The X-Files
11.2: This
(SPOILERS) Glen Morgan returns with a really good idea, certainly one
with much more potential than his homelessness tract Home Again in Season 10, but seems to give up on its eerier
implications, and worse has to bash it round the head to fit the season’s
“arc”. Nevertheless, he’s on very comfortable ground with the Mulder-Scully
dynamic in This, who get to spend
almost the entire episode in each other’s company and might be on the best form
here since the show came back, give or take a Darin.
Langly: Mulder, I need to know. Am I dead? If I am,
they know that I know.
The idea of not only depositing humankind in a simulation
but of us also being in one has a lot of currency lately, not least from
science itself. David Icke’s very big on the subject, taking his cues from the
Gnostics and The Matrix (or is it the other way round?), the former with their
“bad copy” take on the antics of the Demiurge. While This doesn’t go as far as suggesting that we’re all in one not-so-great
holographic simulation and that the physical universe isn’t remotely physical
at all, it does curiously trace out a fleetingly similar – in typically sketchy
X-Files fashion – envisaging of
future events as the one Anjeliki Anagnostou-Kalogera presents in her
Gnostic-influenced Can You Stand the
Truth?, where she posits that the end of this simulation is nigh and that
there are various plans afoot by the Archons to wrest humanity into a parallel
universe when this one ends (that universe itself having only very finite time
available, this attempt to stave off the inevitable end of everything that is
not part of the “Hyper Cosmoi”). Why, she even brings in ETs, but as the old
humanity from the future (or parallel universe).
Mulder: I was gone back then. Could Langly be alive?
In This, Barbara
Hershey’s Erika Price (shoehorned into the final reel to create a causal link with
the rest of the season, exactly as successfully as that sounds) announces that
life on Earth is about to be crushed, that “The
simulation is necessary for our evolution as a species”, and that the means
to upload everyone, whether they like it or not, is currently feasible (via a cell
phone; I’m sketchy on the efficacy of this, but okay), which will be the state
of (most? The select few?) humans when the doomed planet is left behind (as
part of space colonisation). It’s unclear quite how this fits in with the plan
to wipe out most of humanity (if you can put seven billion in a simulation, the
only thing stopping you is that you don’t want to), and in the Gnostic scheme
of things, the more humans there are for the Archons to feed off, the better,
so that analogy only runs so far.
Langly: It’s a work camp. We’re digital soldiers.
Of course, with The
X-Files it’s wise never to get too hung up on the specifics; Langly tells Mulder
and Scully that the Elite are using the minds of participants in the simulation
to deliver the necessary science in order to leave the planet. Again, this is
nebulous. Because they don’t have the tech they need already? I thought that
was where the aliens came in?
Langly’s previously unmentioned girlfriend (as if Langly
ever had a girlfriend) Karah Hamby (Sandra Holt) informs them that she and
Langly theorised when signing up to the project that everything they were told
about the simulation might not be true, and wondered, if they were placed in it
when they died, “How would that life know
it was a simulation?” For Langly, it’s pretty much as The Matrix told us regarding early failed simulations; it’s too
perfect, a world where there’s no cancer, where he eats hot dogs and donuts all
day, where The Ramones play every night and never fight, and the New England
Patriots always lose (whatever the last one means): “I’m begging you, destroy it”. And that “They all hate it here” (the great minds, including Steve Jobs and
Michael Crichton, the latter presumably writing hacky virtual pseudo-science
airport fiction).
Kara: Maybe he saw Mulder in his dreams.
Mulder: Who hasn’t?
Morgan offers no fake-out realities with this scenario,
though, one that seems entirely asking for them (if this had been an JJ Abrams
series episode, it would have probably taken place from inside the simulation looking
out), aside from a coda in which Langly reappears on his phone (“Mulder! They know what we know. Destroy the
back-up”) and the psycho killer Russian shot dead earlier appears on the
screen (and being The X-Files, does
Mulder leave his friend languishing in favour of a new standalone episode next
week? You bet). The lead in to this is rudimentary cobblers, with Mulder
escaping Erika, meeting up with Scully and having a fight while she turns off
the BIG machine (server).
Mulder: So the Russians who tried to kill us have
had access to all our work.
Much of the rest of the material is faintly old hat. The
private contractors aspect would have seemed much more topical a decade ago,
Purlieu Services being an American contractor with Russian links (Russian links
to the government because topical, right? Except that The X-Files is the last show that should be swallowing verbatim that
what we’re told is fake news is fake
news). Who put the X-Files on line, so know all about them (and deleted some of
them).
Added to which, putting Skinner in duplicitous-seeming
situations is plain lazy at this point in the run. His impromptu carpark
speech, where everyone stops squabbling so he can deliver a spiel about how
there are now seventeen US intel agencies, “All
of them are in bed with one another while trying to exterminate each other, and
that means each of us” at least gives Pileggi something to chew on, but
it’s further evidence of this show’s unenviable old git syndrome.
Mulder: He’s dead because the world was so dangerous
and complex then. Who’d have thought we’d look back with nostalgia and say that
was a simpler time, Scully? Everything we feared has come to pass. How the hell
did that happen?
The above is, of course, bunk. It’s the tired refrain of an
older generation who should know better, since every older generation responds
similarly. Getting agitated in the face of Trump only serves to make the
current incarnation of The X-Files
seem the more stranded, waving its arms about helplessly while dropping Snowden
into conversation because he’s only about five years past being happening.
Mulder: Frohike look 57 to you the day he died?
Scully: Frohike looked 57 the day he was born.
What makes the more egregious aspects of this episode
forgivable, however (the trail of clues in Arlington Cemetery is so much
nonsense), is the banter between Mulder and Scully. First seen on the couch
watching TV, it isn’t long before Duchovny’s doing Californication by way of Beavis
and Butthead (“You said taint”) and
waxing lyrical after a hard day wrestling bad guys (“Scully, you looked so adorable then. All curled up in a ball in a
skanky bar with your fingers wrapped around the grip of our assassin’s Glock”).
And he doesn’t get to hog all the good lines either:
Mulder: I’m going to open an X-file on this bran
muffin. I’ve got to get to the bottom of why it tastes so freakin’ good.
Scully: I don’t care if it comes out of an alien’s
butt. I’m going to eat the whole thing.
Morgan’s an infinitely preferable, more composed director than
Carter, even though he has less experience. He should steer well clear of action
sequences, however; the opening home invasion mistakes randomly cutting a scene
to ribbons for a thrilling shootout. Mostly, though, This is welcome for getting the characters back on track, even as
it needlessly rakes over old continuity in the process. Time was you could have
a really great episode and really
great character work, often from Morgan and Wong. I guess things were simpler
then.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.