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The X-Files Season 11 / Event Series 2: Introduction | 11X01:My Struggle III | 11X02: This | 11X03: Plus One | 11X04: The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat | 11X05: Ghouli

We enter the second half of the season, which is interesting as it is a series of episodes almost entirely written and directed by newcomers to The X-Files, at least in writing and directing roles. Kitten is written by Gabe Rotter, assistant in The Lone Gunmen series and XF season 9 and Chris Carter’s right-hand man since then (he also co-wrote a different episode for season 10 that in the end was never made for scheduling reasons); and is directed by Carol Banker, script supervisor for seasons 6-9, director of one The Lone Gunmen episode, and who also had a stint as an actress in a very short role in Gillian Anderson’s own 7X17: all things!

Walter “Eagle” Skinner

Kitten draws heavily from a very memorable scene from 2X08: One Breath, a defining moment for the character, where he confides to Mulder about his dreams and his fears: “When I was eighteen, I went to Vietnam. I wasn’t drafted, Mulder, I enlisted in the Marine Corps the day of my eighteenth birthday. I did it on a blind faith. I did it because I believed it was the right thing to do. I don’t know, maybe I still do. Three weeks into my tour, a ten-year-old North Vietnamese boy walked into camp covered with grenades and I blew his head off from a distance of ten yards.” In Kitten, he repeats “I enlisted in the Marine Corps the day that I turned 18” and we get to see the incident with the boy with the grenades. This is a nice callback, however nothing that we see in Kitten comes close to the emotional impact of that first scene in One Breath, the reason beings that with the character of Skinner the show has been there and done that.

There have been other Skinner-centric episodes in the past, which had more Skinner than Kitten has: 3X21: Avatar, 4X21: Zero Sum, 6X10: S.R.819. In the way Mulder and Scully investigate into Skinner’s dubious activities and discover Skinner in surveillance camera footage, Kitten mostly resembles Zero Sum. All of Skinner’s episodes have been about his allegiances, his self-doubts, his moral compass and the compromises he has to make. Things are no different here. However, after all these characters have been through after all these years — after Skinner was the only friend Scully had during her pregnancy and after Skinner killed Krycek — how many times one can repeat the same storyline until it’s beyond stale? Once more, the question here is “don’t you think that we should give him the benefit of the doubt after everything we’ve been through with him?”

What is new here is the justification for Skinner’s lack of career development within the FBI, something that had rang false when season 10 started, as if the creative team was not trying at all to change the formula of the past. Here we are told that “Walter Skinner’s stalled career has everything to do with his blind loyalty to the both of you and your misguided search for some imaginary truth.” Mulder & Scully seem to cast a very long shadow, given how they have been more absent from the FBI over 2002-2016 than they have been in the X-Files unit!

The episode does provide a showcase for Skinner and the consistently excellent Mitch Pileggi, in his scene with Davey (where we get a rare smile!) and his confession to Mulder and Scully at the end. “You two came along and you taught me not to hide from it, but to have the guts to shine a light directly into the darkest corners.”

The episode wraps with Skinner intent on doing something about all this: “But I intend to do right by this man. And that means finding the truth of what the hell it was they used him for. No matter the cost.” This sort of setup is weird, given that we certainly won’t see Skinner’s assault on Glazebrook mental hospital in the next episode.

MK NAOMI and Kitten’s issues

The series has also done its share of Vietnam War episodes (2X04: Sleepless, 4X16: Unrequited) and its share of government-run mind control experiments (2X03: Blood, 3X23: Wetwired, 5X01: Unusual Suspects). Kitten is derivative of two episodes specifically, Blood (chemicals that increase violence spread by airplane crops dusting in a rural community) and Sleepless (experimented on Vietnam vets still living with their remorse).

Here, we have the son of a Vietnam veteran on a revenge rampage against those that wronged his father, against his platoon mates that testified against him (Banjo, Eagle) and against those that experimented on him (the town doctor, ho was also leading the gas chamber experiments in Glazebrook). There are echoes of Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs here, with some incomplete characterization: did Kitten commit suicide or did his crazed son kill him? The same question applies for the mother.

