August 10, 2019
The X-Files 11.10, My Struggle IV: The Last Good Chance
And so we end as we began: With these two nerds chasing a mystery
Summary: Our last-ever episode-beginning voiceover comes from Jackson. He knows his original name was William, and that he’s somehow connected to Scully and the future. He doesn’t know what his role will be in the future, but his visions are starting to make him understand. He doesn’t want any part in the suffering that will come.
Jackson had a happy childhood, and started to develop powers at a young age, such as breaking a window by stomping his foot. In middle school, he made a bully’s ears bleed. Every time kids at his school caught on that he was different, he had to leave. Eventually, Jackson started using his powers for evil, such as changing traffic lights with his mind and causing accidents. He was sent to a school for delinquents, and when forced to go to therapy, he would make stuff up.
Someone from the government caught on, so Jackson started lying low. He realized people were watching the house, which made him want to stay in line. Then he decided to play a joke on Sarah and Brianna, which got out of control and put him back on the radar of some powerful people. Now his parents are dead and he’s being hunted.
Jackson wants answers about who he is and how to get his life back. He wanted to ask Scully, but he thinks he can only get the answers from his father, a man he’s seen in his visions: CSM. CSM is with Mulder, threatening to kill him, though Mulder doesn’t think he can go through with it. CSM raises his gun and fires.
At what must be an earlier time (though he’s in the same clothes), Mulder goes to the Timberland Motel in Norfolk, Virginia, looking for Jackson. Back in D.C., Kersh tells Skinner that Mulder’s been going off about a conspiracy on the Internet. Skinner needs to rein him in. Kersh announces that he’s closing the X-Files and taking Mulder and Scully’s badges.
Tad’s latest live stream is about the coming global contagion that Scully and Jackson had visions about. It shows footage of Mulder at the motel. Kersh doesn’t care if the conspiracy is rooted in any kind of truth; it’s going to cause mass panic and needs to be shut down. As he leaves Kersh’s office, Skinner gets a call from CSM, who says the contagion is coming because Skinner didn’t find Jackson.
Scully finds Skinner and tells him Mulder needs his help. She knows he’s with Jackson, and that they’re both being pursued. Skinner tells her that Kersh is ending everything; Mulder’s started something that can’t be stopped. Scully says she made the claims on the Internet, not Mulder – and they’re all true. Skinner asks where Mulder and Jackson are.
15 hours earlier, Scully goes to Mulder’s house while on the phone with Reyes. She thinks Jackson has been captured in Tennessee and is being taken to Maryland. As CSM lights a cigarette outside the car Reyes is calling from, she tells the agents this may be their last good chance to save their son. Mulder asks what she means. Reyes says that whoever controls Jackson also controls the future. Then she hangs up.
Mulder wonders if he and Scully can trust Reyes. CSM doesn’t appear to have any suspicions about who Reyes was just talking to. Scully doesn’t think Jackson is really on the plane, but Mulder wants to believe Reyes’ claims. What if this really is their last good chance? Scully sends him off, telling him to come back alive.
A plane lands in Braddock Heights, Maryland, carrying only Mr. Y. He goes into a hangar, which Mulder manages to sneak into, briefly evading some armed guards. When they find him, he overpowers one and grabs his gun. He confronts Mr. Y, who says they couldn’t catch Jackson. Mulder asks why everyone wants him. Mr. Y says Jackson has something everyone wants – something they would kill for.
A guard approaches, so Mulder turns and shoots him. While Mulder’s distracted, Mr. Y reaches for a gun under his desk, but Mulder is faster than him and shoots him dead before Mr. Y can fire. Well, probably dead. It’s The X-Files, after all. Jackson is also dealing with armed guards on what looks like an abandoned ship. Cue the extended action sequence, in which Jackson outruns multiple men, then hides in a homeless encampment, making himself look like someone else.
Mulder calls Scully to tell her he hasn’t had any luck finding Jackson yet, but he did get to engage in some payback. Scully reports that there’s a cluster of recent lottery winners in Tennessee. Mulder goes to the convenience store where one of the winning tickets was sold; the kid who bought it seemed to know exactly which numbers to play. Security footage confirms for Mulder that it was Jackson.
Scully has a vision, which gets interrupted when Mulder calls to tell her that Jackson cashed in his ticket, then hitched a ride somewhere with a truck driver. The agents think he’s heading northeast. Someone arrives at the convenience store and plants a tracking device in Mulder’s car before Mulder heads off on Jackson’s trail.
Scully calls Tad to tell him a conspiracy he needs to talk about on his show. Jackson tells the truck driver that he has superpowers. Scully outlines the contagion for Tad as Mulder tries to get the truck to pull over. Jackson proves his powers to the truck driver by changing the radio station with his mind, then turns into a monster. The driver pulls over with Mulder right in front of him. But it’s not the truck Jackson’s in.
Tad asks Scully if he can name her as his source for the contagion information. She says he can credit her as a federal agent. She adds that Mulder is the planet’s only hope. She and Jackson have a shared vision of CSM shooting Mulder, who then falls into a body of water. Scully calls Mulder to warn him that he’s in danger, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to know where Jackson went after he left the truck.
The man who placed the tracker in Mulder’s car sees that he’s coming up on him, but Mulder’s now going in the opposite direction. As the tracker pulls his car over, he spots Jackson leaving the drain pipe he’s been hiding in and walking down the road. He offers Jackson a ride to his destination, Norfolk.
Mulder gets there first, going to a house. Jackson pays Sarah a visit, throwing some snark at Sarah’s friend Maddy. Mulder’s at Brianna’s, wanting to know if Jackson has been there. She says they don’t talk anymore, but Mulder thinks she’s covering for him. Brianna says Jackson’s in a lot of trouble, but if Mulder wants answers, he’s asking the wrong girl.
Over at Sarah’s, Jackson tells her that he can’t live like this anymore. She urges him to go to the police, but he says they killed his parents because he’s a freak. Sarah firmly says he’s not. He tells her suicide is an option to end his life being hunted, but another choice is running away with Sarah. Thanks to his lottery winnings, they could go anywhere. Since Sarah’s parents are coming home, she offers to meet him somewhere later. He says he’ll be at the Timberland.
Mulder goes to Sarah’s sometime later, but she doesn’t want to tell him anything if she can’t be sure Jackson trusts him. Mulder says he’s Jackson’s father. Maddy calls bull. As Price and some men find a car full of blood, we go back to the beginning of the episode, when Mulder got to the Timberland. He tells Jackson he’s his father, and whether or not Jackson believes that, he gives Mulder a chance to explain himself. Mulder just hugs him and promises to protect him.
The blood in the car belongs to the man tracking Mulder, who looks like he basically exploded. But now Price has a way to track Mulder. As she and her men head to the Timberland, Jackson tells Mulder that the people looking for him are never going to stop. He knows what’s going to happen because of his visions. Mulder says that Scully has the same ones. Jackson asks why Mulder doesn’t. He doesn’t want to live in a world where what’s going to happen happens. Mulder offers to help, but Jackson knows from the visions that Mulder’s going to die.
As Jackson argues that Mulder’s just helping his pursuers find him, Price and her men prepare to burst into the motel room and start shooting. Jackson hears or senses them outside and tells Mulder it’s too late. He tells Mulder to go out the back, but Mulder isn’t about to leave Jackson behind again. The men burst in and start to restrain Mulder and Jackson. Jackson tells Mulder to get down, then starts making the men, then Price, explode. When they’re all dead, Jackson runs away.
Mulder calls Scully as she’s talking to Skinner in the earlier scene. Other people at the motel are filming the chaos, which explains how footage of Mulder ends up on Tad’s live stream. Scully tells Mulder she’s going to join him in Norfolk, but Mulder doesn’t think it’ll matter – Jackson won’t listen to reason. Scully is sure that he’ll listen to her. She tells Skinner this is no longer about the FBI, so he can’t rein her in like he’s supposed to. Skinner invites himself along to Norfolk.
Tad begins his live stream as Reyes and CSM arrive at the Timberland. He points out Mulder on the footage, naming him the FBI source and saying he witnessed the execution of military personnel who arranged an assault on a teenager. What happened was so insane that it can only be part of a kind of conspiracy the world has never seen before. CSM finds the tracker’s device, which will lead him to Mulder.
Kersh texts Skinner a bunch of times, complaining about Mulder’s antics. Dude, go back to Seattle Grace Mercy West or whatever it’s called and leave these people alone. Scully asks why Skinner is violating Kersh’s orders. Skinner knows how important it is to find Jackson, and says he’s explained before why he’s willing to risk his career. He has information about Jackson…and who his father is.
Mulder has tried to call Sarah to find out where Jackson might have gone, but Maddy’s the one he talks to instead. She sends him to an old sugar factory. Scully’s stunned by Skinner’s news about Jackson. Somehow, some way, she and Skinner spot Mulder’s car on the way to the factory, and they chase after him. As Scully goes into the factory to find her boyfriend and/or son, Skinner spots CSM and Reyes’ car and approaches it with his hands up.
Scully thinks she sees Jackson, but she loses him. She finds Mulder instead. Outside, Skinner pulls his gun. Reyes starts to back up the car, but CSM moves the gearshift into drive and stomps on the gas pedal, forcing her toward Skinner. He shoots, hitting Reyes. Oh, good job, Skinner. Mulder and Scully hear gunshots outside and realize Skinner’s in trouble. CSM speeds toward him as Skinner runs, but he gets trapped between his own car and CSM and is run over.
Mulder tells Scully that Jackson doesn’t want to be found. They need to let him go – there’s nothing they can do. They can’t protect him. Jackson knows that Scully loves him, though Scully doesn’t get how he could. Well, it’s because the person she’s talking to is Jackson, not Mulder. The real Mulder finds them, but Jackson runs away again. As they run around the factory some more, CSM gets out of the car and takes Skinner’s gun.
More running. Even more running. Jackson spends, like 50% of this episode running. Mulder ends up outside, where CSM stops him and demands to know where Jackson is. Mulder says Jackson would rather be dead, now that he knows the truth. CSM is ready to kill Mulder, even though, as Mulder points out, he’d be shooting his firstborn son. CSM notes that he shot his secondborn, so this isn’t a big deal.
Once again, we’ve come back around to a scene from the beginning of the episode, with CSM ready to shoot, and Mulder saying he doesn’t think CSM can do it. CSM says Mulder doesn’t know him very well, then shoots. Mulder falls into the water…then appears behind CSM. He shoots CSM a bunch of times and shoves him into the water, where I think we can all agree that CSM is really, truly, finally dead. Probably.
Scully joins Mulder, who tells her that CSM shot Jackson thinking he was Mulder. Scully reminds him that Jackson wanted them to let him go. Mulder’s distraught, saying Jackson was their son. She corrects him – Jackson was an experiment, just an idea. She carried him and gave birth to him, but she wasn’t his mother.
“But for so long, I believed,” Mulder says. “What am I now if I’m not a father?” Scully tells him he is a father. She puts his hand on her stomach. He says it’s impossible that they conceived a child, and she says she knows, but it’s still true. They hug, exhausted and heartbroken but also hopeful. And somewhere in the water, Jackson surfaces, still alive.
Thoughts: Maddy is played by David Duchovny’s daughter West, which…is really the only explanation you need for why the character is in the episode.
I’m going to pretend that Skinner’s still alive. He deserved better.
Can’t wait for this baby to grow up and ask why Mommy and Daddy call each other by their last names.
And that’s it for the series! It was a bumpy ride sometimes, but I’m glad I rewatched it.
Up next: something completely different.
July 6, 2019
The X-Files 11.5, Ghouli: Crossroads
Next time, maybe take something less breakable
Summary: It’s late at night when a teen girl named Brianna goes to an abandoned boat called the Chimera. She’s spooked by the sight of maggots crawling on a dead animal. Thanks for that, show. She looks around for a while, then comes across another teen girl, Sarah. They each think the other is Ghouli. They’re confronted by a slimy monster and start stabbing it. But it turns out the monster isn’t real, and they’ve just stabbed each other. Oops!
Oh, super, a Scully voiceover. She talks about states of consciousness and hypnagogia, where people have dreamlike visions. She experienced it in a stranger’s bed, where she spotted a shadowy figure in the room. She followed it with her gun drawn but lost track of it. Scully’s telling this story to Mulder in their office; he thinks she just experienced sleep paralysis. He asks where the figure was leading her. She sees a picture of the Chimera and realizes that was her intended destination.
Mulder tells her that the boat is from an open X-File. It’s in Norfolk, and as Mulder drives them there, he tells Scully that Edgar Cayce also saw visions in a hypnagogic state and thought they were messages. Scully dismisses Cayce since he also believed in Atlantis. Mulder notices that they’re being followed, and have been since they left the airport (though I don’t know why they didn’t just drive from D.C. to Norfolk).
