Theme: The Millennium

The Millennium refers to the date when the calendar moves over from the previous thousand years to the next. In specific, when we talk about ‘The Millennium’ we refer to the change from the years 1999 to 2000, which is actually the end of the second millennium in the common calendar.

The idea of The Millennium comes with many ideas attached to it. The most common was that it would herald the Biblical End Times due to prophecies that say Christ would return after a thousand years. There was also fear of widespread chaos due to failure of computer system over the Y2K bug – of older computers that would reset to 00 because of internal clocks that only calculated the years in the date in a two-digit notation (99 instead of 1999, 00 instead of 2000). In actually neither of these fears came about.

In older science-fiction works, the year 2000 was seen as the time The Future would arrive. Screen depictions of the Millennium leading up to the event cautiously saw it as a time of social renewal and looking forward. There were several works centred the Biblical End Times, one or two concerning the Y2K bug but relatively few overall.