Posts tagged: The X-Files Reviews

The X-Files S10E06 “My Struggle II” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm

Teleplay by: Chris Carter
Story by: Chris Carter, Dr Anne Simon, Dr Margaret Fearon

Director: Chris Carter

Essential Plot Points:

• Mirroring Mulder’s introduction in the first episode of this season, we see Scully going through a pile of photos and providing a voiceover about her character’s history. It ends with her mentioning her alien DNA, and her face morphs into an alien Grey as she ponders what it could mean.
• Conspiracy theorist Tad O’Malley is back on air, and this time he has a theory that a global epidemic, created by the government, is about to kick off.
• Mulder, meanwhile, has gone missing and his house has been trashed. Agent Miller goes off to find him by tracking his phone.
• Agent Einstein teams up with Scully to help tackle the possible epidemic. Einstein is sceptical at first that it’ll happen, but soon the doom and gloom is coming true. And it looks as though only Scully’s “alien” DNA can stop it – it makes her immune.
• Scully is contacted by ex-Agent Monica Reyes – the woman who worked on The X-Files once Mulder and Scully went separate ways in 2001 – and is told that Reyes has been working with the Cigarette-Smoking Man for the last decade after he promised her immunity from the epidemic. Boo! Hiss!
• It turns out that the CSM sent an emissary to Mulder’s house to see if he wanted a vaccine for the epidemic. Instead, Mulder beat the crap out of the guy and found out the CSM’s address.
• Mulder now confronts the CSM, who tells him that he wants to rid the world of all but the most elite humans with the epidemic. He offers Mulder, who’s really sick, a cure, but he refuses.
• Agent Miller arrives and drags Mulder out of there.
• Meanwhile Scully and Einstein have found what they hope is a cure. Scully administers it to Einstein, tells her to give it to the rest of the staff in the hospital so they can make more, and heads off to find Mulder.
• However, when she finally catches up with him on a bridge by the Jefferson Memorial, Mulder’s too ill and Scully realises he will need stem cells from their son to save his life.
• And then… BOOM! A UFO appears. Cliffhanger!

Review:

When you spot on the opening credits that a story has been co-written by not one but two doctors, it’s a fair bet that what you’re about to see is going to involve quite a lot of medical terminology – because why else would the writer of a supernatural telly show need to go to them for advice? And sure enough, what we get here is a mountain of geeky medical talk, with Scully and Einstein endlessly chattering among themselves as they develop a cure for the DNA attack. To the layperson it all sounds medically plausible, but does it make for interesting TV? Not really. Watching two doctors brainstorming in a lab is nowhere near as exciting as watching someone confronting the man who is destroying the world, and yet Scully and Einstein get way more airtime than Mulder… a horrible mistake.

Mind you, Mulder’s showdown with the Cigarette-Smoking Man isn’t quite as alarming as it probably could have been after all these years. Despite all the CSM’s machinations, he’s still just an old duffer – albeit one in a mask now – who likes to smile enigmatically and smokes so much he’s actually a parody of himself. Hardly a Moriarty or a Devil, this one, and his plan to rid the world of most humans to help its ecosystem is ripped straight off Hugo Drax’s scheme in Moonraker.

The fact that Mulder turns up, waves a gun at him and then conks out also removes all the tension, and Miller’s rescue is positively anticlimactic. “Before he dies, tell him goodbye for me,” says the CSM to Miller – is this the most boring thing a villain has ever said to anyone? What, no witty sign off?

“My Struggle II” has many issues, from the casual way it brings back Annabeth Gish as Monica Reyes for no other reason than to deliver exposition, to the fact that Skinner pops up in one scene and never returns – pretty much all he’s done this season, to be honest. Then there’s the laughable, clunky way Tad O’Malley narrates what’s happening in his broadcasts, as though he’s the only person reporting in a world gone mad: “This may be global in scope,” he pants, “reports in from Europe!” It’s as though someone sent him a telegram, as opposed to the fact an epidemic like this would’ve saturated social media in hours. Was it even necessary to use him in this episode? It is kind of hilarious, mind you, watching him look more poorly with each broadcast.

As for the good things here, we have to admit it is nice to see a plot sown in the original series finally coming to fruition – those smallpox vaccinations from the early seasons have finally played their part! And a reference is made to all of this starting in 2012; again, an attempt to tie in the fact that this was the date of the long-forgotten alien invasion plan. And the final shot of the UFO hovering over the cars is truly stunning – what a cliffhanger, eh?

As it stands, we don’t know if The X-Files will return for a season 11; the main problem appears to be scheduling the actors. But one good episode (“Mulder And Scully Meet The Were-Monster”) out of six generic, forgettable plodders doesn’t exactly leave us gasping for more. Thankfully, though, there have been enough glimmers of the show’s old charm here and there to make oyu not want to give up hope. Fingers crossed that if it does return, the format gets a kick up the backside.

The Good:

• Scully’s alien face. Totally unnecessary, of course, but it looks great.
• Mulder says “I don’t believe you!” to the CSM. The reply? “You don’t want to believe.” Variations of “wanting to believe” have now popped up in every episode this season.
• The Spartan virus that causes all this trouble apparently removes the gene that gives you an immune system. Thus you get poorly from whatever happens to be in your system at the time it switches it off. It’s a fascinating concept, isn’t it? You can understand why Chris Carter found it intriguing enough to focus on.

• David Duchovny’s got some pretty fine zombie make-up on in this shot.

The Bad:

• Scully’s opening voiceover goes on forever! And may we add our voice to the growing hordes wondering WHO TOOK THOSE DAMN PHOTOS ANYWAY?
• Why does the action in Mulder’s fight scene keep switching to slo-mo? While sometimes gimmicks like this can work, all it does here is make you focus on the fact that no, he really isn’t in an Asian martial-arts movie.
• Last week we said that we liked the fact that Agent Einstein was named Agent Einstein. This week, with a far more serious plot, it just sounds silly. (For proof see Best Quote, below.)
• Why does Scully take time out from her mission to deliver the vaccine to a dying Mulder to stop someone smashing a shop window? Okay, she’s an FBI Agent and is supposed to uphold the law, but what does she care if there’s a bit of vandalism going on in the streets? …And why doesn’t the guy with the sign react in any way whatsoever?