The agents meet a detective named Costa at the place where the Chimera has been docked. Sarah and Brianna go to different schools and don’t seem to know each other. They’re both in the hospital, unconscious, but are expected to recover. Someone anonymous called 911 for them, sounding panicked. Scully looks at the crime scene and says that because of the emotional response the girls had, they may actually know each other. Mulder thinks they were just really scared. Either way, Scully doesn’t think their encounter was a coincidence.
Costa tells the agents that when the girls were being treated at the scene, they asked an EMT if he’d found Ghouli. The agents look it up online at a coffee house, finding a site devoted to it, ghouli.net. It’s only been active for a few months and mostly consists of fanfiction. Mulder laments the modern generation’s lack of scary monsters like the Wolfman and Frankenstein’s monster. Scully wonders if the girls were manipulated to attack each other to increase traffic on the website. She sees that most of the fanfiction was written by an @Rever.
Mulder gets a text saying the girls are conscious, so he and Scully leave to see them at the hospital. First, though, Mulder gets his coffee, responding to his fake coffee-getting name, Bob. (He hates having to explain his real name. Fair enough.) At the hospital, Scully interviews Brianna while Mulder interviews Sarah. Both girls describe Ghouli but say they don’t know each other. They were led to the boat by dreams just like Scully’s; the dreams showed them a snow globe with the boat inside.
When asked if they’ve ever had a dream like that before, both girls say they had one after visiting a fun house with their boyfriends. Well, make that boyfriend, since they’re both dating a guy named Jackson Van de Kamp. That strikes a chord with Scully – the couple who adopted William are named Van de Kamp. When she and Mulder meet up, she tells him that it must be a coincidence. Mulder disagrees, thinking Scully was brought to Norfolk for a reason. They need to find out where Jackson lives.
The agents arrive at Jackson’s house in time to hear two gunshots. They burst in, and Scully immediately recognizes the house from her dream. They find the Mr. and Mrs. Van de Kamp dead on the bottom floor. They hear another shot from upstairs and run up to find Jackson’s body.
Local police come to investigate, and Costa shares his theory that Jackson killed his parents, then shot himself when he realized the agents were in the house and would arrest him. Mulder finds that explanation “convenient.” He goes looking for Scully, who’s in Jackson’s room, another location she saw in her dream. She thinks he wanted her to be there. She looks through pictures of him as Mulder notices that Jackson opened a soda right before the shooting, an odd move.
Scully thinks Jackson may have had mental-health problems; he was seeing a psychiatrist and had prescriptions for seizures and schizophrenia. But the bottles are full, so he wasn’t taking them. Mulder sees a Malcolm X poster on the ceiling with the quote “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” He reminds Scully that they don’t know for sure that Jackson was William.
Scully worries that Jackson didn’t see himself as part of a family, so he killed his parents and himself. Mulder wonders why Jackson would call Scully there if he was just going to die. Her top priority is finding out if he was William so she can get some answers. Mulder promises to take care of that. After he leaves her alone in the room, she sees a shelf of snow globes. She picks up one with a Wizard of Oz quote on it: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Mulder goes outside to confront the two men who were following him and Scully from the airport. They lie that they were just trying to find out why the police are at the Van de Kamps’ house. Mulder thinks they’re with the DOD, which the men won’t confirm or deny. They’re not sympathetic about the deaths of three people, and Mulder warns them not to cross him.
Scully collects a hair sample from Jackson at the hospital morgue where he’s taken. She tells the body that if he’s William, she wants him to know she’s sorry they didn’t get to know each other. She gave him up because was in danger, not because she didn’t want him or love him. She thought having to let him go and miss his whole life was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do, but it’s harder now to see the outcome. She feels like she failed him.
Scully continues that she never forgot her son, and thought they would someday be reunited. She wishes she’d been there to help him with the pain he must have been going through. She feels like her words are inadequate, so she just says she’s sorry and cries. She realizes Mulder has arrived and heard part of what she said. He assures her that she has nothing to apologize for. They head off to do a DNA test. Seconds later, Jackson opens his body bag, very much alive.
Scully grabs a nap and experiences hypnagogia again. She thinks William is the shadowy figure. She follows him to an empty room and finds the Wizard of Oz snow globe. She wonders if it’s a message from William, or if she’s sending a message to him. After some flashes of the events of her visions in “My Struggle II,” Scully turns around and sees…
A coroner, Dr. Harris, wakes her up before she can see who’s there. He wants to know where Jackson’s body is. Mulder joins them in the morgue, and the agents try to figure out how Jackson got out, since it was locked. Mulder tells Scully that this isn’t a case where they can jump to extreme conclusions. She tells him she had another dream/vision that led her to the snow globe (which she took from Jackson’s room). She thinks he wants them to find him.
Scully leaves the hospital, running into a man and dropping the snow globe. She apologizes, but he acknowledges that she was distracted. He asks if she likes windmills, since there’s one in the snow globe. He tells her not to give up on the bigger picture. The agents go back to the Van de Kamps’ house and look for footage on the house’s surveillance cameras, but nothing comes up. Scully finds a business card in a sketchbook and pockets it.
There’s nothing about ghouli.net in Jackson’s search history, and nothing a normal 17-year-old boy would have, like porn, so Scully wonders if he cleared his history. But Mulder used something from the dark web that retrieves any search history that ever existed on a computer, and he still found nothing. He thinks Jackson had another computer.
Police arrive at the house, so the agents quickly search the room and find a hidden laptop. Mulder downloads the search history, which contains ghouli.net stuff, as the police demand that the agents leave. Scully tries to stall them, but the men who were following the agents pull rank – they are, as Mulder guessed, from the DOD, and have orders from the Department of Justice. Mulder continues his download, which includes classified documents about a Project Crossroads. When a DOD agent tries to stop him, Mulder purposely spills Jackson’s soda on the laptop, ruining it.
Mitch Pileggi collects a paycheck when Skinner calls to bug Mulder about not updating him on the case. He only knows what’s going on because the DOD agents filed a complaint about Mulder. Mulder tells him there’s a conspiracy the DOD are trying to cover up. He urges Skinner to come to Norfolk, then pretends his cell connection is failing. Skinner can’t do much more because CSM is in his office. He guesses Mulder will now start looking into Project Crossroads, which will lead the two of them to what they’re looking for.
Skinner meets Mulder on the Chimera and tells him to end the investigation. He talks about a eugenics program from the ’70s, led by a Dr. Masao Matsumoto. It was called Project Crossroads and worked with alien/human hybrid DNA, but it was defunded because the results were too unpredictable. Matsumoto burned all the files to protect the subjects, then disappeared.
The DOD has been looking for the subjects since then, and Mulder figures the DOD agents were following him and Scully so they would lead the agents to Jackson. He tells Skinner that the DNA results came back, and Jackson was William. Skinner’s warning is appreciated, but it’s too late.
Scully meets with Jackson’s therapist, Dr. Scholz, who doesn’t think he would have harmed his parents or himself. Scully asks if he ever had visions. Dr. Scholz won’t give details without a court order, but Scully guesses that they were apocalyptic – the same visions she had in “My Struggle II.” Dr. Scholz wonders how Scully could know that.
The agents meet up at the coffee house and discuss Scully and Jackson’s shared visions. She wonders if she was a receptacle for a message from Jackson, like her dream to come to Norfolk. She laughs when a barista calls Mulder by his fake coffee name, joking that “Fox” doesn’t exist in this alternate reality. Mulder says it’s a false reality, just like the rest of the case. He thinks there were two shooters in the house, the DOD agents. They moved Mrs. Van de Kamp’s body after her death, to make it look like there was one shooter, Jackson.
Mulder thinks that Scully was an unwilling participant in Project Crossroads, thanks to CSM. He also thinks Jackson was one of Matsumoto’s test subjects. He knew he was being hunted, so he created an alternate reality, made Mulder and Scully hear a gunshot, and faked his death to protect himself. Similarly, he made Sarah and Brianna see a monster. The question is, where is he now?
He’s at the hospital, visiting Brianna, who’s pleased to see that her boyfriend isn’t really dead. He wants to apologize for the Ghouli thing, which was just a prank. He made up everything on the website, and he made the girls see something he projected into their heads. Things went off the rails and Jackson couldn’t stop it. It all started when he had seizures that gave him visions of scary things like UFOs. But he could share them with a woman, possibly his birth mother.
Jackson knows he’s in danger, so he’s there to say goodbye. It may be too late, as the police have arrived at the hospital. Mulder and Scully come next, and Costa tells them they’ve trapped Jackson inside. Sarah caught Jackson in Brianna’s room and texted a picture to Costa. (Ooh, maybe Jackson should have visited Sarah first.) Scully asks Costa to keep the police outside so she and Mulder can go in first. He tells her the DOD agents are already inside.
Sarah admits that she wanted to hurt Jackson for kissing Brianna. He doesn’t seem too upset, but honestly, the girl trouble is the least of his problems right now. He takes off running and manages to evade the DOD agents for a while. He uses his projection abilities to make one agent look like Ghouli so the other shoots him. (Me, watching this the first time around: “Why doesn’t he just make himself look like someone else so they don’t recognize him?”)
The hospital is evacuated as Mulder and Scully search for Jackson, who’s hiding under a desk at the nurses’ station. Scully and the DOD agent come across each other and fire their guns. When Mulder comes to the place where they’re both lying, the real Scully joins him – Jackson made a cop look like Scully. He’s still under the desk and stays hidden when the agents call out for him. When he emerges from the desk, he makes himself look like a nurse running for safety.
The agents keep searching, but Jackson’s long gone. All Scully has left of him is some of his hair (and, I guess, pieces of the broken snow globe). On the way to the airport to head home, Scully spots a windmill outside a gas station and gets Mulder to make a pit stop. As she’s pumping gas, she encounters the man who ran into her at the hospital and broke the snow globe. He tells her he’s driving across the country to see the world. “Things are about to change,” he says.
Scully asks if the man is Matsumoto, which he should find flattering, since Matsumoto would be much older than this man. He says he’s no doctor; he didn’t even finish high school. He thinks Scully seems like a nice person and wishes he could know her better. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” he says as he gets in his car to leave.
Mulder comes out of the gas station’s convenience store, and Scully tells him she found the man familiar. She thinks he might have written a book they found in Jackson’s room about picking up girls. She shares the advice he gave her, which Mulder recognizes as a Malcolm X quote. They go out to the road to look for the man’s car, but he’s gone. There’s a surveillance camera at the station, so the agents look at the tape. The person Scully was speaking to couldn’t keep up his projection to fool the camera. It was Jackson.
Thoughts: The name Van de Kamp makes me think of Desperate Housewives, which just makes me wish it was on Netflix.
Show, you don’t have to shoehorn Skinner and CSM into an episode when there’s no use for them.
I’m a little surprised that the Van de Kamps told Jackson he was adopted. Wouldn’t it have kept him safer if no one knew?
June 8, 2019
The X-Files 11.1, My Struggle III: Oh, Good, More Conspiracies
Haven’t we done this before?
Summary: Two years after “My Struggle II” aired, CSM greets us with a voiceover, immediately answering a question many have had for years: His real name is Carl Gerhard Busch. He’s seen a lot of history unfold, and knows that if people knew what was really going on behind the scenes, they would riot. CSM claims he’s not a bad man; he makes others great. That’s what makes him great.
CSM says both of his sons have made sacrifices and paid horrible prices while searching for the truth CSM has “parceled” out to them. There’s definitely life out there on other planets. CSM doesn’t want trust or loyalty, just for his sons to realize that CSM was right and did what needed to be done. P.S. The moon landing was fake.
Zoom in on Scully’s eye, then quick flashbacks of the events of the previous episode. Scully’s unconscious, having been found on the floor of the X-Files office by Mulder, who looks much better than he did in “My Struggle II” – as if he was never sick at all. Mulder and Skinner go to the hospital where she’s taken, and a neurologist, Dr. Joyet, tells them she doesn’t know what happened. All she knows is that Scully has abnormal brain activity, but no apparent damage.
Joyet shows the men scans of Scully’s brain and says she’s never seen what’s happening there before. There’s a flashing in her hypothalamus, her fight-or-flight center. Skinner sees the flashing as a code, six dots and two dashes: “Find him.” Joyet lets the men visit Scully, and Mulder vows to stay with her as long as she’s in the hospital. Skinner thinks they should focus on the “him” of the code – probably William. Scully must want him because she’s dying. Mulder refuses to believe that and again says he’s staying with Scully.
