Awards Daily TV

Last season, Saturday Night Live epitomized the constant criticism that the sketch comedy series can be uneven. While some performances can be the subject of the “water cooler” the next day or even set the internet and social media ablaze, the majority seemed flat and it strained for laughs. In its 41^st season premiere, SNL had a bevy of material to tackle, but the weak second half of the show almost ruined the strong opening.

When you have a figure as big as Donald Trump threatening to run the entire country, it’s time for SNL to swoop in and shine with its political humor. Taran Killam has the honor of playing the presidential hopeful, and his impersonation is eerily spot-on. The cold open had Trump and wife Melania (played by Cecily Strong) explaining that his public appearances may have painted Trump in a poor light, and he wanted to give “everyone the chance to get to know the real Donald.” They poke fun at Trump’s insane comments about Megyn Kelly (“She’s talented and beautiful. But she’s a heifer who’s always on her period and I hope she dies”) and they mention how much money they have –“Welcome to our humble gold house,” Melania declares at the top of the sketch.

Killam has Trump down. He pouts and even gesticulates with his mouth like him. Killam is one of the most used current cast members, but his impersonation is pretty awesome. There is enough fodder for SNL to play with for the entirety of the presidential debate, and they have the opportunity to make it as big as Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. Don’t mess it up SNL!

Miley Cyrus clearly raided Phyllis Diller’s garage sale to find the right shower curtain to wear for the opening monologue. I’ve complained that SNL has too many hosts singing for their opening, but Cyrus crooning Sinatra’s “My Way” as a tribute to those we will never hear from again is pretty fun. Vanessa Bayer got to throw on a Rachel Dolezal wig, and Aidy Bryant had the audience applauding with her trembling Kim Davis.

SNL kept the political commentary coming with a short commercial for Abilify for People Who Think They Can Be President. The Republican Party has well over 10 hopefuls, and I will laugh at anything that pokes fun at Rick Santorum’s serious bids for any higher office.

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SNL introduced its new cast member, Jon Rudnitsky, in a quick spoof on 1950’s sock hops. Taran Killam, Kyle Mooney, and Rudnitsky all see a girl they want to dance with at the high school dance, but the new guy gets more than he bargained for with Miley Cyrus. Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon sing chaste responses to their new beaus, but Cyrus busts out a hardcore rap. Guess you aren’t really initiated to SNL until a musical guest/host lathers your face up with whip creams and licks it off, right?

It was only a matter of time. Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton is down on her luck and enjoying a scalding hot vodka when the bartender, Val, lends Clinton her listening ear. Did I mention that Val is played by the actual Hillary Rodham Clinton? The crowd went nuts when she appeared, and the writers joked about Clinton taking her time to speak out against the Keystone Pipeline and rally in favor of gay marriage (“could have done it sooner,” she laments to Val). Clinton seemed rather at ease on the stage and not as stiff as one might expect. Get that younger demographic, Hillary!

Here’s the quality turning point of the episode. Head writer Colin Jost and the underused Michael Che make jokes about Joe Biden and Lemony Snicket’s Planned Parenthood donation. Kim Davis is called a homophobic Forrest Gump. The groaning begins with Kyle Mooney wheels out as Pope Francis to recap his trip to the United States. Mooney sounds like a cross between Borat and a pizza proprietor, and the stint is designed to make Francis look like an overreaching, out-of-touch figure. It fails. Mooney doesn’t even seem to buy it with his unenthusiastic chest thumping. Later on, Leslie Jones appears to dole out advice on texting with the opposite sex. Jones is always great with her aggressive delivery, but does anyone buy her lust for golden boy Colin Jost? I sure don’t. The best appearance is from Pete Davidson, but that might be because he never feels like he’s forcing anything. He compares Donald Trump’s possible presidency to Sanjaya winning American Idol—we all think it’s a joke, and then it’s up to the terrified young people to stop it before it becomes a reality.

