Season Premiere
The Last Temptation of Mulder
Lucky Boy
Push The Button, Frank
Fast Times at Podunk High
Beginner's Luck
Don't Look Any Further
Closure
X-Cops
First Person Shooter
All Things
Season Finale
SHORT STORY: My ass. This was what I kept saying as this episode unfolded. "I love you, Fox." My ass! "I've killed nobody." My ass! "It's the key...the answer to every question that has ever been asked." My ass! Or maybe I should be saying, "Chris Carter's ass!" Because I think that's the place out of which this plot is being pulled.
IT'S A SIGN THAT WE SHOULD GIVE UP: Well, I sure as hell give up. What was going on down there in Africa made no frickin' sense. OK, with the locusts and the blood maybe you have some Apocalypse stuff going on; but what do we do with this figure that keeps appearing, disappearing, and speaking to Scully in sonorous tones? And even let's say we accept that omens are inscrutable and we just have to put up with that, what about human behavior? Scully agrees to collaborate with a man who she knows has killed two other scientists who were working on this project. Scientist's transformation from fairly normal guy to machete-wielding maniac is triggered by what to me seems like a very reasonable thing to say, which is "There is no God." I mean OK, Scully and the other scientist disagree, but why is that what makes them start looking at him all funny? Said machete-wielding maniac somehow manages to keep Scully and the other doctor imprisoned by guarding the exit...to a tent. Hello. Guys. If machete boy is guarding the door, what's to stop you from cutting another one in the back once he falls asleep? Said maniac machetes his driver for no particular reason. OK, he's nuts. But there's a limit to how much that can explain. And as for the artifact, I cannot figure out a way to make it possible for any of what Scully is talking about to hang together. So it's covered with writing, and the writing includes the major tenets of most religions plus the code for the human genome. Nice idea. I got a few piddling little pedantic questions. These characters are all supposed to be the Navajo alphabet, right, and that's why ALbert was able to decipher them. So...that passage from Genesis. Is it in Navajo? Or in English? Cause, see, if it's in Navajo, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense seeing as this passage odesn't come from the Navajo tradition. But if it's in English, that makes even less sense because let us remember Genesis is a Hebrew text. Does Albert know ancient Hebrew? If so, why? What about all the other passages (from the Kuran, etc.)? Is the passage from the Kuran in Navajo? If so, how can the other scientist read it, since presumably she doesn't speak Navajo? Is it in Arabic? If so, then how do we explain the fact that over 2 million years or however long it was the alphabet mutated from Navajo to Arabic but the language didn't change at all? How is the human genome represented, exactly? Please do not tell me that the Navajo alphabet characters are just spelling out the English names of the chemicals in DNA. Please tell me someone on the writing team realizes that the names of these chemicals were invented by scientists and were not passed on to us by our alien forefathers, and that not everyone on the planet speaks English.
"Please tell me the writers know that not everyone on the planet speaks English" could actually just about sum up my feelings about this spacecraft plot. I don't think the people putting this together know very much about the history or nature of language. Either that, or they're just getting too sloppy to care.
HELP ME: Well, I'm glad that Skinner had something to do, but I'm real worried about the fact that CC felt the need to pull Krichgow out of a hat. It's nice that he's trying to tie up some loose ends, I guess, but so far they're still flappin' in the breeze. We both thought he was writing "Krychek" instead, but I guess they did that to tease us. In one sense, it's clear where Krichgow fits: somehow CC is planning to use him to tie together the whole telepathy/ESP plot that was more or less abandoned along with Gibson the chess-playing wunderkind, and which is associated with Diana Fowley. But I have a bad feeling that CC may not know where he's going with all this.
IT'S THE KEY: Yeah, you wish, Chris.
This spaceship is certainly supposed to be the key--not to all of humanity's mysteries, but to all the loose ends and abandoned storylines that CC has been trailing through the past 6 years of X-Files episodes. But I think maybe this is the time to face the fact that I'm just not a believer any more. I don't think this key is going to end up explaining squat; I think it will just vanish forever so that it can become a giant hypothetical that *might* have epxlained all the stuff that makes no sense if only we could have pieced the puzzle together. It ain't God, it ain't extraterrestrials, and it ain't the CIA; it's one guy who's trying to save himself from his own bad planning by trying to have it all possible ways. It's just like with Scully's cancer cure--could be the chip, could be the drugs, could be divine intervention. CC doesn't want to have to choose and he's not gonna let us. There ain't gonna be any answers.
But, if Diana Fowley someday comes to a messy end that'll make up for a lot. Boy does the trailer for next week scare me.
The Plaid Adder
SHORT STORY: That's it, Chris. I'm done trying to clean up your mess.