Great, more voiceover. Mulder fears that he’s responsible for Scully’s condition. If he is, how can he fix it? Scully has more flashbacks, then wakes up. She tells Mulder he has to go find CSM. She knows “how it begins.” The Spartan virus will become an epidemic and lead to massive destruction. But there’s a cure, so Mulder needs to find William and get his stem cells.
Mulder tells Scully there’s no plague, and besides, CSM is dead. Scully insists that he’s alive in Spartanburg. Mulder thinks Scully’s confused because of the weird activity in her brain. Scully tells him that CSM will kill him if Mulder doesn’t stop him.
Since the last time we saw him, Jeffrey Spender’s face has improved a lot. Wherever he is now, someone’s trying to run him down in a parking garage. He manages to dodge his would-be assassin’s car and lock himself out of reach of the driver. The driver says he just wants “the boy.” Spender won’t help, so the driver leaves.
Joyet agrees with Mulder that Scully’s visions are just that, visions. Nothing with the Spartan virus actually happened. The question now is where the visions came from. Joyet has seen some stuff in her time, and she figures Scully’s experiencing the aftermath of some experiments. Impatient, Scully wants to leave and investigate, but Mulder says he’ll handle it. On his way out of the hospital, he gets a voice mail from Spender.
Scully has more visions, this time from the future instead of the past. She sees CSM telling someone they can’t be found, and Mulder getting in a car accident. As she wakes up, we briefly see a teen boy doing the same, seemingly having had the same visions as Scully. Mulder listens to Spender’s message, which warns that someone came after him looking for William. Everyone connected to him is in danger.
CSM knows that Mulder will be looking for him, and just like in Scully’s vision, he tells Reyes they can’t be found. Meanwhile, someone follows Mulder as he heads off on a road trip, voicing over more pointless stuff about Scully. He knows he’s being followed, so he tries to get away from his pursuer. CSM gloats to Reyes that Mulder can’t stop what’s already been put into motion.
The car chase goes on forever. Is this what it’s like watching The Fast and the Furious? I’ll pass. Mulder’s pursuer crashes, but Mulder is able to get away. Back at the hospital, Scully has William-related dreams/flashbacks, waking up when Spender comes by. She asks where William is, but he reminds her that she made him promise never to tell her. Scully says Mulder’s life is at stake. Spender can only provide the adoptive family’s last name, Van De Kamp.
Scully tells Spender that CSM’s alive, and she tries to leave again to go on the hunt. Joyet stops her, but even the risk of a seizure won’t keep Scully in the hospital. CSM admits to Reyes that, though he knows William’s in danger, he doesn’t know who the danger is coming from. Reyes thinks someone knows William is CSM’s weakness. CSM says no one could know that. Even if his plans were to get out, people would dismiss them as “fake news.” No one wants to accept the threat of our impending extinction.
Mulder’s still driving and voicing over. Scully calls him to tell him that Spender gave him William’s last name. She’s left the hospital and is in the X-Files office. She promises that she knows what she’s doing. Mulder tells her he’s in South Carolina, just as Scully’s visions showed that everything begins. She insists that they find William. She has more visions, this time seeing the teen boy in distress as a man says he’s a special child. Scully winds up unconscious on the floor of the office again.
CSM tells Reyes that he thinks Scully will forgive him once she sees “the beauty of a planet returned to its savage state.” Reyes reminds him that he’ll be killing humans, and the survivors will hate him. CSM’s like, “What else is new?” More driving and voicing over from Mulder as Reyes tells CSM that Scully and William have a bond beyond science. CSM thinks Scully’s unaware of it – only he and Reyes know.
More driving and voicing over. We get it! Mulder wants the truth! CSM tells Reyes he’s worried about William. Reyes thinks he’s in love with Scully. CSM says he worries for her; Mulder always protected her, but now he’s forced CSM’s hand. Reyes asks what will happen if Scully finds William first. CSM says they won’t let that happen.
Mulder reaches CSM’s gigantic house and runs around for a while with his gun drawn. When he finally finds people, they’re not CSM and Reyes. They’re Erika Price and a guy known only as Mr. Y. Skinner goes to the X-Files office looking for Scully, who’s no longer there. She’s also left her phone behind, so she’s out of contact.
Skinner gets in his car to go searching for her and is surprised by Reyes and her gun. As Scully drives somewhere, looking like she’s seconds from causing an accident, Skinner turns the tables on Reyes and holds her at gunpoint instead. Then CSM joins them, asking if he can smoke in the car. Meanwhile, Scully predictably crashes her car.
Price and Mr. Y claim they don’t know where CSM is, though he was at the house not long ago. They were part of the Syndicate, but they’re not co-conspirators. Price says that CSM wants to exterminate humanity. CSM tells Skinner that the new human religion is faith in technology, while a simple pathogen could destroy everyone.
Price and Mr. Y tell Mulder that aliens aren’t a threat anymore – they don’t want to come to a dying planet. CSM is going to release an alien pathogen to wipe everyone out. Mulder needs to kill him, or he’ll never see William again. CSM tries to make a deal with Skinner: Bring William to CSM, and Skinner will get immunity from the pathogen. Mulder asks why CSM wants William. As in Scully’s vision, Mr. Y says he’s a special child.
They tell Mulder that years ago, aliens came to study humans and were going to work with the Syndicate. CSM was going to be in charge. Of course, that went badly, and everyone realized he was a bad leader. CSM puts a different spin on it, telling Skinner that he protected humanity as long as he could. He used aliens as test subjects to try to protect humans from the pathogen. I guess the moon landing was a way of making humans look heroic.
CSM says this is “the fourth turning,” the end stages of civilization: “The only truth left is to survive it.” Scully and William have immunity and will survive along with some elites. Mr. Y and Price urge Mulder to kill CSM before he can wipe out humanity. He won’t be expecting Mulder to do the deed. Mulder wants more information, like what Price and Mr. Y want. They plan to colonize space and build habitable structures. Mulder doesn’t believe them – they want a war, and they want to use Mulder to start it.
Mr. Y offers to take Mulder and William along to the safety of space, but Mulder would rather go with Scully’s plan to save everyone. CSM thinks his conversation with Skinner is over, so Reyes gets out of the car, but Skinner has more to discuss. Mulder heads back to D.C., calling Skinner along the way, but he’s still talking to CSM. Skinner wants to know why he’s supposed to betray Mulder and Skinner to get William. This means turning his back on humanity.
Scully’s back in the hospital, thanks to two FBI agents who found her after the car crash and took her to the place listed on the medical bracelet she was still wearing. They’re Miller and Einstein. Joyet calls Mulder to let him know that Scully had a setback but is back in her care. As Miller and Einstein leave the hospital, they pass by a man who goes to Scully’s room and tries to smother her with a pillow. He switches to strangulation when that fails. Mulder arrives in time to save her.
Sigh, more voicing over. Conspiracies! William! Girlfriend in the hospital! Mulder is so conflicted! He tells Scully he recognized her attacker, whom Scully says couldn’t have been sent by CSM, since CSM wouldn’t try to hurt her. She thinks her visions are coming from William, somehow. He’s trying to guide both Mulder and Scully. CSM can’t act without William, which the teen knows. CSM won’t find William, but William will find Mulder and Scully. They just have to keep doing their work and wait.
Skinner arrives, and Mulder instantly gets suspicious about where he’s been, even before he smells the smoke on Skinner’s clothes. The two men start scuffling and have to be broken up. Mulder asks whose side Skinner is on. Skinner just tells him to leave it alone. In a flashback, we see the rest of Skinner and CSM’s conversation. CSM has an offer for Scully, which Skinner says she’ll never take. CSM thinks she will, since she’ll have to choose between Mulder and William.
CSM continues that he and “Dana” have a history that goes back 17 years, to “En Ami.” As we know, he took her to a house while she was asleep/unconscious, and CSM claims he impregnated her at the time. According to CSM, he, not Mulder, is William’s father. Elsewhere, William – now known as Jackson – is hearing distorted voices, possibly from the same visions Scully was having.
Thoughts: Price is played by Barbara Hershey.
Spender has Mulder’s phone number – do you think they’ve kept in touch over the years? They probably have a lot to talk about.
Way to keep an eye on the woman with abnormal brain activity and a risk for seizures, Skinner. Mulder’s justified in being mad.
Miller and Einstein don’t appear to know Scully, which I guess means both “My Struggle II” and “Babylon” didn’t happen. To bad I still had to recap “Babylon.”
June 1, 2019
The X-Files 10.6, My Struggle II: This Isn’t Going to Help Defeat the Anti-Vaxxer Movement
Our hero
Summary: Scully gives a voiceover to recap what the series is all about. Instead of video clips, we get photos. To sum up: Weird stuff happened, the Syndicate may still be at work, and Scully appears to have alien DNA. There, you’re all caught up.
Scully goes to work and sees that Mulder’s been watching Tad’s show, which is airing on the Internet again. He claims that there’s been a discovery: Almost every American has alien DNA. Tad calls and summons Scully to Mulder’s house, which has been ransacked. Tad was supposed to meet Mulder there, but he’s not home. Scully confronts him about his revelation on his show, and Tad says he has a doctor who can verify that his claims are true.
After calling the police, Scully returns to the X-Files office and meets up with Skinner and Einstein. She thinks Mulder took off because he doesn’t want to hear Scully’s opinions on his belief in Tad’s revelation. Einstein thinks they should dismiss the crazy Internet conspiracy theorist, but Scully doesn’t think they can just throw out his theory. It’s possible that some entity was given the ability to tamper with humans’ DNA.
The two women go to Our Lady of Sorrows and encounter a man who’s confused and looking for help. He has a gross-looking wound on his arm but doesn’t know where it came from. Meanwhile, Mulder, who looks like he’s been beaten up, drives somewhere, ignoring a call from Skinner.
Scully draws some blood from Einstein as she tells her she found alien DNA in herself. Einstein doesn’t get why she was even looking for it. Scully tells her that the science they were taught doesn’t take them near the truth. She brings up smallpox vaccines, which could have been used to inject more than just a vaccination. If there’s even a small possibility that happened, they need to investigate.
Miller arrives and tells the women that people are starting to freak out about Tad’s revelation. He’s posted a new video with a doctor named Rubell, his supposed conspiracy verifier. Rubell says that a fast-moving virus will soon spread through the population. People like police officers and healthcare workers will be the first affected. Scully thinks it’s already happening.
She asks a nurse named Sandeep for an update on the confused guy she ran into earlier. His identity is still unknown, but he may be in the military. Scully orders a treatment, telling Sandeep that she thinks the man’s lesion came from exposure to anthrax. Miller and Einstein overhear, and Scully explains that soldiers deployed to Iraq are given doses of anthrax in the event of nuclear warfare. Now, the vaccines may be attacking their immune systems.
Einstein remains skeptical, but Scully says anthrax is just the tip of the iceberg. We may be on the verge of a global contagion. Einstein wants them to wait until her test results are back, but Scully doesn’t think they’ll matter. She goes to the chapel and calls Mulder, who ignores her call as well as he heads into South Carolina.
Miller goes to the X-Files office and watches Tad’s latest video, which confirms Scully’s theory: Other military personnel are showing signs of exposure to anthrax. Tad thinks this is the first wave in a “rolling contagion,” the result of a “far-reaching conspiracy of men.” Miller notices that Mulder has a phone-finder app, so he uses it to track Mulder’s phone to Spartanburg, South Carolina.
At the hospital, the unknown soldier’s lesion now looks 50 times grosser than before. Einstein argues that this could be the result of a faulty vaccine, not a conspiracy. Scully tells her they don’t have time to consider all the possibilities – they need to move to fight the worst-case scenario.
Einstein continues that only one class of people has been infected. If something in their DNA has been triggered, why is it happening now? Something has to be taken away from the genome to shut down a person’s body, not added to it. Scully gets a call from someone she hasn’t spoken to in so long that she doesn’t even recognize the caller’s voice. It’s someone who was there for her once before when she needed help: Reyes.
The two former colleagues meet downtown and give exposition about how Reyes left the FBI a decade ago, very suddenly. She made decisions that she’s not sure Scully will understand. Years ago, CSM – post-explosion and pre-reconstructive surgery – summoned Reyes to his hospital room. She told him he was an evil liar, but she still accepted a deal he offered. He promised to spare her life when he tampered with everyone’s DNA to kill everyone but some elite people.
Reyes tells Scully that the conspiracy is more complex than she thinks. Oh, isn’t it always? She accused CSM of playing God, but CSM said everyone’s fates have been sealed since birth. She told him he would die alone, but he disagreed – she would be there to continue to light his cigarettes. Reyes tells Scully that because of her abduction and alien DNA, she’s one of the elite. She and Reyes are both protected from the global massacre about to take place.