Since I’m an old man, I thought the commercial for the FOX drama The Millennials was funny. McKinnon plays a girl who has been at a job for 3 days and she demands a promotion—no, she deserves one. Cyrus and resident young person Pete Davidson also work in the office, and all the young people can’t do anything without their fingers constantly texting.

The sketches begin to get strange when Cyrus, Strong, Jones and Vaness Bayer visit the famous deli where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm for Billy Crystal in the beloved romantic comedy When Harry Met with Sally… The women take turns faking it, but Jones makes it awkward with her loud and unusual orgasm. Apparently, she does it in public places and the condom always breaks. I’m starting to worry for Jones’ vocal chords, because they only let her scream all of her lines.

SNL continues its awkward relationship with race in this PBS spoof on late night talk shows. Late night has been called out for its lack of diversity, and the network presents an “uncovered” episode of Too Late with Ruby Nichols, featuring Leslie Jones as a host who has to overcome racism. In her opening monologue Nichols says, “They wouldn’t let me into the theater to the premiere of Vertigo. They wouldn’t even let me in the front door of this theater and it’s my show!” When it comes to an interview between Nichols and Hayley Mills, they show a clip of Mills in an uncomfortable show. And then the sketch…just…ends. It was incomplete and strange.

Back in 2013, Bobby Moynihan and Beck Bennett discovered that Kyle Mooney made a sex tape with Cyrus. The final skit involved with Moynihan and Bennett walking in on Mooney and Cyrus getting hitched in a dressing room. Mooney immediately freaks out and questions whether he wants to go through with the ceremony. Every time he opens the door to the dressing room, it seems that time has flashed forward and he watches his life flash before his eyes. A man fearing commitment and questioning his decision to raise a family isn’t original, but the ridiculousness of it all it kind of amusing. It’s not a strong ending, but at least the end wasn’t one of the previous sketches from the second half.

If Saturday Night Live would have focused entirely on the politics, it would have been a stronger episode. It’s a good start, but it’s disappointing that the second half didn’t live up to the front end. Would it have been better if the show recapped the silly events of summer?

This week, Joey serves as the Awards Daily TV pop quiz master as Megan and Clarence battle it out for general TV pop quiz dominances. It’s a short one this week, folks, as vacations and scheduling conflicts prevented a deeper dive into the currently blossoming Fall TV season. But don’t worry, we’ll be back next week with another episode including reactions to the premiere of American Horror Story: Hotel and other new series. In the meantime, enjoy our latest pop quiz!

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Season 4, Episode 17
Director: Rob Bowman
Writer: Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz

The X-Files returns to its central mythology storyline in unexpected ways with “Tempus Fugit,” the first of a 2-part episode arc. While it appears deceptively simple at the start by focusing on a seemingly alien-caused plane crash, the episode then spirals into multiple directions that, of course, can’t be satisfactorily resolved until its upcoming conclusion. As I’ve said before, it’s difficult to review and form coherent opinions around a 2-parter and only seeing its first half. Still, “Tempus Fugit” is a dense episode that, at times, becomes incredibly difficult to follow.

