Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
Short story: Yeah, sure, it was really just a real long episode. But it was a GOOD episode. I liked it. I may see it again.
NORTH TEXAS, 35,000 B.C.: Man, if I'da known they were going to set so much of this movie near Dallas I'd've worked that into *The Widening Gyre.* What I liked about that opening was that it established the fact that the film was going to keep the series' sense of humor, right from the first caption. "NORTH TEXAS..." and they let you think, "North Texas? What the hell?" for a minute before putting up the "35,000 B.C." caption. And that also brought out one of the more subtle little narrative questions of *The X-Files,* which is "Who's telling this story?" Who's putting up those little authoritative captions in their 60's-carbon-paper-typed-duplicate-government-form print? Who was there in 35,000 B.C. to be noting the time and place on a surveillance tape? But anyhow.
The Texas setting made watching this film in Austin kinda funny. Liza tells me that people who are familiar with Dallas found continuity problems in the bomb-search sequence--people weren't seeing the right views for the place they were supposed to be sta nding in, and so forth. But the town where the NAC nest was discovered looked to me like it might really be in North Texas, whereas at no time during the vampire episode was I ever convinced they were in Texas. It was also pretty funny how they had just f lopped that sod down for the playground that was supposed to "camouflage" their dig--AS IF grass like that could ever be maintained in that climate without constant supervision and expensive artificial aids. "They're covering their tracks." Yeah...but not very well. Had M&S arrived two days later, that grass would already have been turning brown, and within a week I bet it'd have shriveled up and blown away, revealing the dig underneath. And when they were driving off after the unmarked tanker trucks, I r ecognized *that* terrain all right. "It's West Texas!" I said. "Or it could be southern New Mexico. Or maybe southern Arizona. Hard to be sure."
On the other hand, the real answer to the question "Why would anyone be trying to grow corn in the middle of the desert?" is "They do that in Texas all the time." True, they don't usually do it in close proximity to a giant bee farm, but to be driving alo ng and see nothing and then suddenly see a whole lotta cultivation is really not that unusual. Ditto with Scully observing inside the giant Jiffy-pop structure that "the climate is being controlled." Walk into *any* structure in Texas in the summer and th e climate is being controlled, whether or not it houses a special strain of Africanized virus-laden killer bees.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PLAYING A HUNCH?: It is true that during that first conversation on the roof of the federal building I was sitting there saying, "Yeah, yeah, establish the characterization for the non-viewers, yeah yeah yeah get on with it." But they put a lot of effort into making it funny and showing everyone the affect ion and trust as well as the skeptic/believer thing. And they stocked it up with jokes for the regulars so we wouldn't get bored. "No, when I'm panicking I make this face." Liza especially liked the soft drink choice he offered--"Coke, Pepsi, saline IV?" She also wondered if Mulder was tipped off because the machine he was trying to buy the soda from wasn't a recognizable Coke or Pepsi machine. I think that this was probably just because no real soda manufacturer wants its product associated with the bomb ing of a federal building...anyhow, I love watching Scully Spring Into Action. She's beautiful when she's authoritative. "Don't think! Just pick up the phone and make it happen!"
I'M THE CENTRAL FIGURE IN A MASSIVE CONSPIRACY: Sling that exposition, Drunk Boy. What surprised me, though, was how little exposition the movie needed. It's true that as soon as he started talking to the bartender I thought, "Oh, great, here we go..." bu t really it didn't take long, and it was sorta painless. Basically, what this proves is that in five years of watching this show we really haven't learned that much. Once the newcomer has been informed that there's a conspiracy, that it involves extraterr estrials, that Mulder's sister was abducted by aliens and he has a thing about it, and that everyone but Scully thinks he's nuts, she knows everything we know. Sure, there are things that mean a lot more to us than they would to people who don't watch the show--but this show is all about creating the experience of confusion and the illusion of comprehension, and in some ways the less you know the better it works.