Scully asks about Mulder, and Reyes says CSM loves him, so he sent someone to offer Mulder a deal. That would be the man who beat Mulder up and left his house trashed. Despite being eligible for AARP, Mulder was still able to put up a good fight against CSM’s man. Now he’s in Spartanburg to discuss the deal with CSM in person.
CSM mocks that he’s controlled Mulder before Mulder even knew he existed. Mulder tells him it’s time for CSM to stop whatever he put in motion. CSM says it’s too late. Mulder doesn’t believe him, but CSM corrects that he doesn’t want to believe. Okay, I could really do without CSM smoking through a tube in his throat.
CSM thinks Mulder will accept his deal because it will allow him to stay with Scully. Mulder makes it clear that CSM will die if he harms Scully. CSM argues that he didn’t set out to destroy the world – people did. He’s not responsible for climate change or any other alterations to nature. Neither of them could have saved mankind from destruction. CSM just sped up the timetable.
Mulder asks what the deal is. CSM says he can have “a seat at the big table.” Mulder knows he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he survived while billions died. CSM points out that the two of them and Scully could create a new world. Mulder’s already feverish, so if he doesn’t accept this deal, he’ll die along with everyone else.
Tad gives an update: Hospitals and shelters are overflowing, and the mainstream media isn’t paying enough attention to what’s happening. He claims chemtrails are releasing aluminum into the atmosphere. You had me until then, Tad. Scully reunites with Einstein, who can no longer ignore the possibility of massive contagions wiping everyone out. Scully says she was wrong about the science causing all this. Alien DNA isn’t responsible for the contagions – it’s what will save everyone.
They’re calling this the Spartan virus, a virus within a virus administered through smallpox vaccines. Scully thinks they still have time to save everyone. She just needs to use her own alien DNA to create a vaccine that will beat the Spartan virus. They just need to move fast.
Mulder’s now so sick that he’s on CSM’s floor, but he still won’t take his deal. CSM says he’ll miss Mulder, who made his life worthwhile. He pulls off part of his face, which turns out to be prosthetic. Mulder wishes Scully were there to see the monster CSM has become. Scully and Einstein look at Scully’s DNA again, but now there’s nothing alien in it.
Sandeep comes to the lab to tell Scully that the staff is getting sick, so they’re running out of time. Tad continues his updates – people are dying, but he and his crew will keep broadcasting as long as there’s hope of stopping the contagions. Scully and Einstein (who’s not sick yet) go over the science again, trying to figure out how alien DNA protects Scully from the Spartan virus. What makes Scully different? Einstein thinks the sample they studied was too small.
Miller finds Mulder at CSM’s and announces that they’re leaving. CSM warns that he has no idea what’s coming next. Einstein draws more of Scully’s blood, sure that the next examination of it will show the alien DNA again. Einstein’s getting sick now. Miller drags Mulder to his car, but Mulder thinks the younger agent should just save himself. Miller asks why Mulder didn’t accept CSM’s offer. CSM tells Miller to say goodbye for him before Mulder dies.
This time Scully’s alien DNA shows up on examination, so she’s just hours from developing a cure. Miller calls her from his car, telling her that he found Mulder but he’s not doing well. Scully promises that help is coming. Miller isn’t sure they can make it back to D.C., since there’s now a gas shortage. Scully administers her cure to Einstein so she can help pass it out to everyone else.
Tad is looking worse as he says lines of communication are starting to fall. People are starting to riot in the streets as Scully heads out to find her boyfriend. She tells everyone to go to the hospital because help is coming. Tad announces that there’s a vaccine – the ray of hope everyone needs to keep them from giving up entirely.
Scully gets to her car and drives on the sidewalk in an attempt to get out of the city. That only works for her until she gets to a bridge. Mulder and Miller are stuck on the same bridge, so Miller and Scully decide to get out and walk to each other. “He saved your life. Old Smoky,” Mulder says when Scully reaches him. She promises that she’ll save him, too (and Miller).
Scully whispers to Miller that Mulder is worse off than she thought – he’ll need stem cells. The best source is William, who must also be protected by Scully’s alien DNA. The problem? Scully doesn’t know where he is. Well, that’s not Scully’s only problem: Now there’s a UFO over the bridge, with its spotlight right on Scully.
Thoughts: Between the soldier’s lesion, CSM’s post-explosion state, and his half-missing face, this episode gets a 9 out of 10 on the grossness scale.
I guess we’re supposed to think all the traffic jams in D.C. are from mass panic, but really, it’s not much worse than a regular rush hour around here.
One season left! Who’s ready to wrap this thing up?
May 25, 2019
The X-Files 10.5, Babylon: The One Where Mulder Tries to Fight Terrorism With Drugs
I have no words
Summary: A Muslim man named Shiraz prays at his home in Texas, then fixes himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He drives somewhere, stopping at a stoplight while two women in cowgirl clothes cross the road. The people in the pickup next to Shiraz’s car make racist comments about him. Shiraz picks up a friend at a motel, and they park outside a place called Ziggurat and say a brief prayer together. They go inside, and moments later, the building explodes. Oh, they were terrorists! And Muslims! That’s totally new for American TV!
In D.C., Mulder plays Scully a video of what sounds like trumpets playing in the sky over various cities. Mulder says it was like the sound was coming from the heavens, as if God Himself was playing music. Scully notes that he doesn’t believe in God. Mulder says his beliefs don’t matter right now; the “earwitnesses” believe they heard something. It could be a sign of the end times.
After some discussion of whether Adam and Eve really ate an apple in the Garden of Eden, the agents get a knock on their office door. The knocker asks if anyone’s there, and Scully gets the chance to repeat what Mulder said to her the first time they met 23 years ago: “Nobody down here except the FBI’s most unwanted.” (She feels good about it.)
Mulder and Scully meet Agents Miller and Einstein, their mini-mes. Blah blah blah, Scully wrote a dissertation on Einstein’s twin paradox, she’s also a medical doctor, let’s get on with this mess. Einstein is also a medical doctor. No one cares. The younger agents are there to discuss Shiraz and his friend’s suicide bombing. Shiraz survived, barely, so Mulder guesses that the younger agents (well, mostly Miller) want to find a way to communicate with him. He may have information on sleeper cells.
Mulder and Miller both think that stories of other conversations with the dead mean they can communicate with the vegetative Shiraz. Scully and Einstein think it’s a waste of time. The women win the debate, so Einstein drags Miller away to go to Texas. After the younger duo leaves, Scully notes that Einstein calls Miller by his last name.
While waiting for a flight at the airport, Miller and Einstein watch a news segment about the suicide bombing. You may be surprised that the white man in the segment is anti-Islam, while the black woman in the segment says not all Muslims are terrorists. Miller comments that it must be weird putting on a bomb vest, knowing you’re about to die. Einstein thinks it was worse for the victims. Miller wonders who taught Shiraz this kind of hate. Einstein points out that Shiraz isn’t going to tell him.
Miller argues that it’s worth a shot to try to communicate with him. Einstein scoffs that no one takes the X-Files seriously; that’s why their basement is in the office. Miller says they have his dream assignment. Scully must have some reason for doing it, despite being a skeptic. “She’s clearly in love with him,” Einstein says, figuring it out after spending just three minutes with them.
Scully calls Miller to tell him she may have a way for him to communicate with Shiraz. She’s holding her mother’s quarter necklace. They agree to meet up in Texas. Meanwhile, Mulder calls Einstein to say the same thing Scully said to Miller. Einstein wonders why he’s calling her instead of Miller. Mulder says that Skinner has wonderful things to say about Einstein. “Yes, I helped him with his migraines, which he claims are due to you,” Einstein replies. Mulder asks her to stay in D.C. instead of going to Texas.
Somewhere, a Muslim man builds a bomb vest while listening to the people on the news fighting. Einstein goes back to the X-Files office, worried that there will be another act of terrorism while she’s there. Mulder talks about thoughts having mass, and faith and forgiveness having weight. Einstein says no. Mulder points out that words have the weight to inspire people to do things like kill. Einstein corrects that the words merely incite actions; they’re not dangerous by themselves.
Mulder asks if Einstein’s ever sucked on a lemon. “I am getting a taste of what Agent Scully must suffer,” she says. He continues that there’s a school of thought that every thought, word, and perception is a step in evolution. If Shiraz knows something that Einstein wants to know, she may need to expand her thinking about the material world.
Scully meets Miller in Texas, where Miller says he wants to believe (ding!) that there’s a way to reach Shiraz. Scully mentions that Maggie was recently in a coma, and Scully wasn’t able to communicate with her. If she’d come up with this idea then, she might have been able to get answers to some questions she’ll never be able to get now.
Back in D.C., Mulder calls Einstein a wugwump, then tells her to sit down and shut up. He really knows how to win over an adversary, doesn’t he? She doesn’t really want to talk about the “woo woo paranormal,” but she’ll give him two minutes to talk before she’s “due back on Earth.” Mulder’s big idea: magic mushrooms. They could allow a transcendent experience and expose a user to truths without altering his or her brain chemistry. Specifically, his – Mulder wants to be the test subject.
As a medical professional, Einstein can administer the mushrooms to Mulder. He claims he doesn’t want to “bother” Scully with this, because of Maggie’s recent coma. Einstein calls Mulder crazy and tells him that once she leaves the office, he’ll never see her again. “So that’s a maybe?” he calls after her.
Scully and Miller go to the hospital where Shiraz is barely alive. Doctors recently used an MRI to trigger electric activity in the brain of a man named Patient 23. She wants to use an EEG to do the same with Shiraz. Scully warns that, even if it works, it might be hard to get the answers Miller wants. Even harder now, since the Department of Homeland Security wants to take over the case.
Scully refuses to leave, so one DHS agent speaks to the other in Arabic. Miller kicks the DHS agents out, taking their picture so he can ID them later. Einstein arrives as they leave and sees that Scully has taken over her role as Miller’s partner. She calls Mulder and invites him to join the group in Texas.
She meets him at the airport and gives him two capsules containing magic mushroom…dust, I guess. She tells him Scully’s working with Miller, but she’ll deal with that later. Mulder asks how to say “howdy, pardner” in Arabic. At the hospital, an FBI agent named Brem tells Scully and Miller that the building is under a terror threat. He figures there’s a radical Muslim community in the area that wants to kill all Americans. Miller notes that other people want Shiraz to die, too.
Brem says the last thing he wants is for Shiraz to die and go to his paradise. Miller chastises him for being Islamaphobic when he and Scully are focusing on gaining Shiraz’s trust. Brem heads off to evacuate the floor in case of a terrorist attack. A nurse stays behind, and when she’s alone with Shiraz, she turns off his life support. She almost gets caught when Mulder and Einstein show up.
The nurse turns the machine back on and comments that Shiraz is receiving a lot of attention, despite not being worthy of it. Surprise – she’s racist! She hates refugees and brown people! While Einstein gets rid of the nurse, Mulder takes the mushrooms and sits by Shiraz’s bed. He then slips out while Einstein’s back is turned.
What happens next is…I don’t have a word for it. Mulder goes on an extended drug trip that takes him to a country-western bar. There is line dancing. David Duchovny’s children hide their faces in shame. There is a backflip. Women scream and swarm Mulder. He changes clothes and gets bling that says “MUSH” and “ROOM.” Some women do an impromptu dance routine that’s more suited to a dance squad, and that makes the more conservative patrons shake their heads. Skinner and the Lone Gunmen show up in cowboy gear.
Finally, Mulder ends up on his back somewhere, with Einstein, wearing dominatrix gear, over him. She makes him say “woo woo” and whips him. Next, Mulder is in the middle of a group of cloaked men who are praying in Arabic. CSM whips him and tells him he’s come to the right place for the truth. He sees Shiraz lying across a woman’s lap, like they’re the Pieta. They’re in boat, being rowed somewhere, while the soundtrack growls, “Misery’s the river of the world.” Mulder leans over Shiraz, who says something to him that we can’t hear.
The vest builder has finished his work, which includes matching vests for his buddies. So that can’t be good. Scully and Miller return to Shiraz’s room, and Miller, who worked in Iraq for a bit, asks in Arabic if Shiraz can hear them. Shiraz’s brain waves show that he might be able to, but Scully can’t tell for sure.
Mulder’s also in the hospital, waking up with Skinner by his bed. He tells Mulder that his actions were an embarrassment to Skinner and the FBI. (I think if Mulder saw footage of what happened, he’d be embarrassed, too.) Einstein arrives and reveals that she didn’t give him mushrooms – she gave him a placebo. Whatever Mulder thinks he was under the influence of, it was nothing more than the power of suggestion.