THE SCIENCE MAKES NO SENSE TO ME: Don't feel bad, Scully. It doesn't make sense, period. Mulder is an alien-human hybrid? I suppose this is meant to be the result of his exposure to NAC and the "vaccine" in Tunguska, coupled with his exposure to the magic rock from the spacecraft. May I remind TPTB that Scully was also infected with this virus, subsequently "vaccinated," and exposed to the magic rock, and yet she suffers no ill effects. Or are we just pretending the movie never happened? What are they taking out of Mulder and putting in Cancer Man? How are they doing that? Why does this cure Mulder? We don't know; I guess we're not supposed to care. The guys with no names in the white coats know, and that's enough for us. Well, I'm sorry. In the immortal words of Jimmy Berlutti, "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Because let's say we spot CC the details and assume he has some larger explanation in mind with which we are just not to be favored. How the FUCK does Scully get into that super-secret bad peoples' lab? Why the FUCK has Mulder been left alone in there? And how the FUCK do they get back out? We're supposed to assume that the whole boiling of them have just cleared out and LEFT Mr. Alien-Human Hybrid lying there on that conveniently cruciform table? "But he's not a hybrid any more! They sucked all the hybridity out of him and stuck it into Cancer Man!" I hear them cry. NOT GOOD ENOUGH! And if the writers can't figure out why that's not good enough, well, I'm about done with them.
YOU'RE NOT CHRIST: Really? Then why am I lying here with my arms outspread in a loincloth with a big iron crown of thorns type thing clamped around my brow while an unearthly light suffuses me from this big cross-shaped table I'm strapped to? Sigh. Raise your hand if you've seen The Last Temptation of Christ. Those of you who raised your hand, raise your other hand if you think this episode was swiped wholesale from that movie. Anyone who does not have both hands raised, go to your local video library and start doing some research.
For those who may have missed Last Temptation of Christ, starring Willem Dafoe and a bunch of other people whose names I can't remember, in that movie Jesus gets nailed up, and while he's up there an angelic little girl comes up to him, pulls the nails out, and takes him off the cross to go enjoy a new life in suburban Galilee. He gets married, he has an affair with his wife's sister, he has kids, and in the end as he's lying there all old, Judas turns up and rips him a new asshole for having abandoned everything he ever believed in. Jesus goes, "Shit! You're right! What am I doing here?" The angelic little girl goes up in a big spout of flame and we realize she's actually Satan. Jesus sprints back to the cross, and dies like he was always meant to.
Sound familiar at all?
I've had it. Christ imagery is the last refuge of the desperate. Don't know what you're saying, but want to be profound? Have the guy stretch out his arms and bow his head. They did it in Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman, but at least there it was a sustained metaphor. They did it in Dead Poets Society but there it was slapped on, unprepared, and hokey. Just like it is here. OK, he's a crusader. But the Messiah? PLEASE. Chris Carter has been reading his own press releases for way too long. So has David Duchovny, who apparently co-wrote this episode.
NATIVE AMERICAN BELIEFS: If that book about the Anasazi explains it all, I sure wish Scully would have told us a little more about what was in there. So they predict a messiah figure too, huh? Well, that's nice. Mulder gets to be worshipped as a savior in two traditions. Gag me with a petroglyph.
IT'S AN UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT: Kid on beach making model of giant all-explaining spacecraft BAD. Beer foamy.
YOU NEED COFFEE: I'm glad it all turned out to be a hallucination because it was mighty unconvincing as reality. It's true that it provided some pretty good squirmy moments, most of them related to Diana Fowley. *shudder* *shudder* *shudder* But I got very, very, very frustrated with Mulder. Very. We'll just move on, I think, no sense dwelling. Can I also point out that what they did with Krichgow made no sense? Krichgow was introduced in order to articulate an alternative, "skeptic" theory that held that all of the "evidence" Mulder and Scully had amassed related of extraterrestrial life was fabricated by the government to cover up their own nefarious activities. Now, suddenly, he's all psyched to prove that extraterrestrial life does exist. Something's wrong with this picture.
DIANA FOWLEY WAS FOUND MURDERED: Well, down the hatch. Too bad we didn't see it happen. How does Scully know it was Diana who sent her the book, anyway?
YOU WERE MY TOUCHSTONE: Still on the forehead, so we're still safe.
You know, I feel very ambivalent about all this. I would like to see them finally start making each othe rhappy, but I would also like for them not to keep making Mulder act like he's had a lobotomy, and I would like for the whole mythology not to be crumbling around them. Sigh.
Next week: eating brains. WOOHOO!
SHORT STORY: Not actively foul, but pretty bland.
WELCOME TO LUCKY BOY: The one thing I liked about this episode was how sinister the Lucky Boy mascot looked in the opening scene. The rest of it was just...well...blah. I suppose it's a novelty that we get the mutant's-eye view this time--the entire episode, aside from that first scene, is filmed from his perspective, which is a departure. Unfortunately, what we gain in character development for the mutant we lose in terms of Mulder and Scully. And most of the time, in this episode anyway, I'd rather be watching them. Or at least I'd rather be watching Scully. Whereas instead we get to see a series of scenes in which Mulder tries to get Rob to crack. Yee ha.