The Random:

• The title card changes from “The Truth Is Out There” for the first time this season.
• Best Quote: Skinner, somehow totally straight-faced: “Hold on, Agent Einstein, you’re talking to a scientist.”

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson

Read our other reviews of The X-Files

The X-Files S10E05 “Babylon” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm

Writer: Chris Carter
Director: Chris Carter

Essential Plot Points:

• A young Muslim says his prayers, eats a sandwich, meets a friend and walks into an art gallery – which they then blow up.
• Mulder and Scully are approached by two young special agents, Miller and Einstein, who are assigned to the case. The bomber survived the blast – barely – and Miller thinks there might be a way to interrogate him while he’s in a permanent vegetative state.
• Miller is clearly Mulder; his mind open to possibilities. Einstein thinks it’s crap.

• Scully later offers to assist Miller in questioning the comatose bomber, using his brainwaves to determine if he understands their questions.
• Mulder hatches a plan of his own: to take magic mushrooms and somehow contact the bomber on a different plane. Einstein is not amused, but after realising her partner is working with Scully, agrees to help Mulder.
• After taking some ’shrooms, Mulder has a crazy trip and goes line-dancing (!). He also sees the bomber lying in the Virgin Mary’s arms. The bomber tells him something in Arabic.
• Back on our plane of existence, two Homeland Security agents and a nurse have tried to kill the bomber for revenge, while the hospital has received a terror alert.
• Mulder comes back down to earth. Turns out Einstein gave him a placebo and the trip was only him thinking he was tripping. Huh?
• However, while passing the hospital entrance, Mulder recognises the bomber’s mother from his dream – she was the Virgin Mary – and takes her to her son, who dies in her arms.

• Realising his experience was, really, him talking to the bomber in his dreams, Mulder repeats what the bomber told him. Miller translates it – it’s the name of the Babylon Hotel. And lo and behold, that’s where the rest of the terrorists are! The police arrest them.
• Mulder and Scully have a little heart-to-heart about the nature of God, children, and love and hate.

Review:

Way back in season two’s “Humbug”, The X-Files’ first bona fide comedy episode, there was a moment in which a carnival member mocked Mulder. “Imagine going through your whole life looking like that,” he grunted, and we saw a shot of the oblivious Agent posing like a catalogue model. It was the first time in the history of the show – which at this point had aired 44 episodes – that we were invited to take the piss out of its male star, and the first time David Duchovny had shown he could be a good sport about his role.

Fast-forward 21 years and “Babylon” has taken this to an extreme that’s less amusing and more downright embarrassing. Mulder willingly doing magic mushrooms? Line-dancing to “Achy Breaky Heart”? Wearing a cowboy hat? Performing a Pulp Fiction/Saturday Night Fever dance? Even to those of us who’ve watched Duchovny act out all this (and far worse) in the intervening years on his sex, drugs and rock’n’roll-fest Californication, there’s something stomach-achingly cringeworthy about watching Fox Mulder go through these moves. And while things soon sober up and his vision actually turns rather meaningful, not to mention beautiful, this is not one of The X-Files’ finest moments.

But what of the rest of the episode? Well, there’s no doubt that introducing Mini Mes of Mulder and Scully is a cracking idea, and while Robbie Amell’s Miller is disappointingly bland, Lauren Ambrose’s Einstein is a stormer. It’s great fun watching Mulder try to convince her that downing psychotropic drugs to contact a comatose terrorist is a good idea. Although sadly, yet again – in a theme that’s been running almost non-stop since the first episode of this new series – poor Mulder ends up spouting reams of loony tunes gibberish that makes him sound like a nutjob. Was he always this bad, or was it just not quite as ridiculous back then? Hmm.

The idea of communicating with a comatose bad guy isn’t a bad one, either, although having random dudes and nurses try to kill him feels less like a comment on racism and Islamaphobia (because the poor guy does turn out to be largely innocent by the end, or so his mother tells us), and more like gratuitous space-filling. There simply isn’t enough story here to propel the plot unless the episode is filled with more FBI agents and shady US government types than an episode of Homeland. And also, given that at early points in the story we’re not sure this guy is actually innocent, isn’t a bit worrying that some viewers might actually be cheering these revenge-seekers on? Brrrr.

Still, there’s a conversation at the end about how Mulder and Scully witnessed love (Shiraz’s mother) and hate (nurses/government agents out for revenge), and that’s supposed to redress the balance… although their talk isn’t really that interesting when it comes down to it, and some viewers may have been checking Twitter by then. Oh dear.

The Good:

• Mulder’s “trip” is a car crash, but the final scene of him talking to Shiraz is gorgeous. But how could it not be? The dead son cradled in his mother’s arms is a direct homage to Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that’s universally regarded as one of the greatest artworks of all time. (The reason it works, while many images of Mary cradling the dead Jesus don’t, is because Michelangelo made Mary a little bigger than her son, despite the fact it should’ve been the other way around, because then it looked more like a mother cradling her child – Art-Connoisseur Ed.)

• Miller and Einstein discussing how Scully puts up with Mulder is a hoot. Clearly, Scully must be in love with him. It’s the only explanation!
• “Special Agent Einstein speaking.” That name is such a cheap shot, isn’t it? But it works.
• Not a bad line, this: “Are you proposing, Agent Mulder, that we administer the magic mushroom to the terrorist?”

• Just a random observation, but DAMN this guy eats his sandwiches in huge chunks.

• The Lone Gunmen cameo in Mulder’s vision – hoorah!
• Mulder says: “I want to believe.”