Mulder’s all, “But you were there!” like this is the end of “Triangle.” Skinner says he was in D.C. the whole time. Mulder insists that he talked to Shiraz, but he doesn’t know what he said, since Mulder doesn’t speak Arabic. Skinner leaves to get Mulder released, and Mulder tells Einstein that she was there, too – and she was “50 shades of bad.” Just like this episode! She does confirm that he danced. She figures that she’ll be punished with her own basement office.
As they’re leaving the hospital, Mulder recognizes the woman he saw holding Shiraz in his dream or drug trip or whatever. He takes her to Shiraz’s room and introduces her to the others as Noora, Shiraz’s mother. When she speaks to her son, his brain waves again indicate that he can hear. Noora chastises Shiraz for becoming a terrorist and killing innocent people. She thinks he lost his nerve when the time came to detonate his bomb. He’s told her that in her dreams and her prayers.
Miller asks for information on the terrorist cell Shiraz could have been working with, but Noora doesn’t know any names. Shiraz flatlines and dies before any more communication can take place. Mulder says again that Shiraz spoke to him. He remembers some of what was said and tells Miller, who translates it as “Babylon the hotel.” The terrorists are there now, praying in preparation for their next attack. FBI agents ambush them and capture them all.
Miller and Einstein head back to the airport, this time really done with the case. He’s humble about his role in taking down a terror cell and preventing any more deaths. Einstein feels like Miller also kept Shiraz safe. She, however, did nothing – but it worked. Miller says some things are just unexplainable. Einstein quotes the other Einstein, who said that there’s beauty in the mysterious. She promises she’ll never again abandon Miller for the paranormal. But now she’s convinced that words and ideas do have weight. Sometimes they just lead people to do crazy things.
Mulder is relaxing on his front porch when Scully comes to visit him. She’s amused by the whole drug trip and Mulder’s lack of understanding of what happened. But he thinks he saw powerful things, like unconditional love. Scully says she saw hate that seems endless. There are extremes in human nature, and the trick is reconciling the two.
They go for a walk together, holding hands, as Mulder says he’s been thinking about God. In the Bible, He punished people at the Tower of Babel and scattered them, making them different from each other. Does God want to be worshiped for His anger? What makes people want to murder for Him? Mulder thinks terrorists swallow a pill that uses the power of suggestion to make them violent. But a mother’s love can overcome that.
Scully says maybe the hatred ends in finding a common language – maybe that’s God’s will. But Mulder wonders how we can know, since God is “absent from the stage.” Scully suggests that it’s beyond words. We have to open our hearts and really listen. Mulder hears a noise like the trumpets heard all over the world, but Scully doesn’t. We end by panning out to the cosmos, for some reason.
Thoughts: Einstein is played by Lauren Ambrose. Miller is played by Robbie Amell (and named for Duchovny’s son).
Einstein may be the most quotable guest star to ever appear on this show. She’s like Scully without the affection for Mulder that makes her soften her words toward him. I love her.
I was going to refer to the person grumbling “misery’s the river of the world” as a Tom Waits wannabe, but I looked it up and, uh, it’s him. Tom Waits does a very good Tom Waits impression.
’90s/’00s/’10s music alert:
- Carrie Underwood’s “Somethin’ Bad” at the beginning of the drug trip (so appropriate)
- Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart” and Trace Adkins’ “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” at the country-western bar
- The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” in the final scene
April 27, 2019
The X-Files 10.1, My Struggle: Here We Go Again
All of their conversations look like this
Summary: Mulder gives a brief recap of the entire series to date, in case people had forgotten about it in the 13 years since the last episode (or the seven years since the second movie). He tells us there are UFO sightings all the time. There’s a huge cover-up, and people think they’re a hoax, but “are we truly alone? Or are we being lied to?”
We go back in time to Roswell in 1947, when a young Army medic is taken to the desert by a man in a black suit. The doctor is stunned when he sees a giant crashed UFO. At Our Lady of Sorrows, where Scully is still working, she gets a phone call from Skinner (who’s still the assistant director – no promotion in 13 years? Ouch).
Mulder’s watching a clip of Jimmy Kimmel telling then-President Obama that if he were elected president, his first priority would be looking through confidential documents to find out if aliens exist. After talking to Skinner, Scully calls Mulder, who complains that his life has become a punchline. Skinner wants to know if Mulder’s been watching an Internet celeb named Tad O’Malley, who’s reached out to the FBI.
Mulder pulls up a clip of Tad saying that the mainstream media is lying about people’s freedoms. He has conspiracy theories that go all the way back to Roswell. Mulder doesn’t know why Scully’s getting involved in this stuff again, but Scully’s just delivering a message from Skinner. Mulder is supposed to meet with Tad, and he wants Scully to tag along.
The two former partners meet up, but Scully’s the only one who bothered to dress professionally. She tells him she worries about him and is glad he’s gotten out of the house. There’s exposition that they no longer live together. Tad arrives and invites the agents to join him for a limo ride, wanting to ensure their conversation is private. He thinks some aircraft can eavesdrop, though he won’t say who’s behind that.
In the limo, Tad tells the ex-agents that he’s not a true believer like Mulder is. Also, he calls Scully “Dana,” and I don’t think Mulder likes that. Mulder corrects that he only wants to believe; he’s never been able to find real proof of aliens. Tad reminds him that he ran the X-Files, but that chapter of the ex-agents’ lives is over. They’ve both moved on (both from the job and from each other).
Mulder thinks Tad just spouts conspiracies for the money and doesn’t actually believe anything he says. He’s “The O’Reilly Factor with a shopworn little gimmick.” Tad says Bill O’Reilly knows very little of the truth. Mulder brings up a woman named Kelly Cahill who claims she and her husband saw a UFO in Australia. They lost an hour of time, and Kelly wound up with a triangular mark on her stomach. Tad wants Mulder and Scully to help him expose the conspiracy about alien abductions. He has something – and someone – to show them.
The limo takes the group to a secluded little cottage where a woman named Sveta lives. She contacted Tad and told him to call Mulder and Scully. Sveta met Mulder as a child, when he interviewed her family after she was abducted for the first time. Over 20 years, she’s been abducted multiple times, and has the little scoop-marked scars to prove it. The aliens replaced her memories, but she still recalls some things.
Like Scully, Sveta got pregnant after a number of her abductions, but the fetuses were taken, leaving the scars. Sveta continues that she has alien DNA. Mulder asks if Scully could test that, since Sveta hasn’t gotten confirmation from a doctor. He calls her “Dana,” which makes me uncomfortable. Back to 1947! The doctor and some other soldiers follow an alien crawling away from the UFO. The Man in Black shoots it, saying it might be dangerous. The doctor is upset.
Scully takes Sveta to a lab to do tests. Sveta knows Scully’s skeptical, since she has some mind-reading abilities. She claims she’s also telekinetic, but she can’t control it, so she can’t give a demonstration. Sveta guesses that Mulder and Scully used to be a couple, and that Mulder’s been depressed. That’s what led to their breakup. Sveta also guesses that they had a child together. Scully tells her to knock it off. Sveta’s mind-reading abilities end there, as she thinks Scully doesn’t know what it’s like to be abducted. Scully gives her a look, and Sveta changes her mind.
Tad retrieves Mulder from his house via helicopter and warns that they’re about to meet with some very paranoid people. They go to what looks like an empty airplane hangar and meet Garner, a scientist, who takes Mulder to an alien aircraft. It’s up and running, and Mulder looks like a kid on Christmas morning. The technology used to make it run has been kept secret for 70 years so oil companies could keep making money. The aircraft turns invisible, thanks to ununpentium.
1947! The doctor takes the alien’s corpse, though the Man in Black says there’s no point, since it’s dead. The doctor asks why he was brought out there in the first place. In the present, Tad catches Scully drawing some of her own blood and asks if she’s testing her own DNA to see if it’s alien. She tells him about her work on children born without ears. Tad notes that the kids look alien-like, which Scully claims is a coincidence. She has no interest in going back to her past chasing aliens.
Tad asks if Scully misses the X-Files. Scully says that it was challenging and made her feel alive; the same goes for her relationship with Mulder. But it ended up being “impossible.” Tad wants to make sure Scully doesn’t feel like Mulder put her on the spot with the Sveta stuff. Also, he wanted to see her again.
Mulder goes back to Sveta’s to ask for some clarification about her pregnancies. She says she doesn’t believe the aliens took the fetuses. Her experiences have affected her whole life, and she hasn’t been able to have a normal existence. She’s afraid it’ll only get worse. She confesses that humans took the babies, though they did take her aboard ships. She was afraid they would kill her if she told the truth.
Mulder promises that Sveta can trust him, even though he used to work for the government. She guesses that he always wondered if the government was lying to him. He calls Scully, who’s in Tad’s limo again, to tell her that they’ve been misled – maybe there’s no alien conspiracy. He thinks Sveta is the key to everything.
Mulder goes to his former X-Files office, accompanied by a bearded Skinner. Even though the office supposedly hasn’t been touched since the X-Files closed, the files are gone. Mulder tells Skinner that this is “about controlling the past to control the future. It’s about fiction masquerading as fact.” He thinks Skinner owes him answers. Skinner says he doesn’t take orders from Mulder, so Mulder asks who he does take orders from.
Skinner promises that he’s looking out for Mulder like he always has. Mulder rips his “I want to believe” poster and blasts himself for chasing nothing for a decade. He guesses Skinner’s been lied to, too. Skinner says he’s thought about Mulder every day since the X-Files closed, wishing Mulder were still there to investigate weird stuff. Mulder says that surveillance and policing post-9/11 were supposed to make us feel safer, but we’re actually in more danger. Skinner tells him to do something about it.
In another clip from his Internet show, Tad complains that the government targets people with registered guns. Then he does a segment on Scully and her work with earless kids. Scully’s watching the clip when she gets the results of her bloodwork. She asks a nurse to retest some of the samples. She adds that she’s expecting – well, hoping for – a call from Mulder.
In downtown D.C., Mulder meets up with an old man who once promised to give a confirmation if Mulder ever put the pieces together. He thinks the technology from the alien aircraft has been used in disappearances that have been misreported as alien abductions. The old man warns that the reason for this is more complicated than Mulder can know.
Mulder takes a stab at it: It’s a “conspiracy of men against humanity.” Ten years ago, the old man came to Mulder, wanting to spill his secrets. The old man – who’s the Army doctor from 1947 – says he didn’t know how his work would be used. He did experiments on the alien corpse that led to lies told to everyone in the world. Mulder wants to expose those lies, but the old man doesn’t think anyone will believe him. Mulder’s willing to be seen as a fool. The old man tells him he’s close to uncovering everything. As he leaves, he says that Roswell was a smokescreen. Mulder figured that out a while ago.
Scully goes to Mulder’s house, where he tries to tell her what he’s uncovered. She’s worried that he’s obsessed again, because he wants to believe so badly. Mulder does believe – he thinks Tad’s conspiracy theory is correct. The truth really is out there, and Tad is going to reveal it. Scully begs him to tread lightly, but Mulder says he knows what he’s doing.
Sveta reveals that she’s in the house, and Mulder again tells Scully that she’s the key to everything. Scully’s heard enough, so she leaves, but before she can drive off, Tad arrives and asks her to stay. She’s annoyed but agrees to hear what Mulder has to say. He tells the group something science-y about UFOs being attracted to America after the H-bomb, and wormholes and transducers and electrogravitic propulsion. Basically, aliens were worried about us self-destructing.
The government used technology from UFOs, then covered it up. The problem is that Mulder isn’t sure what the goal is. Tad blames corporate greed and the takeover of America, then the world. Eventually, we’ll go into a perpetual war, which will just be a distraction. Everything the government is doing right now is preparation for targeting us. Then some elites will take over and “cull, kill, and subjugate” the rest of us.
Tad thinks it’ll start on a Friday. Money will disappear; then bombs will knock out major grids. The government will tell us it’s an attack by Russia, or they’ll simulate an alien attack. Mulder says the Russians tried it in 1947. Scully says Tad can’t broadcast this theory – it’ll be seen as treason. It’s irresponsible to set off the kind of panic that would follow. Mulder and Sveta disagree, saying it’s irresponsible to keep the truth hidden. Scully informs Sveta that her test came back negative – she doesn’t have any alien DNA. Then she leaves.
Back at work the next day, Scully watches Tad’s show, in which Sveta admits that she lied about being abducted by aliens. Tad paid her to lie so he could get ratings. Mulder guesses that someone got to her. Tad says that whoever turned Sveta against him must be afraid about the truth coming close to being revealed.
