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"Goodbye Charlie" is the eleventh episode of the second season of the crime-thriller television series Millennium. It premiered on the Fox network on January 9, 1998. The episode was written by Richard Whitley, and directed by Ken Fink.

In this episode, offender profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen)

Plot
offender profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen)

Production


The script for "Goodbye Charlie" was written by Richard Whitley; it was his sole credit during the show's run. The episode was directed by Ken Fink, who would later return to direct the third season episode "Darwin's Eye". "Goodbye Charlie" reunited several cast and crew members from the programme Space: Above and Beyond, which had been created by Glen Morgan and James Wong, who were the executive producers of Millennium second season. Actors Tucker Smallwood and Kristen Cloke had been regulars on that series, while writer Whitley had contributed two episode scripts for it as well.

The episode makes use of Bobby Darin's song "Goodbye Charlie"; the song had also been used in the earlier season episode "Monster". Darin's music has been noted by Millennium resident composer Mark Snow as a hallmark of the works of Morgan and Wong, and would also appear in the episodes "Beware of the Dog" and "Sense and Antisense".

Broadcast and reception
"Goodbye Charlie" was first broadcast on the Fox network on January 9, 1998. The episode earned a Nielsen rating of 5.6 during its original broadcast, meaning that 5.6 percent of households in the United States viewed the episode. This represented approximately 5.7 million households. "Goodbye Charlie" was the ninetieth most-watched television programme during the week it aired.

"Goodbye Charlie" received positive reviews from critics.

The A.V. Club Todd VanDerWerff rated the episode a "B+". VanDerWerff felt that Smallwood's performance elevated an episode which he thought otherwise "seems stupid on its face". VanDerWerff believed that the assisted suicide storyline was overly-familiar on television by the time the episode aired, but that both the character of Kiley as written, and Smallwood's portrayal of him, "makes “Goodbye, Charlie” worth a watch, even today".

Bill Gibron, writing for DVD Talk, rated the episode 4 out of 5. Gibron felt that it looked past its "hot button" subject matter in order to give weight to the series' purpose—introducing the idea of deeper motives for the Millennium Group's investigations in the series so far.