The prologue begins on Flight 549 with Max Fenig, popular alien abductee from early in the series, on the flight, terrified of a man seated toward the back of the plane. This strange man gets up to go to the bathroom and begins to assemble a zip gun. Before any other actions are taken, the plane begins to violently shake with brilliant white lights emanating from outside – brilliant white lights that recall UFO activity from elsewhere in the series. After Mulder conducts an impromptu birthday celebration for Scully, they are approached by Max Fenig’s sister, Sharon, who tells them of the plane crash. After investigating the crash site, they discover a few anomalies – a missing nine minutes from most wristwatches being the primary oddity. Elsewhere in the crash site, two mysterious agents find the body of the would-be assassin and use acid to erase his fingerprints and facial features as well as steal his zip gun. Max Fenig’s seat partner is the only person on the flight to be found alive, but he is suffering from extreme radiation burns similar to those who have been exposed to the white lights before in the series.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Sharon reveals that she isn’t really Max Fenig’s sister but is later abducted by aliens. The air traffic controllers who were communicating with Flight 549 have information on the crash but have been told to keep the secret. One of the two controllers is found dead from a “suicide,” causing the other to divulge what he knows to Mulder and Scully – basically that there were three aircrafts in the vicinity the night 549 crashed. The air controller believes one aircraft shot another one down – possibly a UFO – which caused the 549 crash accidentally. Mulder begins to search for the potentially downed aircraft in a lake and eventually finds it and an alien body submerged under the water. Scully, meanwhile, takes the surviving air traffic controller back to D.C. where he is almost murdered by a Man in Black, but the attempt is accidentally foiled by Agent Pendrell, Scully’s biggest fan, who is shot in the process.

Whew. Deep breath.

It is difficult to formulate an opinion on all of this given that I’ve been effectively cut-off in the middle of the action, so some of my lingering questions about the episode are natural questions to have. I don’t know the end of the story. As a mythology episode, the goings-on are fairly typical – government conspiracy, UFOs, a dead alien body, etc. It’s becoming the bizarre norm around these parts. It is a nice turn of events to experience it without the Smoking Man seemingly holding court over all of it. I can only assume he’ll show up in the next episode as he tends to be the one pulling the strings with these kinds of stories. But we’ll have to wait until the next outing to see that and really to form a coherent opinion about the overall story itself. It’s just that difficult to review “Tempus Fugit” when it’s not a complete work.

Season 4, Episode 16
Director: Michael Lange
Writer: Howard Gordan, Chris Carter

Chris Carter apparently has a deep mistrust of the American government. I’m not going to go into whether or not that mistrust is warranted – this is television site, not one for political discourse – but his feelings are deeply interwoven into all of his writing. Carter mostly pens conspiratorial mythology episodes, yet he does from time to time branch out into “monster of the week” stories as he did with “Unrequited.” Yet, this episode, while having no connection to the central mythology of the series, has many of the same unmistakable hallmarks of a mythology episode and shares a central theme with them – the government cannot be trusted. “Unrequited” is largely procedural, but it does make a few moments available for real human drama, bearing fruition to a middling episode that neither offends nor thrills.

The episode begins as many recent X-Files episodes like to start – in medias res (in the middle of the action). Mulder and Scully are serving in a security detail for Major General Bloch as he gives a speech at the Vietnam Memorial. Bloch is the target of a particularly dangerous assassin (Nathaniel Teager, played by Peter LaCroix), one that apparently has the ability to make himself appear/disappear at will. Mulder and Scully persistently search him out but lose him into the crowd, putting the Major General at great risk. Flashing back, we see Teager stow away in another high-ranking military official’s car and assassinate him with ease. Mulder and Scully are asked to intervene, but there is little evidence on which to act save a mysterious playing card that mimics ones used by Vietnam soldiers to mark their kills. After the FBI arrests the leader of a radical paramilitary group, they close in on Teager’s identity and discover he was long-considered dead by the military thanks to a handful of (obviously extracted) teeth.

When Teager kills another high-ranking military official despite FBI coverage, he is spotted on a security tape, illustrating his abilities only extend to the naked eye. Mulder eventually reaches out to his all-knowing U.N. contact and learns that all of the assassinated officials were involved in a conspiracy to cover up the fact that American POWs remain in Vietnam. He deduces that Teager’s orders may actually come from the government itself to cover up the plot. Flashing forward to the speech that opened the episode, Mulder and Scully manage to distract Teager long enough to save the Major General. When Teager attempts to highjack a car, he is shot and again becomes visible, muttering his military identification as he passes out. The government claims this man was not Teager, but Mulder believes that to be a lie, effectively ending the episode with an uneasy lack of clear resolution.

