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Summary:
An investigation into a retired FBI agent's suicide conducted by Frank Black and Emma Hollis
reveals
some confusing facts that link the Bureau to the
Millennium Group's modern rebirth half a century years ago. Piling evidence and
personal memoirs also imply that both organizations were involved in the historical events the occurred at the Los Alamos
nuclear research center.
Season Three on DVD
First Draft Script Available
Synopsis:
Inside a retirement home, Michael Lanyard opens a box filled
with memorabilia. Amongst the many items contained within is a small
wooden matryoshka doll.
In flashback, in the year 1945, a much younger Agent Lanyard meets with
Clyde Tolson, then Assistant Director of the FBI. Tolson shows Lanyard
a slide of a mangled body. He explains that the victim was Dr. Carew, a
physicist who had been hard at work on an experiment critical to the Allied
victory in the war. Back in the present day, the elderly Lanyard places
a gun to his head and pulls the trigger.
Baldwin and Emma are assigned
to investigate Lanyard's death. Baldwin dismisses the incident as a simple
suicide. But Emma's interest is piqued when she discovers Peter Watts'
name listed in the retirement home's guest register. She and Frank access
folders containing Lanyard's case files and begin to read the contents
within.
In flashback, Lanyard drives
towards Los Alamos. He is intercepted by General Groves, who attempts to
set ground rules for the murder investigation. But Lanyard counters that
his authorization goes all the way to President Truman himself. He requests
to be driven to Dr. Alexander's residence. When he enters Alexander's home,
he finds it vacant. Lanyard searches through some drawers and comes upon
a receipt for $10,000 to bail out a man named Warren Kroll. Dr. Alexander
interrupts Lanyard's progress. Lanyard demands that he identify Warren
Kroll, but the conversation is interrupted when Alexander's young daughter,
Natalie, runs into the room. Alexander scoops Natalie (who clutches a matryoshka
doll) into his arms, ending the discussion. Later, Lanyard reports back
to Tolson by phone. He explains that Warren Kroll was jailed for assault
two days before the murder, and was later bailed out of jail by Alexander's
nanny, Lily Unser. It turns out that the bail money was withdrawn from
Alexander's account. Later, as Lanyard observes the Alexander house from
the shadows, he hears a fight break out. Lanyard races inside, where he
is attacked by a wild-eyed Kroll. Several M.P.s storm into the house and
pin Lanyard to the floor.
Back in the present day, Emma
and Frank finish reading the file. On the reverse side of the last piece
of paper in the file is an ouroboros, doodled in pencil. Later, Emma approaches
Watts at Lanyard's funeral. Watts denies that Lanyard was ever a Group
member. He tells Emma that Alexander defected to Russia with plutonium.
With the case seemingly at a dead end, Emma researches Lily Unser's name
on her computer. She discovers that Unser is a patient at a mental hospital.
Unser tells Emma and Frank that Kroll is dead. After performing more research,
Frank concludes that Kroll is buried at Los Alamos and labeled as a "John
Doe." Frank has Kroll's coffin unearthed. He discovers a lead box, covered
with cautionary radioactive symbols, inside. The "hot" box is moved to
a nuclear containment room. Inside is a well-preserved male body. Frank
recognizes the corpse's face as Dr. Alexander's.
When Lily learns that Alexander's
body has been exhumed, she become more cooperative. She tells Emma that
Lanyard was arrested by the M.P.s and ordered to stay off the base. Instead,
he returned to Alexander's house and, fearing for Natalie's safety, attempted
to take the little girl away. However, Alexander detected his presence.
Lanyard handed the little girl to Lily and instructed her to leave at once.
Suddenly, Alexander literally transformed into Kroll. Moments later, Lanyard
discovered a hidden lab inside Alexander's house. Alexander told Lanyard
to bring the matryoshka doll to his daughter, as it contains pages explaining
everything. Alexander then reached inside a lead vessel and retrieved some
plutonium. He morphed into Kroll and attempted to walk out of the lab.
But Lanyard knocked him to the ground. Before Alexander expired, he asked
Lanyard to save his daughter. Lanyard attempted to retrieve the matryoshka
doll, which rolled into a crevice at the side of the room during the scuffle.
Suddenly, the sound of a car's engine filled the room. Lanyard rushed outside only to see Lily drive off with Natalie.
Back in the present day, Frank
finds the matryoshka doll, still wedged in the crevice of Alexander's home.
He tells Emma and Baldwin that Kroll and Dr. Alexander were the same person.
It turns out that Alexander became obsessed with finding out how good men
could create something so evil as the atomic bomb. So he experimented with
plutonium, and attempted to split off the evil he felt inside himself.
In doing so, he split off Kroll.
Frank realizes that Lanyard killed
himself after he viewed a television news magazine featuring an adult Natalie
performing secret biological research. Frank travels to a race track, where
he confronts Peter Watts. Watts explains that, many years earlier, the
Group had asked Lanyard to become a member of the organization. Frank pulls
out the matryoshka doll and hands it to Watts. He asks him to give the
doll to Natalie.
In flashback, Tolson and J. Edgar
Hoover approach Lanyard about joining the Group. They tell him that Lily
has already become a member. Lanyard is outraged that the men had Natalie
kidnapped. He promises to turn in his letter of resignation and exits the
room. After he exits, Hoover shows Tolson his drawing of the ouroboros,
sketched on the back of the report.