What little screen time Mulder and Scully logged together was put to fairly good use. The scene in which they interview the employees was good, and I liked the examination of the kitchen, especially how squicked out Mulder was by the "brain matter." And the mutant did get one good line: "What is this, good cop...insane cop?" But there was just not enough of that to counterbalance the boredom of getting inside Rob Roberts' head. Cause really, there ain't much there.
NO, THAT'S GROUND BEEF: As usual, the mutant was ill-explained. If human brains are what you're hankering for, exactly how is ground beef going to work as a substitute? Will diet pills really work on the truly mutant appetite? And why brains? Just the taste, or the fat, or what? I mean, the whole willpower thing was an interesting touch, and made you feel for the poor guy with his self-help videotapes and his diet pills and so forth. But despite all of that, basically, I didn't really care. Since the structure of the episode required us to know who the killer was almost immediately, there was a very low suspense factor. The only possible variables were: How many people will he eat before the end of the episode? Will he try to eat Mulder or Scully? That's not really enough to sustain interest, at least for me.
YOU CAN'T FIGHT BIOLOGY: OK, you all know I have big problems with biological determinism, you can insert the counterargument here and let's move along.
I'M HERE TO HELP YOU: I didn't buy the company shrink's character, not one little bit. First of all, if she's working for corporate masters, she's not the kind of person who goes out of her way just to help out one burger jockey who seems a little weird. Second, I would think she must have run into hundreds of Lucky Boy employees who had similar self-esteem issues and third, I don't know, but I'm under the impression that most therapists don't actually hunt you down at your apartment, especially if you're not really a client. And te Phantom of hte Operaesque moment of beauty-and-the-beast contact there at the end was really pushing the edge of pukeworthy.
I CAN'T BE SOMETHING I'M NOT: And I can't find much to say about this. It was a MOTW. It could've been worse. But it just failed to make me care. And that's about the size. I mean, could anything have made this better? Let's see...
WAYS TO MAKE THIS INTERESTING
1. Find a way to work in the line, "Brain and brain! What is brain?"
2. Have the mutant get in there after Mulder's brain and discover that there's nothing there.
3. Include a Homer Simpson cameo in which Rob is seen looking at his head and seeing through to the lack of brain, then turning away in disappointment and heading toward Lisa.
4. Having the sympathetic shrink turn out to be a kindred brain-eating mutant and having them run off to Tijuana together.
No...I don't think even that would have helped. Ah well.
Next week: Chris Carter gets his revenge on all of us for not watching Millennium. I'm sorry, Chris, but the premiere episode stank on ice, and I figured I'd just let you keep on going and if it got good someone would let me know. And somehow, the phone never rang...
SHORT STORY: I still think Millennium wasn't worth its own show, but it makes a pretty good X-File.
This is the first X-File in a long time to actually scare me. Halfway through I went out into the kitchen where Liza was making fajitas and said, plaintively, "The zombies have Scully!" She assured me that Scully would be OK. And indeed she was, but that didn't stop me from having nightmares last night during which zombie creatures kept attacking me while spouting anti-defense-lawyer invective. I wish they would move The Practice to some other time slot so that my psyche wouldn't pull shit like this.
SOUNDS LIKE SOMEONE I KNOW: This episode reminded me of many of the reasons I gave up early on Millennium, chief among them being Frank Black. As far as I'm concerned, he has all of Mulder's flaws and none of his charm. Think Mulder has a monotone problem? Listen to Frank for a minute. If David Duchovny tends to run the gamut of facial expressions from A to B, Lance Henrikson's gamut runs from A to A. Mulder at least has a sense of humor. With Frank, even if he were cracking a joke there'd be no human way not to take it seriously. This is a guy who makes "Pass the salt, please" sound like "The end is nigh, and all that we know will soon be as dust and ashes." So I don't think I could ever have stood watching him as a main character. But as a weird old guy who pops up now and again to drop cryptic hints and spin out long, descriptive, inexplicably accurate profiles based on almost no evidence, I can take him.
NOBODY LIKES A MATH GEEK: Not only does the millennium start for real in 2001, but even our fake millennium will start at different times in different parts of the world. How come the MG wanted to celebrate it Eastern Standard Time? Wouldn't it make more sense to go wtih Greenwich Mean, or whatever time zone Israel is in, or something like that?
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE: This is really a minor quibble, because as I said the whole necromancy thing worked pretty well for me. I mean, a zombie is a zombie and I've seen 'em before, but for whatever reason they did a good job of spooking me. Especially when Mulder was poking around in the basement and the zombies started grabbing at him. Again, the key in horror is for you to be able to identify with the victim, and say what you want about DD/Mulder (and Lord knows I have) he seems at least in this phase of his career to be playing "scared out of my gourd" pretty well. But... Did these guys really envision this kind of existence when they signed up for the suicide squad? I mean, they don't seem to have very much free will, since they seem to basically spend all their time biting, scratching and hissing at whoever is interfering with Johnson's plans. They would have made some seriously sorry-ass horsemen. Maybe the dawn of the Millennium might have magically transformed them, but as they were, I couldn't really see them as anything other than straight-up run of the mill zombies.