“They were trying to learn how to control human behavior, harnessing our fears to manipulate us into violence.” Kitten presents project MK NAOMI, an obvious mix of MK ULTRA, the CIA research program into mind control techniques, and Agent Orange, the scorched earth herbicide that was used by the US military in the Vietnam War in one of the worst cases of environmental and health damage due to war. MK UKTRA was mentioned in everything but name in 4X23: Demons and 7X02: The Sixth Extinction and was explicitly mentioned in 8X07: Via Negativa; Agent Orange was mentioned by the Lone Gunmen in 1X16: E.B.E. and 2X03: Blood! The other projects Mulder mentions, Bluebird and MK Delta, were precursors to MK Ultra; MKUltra officially stopped in 1973.

Davey’s conspiratorial diatribe strikes a menacing chord with this line: “Do you honestly believe that, after 30 years of research and development and decades of experimenting on American heroes like my father, it would just be thrown in the trash, never to be utilized?” There has been time enough to refine, enhance, perfect the research. Actually, Kitten would have made much more sense as a sequel of sorts to the experiments done in the 1990s, for which 20 years have passed — the same amount of time separating the Vietnam War and episodes like Sleepless! Centering a 2018 episode around the Vietnam War again solidifies the impression that The X-Files is an old show.

In addition, the very last scene expands from crop dusting to include chemtrails. It is meant to be ominous and instill fear in the viewer, but the use of this particular crazy and anti-scientific conspiracy theory has the opposite effect, similar to the fake moon landing in My Struggle III. Chemicals in crop dusting, in food or in water supply are more realistic and believable than the generic chemtrails conspiracy of the all-viral-no-thought internet age. Blood or F. Emasculata opened the episode to discussions of the relation of pesticides to health, of the power of pharmaceuticals, of the private/public interests conflict; the mention of chemtrails takes one out of the episode. The world has changed since the 1990s, yet the revival seems to treat its subject matter with even less subtelty than when out-there conspiracy theories were more interesting to ponder.

For Gabe Rotter’s first script, it does the job, but it is highly derivative. Kitten goes through a checklist of X-Files tropes: government experiments on soldiers, a secret test facility, the scary woods, the rural community, the sheriff that doesn’t want his people to panic, an open ending. This would have been just fine if the story had more to offer. The story has its share of artificial tension (Skinner AWOL instead of just away, Skinner not telling the authorities of the trap in the forest), easy ways out (heavily wounded Skinner getting out of the hole to save the day) and as often in the revival we have an expeditive conclusion. This viewer was also confused by the fact that two actors were used for Skinner but the same actor for Kitten and his son, expecting some psychic or ghostly revelation that never came. The directing is competent, nothing more (although the Vietnam scenes should have been edited differently to make the scene more understandable). The two leads, Duchovny especially, seem particularly bored with the material.

This lack of energy in almost every scene results in a lacklustre episode in what could be the last season. This is especially felt given that the stand-alone/mythology divide is once more dogmatically kept, and Skinner does not take this opportunity to say anything about his knowledge that Scully could have been medically raped by the Cigarette-Smoking Man! “Skinner, we’re with you” all right. Even if they were not Joe Harris’s best issues, the Skinner origin story was better handled in the comics last year (#12-13: Skinner).

Miscellaneous

• “A War Is Never Over“: yet another tagline change, 5 out of 6 this season! Instead of being exceptional, it’s become a habit.
• Skinner enlisted on his 18th birethday, that was 1969; hence we know for sure Skinner was born in 1951, making him 67 today (ripe for retirement!). And why the nickname “Eagle”, did his platoon mates anticipate that her would become bald years later? (Incidentally, young Skinner is portrayed by Mitch Pileggi’s own nephew, Cory Rempel!)
• We assume that Skinner’s “dubious behavior the past couple months” refers to Scully and Mulder’s mistrust of him since the events of 11X01: My Struggle III? It is an odd way to describe something that should be happening between them three and only them, this is not something that should have been noticed Bureau-wide.
• We get some nice continuity with this season, with references to Purlieu Services (This) and William (Ghouli).