As Scully gets her second results, Mulder goes to Sveta’s. The government has found Garner’s hangar, and they knock out the scientists and blow it up. After an operation, Scully tries to go back to Tad’s site, but it’s now unavailable. When she leaves work that night, she sees “don’t give up” written in the dirt on the back of her car.
Mulder arrives and tells Scully about Venus Sydrome, a global-warming scenario that will lead the planet to the brink of the Sixth Extinction. The elite will go off into space and fight the poor souls left on Earth. Scully tells Mulder that Tad’s been shut down, so they need to find Sveta and protect her. She sequenced both Sveta’s and her own entire genomes, and she now believes the conspiracy is true. Both ex-agents get messages from Skinner, and Mulder asks if Scully’s ready for whatever comes next. She says she doesn’t think they have a choice.
Sveta’s driving somewhere when her car shuts down. A green light shines through her roof, and she looks up to see a UFO. She tries to get out of the car, but she doesn’t have enough time before the UFO blows up her car. In an unknown location, FREAKING CSM, who is somehow STILL FREAKING ALIVE, FREAKING A, gets a call letting him know the X-Files division has been reopened.
Thoughts: Tad is played by Joel McHale.
Oh, good, another “key to everything.” We can’t have enough of those.
In a way, it makes sense that CSM keeps coming back from the dead. I mean, you can’t kill the Devil, right?
April 13, 2019
The X-Files 9.20, The Truth, Part 2: It’s Still Out There
An almost-happy ending! Except it’s not the ending
Summary: It’s the day after Gibson threw out a bombshell at Mulder’s trial. Mulder meets with the agents (minus Scully, who’s with Gibson) and laments that Gibson exposed himself to the conspirators. But the agents think it was a good move, since some of the judges are leaning in Mulder’s favor. Skinner urges Mulder to testify, but Mulder refuses. Doggett says they’ll take the stand in his place, even if it means risking their jobs. Reyes agrees – they came here to do their job. Mulder says the judges control the game, so Doggett suggests that they ram them with it.
When the trial resumes, Doggett is put on the stand and talks about the super-soldiers. Agent K. doesn’t want more sci-fi in the trial, but Skinner ties the super-soldiers to Knowle. Agent K. objects again, since Doggett wasn’t at the scene when Mulder killed Knowle. Skinner asks how Mulder could have killed him if Knowle is unkillable. Doggett mentions the magnetite; since Mulder didn’t use it on Knowle, Knowle can’t really be dead.
Agent K. starts his cross-examination by praising Doggett’s professional record, which Agent K. isn’t going to question. But can he really back up Mulder in claiming the super-soldiers are aliens? Doggett’s a skeptic, so how can he believe Mulder’s theories? Doggett can’t answer that question.
Reyes is up next, intended to serve as a level-headed witness so Skinner can show that even rational people believe paranormal stuff has happened. Reyes talks about the circumstances of William’s birth and the audience Scully had while delivering him. Agent K. asks why William would be important to aliens. Blah blah, government conspiracy, the world’s worst surrogate program. Agent K.’s like, “Oh, how convenient that the ship where women were experimented on exploded!”
He asks about William, and Reyes testifies that he has telekinetic abilities. Agent K. asks for a demonstration, but of course, William is now living with an anonymous family. “She gave up the miracle child,” Agent K. spits out. Mulder somehow doesn’t scratch his eyes out. After she’s dismissed from the stand, Reyes accuses Agent K. of not caring about William. He’s just happy that Scully gave him up, thereby giving away proof of an alien conspiracy.
Kersh warns Reyes to behave herself, so she turns on him, saying he’s made a mockery of the X-Files agents and their sacrifices. What’s the point of the trial – to destroy Mulder, who seeks the truth, or to destroy the truth so no one can look for it? “Either way, you lose,” Reyes tells Kersh.
Scully has missed the entire day of proceedings, so Doggett and Reyes visit her that night with big news: Knowle’s body may have been found. Scully reminds them that super-soldiers can’t be killed, but the government claims Knowle is really dead. Doggett stays behind with Gibson while Scully and Reyes go to Quantico so Scully can perform the autopsy. The body is burned, so it can’t be ID’d just on sight. Scully asks Reyes to do whatever it takes to get Knowle’s records.
The trial is about to start back up when Scully arrives with what she says is the proof they need to get Mulder exonerated. Her autopsy shows that the body belongs to a man who died of a broken neck; the body was burned post-mortem. Kersh won’t dismiss the trial, telling Scully she’s in contempt of court. She says Kersh is the one in contempt, since he won’t look at evidence that shows Mulder’s innocent.
Kersh argues that Scully didn’t have authorization to do the autopsy, so she should be removed from the courtroom. Mulder defends his girlfriend, which doesn’t help. Kersh throws them both out and adjourns the trial. Later, everyone returns for the verdict, which Kersh claims is fair and impartial. Mulder is declared guilty of first-degree murder.
Mulder’s allowed to say something before his sentence is determined. Instead of yelling, “F&$% ALL Y’ALL” and flipping a table, Mulder congratulates the judges for succeeding where everyone else has failed. They’ve shown that the truth doesn’t matter if there are enough liars to cover it up. True evil isn’t the devil, but humans.
If Mulder’s guilty, it’s because he dared – and still dares – to believe that the truth will out. The truth wants to be known, and eventually, it’ll come to the judges as it’s come to Mulder. He warns that if the judges think they’re really rid of their headache, it’s only because they’ve cut off their own heads.
Scully, Reyes, Doggett, and Gibson are at Scully’s place when the call comes from Skinner – Mulder has been sentenced to death by lethal injection. Scully breaks down. Later that night, as a very much alive Knowle goes to the Marine base where Mulder’s being held, Skinner and Doggett go to Mulder’s cell and tell him they’re getting him out of there.
Knowle discovers Mulder missing and orders the base sealed. This only slows Mulder and his rescuers down a little, and they continue their escape…until they run into Kersh. He knows they can’t make it out the way they’re going, so he takes them out another exit. Reyes is waiting there at a hole in a fence and drives the getaway vehicle.
The group meets up with Scully and Gibson, and Kersh tells Mulder he needs to go to Canada, then leave the continent within 24 hours. Mulder and Scully leave Gibson behind with the other agents and flee. But Mulder heads south instead of north, since he still has some truth to pursue.
Doggett and Reyes take Gibson to the X-Files office, promising to protect him. But the office has been packed up, and Skinner hasn’t been able to ask Kersh who’s responsible. He thinks they’ve been found out for helping Mulder escape. They go to see Kersh, who’s already talking with Toothpick Man. He and Gibson glare at each other for a little while, and Gibson tells Doggett and Reyes that TM knows where Mulder and Scully are going. They’re not going to Canada, and they’re in a lot of danger.
The lovebirds have reached the Texas/New Mexico border, and while Scully sleeps in the car, Mulder gets out for a bathroom break. He gets a visit from the Lone Gunmen, who tell him to turn around. He shouldn’t be risking his and Scully’s lives or happiness. Mulder still wants to find the truth, but the Gunmen say he already knows it. Mulder tells them he wants to know if he can change it. They warn that he’ll just get himself killed.
Scully wakes up and interrupts, and the journey continues. Mulder has changed into jeans and a white T-shirt, and I give my 100% approval. They end up at some Anasazi pueblos, and Mulder explains that he was sent a message from a wise man who lives in the ruins. He thinks they’ll find the truth there.
Doggett and Reyes take a helicopter to the same area as a woman (whose name is never spoken but who is apparently Lana Chee) leads Mulder and Scully to the wise man – CSM. He says that Mulder now knows the truth, though he hasn’t told Scully yet. CSM helped him find it by sending him to Mouth Weather. He mocks that Mulder could have exonerated himself by testifying at his trial. But he’s too afraid to speak the truth.
CSM is hiding out from the aliens, since they fear the magnetite in the area. That’s what brought down the UFO in Roswell. Wise men have been hiding out there for 2,000, watching Native American culture die: “The original shadow government.” Doggett and Reyes land just as Knowle arrives at the pueblos.
CSM is ready to tell Scully everything Mulder is too scared to. Every president since Truman has been spooked by the tale. The Mayans were even scared, which is why their calendar stops on December 22, 2012 – the day of the final alien invasion. Mulder saw that date on the computer at Mount Weather, so he knows the truth the government is trying to keep hidden.
Mulder taunts that CSM is drunk with power, but doesn’t actually have the power to do anything. CSM claims he’s been protecting Mulder for years in anticipation of this moment, when Mulder would be broken and afraid. Now he can die. Outside, military helicopters arrive as Doggett and Reyes face off with Knowle. Their bullets don’t do anything, but the magnetite in the hills does. His body turns gray and flies into a hill.
Mulder and Scully come outside, and Doggett and Reyes warn that the government is coming for them. Doggett wants the lovebirds to come with him and Reyes, but Mulder sends them off. The helicopters now have two cars to track, but they decide to let all the agents go. Then they blast the pueblos with explosives in an attempt to kill CSM. CSM sits quietly and accepts his supposed fate. (Spoiler: Despite being pretty much set on fire, CSM survives.)
In Roswell, Mulder and Scully check into a motel and mirror one of their first moments together in the X-Files. Mulder repeats what he was supposed to be brainwashed into believing – that he’s guilty and should be punished. When they first met, he tried to convince Scully of the truth, in a motel just like this. Though he succeeded in that, he failed in every other way.
Scully doesn’t agree, adding that Mulder kept the truth from her not because he was broken or afraid, but because he didn’t want to accept it. He says he was afraid the truth would crush Scully’s spirit. Scully says she won’t accept the truth if Mulder won’t. He only fails if he gives up, and she knows he never will. She would do this whole crazy thing all over again.
Mulder points out that the search for the truth hasn’t gotten them to a very good place. Scully repeats that she knows he won’t give up. He’s always said he wants to believe, but in what? If he finally knows the truth, what’s left to believe in? Mulder says he wants to believe that the dead aren’t lost to us: “That they speak to us as part of something greater than us.” If the two of them are powerless now, they can get power when they listen. Scully believes the same thing. He looks at her cross necklace, then gets in bed with her and says, “Maybe there’s hope.”
Thoughts: Say goodbye to Doggett, whose X-Files service has ended. Robert Patrick was a great addition to the cast.
The Marine base has very bad security. A supposedly dead man gets in using his real ID, which doesn’t make anyone suspicious. And Doggett and Skinner just walk in and get Mulder out of his cell. Shouldn’t there be guards with guns or something?
So much New Mexico in the last two episodes. Maybe that’s what inspired Vince Gilligan to set Breaking Bad there.
Here ends the original run of the show. Things are about to get…wildly inconsistent.
June 30, 2018
The X-Files 7.22, Requiem: Take Me Back to the Start
Like I was going to use any other picture here
Summary: There’s a fire burning in Bellefleur, Oregon, the aftermath of a plane crash. Detective Miles is on his way to the scene when his radio and clock start going crazy. His car stops on its own and he’s hit by one of his deputies, Ray Hoese. While Miles’ watch spins, he checks on Ray, who’s not in good shape. There’s alien acid on the ground. Suddenly Ray appears behind Miles, but most fans of the show know that, because of the alien acid, this is probably the Bounty Hunter.
Some number-crunchers total up all the money Mulder’s spent in expenses (rental cars, motel rooms, etc.) on his cases. He suggests that he and Scully share a motel room to save money. One of the number-cruncher thinks chasing aliens is a waste of time and resources, especially since Mulder hasn’t come to any conclusions. And since Samantha has been declared dead, there’s nothing left to investigate. Somewhere else on the planet, Marita goes to a prison to inform Krycek that he’s being released, though she wishes he weren’t.
The number-cruncher addresses Scully’s expense reports with the same criticisms he had for Mulder. Should the government really be footing the bill for the agents to investigate a conspiracy involving aliens enslaving humans? Scully won’t say for certain whether she does or doesn’t believe in aliens, but she admits that she’s seen things she can’t deny. Krycek takes a shower as Marita looks on, because…well, do you blame her? She tells him CSM sent her to get him, and that CSM is dying.
The number-cruncher tells Mulder this evaluation is about money, not the weirdness of his cases. Thanks to the Internet, the agents should be able to do their research from their offices, not on the road. It’s been seven years; the agents should be able to narrow down where the aliens are. It’s about reducing their vision.
In Bellefleur, two teen boys ask Miles about the plane crash. Miles tells them it was a Navy fighter, and definitely not anything extraterrestrial or supernatural. The fire’s out, and there’s nothing to see. The boys are skeptical. Back in D.C., Mulder tells Scully that he and the number-cruncher got into a tussle. He gets a call from Billy Miles, who tells the agents that the disappearances he experienced seven years ago are happening again – but not to him this time. Scully agrees to take a trip to Oregon – the site of her and Mulder’s first X-File together – and waste some more of the FBI’s money.