The Bad:

• The people running around on fire after the bombing is horrifying… but undermined by the “Fox Presents” logo being revealed in their midst. Cheap trick.
• Somehow it takes Scully the same amount of time to fly from Washington DC to Texas as it does for Einstein to get from the airport in Washington to the FBI building to see Mulder. Traffic must’ve been a bitch, eh?
• The nurse turns off Shiraz’s life support machine. Alarms sound. He flatlines. When she turns it on again, he instantly returns to normal before a second has even passed, and all the alarms silence. The human body does not work like that, and nor does hospital machinery. This isn’t an episode of Monty Python.
• Additionally, if you’re going to be making a show about a Muslim suicide bomber who’s just apparently killed innocent people, and you’ve just had a nurse try to kill him by turning off his life support, it’s probably best not to have an FBI Agent come in mere seconds later with comedic brass “rompy pomps” on the soundtrack.
• “She came here today to talk to her son,” says Mulder, bringing Shiraz’s mum into the room. “Mulder, where did you find her?” asks Scully, gobsmacked. Er, she was just outside the hospital trying to get in, probably telling all the FBI men, “That’s my son in there!” It’s not as though Mulder found the Lindbergh baby, is it?

The Random:

• The strange noises in the sky in the video Mulder is playing in his first scene is actually a documented event. As he says, it’s been recorded all around the world and is devastatingly creepy – as this video proves. However, it’s been explained away by science as sounds from many miles away, such as trains moving at a station, being distorted by distance and unusual atmospheric conditions. Still fecking terrifying, mind you.
• Best Quote: Scully: “Nobody but the FBI’s most unwanted! I’ve been waiting 23 years to say that.” (This was, of course, the first thing Mulder ever said to her.)

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson

Read our other reviews of The X-Files

The X-Files S10E04 “Home Again” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm
Writer: Glen Morgan
Director: GlenMorgan

Essential Plot Points:

• A rude guy ordering around a bunch of homeless people is followed into his office by a giant, barefoot man who climbs off a garbage truck. The man then rips him in two.
• No sooner have Mulder and Scully arrived at the crime scene than Scully gets a call from her brother William in Germany, who tells her that her mum is in hospital after having had a heart attack.
• Scully arrives at her bedside and is rather confused to hear that her mum briefly regained consciousness and asked for her son, Charlie – a son we’ve never heard about before because the family don’t speak to him. What’s that about, then?
• Mulder continues to investigate the case as more bodies pile up. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all dicks who aren’t nice to homeless people.
• Scully’s mother dies – and her last words, spoken to Mulder, are: “My son is named William too!”
• Despite being grief-stricken, Scully insists on going back to work on the case, and she and Mulder soon track down a graffiti artist named Trash Man. They discover that he has brought the garbage truck creature (nicknamed – wait for it – “Band-Aid Nose Man”) to life by willing him into existence to wreak justice on the streets.
• They determine that his next victim will be the guy who’s just put a load of homeless people in a hospital refuge against their will. Sure enough, the monster turns up and kills him. They arrive too late.
• During all of this, Scully has been thinking hard about her mother’s final words and realises that even if you don’t speak to your child, you will think about them to your dying day. She weeps in Mulder’s arms about the fact they gave up baby William.

Review:

There’s only one good thing about this disappointingly bland episode and that’s Gillian Anderson’s performance: emoting for all she’s worth by her mother’s deathbed; freaking out when the body is taken to the morgue; tearfully telling Mulder that she regrets William’s loss. She is truly wonderful, giving an acting tour-de-force which unfortunately serves to make poor David Duchovny look a little wooden beside her.

Then again, this isn’t his episode, it’s hers, so we’ll forgive that little issue. In fact, it seems that the running arc plot of this new series is Scully’s guilt at giving up her son, and it’s a rather welcome one – his birth and subsequent dismissal from the original series always did seem a little callous. (Sure, Scully gave the kid away to save his life, but there never seemed to be any repercussions for her… until now.) It’ll be interesting to see where the show goes from here.

Emotional core aside, what else is there to say about “Home Again”? Not much, sadly. The monster of the week is a tulpa – we first encountered one of them in season six’s “Arcadia” – and while it’s kind of cool to think of him as some kind of toxic avenging garbage man (his motto could well be “Takin’ out the trash so you don’t have to!”), he’s actually just a big heap of “meh”. So he can rip people apart? It’s fun the first time – though not for the victim, obviously – but the gore seems rather subdued and his actions stop being shocking pretty damn quick. And as for the scare-factor, we see him far too early on in the episode, removing any sense of the build-up of tension that’s horror filmmaking at its simplest. Plus he’s just a tall bloke with snot-stuff all over his face. Even if he didn’t look a bit slimy, how is a guy with a plaster stuck over his nostrils supposed to be terrifying? Oh dear.

This is a serious misfire after the wit and originality of last week’s episode; a bland script that showcases Scully but does little else, with a run-of-the-mill monster that could’ve been used as a comment on social injustice but simply fails to come to life. The final scene helps a lot, thankfully, as Mulder and Scully discuss their lives while sitting on a log as the camera slowly tracks around them – but it’s too little, too late to help this plodding X-File by numbers.

The Good:

• “Not even in the proper recycling bin.” Mulder’s on fine quip form when it comes to finding a head in the trash.
• Can anybody else remember Petula Clarke’s “Downtown” being used to soundtrack a murder before? It makes no lyrical sense whatsoever but it’s fun to sing along to while the Band-Aid Nose Man (…sigh) chases his victim around her house.

• Mulder and Scully not only whip out their torches again but they also make a beautifully stylish “X” with the beams. Nice touch.
• Scully tells her mum: “I’ve been where you are. I know Ahab is there, and Melissa.” She’s referring to the episode “One Breath”, in which she lay in a coma, while Ahab and Melissa are her father and sister, respectively. It’s little mentions of previous events on the show that are helping to keep this series watchable despite some wobbly plots.
• “Her last words were about our child, her grandchild, that we gave away!” cries Scully. “Why did she say that? Why did she have to say that?” Parents, eh? Even with their dying words, they can really piss off their kids.

• Mulder’s “Ew, gross!” face upon finding a plaster stuck to his shoe is impressive.
• In yet another outing for the show’s famous catchphrase, Scully weeps for William: “I want to believe. I need to believe that we didn’t treat him like trash.”
• Mulder asks if the head of the school board and the developer are married because she calls him a “douchebag”. Sarcastic bastard. Never change, Fox. Never change.