• Deputy Director Alvin Kersh makes an unexpected return! He is…exactly the same as he was, further reinforcing the feeling that we are watching a series that does not want to stray one iota from its comfort zone. Yet Kersh should have been somewhat different after the events of 9X19/20: The Truth, where he helped Mulder escape a military trial and execution and justified himself as doing “what I should have done from the start“. One wouldn’t expect to see his whole character changed, but phrases like “your misguided search for some imaginary truth” ring false.
• For those wondering, Mud Lick, Kentucky is a real place!

X-philes have been waiting for this episode for 17 years: the reunion of Scully and Mulder with their son William! What a set up! If the search for Samantha was The X-Files‘ longest-running storyline, resolved after 7 years, William returned after twice as long, and with twice as many expectations. The return of William is something anyone could have expected despite him being given up for adoption in 9X17: William, with much of Scully and Mulder’s characterization being centered around him since the beginning of this revival — notably in James Wong’s semi-mythology episode 10X2: Founder’s Mutation. And fittingly it is with a James Wong episode that the William story becomes front and center again, with a stand-alone investigation that morphs into a mythology episode — something reminiscent of the Samantha resolution two-parter, 7X10: Sein und Zeit / 7X11: Closure.

James Wong writes and directs. He is a veteran director and that shows: he is able to instill tension and create scares in the teaser and the hospital chase scenes; he makes use of silence and long takes to maximize the emotional impact of Scully’s monologue in the morgue; he gives us the show’s first drone shot, in that zoom out from the boat; the episode flows smoothly and the tension is managed expertly, without the excessive speed which was one of the negatives of Founder’s Mutation.

The script seems to have developed in a similar way as the episode develops. The starting point would have been Wong’s interest in doing a scary story based around creepypasta, the internet’s version of urban legends (and not “fanfiction” really): the Ghouli monster and the ghouli.net website are based around the Slender Man story, an internet legend around which two teens attempted murder using knives. However, for an episode called “Ghouli” there’s surprisingly little about it, and the episode quickly turns towards the Scully-William connection — one could think that Carter contributed with some ideas here in order to make this of one piece with his My Struggle mythology, but very little evidence of that has appeared in interviews.

Meet Jackson Van de Kamp

After so many years of absence, William is an actual character on the show! The season gradually builds towards a reunion of the whole family, with glimpses in 11X01: My Struggle III, a proper introduction but no real meeting here, and we suppose much more in the finale. Ghouli is built around the mere (re)introduction of William as a character; this would be fine if this were one episode in an on-going story with a long future, if we still had many seasons ahead of us, but everything points to this being the final season! Any real character development that might take place for William might be limited to the duration of the season/series finale. Although Ghouli is a good episode in and of itself, in the context of the show’s history and what is left of it, what we get is frustratingly little.

And so we meet Jackson Van de Kamp, i.e. William. With so many Biblical parallels, prophecies and messianic promises, much could have been expected of his character. He could have been a Jesus-like immaculate being living far away from the spotlight in rural America; he could have turned out cynical and prone to evil, full of wrath at the world (something that Joe Harris’ comics could have explored had Carter specifically told Harris not to go there, which could have been a hint at Carter’s plans for William). What we get is more mundane.

What is most surprising about him is not the casting — he is portrayed by Miles Robbins, a 25 year old that somewhat could pass for a 16/17 year old, and we still need more scenes with him to judge his acting skills — nor his physical appearance — a Bobby Briggs / young John Connor / angel from Millennium‘s 1×18: Powers, Principalities, Thrones and Dominions. What is most surprising is that he is sort of a jerk, one could even say he has signs of an emotionless psychopath. He has two girlfriends and reads about how to be a good pickup artist. He thinks that using his powers for a prank involving knives is a good idea. He shows absolutely no emotion regarding his foster parents’ death. He waits patiently playing dead while Scully cries her guts out.