“Unrequited” overall has an intriguing storyline even if it fails to satisfactorily resolve many of the main questions it raises. Teager as a character is a mystery, a cypher, and he’s clearly intended to be one as he is a secretive military operative. Yet, we aren’t clear exactly how he obtained the ability to hide from the human eye – it is casually mentioned that perhaps he learned it from his captives. We also never find out what happens to him at the end of the episode. And, as with may government-centered conspiracies, we never really find out an answer to the central question of his motives or of the potential for the government to be targeting these high-ranking military operatives. What we’re left with is a by-the-numbers procedural where Mulder and Scully attempt to uncover the truth with a sprinkling of the void left in the American psyche by the Vietnam War, highlighted by Teager’s touching interaction with a Vietnam War widow and with his brief interaction with a former colleague.

In the end, “Unrequited” doesn’t really offer anything we haven’t seen or heard from The X-Files before. None of the direction or scripting is particularly new or evolutionary for the series, but that’s not a huge deal honestly. It is warranted for a series of this calibre and success to remain in stasis for an episode or two. They’ve earned their right to do so.

Season 4, Episode 14
Director: Kim Manners
Writer: Howard Gordan

The X-Files‘ “Kaddish” is an exploration into a world that, to most viewers, is as alien and foreign to most of us as anything flying in from outer space. The community of Hasidic Jews seen burying and mourning their dead here are well represented even if the episode isn’t an extremely deep-dive into the customs and practices, yet it’s enough to whet the audience’s appetite for more should they wish. At least they fair much better than the one-note villains that plague the episode.

The episode begins with the funeral of Issac Luria, a Hasidic Jew who was the subject of a hate crime as retold through imagined flashbacks by his fiancée, Ariel. Later that night, during a driving rainstorm, someone fashions a mound of mud into a semblance of a man. As the person walks away, the mud begins to breathe. Mulder and Scully are called in when one of the three boys responsible for Issac’s death is found murdered and in possession of Issac’s convenience store footage so that the other two targets could be identified.

As Mulder and Scully investigate further, they unravel an underground neo-Nazi propaganda organization working out of a print shop. Here, they find charming pamphlets like “Are Jews Responsible for AIDS?” and the like. The owner, unapologetic for his beliefs, is hiding his connection to Issac’s murderer. As the episode progresses, an unseen force slowly murders all of the neo-Nazis. At the end, it is revealed that Ariel created a Golum in the form of Issac to exact revenge and out of grief. She ultimately causes it to disappear as she lets go of Issac. And after he had completed his task, of course.

“Kaddish” is far more successful an episode when it focuses on exploration of Jewish lore and customs than it is a supernatural outing. Much like Witness before it, there is a persistent theme of “the others” (the Jewish community, Mulder and Scully) through the episode, which works nicely with the overall theming of The X-Files. I appreciated the expansion of Ariel’s role and the relationship with her father, however brief their roles were.

I suppose the only nit I would have with “Kaddish” is the shallow characterization of the villainous Nazis. The creators intended to draw them this way and provide “hissworthy” objects against which they could pit the Hasidic Jew characters. But I always bristle when characters so plainly state their biases and ill-intentions. There is a craft to creating villains with subtlety, but I suppose 45 minutes of screen time isn’t going to allow that. Still, it’s too easy of a path to go down. That doesn’t take away from the positive aspects of the episode, though. It just makes it merely good instead of what could have been a great contribution to the overall X-Files lore.

Season 4, Episode 14
Director: Rob Bowman
Writer: Chris Carter, Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, Frank Spotnitz

“Memento Mori” is the episode that finally helped The X-Files gain some traction and major hardware at the Emmy Awards. That’s not to say that series creator Chris Carter was necessarily in the hunt for Emmys, but the series, at the time, had been building a great deal of credibility with the Television Academy – a surprising fact given their relative abhorrence for all things science fiction at the time. Still, it’s hard to overlook the episode given the series’ spin on a more traditional dramatic storyline, allowing star Gillian Anderson the ability to play Dana Scully as a broken and vulnerable woman. It’s something I would argue is there in the previous episode “Never Again,” and it’s something that plays out dramatically and beautifully here in “Memento Mori.”