In the present day, Natalie enters
her office and discovers the matryoshka doll perched on the edge of her
desk and the crumpled pages of her father's journal inside. |
Photographs:
- Frank discovers Dr. Alexander's secret
- Frank watches the opening of
Kroll's coffin
- Frank visits the Los Alamos cemetery
- Frank, Emma, and Barry discuss the case
- The elderly Lily Unser
- Peter investigates the events on his own
- Frank and Emma visit Lily Unser
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Abyss Rating:
(2/5)
Trivia:
"Matryoshka"
is the only third season episode written by Millennium staff
writers Erin Maher and Kay Reindl, their last episode for the series,
although the duo spent a significant portion of the season working on
drafts of another script. An episode with the working title "Fallen
Angel," concerning Frank Black's attempts to arrange an FBI sanctioned
exorcism, was never produced. While working on the episode Reindl told
the Abyss that its story concerned a "unique take on original sin" but
also noted "the network's a little queasy about putting high body
count episodes during sweeps." The script was ultimately turned down
by Fox and the show's producers.
After working on both the rejected "Fallen
Angel" and "Matryoshka," Kay Reindl explained that writing episodes
for the show's third season was a difficult experience. "It was a bad year for
everyone," says Reindl. "We had an ideal experience with Morgan and Wong. They are
terrific teachers and experienced show runners. This year was
different. We had a new show runner, Michael Duggan, who didn't work
out, and then we ended up scrambling through the rest of the year.
Chris Carter was too busy to be as involved as he probably wanted to
be. Producing a TV show is tough enough without having upheavals at
the beginning of the season. During season three, it was very hard to
get anything through and when you did, the life was bled out of it. It
was more of a negative atmosphere: 'We don't want serial killers,
angels or secret societies.' It's hard to do that when you don't
replace it with anything else. In contrast, we had so many ideas
during season two that it was definitely, for us, the more creative
season. I also think it was monumentally terrific television and if
the series hadn't had the stigma of being dark and a failure, maybe it
would have gotten more praise."
Director of Photography Robert McLachlan
was, once again, honored for his work on Millennium as a result
of his efforts on this episode. "Matryoshka" earned the
cinematographer his third consecutive Canadian Society of
Cinematographers Award and his third American Society of
Cinematographers Award nomination.
McLachlan explains that a number of film
techniques are utilized to depict Frank Black's visions
— like those seen throughout "Matryokshka"
— as suitably surreal.
"When Frank has his visions, or gets into the mind of the killer and
gets these flashes, we shoot it on 16mm because we couldn’t find any
35mm technique that would give us the same look. Not only that, but we
shoot the 16mm on reversal film stock that we then push... My
assistant, Mike Wrinch, had this fabulous idea to get strobe lights
from Denny Clairmont, designed for doing Coca-Cola commercials and
anything with running water. We would light one half of a violent,
moving subject with them, light the other half with normal light, and
then shoot at 6 fps. What you get with the normal light is a blurred
effect because the shutter speed is so slow, but with the strobes in a
very short exposure time the picture becomes super sharp. The image
becomes three dimensional. We try to do as much in the camera as we
possibly can rather than letting them play around with it in post.
They end up doing absolutely nothing with it; they roll it over the
way it comes out of the camera. It’s a little bit gimmicky, but it
also doesn’t look like anything that I’ve seen anybody else do.”
This episode expands Millennium's
mythology by offering significant insight into the events that brought
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the ancient Millennium Group
together during the mid twentieth century.
Actor
David Fredericks appears as famed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Fredericks had also portrayed Hoover during thematically similar
episodes of Chris Carter's The X-Files.
Guest star
Dean Winters is seen in this episode, during those scenes set in 1945,
as the young Michael Lanyard. Millennium viewers will probably
best recognize Winters as Mr. Crocell from the haunting second season
episode "The Curse of Frank Black."
Death Toll:
3
Title:
Russian
wooden dolls nested in succession within larger dolls are called
matryoshka. The dolls take their name from the once popular Russian
names Matryona and Matriosha, each derived from a Latin root meaning
"mother." The conspiracies unraveled in this episode and throughout
Millennium seem to reveal secrets within secrets and societies
within societies in a pattern not unlike that seen in the famed
Russian dolls.
Soundtrack:
"Till Then" by the Mills Brothers
Awards:
Canadian Society of
Cinematographers Award - Robert McLachlan, Best Cinematography in
a Television Series (Winner)
American Society of Cinematographers
Award - Robert McLachlan, Outstanding
Achievement in Cinematography (Nominee)
Starring:
Lance Henriksen as Frank Black
Terry O'Quinn as Peter Watts
Klea Scott as Emma Hollis
Peter Outerbridge as Barry Baldwin
Stephen E. Miller as Andy McClaren
Guest Starring:
Barbara Bain as Lilly Unser
Wally Dalton as Michael Lanyard
Dean Winters as Young Michael Lanyard
Peter Hanlon as Clyde Tolson
Mark Houghton as Dr. Alexander
Alex Ferguson as Dr. Caton
David Fredericksas J. Edgar Hoover
Matthew Walker as the Group Elder
Ocean Hellman as Young Lilly Unser
Mecca Menard as Young Natalie
Vince Metcalfe as General Groves
Marie Stillin as Natalie
Monica Gemmer as the
Secretary
Jim Thorburn as the Agent
Tiffany Burns as the Reporter
Production
Credits:
Production #6C14
Music by Mark Snow
Production Designer Mark Freeborn
Director of Photography Robert McLachlan
Associate Producer Jon-Michael Preece
Co-Producer Robert Moresco
Co-Producer Paul Rabwin
Producer Thomas J. Wright
Co-Executive Producer Ken Horton
Co-Executive Producer John Peter Kousakis
Executive Producer Chip Johannessen
Executive Producer Chris Carter
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