HE'S NOT ANSWERING HIS PHONE: Well, at least once in their lives the writers acknowledge that the entire country isn't on Sprint PCS. But you know, I really like the whole cell-phone motif. Putting a cell phone into the coffin so that your zombie can call you once you've reanimated him in a necromantic ritual involving goat's blood--that's what this show is all about. I'm not sure the zombies as they are really even have the free will or the smarts to put through that cell phone call from beyond the grave; but what the hell, it's the Christmas season, I'll give it to 'em.
HE MAY WISH TO WEAR THE CLOTHES OF THE DEAD MAN: And he may have a giant bag of kosher salt sitting in his trash can. Did anyone else laugh when Mulder pulled that thing out? I mean, there was something about that moment that took me back to the original Batman, where everything had a very large black and white label ("LOOT SACK." "BATCOMPUTER." "GIANT LIGHTED LUCITE MAP OF GOTHAM CITY." "NECROMANCER SALT").
THE WORLD DIDN'T END: Well, if they had to kiss, this was a fairly painless way to do it, and the ambiguity is still open even though this is the first time I think we've seen Mulder put his arm around Scully since they were playing house in Arcadia. Actually, if I were Chris Carter I would have cut to the credits at 11:59. Let 'em wonder.
Next week: I dunno what it is, but I bet it's gonna be shot in the dark.
SHORT STORY: It was watchable, with some cute moments. But Max isn't the only one who seems to be slowing down.
WE'RE TOO OLD: I don't know if you can ascribe it to age, but it seemed to me like both DD and GA were phoning in their performances. There was that one conversation where Scully was convincing Mulder to start with Tony's friends, "for me," that was pretty good. But otherwise, they weren't particularly compelling, perhaps because they weren't very well integrated into the plot. When you think about it, their involvement doesn't actually affect anything; they explain what's going on for the viewers at home but they're never actually able to alter the outcome. As with Lucky Boy, this episode was much more focused on the trials and tribulations of three troubled teens. And these characters were all more interesting than the brain eating mutant, but not by a large enough factor.
I'VE BEEN STUDYING: That poor teacher. You know, don't you, that when a teacher is offed by a disgruntled student, s/he officially becomes a holy martyr and goes directly to paradise. Well, I can dream, can't I. Basically, what we've got here is one more variation on the Charlie X theme, which can be summed up thus: "Man, teenagers are scary. Wouldn't they be even scarier if they were super-powerful?" It is certainly a rich vein, but TV and film producers have been working that mother lode for a real long time. Actually, there's yet another Star Trek ripoff in here, but I can't remember the title. That's all right, I know one of you will. It's the one where Kirk is abducted by a space bimbo moving at super-high speeds and accelerated to her pace. (Darth Julie identifies it as "Wink of an Eye." Darth, you can pick up your free toaster in the lobby afterward.)
OH YOU'RE GOOD: Mulder sure is a lucky guesser. Liza has expressed skepticism about Mulder's ability to deduce the whole thing based on some polyurethanous glop and a whole mess of hunching. Well, it's easy enough when the writers are on your side.
SUCH A RUSH: Liza would like to point out that if Max was moving too fast to be seen when he killed the teacher, so should the table and chair that killed him have been. Which is true. The slow-motion effect with the bullet at the end was pretty cool, and I liked the conversation with the spectral photography analyst and how baffled he was. And the scene with Scully looking at Max's charts was pretty good. But somehow even though the episode worked fine and held together pretty well, it just doesn't have that zing that a good X-Files used to have. Or maybe it's just that I couldn't forgive them for naming Max's girlfriend Chastity.
AND GO BACK TO BEING A NORMAL KID: Uh...isn't Tony's real problem going to be that he's now the prime suspect in the murders of Max and Chastity?
Next week: Some guy has all the luck. I'm not sure this looks promising.
Another MOTW comes off the assembly line, but at least this time someone ran it by quality control first. It interested me enough to make me want to screen my phone calls. Course, it was my mother, and I might have screened her anyway. But I digress...
WHERE ARE YOU?: The Mulder/Scully stuff in this one was better-written and, I thought, better acted. I particularly loved the scene where Mulder fails to fix Richie's mother's sink, and Scully is working very hard at not laughing her ass off. The new Ubermulder has in general been too full of himself to say things like, "It's OK, my ass broke the fall!" I miss that about him. And at least in this episode the writers gave Mulder and Scully a plausible reason for continuing to be interested in the outcome--if they had hung around just based on Mulder's hunches I'd've been mad. Scully got to be skeptical in a credible way--she has moved pretty close to believer on the aliens end but she still doesn't buy crap about predestination. Except when it ultimately leads to little Richie getting his new liver.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON: Liza was convinced through much of the episode that the kid was going to turn out to be the source of the mysterious luck, but no. He's just put in there to give the episode that heartwarming Christmas kind of feel, and to give Scully something to be interested in. I'll tell you what would make a good X-File--a follow-up episode in which Catrona's liver starts giving Richie the irresistible urge to start making people offers they can't refuse. Or maybe it would just give him inexplicable cravings for cheap hooch.