Having been unwillingly diagnosed by the killer Leonard Betts, Scully begins the episode reviewing the X-rays of her head, showing the tumor lodged between her sinus and cerebrum. The prognosis isn’t good, but Scully (and Mulder) aren’t willing to give up. They journey to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to reconnect with the group of women who, like Scully, were abducted by aliens and contracted a deadly form of cancer that, as we later discover, has nearly wiped them all out. In Allentown, they track down a man, Kurt (David Lovgren), who apparently has ties to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) to which the women belong, and he begins helping Mulder sort through materials that may be critical to Scully’s survival. After Mulder is called to help Scully, the Gray-Haired Man kills Kurt who turns out to be an alien-human hybrid.

Scully, meanwhile, visits the last surviving member of the women’s abductee group – Penny Northern (Gillian Barber) – who is undergoing a last-ditch treatment to stop the cancer. She points Dana to Dr. Scanlon (Sean Allen) who has been treating and reportedly learning from the previous women who have died. Dr. Scanlon immediately recommends treatment for Scully, and she begins to undergo chemotherapy with her mother (Sheila Larken) at her side. Mulder, meanwhile, finds evidence in a nearby research facility that he suspects may be able to help Scully. After using the Lone Gunmen to break in, he discovers that there are other hybrids identical to Kurt, all working on a potential cure for their “mothers” – the women abducted by aliens who helped give birth to them. Believing that Scanlon is actually killing the women to protect The Program, Mulder takes information back to Scully who is grieving over the death of Penny Northern. We close with Skinner, who had instructed Mulder not to contact the Smoking Man, making a deal with the Smoking Man to save Scully’s life.

It is easy to see why the Television Academy fell relatively hard for “Memento Mori.” This is one of the more accessible episodes of the series and most certainly of the overall mythology series. It gracefully blends the human drama of cancer and Scully’s waning will to live with lighter touches of alien and conspiracy lore. To its credit, it allows Gillian Anderson to show incredible strength and, later, vulnerability in Scully. She runs the gamut of human emotions through the course of the episode, pulling a real tour-de-force performance out of the Emmy-winning Anderson. I especially loved the sequence at the end where she shares the vulnerability with Mulder, allowing him to kiss her forehead only as they continue to fight their natural impulses toward one another. This coupled with “Never Again” provides ample evidence of Gillian Anderson’s amazing acting powers, never overplaying her hand yet finding the right note each and every time. Her performance is so good that she even elevates David Duchovny’s typically flat performance as he balances between adult realization and coping and his natural immaturity, making him dance back and forth on his feet as he interacts with the very ill Scully.

“Memento Mori,” does have its flaws. It is laden with ponderous and pretentious voice-over meant to give Scully a reflective tone as she prepares to die. After Mulder secretly reads her words, she expresses deep regret that he had, telling him she intended to throw it away. That would have perhaps been a very wise choice given the florid nature of the text, which ultimately runs together and blends into nothingness. That is a minor quibble, though, as the rest of the episode finds a way to make Dana Scully’s cancer seem curable by the second as Mulder races to determine a cure. They managed to put a time clock on cancer growth, and that was a wise move given the episodic nature of many of the episodes. Still, Scully’s cancer will linger through the rest of the season and into Season Five as Skinner’s search for her cure takes him down a dangerous professional liaison.

In the end, “Memento Mori” is a touching and heartbreaking bit of television as we watch Scully slowly break. She has been so practical and certain of everything, yet that practicality and certainty works against her as she realizes the odds of her survival. Even though the voice overs are over-written and unnecessary, they do provide a certain haunting quality to the episode that helps it linger in our memory.