Scully finds evidence that he seemed to have lived a normal childhood, or so it would appear to her; after all, she wants to believe that her choice to give him up for adoption was the right one. How would a normal life be possible given his developing abilities? He also has an interest in astronomy (ties well with his would-be memories with Mulder in Founder’s Mutation), snow globes and Malcolm X. He holds a diary, which Scully reads with a similar passion as Mulder read Samantha’s diary in 7X11: Closure. He is internet savvy enough to hold a website, and to find and collect secret information about Project Crossroads. That he would search for Project Crossroads is proof enough that he knows more about his nature than it first appears, and that he must not be in the best of psychological conditions.

The Van de Kamps are here a rich suburban family in Virginia — at complete odds with the God-fearing humble farmers in Wyoming of 9X17: William, and it is difficult to imagine anything that could have happened in the meantime to justify these changes. Could it be that they somehow profited financially from having their child be part of secret medical experiments? (as was apparently the case with the Sims in 5X05: Christmas Carol / 5X07: Emily, who also end up dead) Hopefully we will get some more background in My Struggle IV.

Project Crossroads

The CSM, hanging out and smoking in Skinner’s office as if it were 1995 once more and saying things like “Mulder is close“, provides some exposition: “We’ll be able to find what we’ve been looking for.” The CSM is looking for William and uses the X-Files unit to find him. Evidently the Department of Defense agents that are tracking William to kill him are not on the same side as the CSM. Would any government agency with surveillance powers like the ones exhibited in 9X08:Trust No 1 have trouble finding William despite the adoption? — but let’s accept that for the sake of the narrative. One would expect though that the CSM, the self-described most powerful man on the world, would have been able to use the DOD’s resources to track William down.

Skinner provides exposition to Mulder about what experiments William is the result of. The entire dialogue is worth analyzing here: “After the crash at Roswell, our government’s interest in alien technology exploded in all directions. And finally, in the ’70s, our science caught up to our ambition. A eugenics program was initiated by a Dr. Masao Matsumoto using components of alien technology, hybrid DNA. Project Crossroads. It was ultimately deemed a failure because they couldn’t predict what attributes the test subjects would get from the hybrid DNA. The project was defunded 15 years ago. Dr. Matsumoto burned all the files pertaining to the subjects to save their lives, and then… he disappeared. The DoD has tried to track them down ever since.” And later Mulder: “Scully, I believe that, through the Smoking Man, you were an unwitting participant in a eugenics program called Project Crossroads. It was spearheaded by Dr. Masao Matsumoto. He disappeared two years after William was born. I believe our son was one of his test subjects.”

This description of events is really a very simplified version of the mythology for the purposes of the revival. There is talk of hybridization, of eugenics (to create a “superhuman“, as per the CSM in My Struggle III), of defunding due to scarce results, but nothing about alien colonization and the time pressure this created on anyone working on hybridization, nor is there anything about the hybrids created before the 1970s or about all the different purposes hybrids were created for.

Dr. Matsumoto was never referenced before (a previous Japanese connection is explored in the hybridization experiments of Dr. Ishimaru / Shiro Zama in 3X09: Nisei / 3X10: 731). William’s conception and early years were involved in many different experiments (Zeus Genetics, Valor Victor chloramine project, apparently the CSM’s own impregnation with science), however the show never quite made it clear if William was special from his conception and surprised the scientists in all these projects or if a combination of all these projects made him special. Matsumoto’s Crossroads feels like a generic umbrella term that encompasses everything in the past, without going too much into the details.

The use of “Project Crossroads” here is interesting: a crossroads between a before and an after, a crossing between human and alien (also, the ship’s name “Chimera” calls back to the hybrids in 4X24: Gethsemane / 5X02: Redux), and reminiscent of Operation Crossroads, the US military project that fine-tuned nuclear bombs in 1946 in the Pacific atolls. Is William a sort of weapon, the result of a DOD experiment? The children of 10X2: Founder’s Mutation were also part of a hybridization project that was of interest to the DOD, are they of the same kind? Was Matsumoto’s disappearance after William’s birth a coincidence, or could Matsumoto consider William a success and be keeping tabs on him?