CAUSE AND EFFECT: For a show that has had to spend a lot of time coming up with creative ways to kill people, they did a pretty good job with the mobster deaths. It was sort of like Home Alone, except someone's turned off the holodeck safety protocols. And except for the fact that I could stand watching it, whereas Home Alone and its spawn...well, let's not go there. My favorite was the one who had a heart attack while being dangled from the ceiling fan by his shoelace. Of course, it's probably easier to make things like that happen if you're messy and you leave stuff like irons and things lying around so that the place is naturally booby-trapped. Although if that were all it took, I'd have a whole raft of gangsters dangling from my ceiling.
MAURICE, I WANT YOU TO HAVE THIS: See, this is the difference between a good writing job and one that is merely adequate. The scene with Scully interrogating Maurice is an extra--it's not necessary to the plot, but it's funny, and paying attention to details adds that extra layer of interest. Instead of making the guy who sells him the Lotto ticket a total nonentity, they gave him a little bit of a personality and some funny lines. It's the little extra touches that make the difference between good and enh.
Mind you, we're still not talking spleen-rupturing excitement here. But to me it felt almost like a return to the days of Clyde Bruckman, with the same kind of humor. Because really it's the same kind of plot--a guy with a paranormal gift trying to live a normal life, and failing in a kind of quietly despondent way. So I'm cautiously optimistic here. But cautiously, because we all know that luck changes.
SHORT STORY: It was mighty creepy and very tension-filled, but I have big, big ideological issues with the plot. Big.
This is a follow-up to an episode called "Irresistible" that ran several years ago. I was interested in "Irresistible" because it was, at the time, an anomaly in terms of Scully's characterization. Pfaster starts off scavenging dead bodies and doesn't move on to actual murder until he loses his job at the mortician's (something the exposition in this episode mentioned). Even before murder comes into play, however, Scully is portrayed in that original episode as being deeply, inexplicably freaked out by this particular case--so much so that she consults a therapist trying to figure out why it bothers her so much. That question is never really answered. Unless, of course, you count the resolution as the answer. Because of course Pfaster ends up kidnapping her and trying to kill her, and she's only saved from a fate worse than death because Mulder rides to the rescue. The final image is of her, having said, "I'm fine" for the 10th time, breaking up into tears as he holds her.
This makes a point about the whole "serial killer" genre: it is not a coincidence that we are fascinated so much by these fictional killers who almost always target women exclusively. This is not something borne out in reality; several of the more famous serial killers of the 50s preyed either on men or on men and women. And of course in the 1990s we had Jeffrey Dahmer, whose victims were all young boys. (Dahmer, incidentally, is mentioned in a throwaway line in "Irresistible"). But with the serial-killer genre you not only get to watch a lot of young, nubile women get victimized, but you also get to watch a tough woman federal agent--Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, or Scully in "Irresistible"--reduced to victim status until she is ultimately saved at the last moment by her male mentor (Crawford in SOTL, Mulder in these two episodes). There is no explanation of why Scully feels so vulnerable and shaken by the details of the Pfaster case in "Irresistible"--unless, having maybe hung around with Ophidia too long during her last trip to Texas, she now has meta abilities, and realizes that the requirements of the genre will force her into the victim position.
And so what happens here? Well, the selection of "Don't Look Any Further" as the Sign from God indicates that not much has changed. In the snippets where the lyric is intelligible, we always hear the couplet, "You need a lover, someone to take over." This plays while Donny Pfaster is running the bath in which he's going to soak Scully before killing her; it also plays while Mulder is sitting on his bed trying to figure out if he should go on over. Scully needs protection, whether it's from God or from Mulder (and we know from "Last Temptation" that the distinction is getting blurry in the writers' minds). If God is speaking through that song, that's what he's telling her. And I'll tell you, I don't like it one bit.
Sure, Scully isn't your typical murder victim. She administers a righteous clobbering to Pfaster when she first discovers him--which I only wish they had lit better so I could see what she was doing--but seeing as she has so effectively downed him, why then does she run down the hallway, leaving her gun in the room, and pause to make a phone call? Run *out* of the house into the street and start screaming, that's what you do, or at the very least slam the hall door on him and lock it. But instead, having cleaned his clock, she has to allow him to overpower her, because that's part of the insidiousness of the genre: you can wear a badge, you can train for combat, you can carry a gun, but if you're female, you're no match for a serial killer. Simply by virtue of being female you carry an extra burden of vulnerability which you cannot shed no matter how hard you fight. Serial killers have magic powers that make them--if you will--irresistible. But only to women.