We may not like or even remember the words, but we’ll always fondly recall the tune.

One of The Best Shows You’re Not Watching

“A man, hell-bent on fulfilling a commitment to himself and others, jeopardizes his family and his life in order to follow through with it, becoming drunk on power in the process.”

If I asked you what TV show the above description matches, you would probably say Breaking Bad. It aptly fits the “man” in question, Walter White. But there’s another, more unlikely, TV show that this description suits: Comedy Central’s Review. During the final episode of the first season titled “Quitting, Last Day, Irish,” it dawned on me the similarities between the AMC drama and this absurdly brilliant half-hour series.

When Daly’s Forrest MacNeil lives like it’s his last day on earth and accidentally implies to his ex-wife Suzanne (Jessica St. Clair) that he is dying, the show suddenly takes on a grim, Breaking Bad-like persona. Suzanne believes her ex has an incurable brain tumor or similar disease, which explains his insane actions over the course of the previous weeks (creating a sex tape with a doll, getting addicted to cocaine, asking for a divorce). But Forrest is hiding a huge, bigger lie: that all of his actions are for the sake of reviewing life for a TV show.

Clearly, Suzanne is the Skyler, with Eric, their son, as the Walter Jr. Once Suzanne learns that he’s not dying and that he’s ruined their lives over a TV vanity project (that no one seems to watch since he’s rarely recognized in public), she splits with her son, moving to San Francisco to get away from her husband/monster/one who knocks.

As darkly hilarious as Review is, it’s also just as devastating to watch as Breaking Bad. When we first meet Forrest MacNeil, he is a happy-go-lucky family man, albeit an overt racist (“I was surprised to find like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, spoiler alert, I had been a racist all along”) that’s exposed to the seedy underbelly of life like Kimmy Schmidt emerging from her mole hole. But soon, MacNeil becomes a part of the underbelly, engaging in hours-long orgies, becoming a part of the Mile High Club in front of his son, and catfishing his ex-wife. Like Walter White, Forrest seems to have little remorse for his actions because, ultimately, he is achieving his destiny. Each Review he makes is like a badge of honor.

The show is based on an Australian television series called Reviews with Myles Barlow and is pitch-perfect commentary on today’s review culture. You can audit anything, from dining to plumbing services, but there’s still no application that lets you critique life.

There has been some question as to what universe this show exists in. Vulture recently revealed 6 reasons why it takes place in purgatory. I’d like to believe the same with show producer Grant (James Urbaniak, aka Arthur from Difficult People) serving as Lucifer (although in a recent episode where Forrest is asked to review killing someone, Grant quickly intervenes and says he doesn’t have to do it, which is very un-Beezlebub-like).

Whatever universe this show exists in, I’m glad I live in one with it. Five stars.

… of which she don’t give a damn.

Jessica Jones drops on Netflix November 20.

ABC’s Blood & Oil premiered Sunday night, filling the void left behind by other ABC dramas like Revenge (RIP). The show is pretty harmless fun, the enjoyable sudsy series ABC is known for on Sunday nights.

But despite B&O’s original premise involving a young couple moving to North Dakota during America’s greatest oil boom, this show’s writers clearly have watched their share of Days of Our Lives and General Hospital. The first episode is riddled with soap opera cliches.

A car accident for no apparent reason.

En route to their dream of opening a laundromat in North Dakota (yes, really), Cody (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Billy (Chace Crawford) suddenly get into an accident, throwing all of their laundromat essentials into the air!

Were one of those truck drivers in the wrong? Or was Billy stupidly traveling down a two-lane road in the wrong direction? We’ll never know.

Sex on a stack of money!

Wick Briggs (Scott Michael Foster) and Jules Jackman (India de Beaufort) figure out the exchange rate right on the table!

The Evil Father Figure

Think of Don Johnson’s Hap Briggs as the Victor Kiriakis of the show, for you Days of Our Lives fans. He’s the most powerful man in town. . .and possibly the most evil?

