It’s good to be back, but what we’re back to isn’t good.
This has been my standard catchphrase when people ask me how the new X-Files is coming along. I say my catchphrase often, and without variation, because if I answered everyone honestly, I would deluge these poor people with nonsensical, stream of consciousness shouting.
A scream of consciousness, if you will.
But it’s not the worst thing ever. It’s still The X-Files, and on its worst days that’s enough for me. It’s better than the 2008 movie I Want to Believe. It’s better than Season Nine and most of Season Eight. It was, honestly, never going to be what it was in its glory run. TV is different now. Most TV of this genre isn’t afforded the luxury of what made X-Files great and unique and still un-duplicated: the slow burn. This is X-Files in the age of turbo-loading seasons with OMG moments (except the most OMG moments came in the form of “OMG this dialogue.”).
What we have is something that feels like the old show, but mythology episodes charged with a rushed, no-time-to-explain ADD and enjoyable Monster-of-the-Week episodes bogged down with hand-wringing about the child Mulder and Scully gave up for adoption in Season Nine. Let’s break it down:
10x1. My Struggle
The premiere that brought our agents back together again and tried to convince us that over the entire series, we never truly faced a threat from aliens but rather from (in the style of Twilight Zone) MAN HIMSELF.
The Good: No matter what the fucking Goddamn internet says, Gillian Anderson remains flawless and slips back into Scully’s soothing voice like a glove after her cold performance in Hannibal. And like I said before, it really is good to see them back together again solving mysteries and the like.
The Bad: Whose “Struggle” is this? Mulder seems the likely answer, since he starts the story disillusioned with his work. However, like my Uncle Gary, upon being shown a single YouTube right-wing conspiracy video, he is sold. No struggle there! The struggle is really Scully’s, who—despite the two hundred monsters she’s seen and flying saucers and abductions—the show still wants us to believe she’s a skeptic.
SIDE NOTE: It is my strongly-held belief that the dynamic of Mulder the Believer and Scully the Skeptic being the cornerstone of the show is false. It’s Mulder the Reckless Hothead and Scully the Methodical Evidence Collector. She believes! …Upon seeing evidence, of which there is much. Embracing this dynamic would have spared us many scenes where my beloved Scully comes across as a nagging, deluded bonehead. She just wants evidence, guys. It’s not tough.
10x2. Founder’s Mutation
Super teens! This episode delved, whether we wanted it or not (NOT), into the guilt Mulder and Scully still feel over the giving up of their child. Also classic X-Files goings-on with inner-ear frequencies that make you want to kill yourself and science-y corporations getting their just desserts for Playing God or Something.
The Good: This is actually my favorite episode of the season. It didn’t make a lot of pretense of being more than a good old MOW (except in one scene; see below). It also started a trend of this new season being the most ethnically diverse they’ve ever been. The world Mulder and Scully investigate is starting to look like the real world! Multiple South Asian and black actors in key, speaking, story-driving roles. All very good.
Plus we got a little gay subplot! This was handled with reality and kindness and normalcy (if you can get past the introduction of the gay character being him trying to go down on Mulder in a public toilet—which I can!).
The Bad: There are some fans that like Baby William. There are some that like it enough but don’t need him mentioned again. Then there are a lot of people who were never feeling it, think of him as a marker of when the show started to unravel, and are livid that he’s playing such an enormous role in these new episodes. I belong in that camp.
10x3. Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster
The title says it all. Rhys Darby from Flight of the Concords plays the Were-Monster whom they meet. He’s actually a lizard in his normal form but was bitten by a man, turns into a man, and that is his curse! (Twilight Zone music)
The Good: Baby William is mentioned the least out of all the episodes. The Internet seemed to like this one best.
The Bad: THE INTERNET IS WRONG, AS USUAL. This was actually the most unwatchable episode for me. Writer/Director Darin Morgan tried to recreate the wickity-whack, shifting POV comedy of his Season Three masterpiece “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” or Vince Gilligan’s “Bad Blood.”
Vince Gilligan and Season Three Darin Morgan he is not.
The problem here isn’t really the so-so script. Personally, I think these jerk-off comedy episodes are great but only to palette cleanse in the middle of a long season. Using one of six precious episodes to devote to poorly executed yuks (and using Scully only for a single, sex scene fantasy) was deeply unwelcome.
Lastly, the episode stumbled through some C-Plus discussion of transgender issues. It seemed like they wanted to do trans jokes but get away with it. Mulder followed up every joke by spitting out a Wikipedia-ed clarification of what trans really means. It comes off as icky!