The Bad:

• Mulder explains what’s happening with the case to Scully, who clearly isn’t listening because her mum is about to die, but he doesn’t seem to get the hint and carries on wibbling out all the exposition we need to hear as viewers. Empathy, dude, empathy!
• Okay, so Margaret Scully didn’t want to be kept alive on life support, and so her breathing tube is removed as per her request. But it does seem a little mean that this was done before her poor son, William, could fly in from Germany to say goodbye. We’re not experts on medical law, obviously, but… couldn’t they have hung on a bit longer? (It also would’ve been nice to see Bill, played by Pat Skipper, one more time – oh well.)
• The Trash Man graffiti artist gets a long speech that seems to be very Deep and Serious and Important but by God, is it dull. Incidentally, he’s played by musician Tim Armstrong, singer/guitarist for punk rock band Rancid.
• Far be it for us to judge those murdered by supernatural serial killers, but Daryl Landry knew someone had been picking off people taking advantage of the homeless, and yet he still followed mysterious noises down a corridor so dark he had to use his iPhone as a torch. And there really is no motivation whatsoever for him to do so; watching that sequence is a masterclass in “this character will do this for no other reason than the writers want him to”. So yup: we’re glad he carked it.

• Scully sobs all over Mulder’s bright white shirt but somehow doesn’t get any mascara or eye-liner on there at all. Damn, that’s some impressive war paint.

The Random:

• Pure coincidence, of course, but in the teaser we’ve just seen a guy rip both arms off some poor dude and, post opening credits, the first name to pop up on the cast list is “Tim Armstrong”. Snigger.
• Best Quote: Mulder: “What? I wasn’t gonna shoot the kid and I don’t do stairs any more.”
  Scully: “Mulder, back in the day I used to do stairs and in three-inch heels.”

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson

Read our other reviews of The X-Files

The X-Files S10E03 “Mulder & Scully Meet The Were Monster” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm
Writer: Darin Morgan
Director: Darin Morgan

Essential Plot Points:

• Two stoners are getting high in the woods under a full moon when they see a guy being attacked by a terrifying lizard-man. Once the creature runs off, they find a body.
• The case falls into Mulder and Scully’s lap. Scully’s up for it, but Mulder’s disenchanted by all things “monster” these days and thinks it’ll be a bust. He investigates anyway.
• They stay at a motel lodge, where Mulder overhears the manager yelling about a monster. He questions him, discovering the sleazy bugger was spying on his guests – and saw one of them turn into a lizard-man.
• In the lizard-man’s room, Mulder finds some medication with the name “Guy Mann” (subtle) on the label. He goes to see Guy’s psychiatrist and, from there, traces Guy to a graveyard.
• Guy, a rather peculiar Australian chap, asks Mulder to kill him. He claims to be a lizard who was bitten by a human and has become a man. WTF? He also denies he’s killed anybody.
• Scully tracks down the real killer: an animal control officer.
• Guy is innocent. Mulder watches, amazed, as he turns from human to lizard and vanishes into the forest to hibernate for 10,000 years. (Naturally Scully isn’t there to see it too.)

Review:

So we finally hit the episode everybody’s been talking about: the one written by Darin Morgan, famed for playing the Fluke Man in the original series and also for penning some of The X-Files‘ most fondly remembered stories – everything from “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” to “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’”. In other words, he’s the guy who makes us laugh, and he certainly doesn’t fail to do so here.

In short, this is an absolute treat – from its daft title to the sheer joy you see on the faces of Duchovny and Anderson as they can finally relax and smile in their roles; all that po-faced exposition in the first episode seems like a distant memory. These are two human beings at last, teasing each other (“Mulder, the internet is not good for you”), laughing, enjoying their work and relaxing – although the shot of Mulder on his bed in his red Speedos, famous from episode “Duane Barry”, might be step too far, even if Duchovny ain’t exactly in bad shape after all these years.

Then there’s Flight Of The Conchords’ Rhys Darby – who incidentally played a werewolf in the wonderful What We Do In The Shadows, so he’s rather cornering the market when it comes to human-animal transformation acting. He’s by turns grumpy, exasperated, hilarious and likeable in his role as the unfortunate lizard-turned-human, and the way he describes human life just gets funnier and funnier as he goes on. From experiencing an insatiable urge to go out and get a job to finding himself transfixed by burgers and porn; to realising that life sucks and the only way he can find happiness is to get a dog – which he promptly loses – to mocking the concept of wearing a tie around his neck… well, there’s no avoiding the fact that everything he says makes a surprising amount of sense, and human life is actually a farce from start to finish. (His anguished assessment of existence also echoes the bleak worldview of Clyde Bruckman; there’s definitely a theme to Morgan’s writing.)

Of course his story is bonkers, and Mulder listens, perplexed and disbelieving, until he eventually realises it’s all true – and, therefore, his visionquest is still as valid as it always was. It’s a lovely way of dealing with his mid-life crisis, and when you add to this all the references to how the world has changed since he first took up the job in that FBI basement, it’s also a clever way of proving to him that some things always stay the same.

Incidentally, the running joke about Mulder almost missing his quarry because he’s fiddling with a new camera app is genius – and of course he doesn’t even think to use it when he’s finally confronted with a fully-fledged horned lizard-man. Ain’t that just life in a nutshell?

The Good:

• Where do we even start? Well, first up, a huge “bravo” for the lizard make-up.
• Then there are the in-jokes. Hold on, there are a few…

• There were three cameos from old X-Files regulars: Tyler Labine and Nicole Parker reprised their roles as the stoners who also popped up in “War Of The Coprophages” and “Quagmire”; they also appeared, separately, in episodes of Millennium. Meanwhile the motel lodge owner is played by Alex Diakun, who’s been in several Morgan X-Files episodes as well as Millennium and The X-Files: I Want To Believe. Family reunion!
• Of course you noticed this, but Mulder’s ring tone is the X-Files theme. How very meta.