Where do we go from here?

The developments in this episode render some weighty scenes from 11X01: My Struggle III useless. What was the point in Jeffrey Spender telling Scully about the name of William’s foster family if Scully was to find William through her visions anyway? The name Van de Kamp does raise Scully’s attention in Ghouli, but it’s really William’s visions and the investigations that leads her to him, not Jeffrey’s information. What is certain is that Jeffrey’s magnetite injection in 9X17: William was of no use — William did develop superhuman abilities, and the adoption did not protect him more than what Scully could have.

The viral apocalypse itself is put into question here: “What if I didn’t get a glimpse of the future? What if I was just a receptacle for his message to me?” What if the visions of a viral apocalypse are the result of William’s mind trying to make sense of this world and his place in it as a lab rat in hybridization experiments, and 10X6: My Struggle II was these visions as seen from the point of view of Scully? Season 11 could very well not be leading us to a realization of the My Struggle II future after all.

William’s powers are to convince those around him that things are not like they really are, as if the shapeshifter ability of the hybrids in the 1990s has been updated to mind manipulation (a la 3X17: Pusher!). As the tagline says, “I see what I want you to see” (4 out of 5 tagline changes in season 11, a weird record!). He seems to be partly in control of his powers, at time trying very hard for a result and at time easily slipping in and out of it. When Scully receives William’s vision, she is in a hypnagogic state or sleep paralysis, shot in an intense way similar to the strident sounds experiences in Founder’s Mutation, reminiscent of many alien abductees’ accounts — and Mulder’s memories of Samantha’s abduction. (The episode kicks off on a bad note with a Scully voiceover about her dreams — an inspiration from My Struggle III?)

William/Jackson assumes the appearance of Peter Wong, and that actor (Francois Chau, of Lost and The Expanse fame) portrays William as a much more caring and warm individual. Given that this actor is relatively well-known, could he be returning in the future?

Oddly enough, Scully describes William’s ability as creating an “alternate reality“, although we are certainly far from anything like an alternate universe here. An alternate theory, reinforced by all the dream-man “This Man” sightings in nearly all the episodes this season, would be that the apcalypse is indeed coming in the future, and future William is creating an alternate reality where it is not happening, i.e. all of season 11. We are heading towards the events of My Struggle II but William’s future powers switch us to a different outcome. This might be too far-out science-fiction for the show to attempt. And yet, Jackson/William’s handle on his ghouli.net site is “rever“, i.e. “to dream” in French; in a Twin Peaks fashion, we can wonder, “We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer?”

A mother’s pain

However, everything written above is not really what the episode is about. Ghouli is really about Scully and her anguish and pain.

Mulder does feel pain but it is much more internalized — which is arguably not that characteristic of him, but between this episode and 10X4: Home Again it seems Mulder/Duchovny is shown as much more introverted, if not relegated to a supportive role for Scully’s drama. And while Mulder was running a DNA test to find out if Jackson is Scully’s son, he could have saved everyone a lot of worries if he also ran a comparison with his own DNA! “Our son” is mentioned several times, but the question of who William’s father is hovers over the episode, and seems to be torturing Skinner (oddly enough, Wong had no idea about the games Carter would play in My Struggle III when writing Ghouli!). If Mulder did not, it would evidently be because he is convinced he is the father? Incidentally, William’s new name “Jackson” could be “Jacob’s son”, i.e. the son of Jacob and Rachel, continuing a Jacob/Mulder and Rachel/Scully parallel introduced in 11X03: Plus One!

Just when Scully feels she will find her son again, here he is lying dead. “This is torture, Mulder“, and indeed it is! Scully found a daughter of hers, Emily, only to see her die; she later had a vision of her on a morgue slab (5X17: All Souls). This is repeated here, in the most harsh manner possible. Just when she might have met him, Jackson/William chooses to postpone their true meeting, perhaps wary of them being FBI, and assumes a different identity. This is high drama, giving Anderson plenty of opportunities to showcase her talent. The ending scene of the realization of what happened at the gas station could very well be this season’s most powerful image. Ghouli might be problematic in the way it is part of a larger continuity, but as an episode it is very effective.

