Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
As I said, I haven't watched every episode over the past couple of seasons, but that's OK, because only about one-third of all the episodes deal with the actual conspiracy. The rest deal with your run-of-the-mill investigations of that vampire mom with jaws that unhinge who devours her son's entire soccer team, and those exist as if in suspended animation.
As the series has worn on and the stakes for Mulder and Scully have grown higher, this discrepancy has become perhaps the most frustrating absurdity plaguing "The X-Files": the lack of connection between the episodes that delve into the conspiracy that hangs like the sword of Damocles over humankind and those that deal with unrelated paranormal phenomena.
Aliens are taking over the planet, the fate of the human race hangs in the balance, fire and brimstone are raining from the sky, and yet the agents have the time to delve into picayune murder mysteries. Forces of incomprehensible magnitude are conspiring to destroy Mulder, Scully and their efforts to uncover the truth, yet they are in no apparent danger when they walk to the grocery store to get a roll of toilet paper.
Another annoying development has been the discontinuity in terms of the emotional relationships between the characters. In the 1998 "X-Files" movie "Fight the Future," Scully and Mulder essentially go to hell and back. They almost consummate their affection for each other with a kiss. He saves her from a tank deep in an alien spacecraft buried in the ice of Antarctica just before the huge ship takes off, nearly killing them. But in the denouement, when they see each other again in Washington, D.C., they hold a terse conversation before Mulder, for no apparent reason, spins on his heel and walks away.
At its best, "The X-Files" provided the kind of action and suspense packed into 45 minutes that you normally found only at the movie theater. It was like watching a good thriller every Sunday night without having to schlep over to Blockbuster and stand under those horrible fluorescent lights.
"The X-Files" also delivered first-rate humor in offbeat episodes, like 1996's "War of the Coprophages" and 1998's "Bad Blood." In the latter, a botched investigation of vampires in Texas leads Mulder and Scully to present entirely different versions of the same events in their report to a bemused A.D. Skinner. Luke Wilson played the local sheriff who, in Scully's version, is a charming and capable officer who flirts with her and lavishes praise on her investigative insight. In Mulder's eyes, he's a bumbling, bucktoothed yokel.
In a two-part episode titled "Dreamland," from 1998, a government-operated UFO outside the infamous Area 51 creates a ripple in the space-time fabric, causing Mulder to switch bodies with government official Morris Fletcher, played by Michael McKean. Only Mulder and Fletcher are aware of the identity change and, as Mulder desperately tries to figure out how to reverse the situation while dealing with Fletcher's horribly fractured family life, Fletcher, liberated and with no intention of going back, settles fatuously into his new role as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, hitting on an increasingly flustered Scully and slapping her on the butt. McKean's performance is the funniest thing I've seen him do outside "This Is Spinal Tap."
In those episodes, the X-Files team showed a willingness to spoof itself, and Duchovny and Anderson were given the opportunity to step out of their characters and treat Mulder and Scully with refreshing irony. That was particularly effective in the case of Anderson, who displays a giggly, winning personality on late-night talk shows that stands in stark contrast to Scully's ice-queen demeanor.
"The X-Files" has also, in its finer moments, been among TV's most inventive shows. In a 1998 episode titled "Triangle," distinguished by its outstanding camerawork, Mulder finds himself in 1939 aboard the Queen Anne, a British ocean liner taken over by Nazis as war begins in Europe. As Scully hustles around FBI headquarters, trying to figure out what's happened to Mulder, the viewer follows her through corridors, into and out of offices, and up and down elevators via a single camera shot that lasts for several minutes.
Later, aboard the ship, Scully and the super-nerd Lone Gunmen trio race through the hallways searching for Mulder. Mulder, meanwhile, is running through the same hallways, only in 1939. Director Carter splits the screen in two, so that the viewer sees Mulder and Scully running toward each other on different halves of the screen and assumes they will collide where the hallways intersect. Instead, since they occupy the same space at different points in time, the agents run right past each other, switch screens and continue sprinting down the hall.
The thing about "The X-Files" is that, every time you pronounce it creatively dead, it comes back to life like the ghouls Mulder and Scully have been investigating these eight-odd years. Every time you think the show has fallen into irreparable, lazy self-parody, Chris Carter has a marijuana-induced epiphany, rolls off his chaise on some remote Hawaiian beach, and videophones in an idea that will shake new life into it.
But now, because he has avoided doing it over the past 10 episodes, Carter is out of time. And in the season finale, "The Truth," he has to deliver answers to the riddles he has posed.
The audience Carter has toyed with for so long will on some level demand that there be logic underlying the mystery, that the show make sense. The frustrating yet compelling ambiguity that has been "The X-Files"' hallmark is poised to be its undoing.
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