Outside, it is raining, a portrait of gloom and wet-slicked concrete. Inside, on the cramped, dark-lit soundstage of Millennium’s North Shore studio, surrounded by ghostly silence and shafts of light stabbing through clouds of artificial smoke, Robert McLachlan is solemnly applying the final look to a scene in which Frank Black, the world-weary psychological profiler played with appropriate world-weary intensity by Lance Henriksen, is being briefed by Missouri state troopers.

McLachlan studies the scene closely for flaws, immersing himself in the moment, analysing the tiniest of details. But on Millennium, the tiniest detail warrants undivided attention. It is the defining characteristic of a Chris Carter production, the trait that he has made Millennium’s progenitor, The X-Files, succeed where others failed -- the trait that no one sees, except for the 200 or so cast and crew who put in 12-hour days and seven-day weeks on a 10-month year. Millennium is the first time in his 20 years in television, McLachlan says, when good just won’t cut it, and very good earns, at best, a passing grade.

Technically, McLachlan is a director of photography, the ringmaster of shifting images behind the most disturbing series on television -- some say the most disturbing in the 89-year history of the cathode-ray tube. Millennium stares unflinchingly at the nature of evil. It can be perverse, deeply disturbing and unexpectedly thoughtful: at its heart, it is the story of a man, the family he loves and how he is trying to make the world safe for those he loves. Visually, it’s a challenge.

McLachlan’s colleagues say he is a cameraman of the first order. He prefers to describe himself as a camera-buff who began fooling around in the family darkroom when he was 12 (his father was an art designer), and who got lucky enough to make a living at a job he loves doing.

He grew up in North Vancouver, attended Handsworth Secondary school, married his highschool sweetheart and settled down to a routine of married life and shadow plays. The late 1970s were not the easiest time to pay off the mortgage while working in Vancouver’s fledgling production industry, but McLachlan made a go of it, co-founding Vancouver’s Omni Film Productions with
partner Michael Chechik, where they produced more than 300 TV commercials and TV movies together. Then the dollar plunged, Hollywood production companies looked north for relief from onerous production costs and Stephen J. Cannell proved the North Shore could pass for just about anywhere.

McLachlan’s television credits began burning with activity: The Beachcombers, The Odyssey and Max Glick for CBC, then Neon Rider, MacGyver, The Commish and, most auspiciously, Strange Luck. Strange Luck, Fox Television’s shortlived fable featuring D.B. Sweeney as a modern-day Walter Mitty, brought McLachlan to Carter and co-executive producer John Kousakis’ attention.

For McLachlan, the father of two young daughters, what drew him to the material was Millennium’s pervasive sense of sadness, black’s heroic struggle to make the world a safer place for his own infant daughter and the striking emotional contrast between Black’s home -- photographed in soft-hued, misty colors -- and the inescapable evil beyond. That, and the sense that no cost would be spared to make Millennium look as good as possible.