Despite all expectations, My Struggle III had ended not with a re-energized Scully & Mulder searching for William, but with Scully saying that William will find them — despite an impending viral apocalypse. Ghouli ends with us certain that William is not actively searching for Scully & Mulder, he is mildly intrigued but nothing more (“This woman…I don’t know, she’s maybe my birth mother“). Nobody is too worried of the viral apocalypse it seems. And it might be a given that My Struggle IV will focus on him, but actually if we were not to see William anymore it would not be surprising either: we know he is alive, out exploring the world, with some special powers that could be one more X-File, and that’s that.

The X-Files Season 11 / Event Series 2: Introduction | 11X01: My Stuggle III | 11X02: This | 11X03: Plus One

Written & directed by Darin Morgan, who once more enjoys the complete freedom given to him by executive producers Carter & Glen Morgan to do a very personal episode full of his trademark quirks — such as multiple narratives, intellectual monologues about the nature of truth, mise en abyme (Mengele effect: a Mandela effect about the Mandela effect), recurring phrases (“wait, what?”). His most recent effort was 10X3: Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster, however Forehead Sweat has more in common with some of his best post-modern work, 3X20: Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ and its Millennium sequel 2×09: Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense.

“Oh, that’s so po-co.”

Reggie Something, in the classic (!) modernist approach, is another stand-in for the author, an insecure man making fun of the male lead’s all-American features and who manages to seduce the female lead. Forehead Sweat is a thematic sequel of the post-modern From Outer Space, for which countless academic analyses have been written. We are presented with stories that are accounts of what happened according to a point of view, but it is difficult to get to an objective truth. What happened here? Was Dr. They’s conspiracy so far-reaching that it convinced everyone of its non-existence? Was Reggie Mulder & Scully’s partner, making Scully’s findings of Reggie’s career planted information by Dr. They? Was Reggie and his sudden disappearances evidence of parallel universes? Was Reggie a disillusioned ex-NSA agent who was trying to find like minds? Was Reggie truly a mad individual, or just a good shaggy dog storyteller? If so, what to make of Skinner knowing him, with a final line “Where the hell are they taking Reggie?” that turns everything on its head once more? (reminiscent of From Outer Space‘s “Who, Lord Kinbote?“) We do not know what the truth is (although the crazy theory sounds more plausible).

This post-modern approach is reinforced with layers and layers of meta. The episode revisits The X-Files‘ past with alternative facts on its opening credits and best hits (all from the first four seasons, when Morgan was more or less close to the series), and has a very clear breaking the fourth wall modernist moment when the creation kills the author, with that alternate scene from 4X20: Small Potatoes! And with the excellent casting of Brian Huskey, who can’t think that the Reggie-Mulder-Scully partership wouldn’t work?

“Well, believe what you want to believe… that’s what everybody does nowadays anyway.”

Morgan built the Dr. They/Mandela effect conspiracy around his critique of the “alternative facts” phenomenon, taking multiple jabs at Trump’s administration and Trump himself, yet never naming him directly — too many jabs in fact, one wonders how this episode will be read in a few years in post-Trump years (certain details, like the alien’s absurd “bing bong” when he’s going up the stairs to his UFO is also a reference to Trump, something which is already receding in the wastebin of history given the man’s many absurdities since). This could be quite gratuitous, but the entire episode is thematically solid with extension of these ideas, from Dr. They’s 1984-like conspiracy to control the future by controlling the past to Mulder’s memories of the Twilight Zone.