That throws an interesting light on the other weird aspect of "Irresistible"--the vague and unexplained suggestion of something supernatural about Donny Pfaster. In "Irresistible" Scully has dreams where she's on an autopsy table being examined by a demonic creature, and in her final battle with Pfaster his face starts morphing into various demonic images. In this episode that suggestion is much clearer, since we have the whole God vs. Satan thing being played out with the 6:66 digital clock and that demonic vision of Pfaster that the prison chaplain has right before he's murdered. And it also makes explicit something that was more suggested in the first episode--the idea that this kind of criminal is not really human at all. The final frames of "Irresistible" are priceless in that regard because they show a series of photos of Donny Pfaster during which he progresses from innocent little boy to clearly disturbed youth to psychotic adult. Meanwhile Mulder's voiceover is talking about how Donny was just a clean-cut, wholesome-looking boy next door and that the real fear is that evil is actually part of the normal fabric of everyday life--which is "as frightening as any X-File." There was clearly a difference of interpretation between the writers and the producers/director about how to characterize Donny; numerous references in the script seem to indicate that Donny is supposed to be the kind of guy who looks perfectly normal and who you would never suspect of being this kind of monster, but the actor's portrayal of him, combined with the way he's lit and shot, make it clear from Minute One to the closing credits that Donny Pfaster is obviously, as Scully says in this episode, "just plain evil." In that final montage we have the writers' message--that evil is mundane and often goes unobserved because it doesn't look like what we see in the movies--being competed with and subverted by the production team, who want Donny to be a monster from the otherworld.
OK, I know this review so far has been a lot more about "Irresistible" than about this episode. But my point, and I do have one, is that in this revision the message of that script has completely disappeared and Donny Pfaster is what the producers wanted him to be--clearly, demonically, supernaturally evil. He's the only one who doesn't respond to the prison chaplain's hypnotic sermon; he escapes in that "devil's moment" that the prison chaplain was rambling about, and he certainly seems to be having some kind of epiphany from the beyond during his confrontation with the chaplain right before he morphs into Satan Himself. And I see a clear connection between the increased emphasis on his supernatural affinities and the revictimization of Scully, one which fits in with the developing trend toward a Mulder/Scully romance. Mulder does say in that corridor that if "Don't Look Any Further" was a makeout song, he'd be a lucky man. They're pushing her into his arms--first by softening her up via the abduction/ovarectomy/cancer plot and now by feminizing and victimizing her through the serial killer plots. Think back to "Milagro," where having been manipulated, bewitched and almost cardioectomized by the creepy writer down the hall, Scully ends up hanging onto Mulder weeping. It is true that here Scully gets to blow Pfaster away. But at the same time her actions are going to be overdetermined by the male figures around her--Mulder, who will put a favorable spin on it with his report, and/or God, who may or may not have been inspiring her to pull the trigger and who, as the final scene implies, therefore has the right to determine whether she was or was not justified in doing so.
Now, it's interesting to me that all of this gender baggage is attached to the reiteration of a message that goes all the way back to the bad old days of Victorian England, which is that there is a subsection of the human race that falls into what a judge in Texas once referred to as "the predator class," and that these people are congenitally, incurably evil and can only be dealt with via incarceration or execution. But that's a whole nother essay and you're probably already sick of me. I will content myself with merely observing that this episode is another step in the progression of Scully's debutchification and no sir, I don't like it.
As for the hypnosis, the preacher, and the coincidences with the song and the 6:66, well, in the words of the great poet Virgil, "Scilicet is superis labor est, ea cura quietos sollicitat." Or, loosely translated, "As if the gods give a damn about piss-ant crap like this."
Next week: The world of illuuuuuuuuuuusion. At least it looks like it'll probably be funny.
Now, I know a lot of people were down on this two-parter because it was full of plot holes. Forutnately, I found a diary in an abandoned military base that explains them all!
May 10. Saved a kid about to be gored by a bison! His parents seem to have taken it in stride. One thing about the Anasazi, they don't get fazed by much. I hope this will redeem myself a little bit. The Big Guy is still mad at me for letting those 15 Tibetan kids get trampled to death in the yak stampede.
May 11. Big Guy has transferred me to the Middle East. Everyone says this is a move up, but I dunno.
May 20. This Egyptian gig BLOWS! First of all, how am I supposed to do my job if no one gives me directions? How am I supposed to find the slave quarters without a map? So I took the Egyptian kids instead of the HEbrew ones and now the Big Guy is pissed at me. I hope this week doesn't get any worse.
May 21. Just got back from a conference with the Big Guy. Apparently some guy Moses claims that I dictated a ransom note to him. The alleged note reads, "All right Pharaoh. If you ever want to see your kids alive again, let my people go. Nobody shoots at Santa Claus!" As *if*! Big Guy wants to know how this happened. I have no @#$! clue.
June 12. Oh great, another childrens' crusade. The Big Guy has gotta hire more help.
August 23. The Big Guy says he wants to talk to me in his office tomorrow. Hope it's good news.
May 13. Yahoo! I've been promoted to management! I'm head of the North America region. Have called a big meeting for next month re impending arrival of European colonists.