Marita takes Krycek to D.C., where CSM is holed up at the Watergate. Krycek is angry that CSM had him thrown in prison, but CSM is no less angry that Krycek tried to sell something that was CSM’s. He wants a truce, since they “have a singular opportunity now.” The crash in Oregon was between a military plane and an alien ship, just like Roswell. Now they can rebuild their project. CSM smokes through a hole in his neck, which I really didn’t need to see. Marita asks how he knows that someone hasn’t already covered what CSM wants from the wreckage.
The two teens, Gary and Richie, search the crash site (somehow they got hold of a radiation detector), and Gary has a shaking experience like he’s in the cave in “Rush”. Richie’s flashlight catches fire and he runs away. The next morning, the agents meet up with Billy, who’s now a deputy, thanks to his father’s help. He’s gotten past his abductions, but others haven’t, and Miles denies that they ever happened. He’s sticking to the story about a Navy plane crash. Ray is missing, and Miles hasn’t helped with the search. Mulder thinks Miles will have to admit the truth when they find a UFO.
Miles arrives, confused as to why the agents are in Oregon, since the FAA is now saying there was no crash in the woods. He takes the agents out to the site, and Mulder sees the X he painted on the road seven years ago. Scully finds three bullet shells that seem to be from Ray’s gun. Mulder says he must have shot at nothing, since there’s nothing to find. Scully quietly asks Billy if Ray was a good deputy. Billy says he was; he’s married and just became a father. After the agents leave the site, Miles tosses the shells in his trunk…which already holds Ray’s body.
Mulder and Scully go to Ray’s house and learn that his wife is Theresa Nemman. She tells them that Ray is also an abductee, though he hasn’t told many people. She has medical records showing that he underwent a lot of tests when he was abducted. While she goes to get them, Scully plays with the baby. Mulder enjoys the sight, even knowing that, thanks to the aliens’ tests, Scully will never get to play with a baby of her own.
That night, Scully comes to Mulder’s motel room (“it’s me”), feeling sick. He tucks her into his bed and spoons her, allegedly to warm her up. He thinks she should go home, since this case will just keep reminding her of her own abduction experiences, and the fact that they’ve left her unable to have a baby. Mulder continues that the number-cruncher might have been right about the costs of their jobs. The personal costs might not make it worth it. They should have lives that focus on something other than chasing monsters. Scully stays put, though, so I’m not sure she agrees.
Krycek is in Oregon and hasn’t turned up any evidence of a UFO. He tells CSM that Mulder and Scully are there looking for Ray, and will probably find the ship before Krycek does. CSM thinks if Krycek finds Ray, he’ll find the UFO. Theresa wakes to a knock at her door and thinks her husband has come home. She guesses that he went missing because he was abducted again. She quickly realizes that Ray isn’t really Ray, but she’s ready with an alien ice pick. Unfortunately, the alien acid burns her eyes, and the Bounty Hunter is able to overpower her.
The next morning, the agents come to the Hoeses’ house, where Billy tells them he’s sure Theresa was abducted. They see a burn mark in the carpet, something they’ve both seen before – the remnants of the alien acid. Scully gets dizzy but wants to keep working. In D.C., CSM dismisses his aide, Greta, and tells Marita that he’s sure Krycek will find the UFO. It’s rebuilding itself after the crash, so time is running out.
CSM can’t give Krycek any help, since Krycek will want to sell the information he finds. That information is “the answer to all things – every possible imaginable question.” Not God, as Marita guesses; God is just alien intelligence that humans can’t understand. Marita asks if the aliens are coming. CSM says they’re coming back.
Mulder spots Richie in the crowd gathered outside the Hoeses’ house and thinks he knows something. Richie tells the agents and Billy that Gary was taken, and he knows Miles knows what’s going on. He takes the agents to the woods, where Scully has the same shaking experience Gary did. The guys don’t see, since they’re somewhere else, finding Richie’s flashlight. When Mulder makes to to where Scully’s been knocked to the ground, he tells her they need to warn Billy that these abductions are different from the ones seven years ago. These victims aren’t coming back.
Billy goes looking for his father at home, believing he’s the Bounty Hunter (in which case your gun wouldn’t do you any good, Billy). If Miles is really Miles, he should believe Billy about his abductions. Miles says he believes him; he just wants it all to go away. He calms Billy and takes his gun…then morphs into the Bounty Hunter. Mulder and Scully arrive moments later and find the house empty.
Two days later, the agents are back in D.C., and Mulder’s ready to hear their punishment for going to Oregon. Skinner’s in the clear, but he can’t do much for Mulder. He lets Marita and Krycek into the office, holding Mulder back when he tries to attack Krycek. Marita announces that CSM is dying and wants them to revive the conspiracy. They know there’s a UFO in Oregon; it’s just cloaked. The Bounty Hunter is getting rid of anyone who underwent testing so he can cover everything up. Krycek wants to give Mulder the chance to find proof (and, in the process, damn CSM’s soul).
Scully arrives just then, so Mulder has to bring her into the fold. He calls in the Lone Gunmen to confirm that there’s a cloaked UFO in the woods. Marita and Krycek repeat CSM’s warning that it’s rebuilding itself, so time is running out. Mulder tells Scully he’s not letting her go back to Oregon with him: “It has to end sometime. That sometime is now.” Since previous abductees are being taken, Scully’s at risk, and Mulder doesn’t want to lose her. She hugs him and tells him she won’t let him go alone.
So Mulder goes back to Oregon with Skinner at his side, while Scully looks at Billy’s medical records in D.C. She tells the Lone Gunmen that all the abductees have experienced strange brain activity, just like what Mulder experienced earlier in the year. She remembers being knocked down in the woods and thinks the abducting force was rejecting her. Mulder’s the one who’s really in danger. Suddenly she collapses.
In the woods, Mulder and Skinner set up some laser beams in an attempt to unclock the cloaked UFO. Mulder sticks his hand in the space where the beams stop and experiences the shaking. Skinner goes looking for him, but the field has now cloaked Mulder as well. He sees all the abductees standing together and goes to join them. They’re under the UFO, as if they’re waiting for it to beam them on board. The Bounty Hunter arrives, and he and Mulder stare each other down.
The UFO sheds its cloaking, and Skinner is able to see it fly away. He guesses that Mulder’s on board. In D.C., Krycek and Marita go back to CSM, who guesses that they failed. He knows his time is up. Krycek is ready to send the Devil back to Hell, ignoring CSM’s warning that he’ll be dooming all of mankind. Krycek ignores him and pushes him down a flight of stairs.
Scully’s in the hospital, undergoing tests (presumably not the kind the aliens performed on her), when Skinner gets back to D.C. He’s upset that he lost Mulder. Like Scully, Skinner can’t deny what he saw. Scully’s determined to find Mulder – she has to. As Skinner’s about to leave, Scully says she needs to tell him something, and he’ll have to keep it quiet. She can’t believe it or explain it, but she’s pregnant.
Thoughts: If I were Gillian Anderson, I would have been really ticked that David Duchovny made the show move production to California, then bailed.
Even without being Gillian Anderson, I’m ticked that they didn’t bring Krycek back for any of the revival episodes. I mean, they brought back Jeffrey Spender, and no one likes him.
Speaking of Krycek…stairs? That was your big murder plan? How dumb.
Season 7 is a wrap! Get ready for John Doggett!
May 12, 2018
The X-Files 7.15, En Ami: The Worst Road Trip Since “Drive”
Same
Summary: In Goochland, Virginia, a couple is driving home with their son, Jason, reminding him that people’s words can’t hurt him. He’s still not prepared when they’re accosted by protesters carrying signs talking about the family’s faith. They have to be escorted into their house by a police officer.
Jason’s father, Cameron, tells him that the protesters think they should take him to the hospital to have his cancer treated. But his parents believe that since God gave him cancer, God is the one who has to heal him. That night, Jason wakes up to a huge storm outside his window. A bright light appears, and he stands in front of his window with his arms open. A group of men in suits approach the house.
Scully is leaving for work when she finds a copy of the Goochland Guardian outside her door. There’s a note attached with a verse from Psalms: “You are the God who performs miracles. You display your power among the peoples.” The front-page article is about a miracle. Scully takes the paper with her to the office, where Mulder tells her that Jason McPeck woke up completely cured of cancer. The McPecks’ religion forbids medical treatment, and they believe their son was cured by angels.
Scully knows that spontaneous remission has happened before, so this isn’t really a miracle. But Mulder thinks something else is going on, since he got word of Jason’s recovery from an anonymous email from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He thinks that plus the paper at Scully’s door means this is an X-File someone wants them to investigate. Even if it’s not, Mulder’s curious to get answers.
So Scully goes to the McPecks’ and sees for herself that Jason is back to his normal self. He tells her that the angels came from the sky in a ball of light and looked like human men. Like the angels in the Bible, they told him not to be afraid. Unlike the angels in the Bible, they pinched the back of his neck – the same place Scully had her chip removed years ago.
When she goes back to her car, she finds an unwelcome guest: CSM. He tells her he’s doing God’s work and claims he saved Jason. Scully kicks him out of the car but finds it hard to ignore him when he asks if she’s not curious about his claims, since she’s a doctor. He’s the one who sent her the newspaper and sent Mulder the email. CSM announces that he’s dying and wants to make things right. He has a cure for cancer and wants to give it to Scully.
Scully won’t take the bait, and CSM tells her she’s the only person he’ll give it to. If Mulder hears anything about his claims, CSM will take the secret to his grave. Scully sees that he’s left something on the seat, but she drives off without looking at it. She heads back to her office and studies the card CSM left her, blank except for a phone number. She dials the number, hangs up, then has the number traced so she can get the address associated with it.
This leads her to an office building where security guards give her a visitor’s pass and send her to the third floor. She ends up in CSM’s office, where he tells her that he’s looking back on his life and has realized he has no legacy to leave behind. He’s dying of some complication from the procedure he underwent back at the beginning of the season. Scully thinks he wants to use her to make himself look respectable.
CSM says they’re wasting time with the past while millions are dying of cancer. Scully’s game to go along with his plan, but it’ll involve a road trip. CSM is taking a huge chance by offering her access to this huge secret. He’s destroyed a lot of people, including those closest to him. Now he wants to do something good before he dies.
Mulder gets a message from Scully (“Mulder, it’s me”) telling him she’s going out of town for a family emergency. He leaves her a message in return (“Scully, it’s me”) saying he hopes everything’s okay. She’s getting ready to go off on her road trip, and has stuck a microphone in her bra so she can record whatever CSM says to her.
Scully drives, and objects when CSM tries to light up in the car. He throws out his cigarette and says he’ll just quit. He wants to earn her trust, knowing that she thinks he’s heartless. He admits that he’s always felt affection toward her, and his intentions are honorable. After all, he could have let her die when she had cancer, but he saved her. Now, CSM wants to give Scully the same power to save lives.
In the morning, Mulder goes to Scully’s apartment building to find out if she left under suspicious circumstances. The landlord tells him that she went with a driver he’s seen before – a driver with a fondness for smoking. Scully has been driving all right, but CSM hasn’t told her where they’re going. He notes that she still doesn’t trust him. How long did it take her to trust Mulder? CSM knows they didn’t immediately click. He psychoanalyzes that Scully is drawn to powerful men but fears their power. She’s devoted to Mulder, to the point where she would die for him, but she won’t let herself love him.
The two are finally at their destination, where CSM plans to show Scully that he’s capable of more than destruction. They’re being followed by someone. Scully and CSM are at a house to see a woman named Marjorie who can back up CSM’s claims. He tells Scully that the woman, who looks to be in her 70s, is actually 118. Scully sees a scar on the back of her neck. CSM thinks that being able to save lives and see people’s joy after their recovery is why Scully became a doctor.
Mulder has checked with Maggie, who doesn’t know anything about a family emergency, and is now in Skinner’s office to get help finding out why Scully disappeared. Skinner thinks she left willingly, so they shouldn’t worry about her. Scully calls just then to tell both men that everything’s fine. Mulder doesn’t believe her.
Scully and CSM stop at a gas station, and Scully goes to use the bathroom while CSM fills up the car. She leaves a message for Mulder through her hidden microphone, telling him she weighed the risks before agreeing to the road trip. She gives her location and puts the tape in an envelope to mail to Mulder, planning to send more along the way. When Scully leaves the bathroom, CSM’s ready to drive. He offers her a Lifesaver, which I guess is his version of a joke. A man back at the gas station steals Scully’s tape from the mailbox.