Were-Monster already included reasons as to why The X-Files is passé today — mobile phones everywhere, exposed pranks that would have populated tabloid news as paranormal sightings. Forehead Sweat presents more socio-political reasons about why The X-Files‘ mythology, specifically, is irrelevant today: secrets hardly remain secret anymore and people are hardly interested in truth when they would rather have opinions. The X-Files‘ gold time was in that moment between the end of the Cold War and pre-9/11; conspiracy theories today are not cool, they are either legitimate social concerns or far-right agit-prop lunacies. Conspiracies cannot sustain themselves, conspirators would rather accuse the accusers (This tagline). Mulder’s chivalric and quixotic search for The Truth is just not that interesting or relevant anymore, people would just laugh at him like these peculiar Vancouver statues do — now, everybody knows their own truth and what everybody is asking for today is justice. Instead, today’s situation is more complex and wilder than in the 1990s. As even the Twilight Zone teaser says, “the world’s gone mad“!

Where the My Struggle episodes try very hard to continue the mythology to its bare-bones caricature villain extremes, Forehead Sweat pulls the rug under any fan of the mythology with an inconvenient version of the truth. Reggie-Mulder-Scully’s last case presents the reason why the aliens are more of a 90s phenomenon and “Why aren’t people getting probed by aliens anymore“. The aliens, that symbol of the unexplained, both menacing and fascinating, are presented as pretentious parrots of Trump’s hate speech and put Earth in quarantine — in a scene that turns on its head the optimistic offer of the aliens in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). They even present what Mulder, and by extension the show, actually fears most, “All the answers“, and suddenly life is not worth living. Having answers, especially answers one doesn’t like, really is the end of the X-Files.

“It’s time to face the facts, guys. This is the end of the X-Files.”

Because the other thing that Forehead Sweat manages to do is to make its own existence irrelevant. This is not just about Trump or post-truth, it is about post-X-Files: when Mulder frustratedly shouts “I was fighting the power and breaking conspiracies before you saw your first chemtrail, you punks” to younger FBI agents disappointed with this “legend“, one realizes how much time has passed. “The world’s gone mad” all right, but that’s also what an older person would say about the younger generation too.

When it presents us with a Twilight Zone teaser (shot where a memorable scene from From Outer Space was shot!), we reflect on The X-Files‘ place in history and popular culture. The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and The X-Files (1993-2002) are separated by a bit over one generation, and we are approaching that moment as much time will separate us from The X-Files‘ heyday, a moment when The X-Files will be fondly regarded as a memory of the past, remembered by many but seen by few. It is aware of the whole revival’s status as just icing on the cake.

When the episode shows young Mulder’s awe at discovering a Twilight Zone episode and then shows Mulder’s obsessiveness about it, it is of course the audience and its relationship with The X-Files that is mirrored here.

“It can’t be that good of an episode.” “It-It’s-it’s not about the episode, Scully. It’s about my memory of seeing my first Twilight Zone. It changed me. You don’t forget that.”

Any fan can relate. Like Reggie, we have lived the past quarter of a century in company with these characters. Our memories of the show are very important to who we are — and the more time passes, the more this nostalgia becomes valuable and a fundamental part of ourselves. When these memories are either altered (Dr. They) or when we revisit them to find out they are not as we remembered them, it is our relationship with and understanding of the world that is changed. Scully’s solution is simple: let the past be the past. Don’t eat that goop-O/jell-O/madeleine de Proust.

“I want to remember how it was. I want to remember how it all was.”

In short, let the memories of the show intact and move on with your life. Darin Morgan is aware that it would be trivial to attempt to recapture lightning twice — either because he aware that the revival is not as good as the old series, or because our memories of the old series are such that we cannot be objective viewers to anything the revival might present to us. And so, The X-Files is just a TV show, remember it fondly, don’t try to tamper too much with it. It is an odd message to have while the showrunner says there are always more stories to tell, but Darin Morgan seems to be aware that this is the end. It is the kind of episode about memory and about the series itself that is only appropriate at the end, or in retrospect. Building sentimental ties to a TV show to make sense of the world is also the theme of 9X18: Sunshine Days — which was also, appropriately, a farewell to the series. However, this episode is, once more, an episode about the series instead of the series just trying to do a good episode, a self-awareness that was very noticeable and annoying in season 10; such episodes work only when they are exceptional, and season 11 as a whole might flow better after all, with its more numerous episodes.