• In “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” Scully inherits Clyde’s dog, who she names Queequeg after a character in Moby Dick (her father’s nickname for her was always Starbuck, another Moby Dick reference). Poor Queequeg was eaten by a crocodile in another Morgan episode, “Quagmire”. Here he makes amends by having her take home Guy’s dog, who coincidentally is also named after a Moby Dick character, Daggoo. Bonus points to Scully, by the way, who adopts the dog even though it bites her. Never judge a dog by how it behaves in a cage, as many rescue centres will tell you…
• Absolutely love the casual way the murderer starts to confess his entire life story and Scully simply dismisses him with the line that all serial killers are the same. “I have a whole speech prepared!” he squeaks, the wind taken out of his sails. Fabulous.
• Not only does Mulder proclaim that old chestnut “I want to believe!” here, Scully also says the immortal line “Mulder, it’s me” as they speak on the phone.
• There’s a passing reference to Scully being immortal. Again, this is a shout-back to events from another Morgan episode, “Clyde Bruckman”, in which she’s told she’ll live forever. And that’s also referenced in the episode “Tithonus”. Will she? Won’t she? It seems certain that Mulder won’t, mind you, as Clyde already told him he’d die of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
• In a glorious tip of the hat – literally – Guy Mann wears the same outfit that Darren McGavin wore in Kolchak: The Night Stalker… the show that originally inspired The X-Files.
• When Mulder looks through the peephole in the motel, he’s a Fox looking through a fox. We see what they did there! Oh, and the seedy motel full of stuffed animals with peepholes has a serious Psycho vibe.
• The label on Guy’s medication says it came from Lycans Pharmacy. Lycanthropy is associated with being a werewolf.
• Mulder’s throwing the pencils again – this time not at the ceiling, but at the “I Want To Believe” poster, taped up and hanging on the wall again after he kicked it to pieces in episode one.

The Bad:

• Throwing in a random transgender character might have seemed like a wry reflection of the times we’re living in – and there’s no denying DJ “Shangela” Pierce is a blast to watch – but it’s a pity they made her (a) a prostitute and (b) a crack addict. Yes, yes, it’s supposed to be a humorous scene, but stereotypes are stereotypes and this is 2016, guys. Feathers were ruffled and viewers were annoyed… oops.

• “C’mon, I wanna make you say ‘cheese’,” says Scully in Guy’s gratuitous sex fantasy. That is, without a doubt, the worst pick-up line in the history of pick-up lines. Her squeaky Betty Boop voice is giggle-worthy, though.

And The Random:

• The grave visited by Guy is for Jack Hardy, who was an assistant director on Millennium, The Lone Gunmen and The X-Files: I Want To Believe. Beside it lies a gravestone for Kim Manners, who directed more episodes of the show than anybody else. “It’s really our way of dedicating the episode, if not the show to him,” Chris Carter told E! News about this sweet little moment. As a lovely touch, Mulder actually lays flowers on the grave, and places a hand on the stone in tribute. D’awww.
• Best Quote: Mulder: “When one checks into an establishment such as this, one expects the manager to be a peeping Tom.”

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson

Read our other reviews of The X-Files

The X-Files S10E03 “Mulder & Scully Meet The Were Monster” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm
Writer: Darin Morgan
Director: Darin Morgan

Essential Plot Points:

• Two stoners are getting high in the woods under a full moon when they see a guy being attacked by a terrifying lizard-man. Once the creature runs off, they find a body.
• The case falls into Mulder and Scully’s lap. Scully’s up for it, but Mulder’s disenchanted by all things “monster” these days and thinks it’ll be a bust. He investigates anyway.
• They stay at a motel lodge, where Mulder overhears the manager yelling about a monster. He questions him, discovering the sleazy bugger was spying on his guests – and saw one of them turn into a lizard-man.
• In the lizard-man’s room, Mulder finds some medication with the name “Guy Mann” (subtle) on the label. He goes to see Guy’s psychiatrist and, from there, traces Guy to a graveyard.
• Guy, a rather peculiar Australian chap, asks Mulder to kill him. He claims to be a lizard who was bitten by a human and has become a man. WTF? He also denies he’s killed anybody.
• Scully tracks down the real killer: an animal control officer.
• Guy is innocent. Mulder watches, amazed, as he turns from human to lizard and vanishes into the forest to hibernate for 10,000 years. (Naturally Scully isn’t there to see it too.)

Review:

So we finally hit the episode everybody’s been talking about: the one written by Darin Morgan, famed for playing the Fluke Man in the original series and also for penning some of The X-Files‘ most fondly remembered stories – everything from “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” to “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’”. In other words, he’s the guy who makes us laugh, and he certainly doesn’t fail to do so here.

In short, this is an absolute treat – from its daft title to the sheer joy you see on the faces of Duchovny and Anderson as they can finally relax and smile in their roles; all that po-faced exposition in the first episode seems like a distant memory. These are two human beings at last, teasing each other (“Mulder, the internet is not good for you”), laughing, enjoying their work and relaxing – although the shot of Mulder on his bed in his red Speedos, famous from episode “Duane Barry”, might be step too far, even if Duchovny ain’t exactly in bad shape after all these years.

Then there’s Flight Of The Conchords’ Rhys Darby – who incidentally played a werewolf in the wonderful What We Do In The Shadows, so he’s rather cornering the market when it comes to human-animal transformation acting. He’s by turns grumpy, exasperated, hilarious and likeable in his role as the unfortunate lizard-turned-human, and the way he describes human life just gets funnier and funnier as he goes on. From experiencing an insatiable urge to go out and get a job to finding himself transfixed by burgers and porn; to realising that life sucks and the only way he can find happiness is to get a dog – which he promptly loses – to mocking the concept of wearing a tie around his neck… well, there’s no avoiding the fact that everything he says makes a surprising amount of sense, and human life is actually a farce from start to finish. (His anguished assessment of existence also echoes the bleak worldview of Clyde Bruckman; there’s definitely a theme to Morgan’s writing.)

Of course his story is bonkers, and Mulder listens, perplexed and disbelieving, until he eventually realises it’s all true – and, therefore, his visionquest is still as valid as it always was. It’s a lovely way of dealing with his mid-life crisis, and when you add to this all the references to how the world has changed since he first took up the job in that FBI basement, it’s also a clever way of proving to him that some things always stay the same.

