I was watching the show on TV when it originally aired (that bit with the family sitting down to Mother's Day dinner -- not so obviously part of the show if you're watching it on broadcast TV with commercial breaks rather than on a DVD without ads...), so whether or not to watch S3 wasn't an immediate question then -- the S2 finale was mindblowing, then there was that whole summer between seasons when I wasn't sure if it was over or not, and then it was back in the fall. Not knowing what they'd do, I kept watching.
There was another switch in showrunners that had a different vision for the show between seasons. They backpedal and retcon the scale of the apocalypse to a local disaster, and it is awkward, and inevitably a huge let down that they didn't go the post-apocalyptic route. However they still do interesting things, and it's often a better show than so many others even when it's not really coherent, so it's tough to either dismiss outright or recommend wholeheartedly. YMMV, as the comments above show.
S3 is a weird mix, not visionary along the same lines as S2's, but not a total return to baseline S1 either. There is grief over the regrettably fridging-in-retrospect of Catherine. There are other cases of pre-millennial angst. There are cases that could be classified as X-Files or Fringe events, and more run of the mill crimes. There is Frank in a reindeer-patterned fleece jacket (http://pics.livejournal.com/ide_cyan/pic/000rq949/s640x480). (...it makes sense in context, although the episode's twee-ness is... uncharacteristic.)
It's hard to pin down as a whole.
(The post-S3 fully-integrated-finale where characters from Millennium appear on The X-Files episode titled "Millennium" is itself a major letdown, FYI; while it's nice to see the characters again, the whole thing is utterly nonsensical with regard to Millennium mythology, as the two shows' mythologies don't mesh.)
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There was another switch in showrunners that had a different vision for the show between seasons. They backpedal and retcon the scale of the apocalypse to a local disaster, and it is awkward, and inevitably a huge let down that they didn't go the post-apocalyptic route. However they still do interesting things, and it's often a better show than so many others even when it's not really coherent, so it's tough to either dismiss outright or recommend wholeheartedly. YMMV, as the comments above show.
S3 is a weird mix, not visionary along the same lines as S2's, but not a total return to baseline S1 either. There is grief over the regrettably fridging-in-retrospect of Catherine. There are other cases of pre-millennial angst. There are cases that could be classified as X-Files or Fringe events, and more run of the mill crimes. There is Frank in a reindeer-patterned fleece jacket (http://pics.livejournal.com/ide_cyan/pic/000rq949/s640x480). (...it makes sense in context, although the episode's twee-ness is... uncharacteristic.)
It's hard to pin down as a whole.
(The post-S3 fully-integrated-finale where characters from Millennium appear on The X-Files episode titled "Millennium" is itself a major letdown, FYI; while it's nice to see the characters again, the whole thing is utterly nonsensical with regard to Millennium mythology, as the two shows' mythologies don't mesh.)