June 5. Saving entire indigenous population fo North and South America deemed inefficient use of resources. I put my heart into the presentation, but the Big Guy says if we do it for them we have to do it for everyone. Have decided to have the team concentrate on a particular tribe. Anasazi chosen by voice vote.
June 24. Anasazi mission successful. Another one of those damn ransom notes was found carved into a hillside in pictographs. I think it says "If you ever want to see the Anasazi again, leave a crate of smallpox vaccine in the cornfields in Tunisia. Nobody stings Pere Noel!" What the FUCK? Big Guy is asking for answers.
March 12. This Amelia Earheart chick is a pain in my ass. Is it *my* fault she couldn't bring the plane?
March 31. Oh SHIT! I was supposed to take Samantha Mulder six years ago! Damn he's gonna be pissed at me.
April 3. Got this memo from the Big Guy:
"RE: Unexplained Phenomena Relating to Routine Transmogrifications
It has come to my attention that many of you are, during yoru daily work, somehow managing to inadvertently cause the friends, relatives and in some cases total strangers who have a very slight tangential connection to the transportees to experience visions of the transportee's averted fate. We are studying this problem in an attempt to correct it. We are proceeding under the assumption that the second unexplained phenomenon, viz. the generation of bogus and nonsensical ransom notes by close relatives of the transportees, is somehow related. Please route any information you may have about either of these phenomena directly to the head office. Sincerely, T.B.G."
First I heard about the visions. Am planning to interview the team to see if anyone can shed light on this.
February 14. WOOHOO! HUGE promotion from the Big Guy for having solved the ransom note/vision problem. It was so simple, I can't believe it took me this long to figure it out. All that was happening was
[here several pages are ripped otu of the diary. A charred fragment was found in a wastebasket nearby reading]
sure am glad we cleared that up. Going out to celebrate with the new arrivals. I'm stoked!
* * *
So you see, it all makes sense.
There must be, like, one person left on their staff who's a decent writer, and unfortunately this person has been kept away from the mythology line.
OK, the plot was certainly recycled (wasn't this, like, about 5 different Original Series Star Trek episodes?). But I really liked the characterization, especially Scully's. I thought there was plenty of her, and that she was a stronger character in this episode than in most of the others we've seen this year. We especially loved her putting her hand over the camera and making the camerman not be in her car, adn then how mad she was when Mulder let them ride with them. And that shot of her looking into the lights and smiling over the corpse going, "Because the FBI has nothing to hide!"
I also liked the little digs at COPS. I will probably show at least part of this to my students because it points out something interesting about the relationship between "reality TV" and regular old fantasy TV. What makes COPS look "real"--handheld video, outside lighting, the disjointed and confusing narrative--is produced, just like any other show is, and can be reproduced for a staged and avowedly fictional story. And there were a few references to the maniuplative nature of video ("The camera doesn't tell the whole story"..."it all depends on how they edit it together.") Of course, the funniest thing, really, is that voice at the beginning of the episode saying "All suspects are innocent until proven guilty."
And I actually liked the interaction between Mulder and Scully and Steve and Edie. OK, Edy is a mess, but at the same time both characters are really physically strong and are also the only ones who refuse to be afraid of the mystery beast. And Mulder was much less of an asshole about being caught up in their domestic dispute than one might expect he might be. In general, Mulder was less of an asshole in this episode, partly because once the werewolf turned out to be Freddy Kruger he was all downcast and dejected and felt stupid. Mulder needs to do more feeling stupid.
It was also interesting that Mulder was so excited about being filmed so they'd have proof of the paranormal. Because of course, they really always *are* being filmed, but they don't realize, so to them the video makes a big difference whereas to us it doesn't. Ooh! Meta!
"I am Matrea. These are my butt cheeks."
Pl. EASE.
It was obvious to me from the teaser that I was goign to hate this episode, and I was right. Call me curmudgeonly, but I'm puttin' together my
10 EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF AN UNFORTUNATE X-FILES VIEWING EXPERIENCE
10. Cheesecake before the opening credits.
9. No corresponding beefcake.
8. The Lone Gunmen show up early and often.
7. Your mind beginning to think to itself, "Isn't this a rerun of the one where Professor Moriarty takes the Enterprise hostage?"
6. Sinking feeling that out of perhaps a 25 page script, 23 pages just say, "BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM!"
5. Sinking feeling that the remaining two merely say "He's in the Zone!" and "The bloodthirst is unquenchable!" over and over, interrupted by the occasional "The game's gone haywire! We have to stop it!"
4. You leave to pick up a pizza, return half an hour later, and find that the plot has not discernably advanced.
3. Attempts to coat a core of curdled testosterone with a micron-thin layer of Generic Feminist Gloss.
2. Mulder dressed up as Mad Max.
1. The Lone Gunmen are not the biggest geeks in the room.
Am I the only person on the planet who finds watching people fire large weapons at ranks of identical virtual assailants boring? Even the Never-Ending Pod Race was more exciting than this crap. Even watching Scully save Mulder's ass was boring, and as I think people will agree, nobody looks forward to Scully saving Mulder's ass with keener anticipation than I do. No wonder they took Harsh Realm off the air. Is this Chris Carter's dearest ambition? To produce hour-long video games?