Incidentally, the running joke about Mulder almost missing his quarry because he’s fiddling with a new camera app is genius – and of course he doesn’t even think to use it when he’s finally confronted with a fully-fledged horned lizard-man. Ain’t that just life in a nutshell?

The Good:

• Where do we even start? Well, first up, a huge “bravo” for the lizard make-up.
• Then there are the in-jokes. Hold on, there are a few…

• There were three cameos from old X-Files regulars: Tyler Labine and Nicole Parker reprised their roles as the stoners who also popped up in “War Of The Coprophages” and “Quagmire”; they also appeared, separately, in episodes of Millennium. Meanwhile the motel lodge owner is played by Alex Diakun, who’s been in several Morgan X-Files episodes as well as Millennium and The X-Files: I Want To Believe. Family reunion!
• Of course you noticed this, but Mulder’s ring tone is the X-Files theme. How very meta.

• In “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” Scully inherits Clyde’s dog, who she names Queequeg after a character in Moby Dick (her father’s nickname for her was always Starbuck, another Moby Dick reference). Poor Queequeg was eaten by a crocodile in another Morgan episode, “Quagmire”. Here he makes amends by having her take home Guy’s dog, who coincidentally is also named after a Moby Dick character, Daggoo. Bonus points to Scully, by the way, who adopts the dog even though it bites her. Never judge a dog by how it behaves in a cage, as many rescue centres will tell you…
• Absolutely love the casual way the murderer starts to confess his entire life story and Scully simply dismisses him with the line that all serial killers are the same. “I have a whole speech prepared!” he squeaks, the wind taken out of his sails. Fabulous.
• Not only does Mulder proclaim that old chestnut “I want to believe!” here, Scully also says the immortal line “Mulder, it’s me” as they speak on the phone.
• There’s a passing reference to Scully being immortal. Again, this is a shout-back to events from another Morgan episode, “Clyde Bruckman”, in which she’s told she’ll live forever. And that’s also referenced in the episode “Tithonus”. Will she? Won’t she? It seems certain that Mulder won’t, mind you, as Clyde already told him he’d die of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
• In a glorious tip of the hat – literally – Guy Mann wears the same outfit that Darren McGavin wore in Kolchak: The Night Stalker… the show that originally inspired The X-Files.
• When Mulder looks through the peephole in the motel, he’s a Fox looking through a fox. We see what they did there! Oh, and the seedy motel full of stuffed animals with peepholes has a serious Psycho vibe.
• The label on Guy’s medication says it came from Lycans Pharmacy. Lycanthropy is associated with being a werewolf.
• Mulder’s throwing the pencils again – this time not at the ceiling, but at the “I Want To Believe” poster, taped up and hanging on the wall again after he kicked it to pieces in episode one.

The Bad:

• Throwing in a random transgender character might have seemed like a wry reflection of the times we’re living in – and there’s no denying DJ “Shangela” Pierce is a blast to watch – but it’s a pity they made her (a) a prostitute and (b) a crack addict. Yes, yes, it’s supposed to be a humorous scene, but stereotypes are stereotypes and this is 2016, guys. Feathers were ruffled and viewers were annoyed… oops.

• “C’mon, I wanna make you say ‘cheese’,” says Scully in Guy’s gratuitous sex fantasy. That is, without a doubt, the worst pick-up line in the history of pick-up lines. Her squeaky Betty Boop voice is giggle-worthy, though.

And The Random:

• The grave visited by Guy is for Jack Hardy, who was an assistant director on Millennium, The Lone Gunmen and The X-Files: I Want To Believe. Beside it lies a gravestone for Kim Manners, who directed more episodes of the show than anybody else. “It’s really our way of dedicating the episode, if not the show to him,” Chris Carter told E! News about this sweet little moment. As a lovely touch, Mulder actually lays flowers on the grave, and places a hand on the stone in tribute. D’awww.
• Best Quote: Mulder: “When one checks into an establishment such as this, one expects the manager to be a peeping Tom.”

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson

Read our other reviews of The X-Files

The X-Files S10E02 “Founderʼs Mutation” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm
Writer: James Wong
Director: James Wong

Essential Plot Points:

• A scientist hears a terrible whining noise in his head and kills himself by stabbing a knife into his ear.
• Mulder and Scully investigate, uncovering a secret lab trial – possibly run by the Department of Defense – which is experimenting on children, apparently giving them terrible mutations by doing something to them in utero.
• The head of the trial, Augustus Goldman (Doug Savant), assures them he’s actually trying to cure the kids.
• Mulder starts to hear the whining noise himself.
• Scully wonders if her own baby with Mulder, the long-lost William, might’ve been one of these mutated kids.
• The Agents track down Goldman’s wife, who tells them she also has a long-lost baby who has the mutation. He turns out to be named Kyle and the source of the whining noise – he’s psychic.
• Mulder and Scully take Kyle to see their dad and also his sister, one of the imprisoned kids (she can breathe underwater, it seems).
• Kyle ramps up his whiny noise until his dad’s head all but explodes and escapes with his sister.

Review:

Ahhhh, this is better! Still not a perfect episode by any means, but a million times better than that turgid opener – not least because Scully doesn’t look bored and Mulder isn’t ranting like a manic street preacher (in the old, pre-musical sense of the phrase). And there’s even a scene in which the Agents report to Skinner in his office (seriously, why has that man not been promoted yet?!) while a mysterious governmental official in the background locks up all the evidence – just like we’ve seen on the show since day one. Nice touch.

(There’s also fun to be gleaned from the fact that Skinner is his usual unhelpful, pouty alpha-male self right up until the guy leaves, and then suddenly he’s on the Agents’ side again – a big old bear with a heart of gold, that’s our Walter.)