YOU SAID YOU HAD ANSWERS: Well, so if we step back and think about it, what do we really know now that we didn't before? We know that the NAC is an alien lifeform--we'd figured that. We know that the consortium has been secretly working on a vaccine--an a ntidote, really, but I'll leave the semantic quibbling for a later section--which was established with the whole Terma/Tunguska/Red and the Black thing. We know that the governmental folks have been cooperating with the aliens who want to colonize us--tha t was established as far back as Anasazi. We know that the bees are a delivery device for this virus, which was established in that Skinner-works-for-Cancer-Man-till-he-shoots-at-him sequence of episodes. We didn't know that their ultimate purpose was to carry the NAC virus; preivously the bees were linked to the smallpox strain of the conspiracy, which now starts to look like an aborted plotline or, more charitably, a red herring. We know that it takes over the host body, gestates, and then busts on out as an Aliens-type clawed slashy thing. This is new.
We thought it over, and this is what we came up with: the NAC is the first developmental stage of a parasitic alien organism that goes through many, many transformations before it reaches adulthood. Like many parasites, it requires an extremely elaborate progression of hosts and gestational stages before it can mature, which explains why these incredibly powerful beings are bothering to set Earth up as a giant host farm. After the NAC invades a host, it gestates for a while, then busts out as this shrieki ng clawed predator thing. Then, we figure, it must go through some kind of other transformation, because as Liza put it, "You can't negotiate with one of *those* things." Perhaps it becomes the shape-shifty people, ultimately; or maybe the shape-shifty pe ople are a slave race that has been taken over by the NAC aliens.
I find it amusing that Well-Manicured Man didn't mind the idea of humans being a slave race for the benefit of aliens, but was bothered by the idea of becoming a host for an alien baby. "Freedom, yeah, it's overrated. Life, though, that's different." I wi ll very much miss Well-Manicured Man, who was always my favorite Consortium Guy, and who was played by John Neville, who brought me such delight as the Baron von Munchausen in Terry Gilliam's film of the same name. Now who's gonna keep Krychek fed, clothed, and in out of t he rain? (Same folks who kept him out of the movie, maybe...)
So we know that much. However, there are still a number of unanswered questions:
1) The human-alien hybrid experiments fit into this where, exactly? Theycseem to be connected to the shape-shifty aliens, who do not appear in thiscfilm. So the whole Mulder's-cloned-sister/Scully's-stolen-ova thing has yet to be explained.
2) If all these people plan to do is use the entire human race as hosts, why do they need to go to all the trouble of identifying and inventorying them with those coded proteins and chips in the neck and so forth? Send the bees out and wait for everything to hatch, that's the plan, Stan. You don't need to know that the corpse you came busting out of used to be Myra Breckenridge of Little Rock, Arkansas.
3) The smallpox? What of the smallpox?
...and so forth. But on to what *really* mattered about this movie:
I OWE YOU EVERYTHING: FINALLY. It's about goddamn time he made Scully a speech like that. I was sort of wishing he had gone into a little more detail, but I guess expressing his feelings in full color and loving detail is just not Mulder's bag. And I thought they handled the "almost-kiss" really well. Scully's face was the be st part--that little tearful smile she had when they were moving into it, which said, "Well, shit, I mean, we may as well, right? Although it seems kinda silly, but...since we're clearly in love..." I called the interrupting bee-sting before it happened, but I didn't mind. "I had you going there for a minute" could just as well be the title of this movie; they were constantly toying with us, and that's just the most extreme example. We spent a lot of time worrying about Scully getting infected from the NA C-infected corpses, and then they got us with the bee sting. Her diagnosing herself as she goes into anaphalactic shock was in character, I suppose, even though it wasn't entirely plausible. But then again...
WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO START?: This film gets a 10 for characterization, 10 for production value, about an 8 for plotting, and a BIG FAT ZERO for plausibility. I won't exhaust you by listing all of the problems, but here's the ones that kinda stuck out:
1) Mulder, Man Of Steel. Get him drunk, shoot him in the head, strand him in Antarctica without a hat, you just can't stop this man. He was a lean, mean, rescuing machine, performing feats of impossible strength almost but not quite as unbelievable as the hour Rose spent rescuing Jack in *Titanic.* How he got out of that alien pod repository carrying a barely-conscious Scully is beyond me. But then this is the guy who got himself out of Siberia without explaining how or why.
2) The vaccine. OK, first of all, a vaccine is something you give people BEFORE they get infected. But let that pass. WMM hands Mulder a bottle, a syringe, and some coordinates and says "Go cure her." Well, as he was charging toward the Antarctic strongho ld I said, "You know, I hope he knows how to find a vein." Lucky for him it turns out ot be an intramuscular injection--but how the hell did he know that? Did they print up a little label for the bottle explaining how to administer it? And he didn't even check for air bubbles...but fortunately, in the land of the X-Files, you can cure someone just by taking the magic potion, sticking a needle into somebody's frozen shoulder, and pressing the plunger. (Did anyone notice that when they put Scully into the b ig box she looked just like Snow White in the glass coffin? I mean, why not just have him kiss her and knock the poison apple out of her throat...)
3) The bodies in the federal building. Unless they were planted there *after* the explosion (I had the impression they were already being stored there when the thing went up) shouldn't they have been seriously crushed, broken, flattened about, gashed into , etc. by the explosion? And how come the conspirators weren't worried about the NAC busting out of *their* bodies to infest rescue workers, FBI agents, and everyone else? Especially since we know from Tunguska/Terma that when the host dies, the NAC flees the body? The "hiding a dead leaf in a dead forest" dodge is an old one, but in this case it doesn't hold up to scrutiny real well.
Then, of course, there's the fourth fireman. CM doesn't have them destroy the body because he wants to "test the vaccine" on it. Excuse me? The dead guy, himself, is way too far gone to be done any sort of good by any vaccine. So was he planning to test t he vaccine on the actual alien offspring? What would he be vaccinating it against--itself? Again, unless this isn't a "vaccine" at all, but rather an antidote that works by poisoning the organism without poisoning the host, this part of the plot makes NO SENSE at all.
4) Yeah, Antarctica is a long was from Dallas...so how did Mulder get from D.C. to Antarctica in 48 hours? And how did they get out of there?
And, in the "piss-ant 'I can't believe I'm anal enough to notice this' problems" department:
SCULLY, YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS: I loved the final flight of the S.S. Snuffalupagus. And how he was laughing about her being too out of it to look up and witness its passage. And how she got to hold on to him and take care of him as they waited for whatever was coming. All of which proves to me that what really matters about this show is not the nitty gritty details of the conspiracy (although that's fun too) but the Mulder-Scully relationship. They did a good job with that, so I didn't care about the fact t hat Mulder should have been dead many times over and that Scully should certainly have either frozen to death or died of shock while she was being unceremoniously thawed out with no precautions taken whatsoever. I have decided that I don't want to see the show actually "get them together" (like, how much more together can they get?) but that if it were real life, I would definitely want them to get together. The thing is that I do not believe for an instant that anyone on the X-Files writing team is capab le of writing a believable, long-term relationship that would allow their characters to stay consistent while still developing, and without allowing the show to smother in a welter of smarm. It's no reflection on the writers--I don't think anyone on TV ha s ever really done that. The conviction that once they declare their love the story is pretty much over is still too strong among most writers to allow a show to survive once it happens (witness *Moonlighting,* *Cheers,* *Scarecrow & Mrs. King.*) But as l ong as Mulder remains willing to acknowledge his MASSIVE HUMONGO-GARGANTUAN debt to Scully, then I'll be happy.
ALLUSIONWATCH: How many references to other sci-fi films can *you* find in this movie?
This is assuming, of course, that these are "references" rather than good old-fashioned plagiarism. But...
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