SHORT STORY: It was interesting. That's a step up.
MAYBE YOU NEED TO SLOW DOWN: Well, that seems to have been GA's approach to directing. I found the pace more than usually slow, perhaps because the plot was more than usually meandering and tension-lacking. I also found the "moment frozen in time" shots annoying rather than artistic, but perhaps that's just me. I felt like this was basically just a character study rather than an episode--in a way, it's more like fanfic than a regular show, which I suppose makes sense given its source. If I were GA, and I got the chance to write an episode, I sure would use it as an opportunity to straighten out some of the things they had done to her character, and would care a lot more about that than about some stupid paranormal plot. However, watching this made me consider the possibility that the character study is perhaps an exercise best left in the realm of fiction.
HE WAS MY WHOLE LIFE: I am glad that she ended up walking away from her older formerly married mentor and his extremely grumpy daughter, but I was kind of disappointed that he was there in the first place. I suppose this means that GA buys that crap Scully was asked to sling in Creepy Tattoo Episode about how she's always had a thing for male authority figures. I wish she didn't, myself, but there we are. I got tired of watching her scenes with him in the hospital--too much of her trembling on the verge of tears while the camera focuses lovingly on her silent face.
Can I just digress here for a minute?
It struck me recently that one of the things that has happened to Scully's character, perhaps unfortunately as a result of her becoming more of a sex symbol, is that her presence has started to become visual rather than textual. In other words, she's become a kind of silent icon, an image for the camera to linger over instead of a participating, developing character. If you think about the amount of time that she spends gazing silently at the camera, into the distance, at Mulder, at some other character, while the atmosphere broods around her, versus the amount of time she spends talkign or doing anything, I think that in the later seasons she has been getting more and more silent and more of a face than a voice. But, this could be my crackpot theory so let us move on.
I WAS IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH CAROL: WOOHOO! It is true that I was watching that Taoist healer explain it all to her and thinking, "Thief! That Gratuitous Wise Lesbian character is MINE!" But still, it was nice to see a little lesbian visibility in this episode, and that they didn't trumpet it with much self-congratulatory fanfare. I wonder if GA knows she has lesbian fans and was trying to make us happy. Anyhow, watching the Taoist Guide did make me wonder if perhaps Ophidia would be more annoying on screen than I had imagined; but it was still a nice touch.
So, that scene with Mulder in bed in the beginning was merely so much chain-yanking. But you know, in this episode I didn't mind the relationship stuff because I thought the characterization was pretty good. I especially liked how hurt Mulder got when Scully blew him off about the crop circles, and how sheepish he was when he came back and nothing had happened. See, that's the kind of Mulder I could stand to see her get to know better. Ah well.
SHORT STORY: This is the way the world ends?
The only response this episode deserves is a long howl of pain.
Or wait, not even. This episode should *wish* it could evoke a response as intense as pain. It's not even really a howler--it's just weak. Lame, sad, dishwater-dull, dishclout-limp, and WEAK.
OK, so Krychek is in a Tunisian prison. Why? Kovarrubias has recovered from the "terrible tests" done on her. How? Cancer Man thinks he can get them to restart the Conspiracy for him if they find the ship. With what conspirators? Kovarrubias and Krychek decide to team up wtih Mulder and Scully and Skinner and the Lone Gunmen. What's in it for them? M&S&S&TLG trust these two embodiments of the Very Bad. Why?
NONE OF THESE QUESTIONS ARE ANSWERED, and we are just supposed to sit back and accept that. Nope. I'm done. I've stopped believing, and because I don't believe any more, I also don't care. I remember how after that season finale with Mulder in the burning boxcar, Liza and I spent weeks discussing possible explanations for all of this stuff. After this episode, I don't even give a shit. Do I care whether Alien Bounty Hunter is a rebel or a dominant alien? No. Do I care how the six or seven alien colonization lines he's been involved in work out? No. Does it even bother me that this slapped-on finish to the alien plot line doesn't appear to be significantly linked to any of the other ones in any way that makes significant sense? No. Do I care that Mulder is gone? No. I would have two years ago, but I don't now. Because I've stopped expecting any of this to hold together, cause it don't. And that means the thrill is gone.
Do I care that Scully is now pregnant? Yeah, I care about that. I care because it SUCKS. I mean, it's bad enough that Xena is running around giving birth to babies that are their own grandpas. Now this rot has spread to the X-Files. In addition to causing Scully to swoon into the waiting arms of her male protectors a lot, this pregnancy will almost certainly do terrible things to next year's story line. As if it weren't going to have enough problems.
I knew what she was going to be saying, too, as soon as she told Skinner she had something else to tell him. I was just too appalled to accept it until she actually said it. If that's Mulder's baby, I don't wanna know. If it's an alien baby, I don't wanna watch. If it's Anakin Skywalker, I'm gonna have to go postal.
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