The story itself, much like the alien conspiracy in episode one, is X-Files 101. It doesn’t feel that fresh, true; hell, we must’ve seen every variation possible of “the government is experimenting on babies” during the show’s run, and this certainly isn’t the first time that we’ve wondered about the origins of baby William (Scully was supposed to have been sterile before she had the little lad). However, liberal use of gore and excellent make-up effects make the investigation interesting. And while we’ve seen worse gore on shows like Fringe, Supernatural or Grimm over the years, we have to remember that The X-Files kick-started all that in the first place, so it’s not really fair to play such things off each other.

There are also some genuinely compelling moments, such as Goldman’s wife leaping into a pool to save her child, only to see the little girl sitting there quite happily, breathing away; or the birds gathering every time Kyle uses his powers (apparently because the frequencies attract worms; weird how only the crows noticed…).

Sure, the episode ends with Mulder and Scully thrown around by Kyle’s psychic powers, and Scully doesn’t have her usual, “There must be a rational explanation for that!” moment. Or, indeed, does she decide it’s proof of special powers. Someone does say to her at one point, “Dr Scully, I was told that you were the rational one.” So were we. These days, she’s clearly somewhere in between.

One final thing: while Scully’s dream sequence about what her life with William might have been feels jarring and out of place, it is utterly lovely seeing her dropping him off at school with a smile on her face. Likewise, Mulder’s fantasy also seems odd in the flow of the episode, although it makes more sense coupled with Scully’s. And him quoting JFK’s famous, “We choose to go to the moon,” speech at his son while teaching him to build rockets is just heart-clenchingly sweet. (Although, given the realities of actually having a child, chances are young William would probably have preferred being indoors on his PlayStation than outside with his boring old dad.)

The Good:

• Dr Sanjay’s bloody eyes are really gross. Incidentally, kudos to Christopher Logan for his performance – it’s incredibly disturbing.
• Mulder is back in his suit!
• The agents are back in their basement office!

• TORCHES!
• Mulder using the corpse’s fingerprint to access his phone while nobody is looking – bonus points for sneakiness.
• Mulder mentions The Syndicate, one of the over-arching Big Bads of the original series. Good. They haven’t been forgotten, then.
• The baby climbing out of Jackie Goldman’s belly? Groooooooosssss.
• The X-Files is filming in Vancouver again, back where it started. How do we know this? Well, half the cast of Continuum turning up is one clue, not to mention the fact Dr Sanjay’s workplace is the headquarters of Alec Sadler’s tech company on that show… Alec Sadler himself, in old age, being played by The X-Files‘ William B Davis. Oh Vancouver, what a tangled TV web you weave.

• Anderson tweeted about this episode… Once seen, never forgotten.

The Bad:

• Mulder accidentally propositioning Dr Sanjay’s gay lover is an amusing – and somehow inevitable – moment; after all, how do you go up to a stranger and say, “Do you want to go somewhere private?” without that being misinterpreted? Brilliant. However, the fact the guy then thinks Mulder is keeping his homosexuality hidden and tells him, “The truth is in here,” pointing at his heart… hmm. Over-egging the pudding, maybe? Or perhaps we’re just being a little too critical of what’s actually a rather silly scene.
• Mulder goes to a bar. Scully gets stuck with doing an autopsy. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it’s basically the equivalent of them being a married couple and him going for a pint after work while she cooks the dinner…
• “Was I just an incubator?” asks Scully earnestly. “You’re never just anything to me, Scully,” Mulder replies. What a smoothie.
• Nowhere in the episode do we get an explanation for why Mulder heard the whining noise at Dr Sanjay’s apartment. Yet beforehand there’s a pointed shot of Kyle’s face on Scully’s dashcam, proving that he was nearby and therefore responsible. Was that supposed to be used later to identify him? Perhaps it was cut out – luckily it’s easy to figure out on our own.

The Random:

• Mulder’s little, “This is how I’d bond with my kid,” fantasy features him showing William the film 2001: A Space Odyssey – specifically, the scene with the monolith appearing to our ape ancestors. Earlier on in the episode we also see a TV screen in the hospital showing a newborn baby being cuddled in (what looks like – feel free to correct if you recognised it) an episode of the Planet Of The Apes TV show.

• Given that the episode is about the next stage of human evolution, there are two subtle, or not so subtle, messages here: 1) we evolved from apes; 2) we could evolve back into them. And were aliens involved…?
• Best Quote: Mulder: “I blacked out after Goldman’s eyes popped out of their sockets.”

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson

Read our other reviews of The X-Files

The X-Files S10E01 “My Struggle” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on Channel Five, Mondays, 9pm
Writer: Chris Carter
Director: Chris Carter

Essential Plot Points:

• Agent Fox Mulder narrates the events so far, just in case there are any newbies watching. Some humour might’ve been nice, mind, rather than a lengthy, deathly serious info-dump.
• We start in 1947, with an unnamed chap being escorted to a flying saucer crash site by some Men In Black. Yup, it’s Roswell! As the episode continues we see more flashbacks of this guy being aghast when the military shoot dead the ship’s (kinda cute-looking) alien occupant, then working on its corpse, and then, today, talking to Mulder about it – except he merely hints at what he’s seen, rather than telling him everything. How helpful.
• Mulder and Scully are reunited when celebrity conspiracy theorist Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale) asks them to come and meet a woman he knows, Sveta (Anita Mahendru), who has been regularly abducted by aliens.
• Mulder soon realises that aliens weren’t abducting her – she was actually being experimented upon by humans. With a shock, he realises that must mean there’s a Massive Conspiracy: powerful humans have been using alien stories as a cover-up while they seed war, famine, economical disasters and even bad weather (!) across the globe. Gasp!
• With this in mind, Mulder goes off on one (ie, he starts gibbering like a loon) while Scully stands around and looks utterly bored, even when she runs a DNA test on Sveta – and herself – and discovers they both have alien DNA.
• Tad takes Mulder (not Scully, of course, that would be too easy) to see a special ship built using alien technology. It’s pretty cool.
• Tad decides to go public with the allegations. Naturally, his show is taken off air, everything’s covered up and the ship is destroyed.
• Poor Sveta is murdered.
• Mulder finally gets Scully to realise something’s up. The truth is still out there, guys.