The episode surely is not devoid of shortcomings. Most noticeably compared to masterworks like From Outer Space, once more there is no investigation, the “case” comes to them. There is not even an X-File or plot, arguably, just the musings of a mad man, and it would make little difference if the scene with Dr. They or the scene with the “last case” would come at any point in the episode. Some of the dialogue or jokes could have been trimmed (the Mandela effect explanations, the redacted letter), some/much of the Trump jokes could have been condensed or made more universal than direct Trump quotes (the wall speech). But most importantly, the enjoyment of this episode depends a lot on one’s taste of humor and tolerance for camp; the campiness is much, much more present in Darin Morgan-directed episodes than the one he just wrote for. He goes wild here, reusing 1950s/1960s pulp scifi aesthetics extensively, much, much more than with the references to Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion in From Outer Space; this can be justified by this just being Reggie’s Twilight Zone-filled fantasies, but it is a lot to digest.

It might not be Darin Morgan’s best episode, but it is a very good one, and it is a thematically and emotionally appropriate episode for The X-Files final hurrah of a season.

Miscellaneous

• Mulder did have a partner named Reggie in his first years at the FBI! Reggie Purdue met with his death in 1X15: Young at Heart and was named again only twice, in 4X08: Paper Hearts and 5X01: Unusual Suspects (the source of the clip here). Interestingly, Reggie Purdue does look a bit like Reggie Murgatroid!
• The directing and the music editing has fun with setting up another conspiracy adventure, with rising tension and underground parking meetings, then cutting it short!
• “There are companies who are willing to pay anything […] Companies like G–” censored! A meta-joke similar to the cockroach crawling in front of the screen in 3X12: War of the Coprophages! Did Reggie mean GM? This would make it a Mandela effect on the Ford Pinto scandal in the late 1970s, about a cost-benefit analysis of replacing a fuel tank catching fire versus the social cost of injuries and deaths!
• References: Shazaam/Kazaam and other Mandela effects; the US invasion of Grenada in 1983; Soy Bomb in a Bob Dylan concert in 1998 (on video!); safety ban of lawn darts; Grenada UFO stamps and the prime minister’s interest in the UFO phenomenon making its way to the UN.
• The sequence of Reggie’s series of public sector jobs, with its similar cubicles and its gradual improvement of technology, will strike a chord with anybody that has an office job. Morgan uses the opportunity to drop jabs at the US’s awful foreign policy record, with torture of prisoners and gratuitous “collateral damage” drone strikes!
• Dr. They’s crazy video and hidden past life in show business is very akin to Dr. Oonan Goopta from Doomsday Defense!
• Is the ambulance from Ghostbusters (why?) from the same “Spotnitz Sanatorium” from Doomsday Defense? (and of course to Frank Spotnitz)
• Darin Morgan seems to be making fun of or siding with the accusations of sexism in The X-Files: Reggie tells Pilot Scully “Move along, sugar boobs. This is the X-Files. No women allowed.” and present-day Scully, very relaxed, occupies Mulder‘s desk.
• The aliens return the Voyager space probe with its gold record — see the teaser to 2X01: Little Green Men for the description of that historic mission!

• No Darin Morgan is complete without an Alex Diakun appearance! (here the excellent Twilight Zone bartender/devil) We also have a cameo from Dan Zukovic, who was in Darin Morgan’s other Millennium episode, 2×21: Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me! (the Standards & Practices guy; here the no less excellent Twilight Zone bar client) We also see Bill Dow (the memorabilia store clerk), who we know better as Chuck Burks (introduced in 2X21: The Calusari, last seen in 8X12: Badlaa).
• Some real Twilight Zone references: revealing who the alien is in a diner is the plot of Will The Real Martial Please Stand Up?; telepathic aliens giving humans a book with secrets (with a twist!) is the plot of To Serve Man.
• “This Man” sighting: on Mulder’s “everything is connected” board.
• Mark Snow is again recycling himself — but this time he goes along with Darin Morgan’s self-awareness that this is the end: the music at the end of the “last case” scene is from the end of I Want To Believe (track “Home Again”).