Cody’s not feeling well. . .

As soon as Cody said she had been feeling sick lately, I hoped/prayed she wasn’t going to be pregnant. Not because I’m against these two kids becoming parents (although I am), but the pregnancy was so obvious, and I was hoping for something a little more original (given the unique setting).

Another accident for no apparent reason (same person)

After Billy wheels and deals to get a piece of land, he races to the owner’s house to provide payment, crashing his car almost immediately. And this guy wants to use the land to put a “car wash” on it.

Man carrying the woman across the threshold

Soap opera couples always do this.

Season 4, Episode 13
Director: Rob Bowman
Writer: Glen Morgan, James Wong

I suspect finding out you have cancer is a life-altering experience. Granted, I have never been in the position, but I have known those who have suffered from the disease. Having received an unofficial diagnosis last episode, Scully doesn’t mention her fears within “Never Again,” but the specter of illness hangs over her throughout the episode. It suffocates her, causing her to start to reject the trappings of her life she once found comfortable. As I’ve found over the course of four seasons, the best X-Files episodes manage to push aside the supernatural, relegate it to the background, and focus on deeper character development. “Never Again” is one of those episodes.

The prologue takes Ed Jerse (Rodney Rowland) through a divorce and straight into a seedy bar. Drunk and miserable, Ed wanders into a tattoo parlor where he has a pinup tattooed on his arm with the phrase “Never Again” written under her. Soon, Ed is taunted by a female voice (Jodie Foster) who consistently berates him and pits him against women out of jealousy. Ed eventually kills him neighbor beneath him, thinking she was talking about him when it was really the voice in his head. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully are slightly at odds with Scully starting to feel like Mulder’s second hand rather than his partner – she doesn’t even have her own desk in the basement. After Mulder requests that she stake out someone in Philadelphia, Scully reluctantly agrees, embittered by her life falling second to the job.

While on stakeout, Scully follows her target into the same seedy tattoo parlor that Ed earlier visited, and she sees Ed begging to have his tattoo removed. They “meet cute,” and Ed gives her his number. After an argument with Mulder, Scully decides to take Ed up on his offer, and they settle on returning to the same dive bar from the prologue. After a deep discussing in which Scully discusses her affinity for strong men (thanks to her father), Ed convinces Scully to get a tattoo, and she obliges. Scully spends the night at his apartment, and, the next morning, Ed goes out to get breakfast. While he’s out, Scully is visited by two officers who tell her Ed’s neighbor is missing, and they have uncovered a blood type that did not match her. The blood sample also included something that, after analysis, proved to come from the same rare ink the tattoo artist used to achieve his brilliant colors. This substance could have caused Ed’s hallucinations. After discovering Scully was an FBI agent, Ed attacks her and nearly burns her in the basement. Overpowering the voice, Ed thrusts his arm into the incinerator. Scully then returns to DC where Mulder questions her, thinking he’d made her made by not giving her a desk. Scully responds simply with “not everything is about you Mulder,” leaving the typically loquacious Mulder speechless.

The brilliance of “Never Again” is within the completely different mood and tone established by the erotic adventures of Dana Scully. This is a tour-de-force performance from Gillian Anderson, giving us a darker side to Scully that we have yet to see. This side of Scully is the cancer diagnosis changing her, giving her a different, fragile perspective on her life. Practically in shock, she sinks into actions and relationships that she normally would never follow. It also gives her a moment of introspection where she admits her attraction to strong, take-charge men, namely Mulder and her father. What’s interesting about this is the fact that “Leonard Betts” and “Never Again” were actually filmed in reverse order from which they aired, meaning “Never Again” was filmed first, meaning that Anderson didn’t know Scully had cancer when she filmed the episode. Yet, Anderson’s performance here feels incredibly influenced by the earlier cancer revelation. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was luck.

Whatever it is, it works in spades. Excellent work.