Review:

The episode title, “My Struggle”, is a reference to a bestselling series of biographical books by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgard. It also rather perfectly sums up how many viewers might have felt while watching this debut episode of the new X-Files… because boy, is this a struggle to get through.

Sure, it’s lovely to see all the actors again, even William B Davis as the Cigarette-Smoking Man at the end (although Lord only knows how he survived being blown sky-high at the end of the original series – is he immortal?). And all the original elements we know and love are there: Mulder – albeit battling depression; Scully – albeit wearing a wig, despite Gillian Anderson’s determination not to (her hairdresser advised her not to dye it red or she would seriously damage it); assistant director Skinner, who has somehow avoided promotion despite decades of work at the FBI; the “I Want To Believe” poster in the old FBI office; the opening credits; Mark Snow’s gloomy synthesisers on the soundtrack (which we also heard in the interim in countless episodes of Smallville, and dear god, they’ve dated so horrendously); the endless exposition about alien visitors and government conspiracies; even Scully’s old crucifix necklace.

All this should leave us feeling warm and glowy, as though we’re spending time with old friends… but while that may be true for some (and with 21.4 million viewers, not all of them could have hated it), there’s just too much bad here to counteract the good.

Let’s take a look at the plot. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that a conspiracy of humans have been seeding the world with fake alien stories to distract us while controlling wars, governments, the global economy and probably how many photos Kim Kardashian posts on Instagram. We even discover they’re going to take over the planet starting on a Friday (!). Mulder believes this hook, line and sinker five minutes after meeting a woman who’s probably the 900^th abduction victim his met in all his years on the X-Files. Jeez, if he looked up “gullible” in the dictionary there’d be a picture of him.

Sorry to sound like Scully here, but where’s the rest of the evidence? How could he think all this based on two conversations? Does having back-up in the form of a web-show host suddenly make him bolder? And most importantly, why doesn’t the show just come out and say, “The Illuminati control the world!” Were they too scared to give them a name? Or do they really believe they’re out there?!

Then there’s the episode’s dialogue, tone and almost laughable seriousness. While we love Chris Carter for giving us The X-Files in the first place, in much the same way as the backlash against George Lucas eventually happened, so it’s happening here. By the end of the show’s nine-season run, viewers were so weary of conspiracy theorising, po-faced monologuing and frustrating plot arcs that they simply gave up. So why open your new series with exactly the same thing? Come on, Chris, shake things up a little! It isn’t 1993 any more – you have to update more than just your characters’ cellphones!

Case in point: one of the worst phrases to come out of The X-Files was Scully’s tongue-mangling “deceive, inveigle and obfuscate”, way back in season four’s “Teliko”. Here, we get Tad coming out with “cull, kill and subjugate”. Please. Just stop it.

After all this ranting, the good news is that, by all accounts, the series gets better as it goes on. So consider this a temporary blip. The Mulder and Scully we know and love are out there – we just have to wait a little bit longer to see them again…

The Good:

• Seeing the original opening credits. Aww, nostalgia alert! However, see also “Bad”, below…

• The flying saucer crash is rather cool.
• Scully: “Aliens couldn’t find this place.” Mulder was always regarded as the funny one, but she could deliver the odd pleasing one-liner as well, you know. Nice to see she still can.

• It’s only a brief glimpse, but Sveta’s icky tummy is… well, icky.

• The ship in the hangar is pleasingly similar to the triangular ship that menaced Mulder in the second-ever episode of The X-Files, “Deep Throat’” all the way back in 1993. In fact, that shape is possibly more clichéd these days than actual flying saucers, given that there are so many variations in real life and in rumours surrounding US military secret projects (see: Aurora).

The Bad:

• The original opening credits are a lovely touch… but using footage of Mulder and Scully from the early ’90s isn’t really fair on the actors today, is it? Not to mention looking decidedly odd if you’re a brand-new viewer. Why not replace them with their older counterparts?
• When Mulder is told to look at Tad O’Malley’s YouTube… er… MindQuad channel, a video of him loads and plays so quickly, and without Mulder even clicking on it, that it breaks the laws of the internet. X-Files fans aren’t stupid, guys, we notice little slips of reality like that.
• Mind you, saying that, we’re not the only ones being picky about internet-related cock-ups. There’s a comment in the “Goofs” on this episode’s IMDb page that points out this nugget: “When Scully attempts to use the search engine, she receives ‘Error 404 – Site temporarily unavailable.’ Hypertext transfer protocol status 404 is a “Not found” error. An site unavailable error should generate a 503 status.” See? Point proved.
• When Scully rather cruelly sticks the needle in Sveta’s arm, it makes a ridiculous noise.
• Sveta says portentously, “I have alien DNA!” She’s never been tested, though. She doesn’t say, “I think I have alien DNA, can you test me?” She just announces it, and Mulder instantly believes her. Later we discover it’s true, but basically she could’ve said “I have potatoes for blood cells!” and it would’ve made about as much sense.

• The most pointless scene of the episode, maybe: Mulder calls Scully and says over and over, “Sveta is the key!” before hanging up. When you watch it back, it contributes nothing except to make Mulder look like a yelling, unhinged lunatic. Great if him losing his mind is a plot point (see also: “Anasazi”, season two), but he’s actually not losing his mind here, and he also says “Sveta is the key!” later, so it’s hardly as if we needed the reminder.
• “It’s all about controlling the past to control the future!” Oh dear. This dialogue is so up itself. Some self-awareness about how ridiculous all this sounds might have been nice.
• “You’re nearly there. You’re close,” says Mulder’s contact. Dude, this kind of breadcrumb-dropping might have worked in the ’90s, but these days we’re too impatient. Just tell him, you old fart.
• When Mulder delivers his monologue about conspiracies, Scully gets out her best “bullshit” face.
• Here’s an observation that can apply to most TV shows these days, but we’re going to make it anyway, seeing as things like this have been in the news of late: where are all the black characters?

And The Random:

• The pencils stuck in the old X-Files office’s ceiling were thrown up there by a very bored Mulder during the course of the original series.
• Best Quote: Mulder: “I only want to believe. Actual proof has been strangely hard to come by.”

Reviewed by Jayne Nelson