the time the Episode was Broadcast? I sure as hell didn't! We all needed to have Lucy Butler kick us in the Tenderloin District and scare us to death before we really started realising this.

Millennium - The Judge

[Scarecrow-88 · 6/10 · 23 September 2018]

My first real disappointment of the first season of "Millennium" so far, I had anticipated (especially when Frank finds an envelope left for him taped to a wall outside the "Judge's" house) something perhaps far more extensive involving Marshall Bell's introduced judge who wears a hood when passing sentence on those he believes didn't receive the proper justice they deserved, utilizing gullible cons in need of guidance to actually perform the violence he wants carried out towards his targets...that he doesn't make it out of this episode, self-titled, "The Judge", seems like a lost opportunity to really give Black and Bletch a good early nemesis for the series. John Hawkes ("Deadwood"; "Winter's Bone"; "The Sessions") is the next con (a repeat offender always returning to prison, barely out long enough to enjoy any freedom, unable to behave himself) Bell lures into his vigilante fold. Before Hawkes was JR Bourne ("Teen Wolf: The Series"), but a mistake involving the removal of a tongue in haste after the death of a victim meant to suffer the complete injury while alive meant Bell considered him a liability. So Hawkes essentially kills Bourne and replaces him, leaving his body near a railroad to throw of the police as a train accident. CCH Pounder is a forensics examiner who leads detectives to a victim left in a tank with an amputated leg, responsible for a tenant's tragic fate, while the bowler (later determined to be retired cop who provided false testimony that put a woman's husband in jail where he would be killed while inside) who lost the tongue (sent to the cop's victim's wife) is found by a dog after his body was dumped in a park. Black is in the morgue when both Bourne and the cop's bodies are found, assuring Bletch that they are killer and victim respectively. The Judge, with his manner of speech quite peculiar but convincing enough to manipulate cons to follow his cause-capitalizing on their violent natures, supposedly giving them a purpose beyond going back to and out of prison-while-when interrogated by police-frustrating law enforcement. The Judge sees Black as a potential recruit, but after he holds the police department accountable for bringing him in for interrogation, Hawkes' con is so repulsed he metes out his own vigilante justice against the hypocrite for talking a big game but not necessarily adhering to the very code he supposedly follows religiously. The Judge's code is based on righting wrongs caused by a criminal justice system he felt didn't do its job and yet there he is exploiting that very system for his own gain: Hawkes can't stand the fact that this man who claims to be offering him the chance to use his "talents" for a cause of justice ultimately proves to be just another exploiter of the system. A tongue delivered to a woman, a severed leg found in a package when X-rayed in a postal factory, a dead body dug up by a dog in a park, and a tank located deep in a valley containing a recently deceased bleeding from the wound where the leg was cut off; just another grisly episode of "Millennium"! Frank doesn't necessarily have to recover visions of the murderous actions often in this particular episode although his intuition and investigative skills do come in handy. Frank encourages Bletch to look into an initiator/motivator (with an "act of hubris" that is behind the murders) despite tying Bourne to the dead retired cop's murder. Catherine isn't given as much time in the episode beyond informing Frank that she had a talk with someone where she works about the woman who found the tongue in a package delivered to her. The murders in Seattle means Frank didn't have to leave the city for a change. The pigs oinking in their slop while foraging about (The Judge is a "hog auctioneer"!) near the Judge's house, later to be feeding not only on other victims' body parts but his has its own dark irony. I admit when Hawkes admits to killing Bell and then the body turns up as Frank turns up in the kitchen I was rather surprised that those who wrote the episode would dispatch with a rather colorful villain so soon.

Isn't looking good.

[bombersflyup · 2/10 · 13 August 2019]

The Judge doesn't have much to offer. This happened, that happened, not enough's shown or detail given. The ending's non-affecting, as the bad guy takes out the other bad guy and then just sits around without any plan of his own. The cops seem to just be in the way.