10x4. Home Again
Scully’s Mom dies, and Scully uses her grief to motivate herself to take down a trash monster that’s been slaughtering urban developers. Also, the trash monster was created by Banksy.
The Good: The Trash Man is legit frightening, and the Banksy art of him coming to life is unique and gorgeous. Writer/Director Glen Morgan clearly pulled out his Final Destination bona fides on this. Gillian Anderson slays a deeply emotional performance made near-impossible by a script of hideous dialogue and out-of-character actions.
The Bad: Gillian being shackled to hospital bed scenes with shite, subtext-less dialogue while Duchovny gets to run around doing his job…left me cold. I know Fox Executives think Scully is a guest star because they want to pay her like a guest star, but this season IS a Scully arc. She’s losing her mom, having her faith tested (again), needing to buy into another conspiracy, needing to embrace her abduction past, and having the most regret over William. Mulder is just following her lead.
10x5. Babylon
Mulder and Scully meet their younger doppelgangers (even though Lauren Ambrose is only nine years younger than Gillian!) on a quest to psychically draw information out of a comatose terrorist bomber before another attack can occur.
The Good: Lauren Ambrose is great. Her character name, Agent Einstein, issssssssn’t. When I was fifteen, I wrote a spec X-Files where I introduced Mulder and Scully mirror analogues. It was soooooooo misguided, but I was fifteen.
The Iffy: The X-Files is a show with a muddled political thesis. It sort of always has been. It’s thrived during two Democratic presidencies when, apparently, government mistrust is at its highest. But it swings both ways. The show’s genesis formed around Nixon/Watergate paranoia. They’re also very careful never to slant the paranoia politically one way or another.
The Bad: Their attempts to be even-handed backfired for me on this, particularly in the opening scene. Our Muslim terrorist is seen being a normal Joe—he prays, he makes himself a PBJ, he meets his friend to hang, and then he blows up an art gallery.
I get the need to humanize the character since his mother plays a pivotal role later on. However. For all of Mulder and Scully’s correcting of “Not all Muslims are terrorists!” to the bigots in this episode, starting off with a scene of the bomber being just a normal Muslim kind of validates that thinking. It’s words versus actions.
10x6. My Struggle II
AKA the finale you heard everyone hated. The Cigarette-Smoking Man returns from the dead to begin his plan for world domination—initiating a pandemic using genome witchcraft the government began sixty years ago with smallpox vaccines. With Mulder dying and Scully immune (thanks to her altered alien DNA), it’s race against the clock to find a vaccin—OH WAIT, HOLD ON, THEY FOUND ONE.
The Good: This is actually what the show has been teasing from the get-go: the moment the shadow government puts its long-gestating plans in motion and the world learns the truth. The truth is literally out there now. That’s exciting, right? (NO; see below).
Lauren Ambrose and Gillian spend much of the episode together as a team while Mulder and the Cigarette-Smoking Man growl at each other. The episode was written by Chris Carter, co-written by Drs. Anne Simon and Margaret Fearon, the former being a science advisor on the 1998 film Fight the Future. There’s a lot of DNA chatter in this episode, so thank you, Anne! Also, the episode co-written by women is the first Season X episode to pass the Bechdel test. Agents Scully and Einstein and the Our Lady of Sorrows nurse are the chief characters in this. So, thank you Dr. Simon and Dr. Fearon for being Science AND Women Talking to Each Other advisors.
The Bad: Good God was this episode rushed. In forty-two minutes, we went from ordinary world to plague to cure. They would have benefited from having a second hour to build things more gradually. Scully (and the audience) had to do a lot of catch-up very fast. It also meant Scully and Mulder never shared a scene together until the ending. This entire season has verged on Arrested Development Season Four levels of actors being separated.
The Cliffhanger: So. Mulder is on his deathbed in the middle of a gridlocked bridge while Scully looks up at a UFO descending on them. Also Mulder needs alien stem cells, which can only be gotten from…William, the child they gave up for adoption and is Godknowswhere.
This is my problem with William that we as X-Fans wanted to avoid but is now unavoidable: the realization that Mulder and Scully are horrible parents (and possibly people). William was given up for adoption because mysterious men were trying to kill him for his supernatural abilities. Okay. He still has the supernatural abilities and can probably still be found by these mysterious men—he just won’t have his parents’ insight about who he is and what is happening to him. He’s alone and terrified, likely. He’s in a shitload of danger, way more than he would have been had they kept him.
Buuuuuut now Daddy needs medical help, so we gotta find our son. It’s basically the story of Locke’s deadbeat dad from Lost suddenly reaching out to him because he needs his kidney.
In Season Eleven, when we meet this super-powered Scully teen, I advise the creators not to make him chill with this arrangement.