Scully and CSM reach their next destination in the middle of the night. Scully’s asleep, and CSM puts on gloves to do who knows what. The Lone Gunmen are also awake in the middle of the night, having spent some time looking into Scully’s disappearance. They show up at Mulder’s apartment in disguise and tell him they found a series of communications between Scully and someone named Cobra. They think she’s gone to great lengths to keep her location hidden. Mulder says she knows he’ll find her no matter what.
Scully wakes up in a fishing cabin, wearing pajamas she definitely wasn’t wearing in the car. She accuses CSM of drugging her, which he denies. She was tired, and he wanted to make her comfortable. They’re in Milford, Pennsylvania, but Scully thinks this is outside of their deal, so she’s done with the trip. CSM tells her she’s free to go, but Scully knows she won’t get any answers if she leaves, so she decides to stick around. They’re still being watched.
Mulder takes the Lone Gunmen to Skinner’s office to tell his boss that Scully’s been communicating with someone who works on a Department of Defense shadow project. Except the Scully sending the emails to Cobra is an impostor, someone who hacked her email and intercepted the messages from Cobra. They’re supposed to meet so Cobra can hand over information on his project. But the Gunmen can’t figure out where the meeting is supposed to take place. Mulder thinks CSM is the impostor, and they need to stop him before something horrible happens to Scully.
In Milford, CSM tells Scully that his contact has invited them to dinner. He’s bought her a dress, and it’s low-cut, so I don’t think Scully will be able to wear her microphone. At dinner, CSM tells her that his contact “is to human genetic science what Oppenheimer and Fermi were to the advent of nuclear warfare.” Cobra wants assurances from Scully that his research will be used by the good guys. The two toast to the future.
CSM has another revelation for Scully: The cancer cure isn’t just for cancer – it can cure all human disease. It’s mostly extraterrestrial. Scully knows that this cure can make CSM well. He tells her that the power in something like this can be used for both good and evil. People will be able to choose who lives and who dies. CSM doesn’t seem sure that he actually wants to be cured. Maybe dying is the last good thing he can do.
As a man watches Scully from a nearby table, CSM goes outside for a cigarette and tells another man that Cobra hasn’t shown up. The man warns that Scully won’t wait forever. CSM tells him to just do his job. As a waiter clears her plate, Scully notices a note giving her a location, Calico Cove. She and CSM head to a dock on a lake, and she heads off by herself in a boat.
The man who was watching Scully at the restaurant comes to meet her; he’s clearly Cobra, and he thinks Scully is the person he’s been communicating with. Someone watches through a sniper scope as Cobra hands over his work on a CD. Scully asks where the science came from, revealing that they’ve never spoken before. Before Cobra can respond, someone starts shooting. Cobra’s dead, and Scully’s next in the shooter’s sights. But before the sniper – the man CSM spoke to outside the restaurant – can kill Scully, CSM takes him out.
Scully returns to the cabin, where CSM pretends he’s been waiting for her the whole time. She blasts him for claiming that no one else knew what was going on. He tells her to keep Cobra’s research. She takes it home with her and gives it to the Lone Gunmen, but the CD is blank. All of Scully’s work was for nothing.
Scully takes Mulder to CSM’s office building, but it’s empty. Mulder says that CSM used her, and told her things that would make her believe him, like about Marjorie’s age (he showed Scully her birth certificate). Scully thinks Jason’s recovery is undeniable proof that there’s a cure for cancer. But Mulder knows that sooner or later, the chip in his neck will disappear, and they still won’t have any proof. CSM conned Scully, and Mulder’s surprised that he left her alive.
Scully insists that CSM was sincere, but Mulder disagrees. As he voices over that CSM did everything to get the cure for himself, even if it means sacrificing the rest of the human race, CSM enjoys a glass of wine, the CD by his side. Scully thinks CSM’s longing for something more than power was genuine. At the cabin, CSM tosses the CD in the lake and lights up a cigarette.
Thoughts: This episode was written by William B. Davis (CSM), probably just as an excuse for him to work with Gillian Anderson.
Goochland is a real place, and I bet everyone who lives there hates that name.
In season 11, CSM claims that in this episode, he drugs Scully so he can impregnate her. But as of the end of season 11, that wasn’t verified, and I choose to remain in denial. I’ll buy that he gave her the ability to conceive, which leads to William, but I’m in denial that CSM is his father.
April 14, 2018
The X-Files 7.11, Closure: In Starlight
Shouldn’t these kids have adult supervision?
Summary: The bodies of Ed’s victims are exhumed and taken away for examination as Mulder voices over something poetic about their deaths. That night, visions of the children crawl out of their now-empty graves and form a circle before vanishing. Mulder voices over that he wants to believe that they’ll one day be reborn.
At the Sacramento police station, officers review Ed’s tapes while Mulder looks at his pictures. Scully tells him that Ed committed his first murder when he was 19, after he was asked to play Santa at a school. He’s made a full confession, but he won’t admit to killing Amber Lynn, and her body wasn’t in any of the graves. Neither was Samantha’s. Mulder says he just wants this to be over.
A man named Harold Piller comes to the station to offer his services as a police psychic. He’s intuited that they’re still looking for a girl who isn’t among Ed’s victims. He thinks he can find her. Scully sees that Piller has worked in many different countries, and hasn’t always succeeded at finding missing people. He explains that in one instance, he determined that the kids were walk-ins, transported from the sites of their supposed deaths “in starlight.”
Scully pulls Mulder aside to warn him that he’s vulnerable and shouldn’t believe that Piller can help them. He reminds her that Kathy Lee also mentioned walk-ins, so there may be something there. Scully argues that it’s just an explanation to offer comfort when people can’t explain what really happened. Mulder thinks the bodies really are somewhere else. Maybe Samantha’s is, too. Scully says that she’s going back to D.C.; there’s nothing more for them to do in Sacramento.
Mulder and Piller go to the mass grave site as Piller explains that his son disappeared under “strange circumstances” and was never found. One day, Piller started to see him. Mulder asks why walk-ins take children. Piller tells him that in most cases, the parents have a vision of the kids being dead. He thinks good spirits are responsible for those; they’re showing the fates the kids were going to meet. The spirits intervene and transform their fates into starlight, saving the kids.
In this instance, though, Piller knows that Ed’s victims all died horribly, pleading for their lives. He can see them. Mulder asks about Amber Lynn, but Piller says she was never there. However, he can sense a connection between her and Mulder. He can sense that Mulder lost a young girl close to him a long time ago. He guesses it was Mulder’s sister. He thinks Samantha and Amber Lynn also have a connection of some kind. Piller’s sure they’ll find them.
In a video from 1989, Mulder undergoes hypnosis to try to remember what happened the night of Samantha’s disappearance. Scully watches the tape with an agent named Schoniger, who says that Mulder seemed to really be in a hypnotic state. However, he thinks his guilt and fear are preventing him from remembering what really happened to Samantha. His delusion of abduction is playing into his hope that Samantha’s still alive.
Scully asks why Mulder has picked alien abduction as his theory for what happened. Schoniger thinks that in the 16 years between Samantha’s disappearance and Mulder’s first regression hypnotherapy in 1989, he saw a lot of imagery that he made fit. Schoniger guesses that Samantha was just kidnapped (by a human) and murdered. He wonders why Scully’s digging into the case. Scully says that someone owes it to Mulder. Schoniger thinks she should leave the past in the past, but Scully wants Mulder to get closure.
Mulder checks into a motel and falls asleep watching Planet of the Apes. Piller comes by to tell him he’s sensed a visitor who wants to tell them something. He tells Mulder to grab a pen and paper, then relays a message from Teena. It’s about Samantha. A vision of Teena appears behind Mulder, trying to say something to Piller, but she disappears before Piller can get anything from her. Mulder decides Piller is a fraud and kicks him out. But Piller sees that Mulder has written “April Base” without realizing it.
Scully goes back to Teena’s house and finds a scrap of paper that came from something she burned along with her pictures. The only thing she can make out are the letters CGBS. She calls Mulder (“Mulder, it’s me”) and tells him there was a Treasury Department investigation into Samantha’s disappearance. She’s matched the scrap of paper to a copy of the document in the investigation file that calls off the search for Samantha. CGBS are the initials of the person who ended the search – C.G.B. Spender, AKA CSM.
Mulder isn’t surprised that CSM was involved in the investigation, since he was a friend of Bill Mulder’s. He doesn’t think there’s any reason to try to contact him and ask questions. Besides, Mulder’s busy checking out April Air Force Base with Piller. It’s decommissioned, so Mulder doesn’t think it hold any answers for them. Piller accuses him of being afraid of finding out the truth. The base must be important, since Mulder wrote the name down himself. Mulder wonders why it’s so important to Piller.
Scully arrives home to find CSM waiting for her. She thinks he’s sick, since he doesn’t look well, and he tells her he had an operation. She confronts him over ending the search for Samantha. CSM says he did it because he knew no one would find her – she’s dead. Scully asks why he didn’t say anything earlier. Why let Mulder keep believing she’s alive. CSM insists that he was just being kind. Otherwise, Mulder wouldn’t have had any hope.
Mulder and Piller return to the base after dark and climb the fence that’s there to keep people out. Piller senses that Samantha was there, but he can’t determine which house she was in. As they’re hiding from an officer driving around the base, Mulder finds handprints in some cement, with Samantha’s name written next to them. There’s also a set of handprints labeled “Jeffrey.”
Scully comes to Sacramento and gets filled in. Mulder believes that Samantha was abducted and returned, then lived with the Spenders. Scully tells him that CSM said Samantha is dead. Of course, Mulder thinks he lied, but Scully doesn’t think he has a reason to lie. She believes that Piller has been lying to Mulder this whole time.
The agents confront Piller with information he didn’t provide before: He’s the main suspect in his son’s murder, and he’s been institutionalized for schizophrenia. Piller thinks Mulder should believe him anyway, considering what he’s shown Mulder. He has no reason to mislead Mulder. They have the same goal, and Piller thinks his gift is meant to help people. He wants to prove that Samantha is really out there.
The three go back to the base and enter the Spenders’ empty house. Piller tells them to hold hands while he tries to summon the family’s presences. Scully is adequately sarcastic, while Mulder hopes they play spin the bottle afterward. Visions appear, and a boy takes Mulder to one of the bedrooms. He finds a diary that Piller tells him was Samantha’s.
Mulder and Scully read the diary in a diner, learning that Samantha underwent tests as late as 1979. She only has a few memories of her past, but is able to remember Mulder. She hopes someday he reads her diary. The last passage is about how Samantha wants to run away. As they leave the diner, Mulder looks up at the stars and talks about how old the light is by the time we see it. It starts at the beginning of time and will continue to the future. Maybe they’re souls looking for homes. Mulder wonders what Teena was trying to tell him.
The agents split up to get some sleep, and a vision of Teena visits her son to whisper something in his ear. The next morning, Scully brings Mulder a page from a 1979 police department blotter about a runaway matching Samantha’s description. They look through hospital records to find out if Samantha was a patient under a fake name. Mulder finds a file on a Jane Doe who was paranoid and had been abused. He thinks CSM lied about Samantha being dead because she’s still alive.
Scully points out that 1979 was 21 years ago, and they have no idea where Samantha could be now. They don’t know who released her from the hospital, but they do have the name of the nurse who signed her into the ER. When the two of them and Piller go to the nurse’s house, Mulder gets the feeling that this is the end of the road, and he’s finally about to learn the truth.
Scully and Piller go up to the house first and speak to the nurse, Arbutus (…what?) Ray. She had a vision of the girl, dead, but no one believed her. Somehow, it made sense to her. Some men came to get the girl, and the one Arbutus thought was her father glared when she asked him to put out his cigarette. She took the men to the girl’s room, which was locked, but she had vanished.
The boy from the Spenders’ apartment leads Mulder to a clearing where a bunch of ghostly children are playing. Mulder recognizes Amber Lynn, who gives him a smile. Samantha runs up to her brother and hugs him, appearing almost real for a moment. When Mulder rejoins Scully and Piller, he repeats that this is the end of the road. He saw Piller’s son and knows that all the missing kids are dead, but they’re okay. Piller needs to let go. Now Piller’s the skeptic, refusing to believe Mulder. Mulder can’t explain what happened, but he tells Scully he’s fine: “I’m free.”
Thoughts: Piller calling himself a police psychic makes me want an X-Files/Psych crossover so badly.
Who’s responsible for letting Mulder wear his hair the way he did in 1989?
I’m not saying a so-called psychic is reliable, but if my choices are believe him or believe CSM, I’m siding with the psychic.
But seriously: Arbutus?
'90s Flashback 