Season 3, Episode 2
Director: Rob Bowman
Writer: Chris Carter

The trilogy of episodes that bridged The X-Files Season Two and Season Three ends with “Paper Clip,” an episode that improves upon the story arc but lacks the interest and vitality of the best episodes the series has to offer. Lighter on mysticism and big on advancements in series mythology, the episode still confounds and confuses. It proves what other series have faced before – that answering questions with more questions is a frustrating way to grow a series.

The prologue offers a side story about a Native American omen: the birth of a white buffalo. The metaphor is lightly carried through the episode but is never particularly clarified. The real action begins as Mulder interrupts the stand-off between Scully and Skinner who spend much of the episode tracking down some of the men in the photo containing Mulder’s father. Their investigation leads them to one of the men in the  photo, an infamous Nazi doctor who escaped trial and continued experimentation working with the American government. The former Nazi points Mulder and Scully to an abandoned mining facility in West Virginia. There, they uncover a massive series of tunnels containing records on hundreds of thousands of children born since 1955. Scully is in those files. So is Mulder’s sister. When the lights go out, Mulder races out of the facility to see a UFO rising and flying away. Scully has an encounter as well when a handful of tiny green men race by her in the dark, running toward the light.

The Syndicate, a collection of smoking white men in a dark paneled room, sends a collection of (what appears to be) CIA agents to kill Mulder and Scully at the facility. They escape and meet up with Skinner who tells them he will broker a deal with their assailants if they want him to give up the disk containing the top secret files. Meanwhile, Scully’s sister, having been shot by Krycek, clings to life in the hospital despite having been prayed over by the Navajo Indian who saved Mulder. Skinner arrives but is ambushed by Krycek and other agents who steal the top-secret tape. Gee, for a file that everyone wants, Skinner sure is free and easy with it. Anyway, Skinner uses the Navajo Indian to convince the Smoking Man to leave Mulder and Scully alone, effectively reinstating them in the FBI to continue their wacky exploration of the X-files. Scully’s sister dies, leaving Scully crushed and questioning the purpose of it all. Mulder saves her by telling her he’s convinced “the truth” is in the files. Scully replies, saying she’s tired of the truth. She wants answers.

Word.

The central action of “Paper Clip” is far more straightforward and interesting than anything in the two previous episodes. Carter effectively forgets the mysticism for more literal action. Well, not completely. There is the strange business of the white buffalo. So, at the end of “Paper Clip” when the white buffalo’s mother dies, the Navajo Indian remarks that something in nature must die so that something else can live. Is Carter effectively comparing the two Scully sister’s to buffalo?

At the end of the day, we’ve really gained very little in advancement of the overall mythology. We know that the Nazi doctor was apparently trying to create an alien/human hybrid, which explains the bodies in the buried railway car. But why on Earth were aliens locked in the facility? Why was the UFO hovering nearby without being detected? Why was the facility locked with a high-tech keypad when there was a rusty back door through which Mulder and Scully easily escaped? These are the questions that plague me still.

I, like Scully, want answers, and I suspect answers will be hard to find. In the meantime, bring on the monsters of the week.

Season 3, Episode 1
Director: R.W. Goodwin
Writer: Chris Carter

Well, if ever there were a way to take “Anasazi” (The X-Files’ Season Two “cliffhanger”) and make it worse, then it would be add a dash of a Navajo healing ceremony, a tablespoon of a near-death journey for Mulder, and a heaping amount of mythology conspiracy. Then, underbake for forty-five minutes and call it “The Blessing Way.” Please take me back to the “monster of the week” shows – this mythology is killing me.

In a nutshell, “The Blessing Way” picks up where we left off with the mysterious government agents, allegedly responsible for Mulder’s death, hunting both him and the encrypted data of which he was in possession. Scully arrives to search for Mulder, but he is nowhere to be found. Believing him dead, she returns to headquarters to be stripped of her badge and placed on administrative leave (without pay, even). But, shock and awe, Mulder is not dead. Instead, he’s mysteriously buried under some rocks. Yes, folks, he was in a subterranean railroad car that was full-on napalmed but apparently survived long enough to hide himself under red rocks for safely.

The local Navajo Indians find him and begin to perform a traditional healing ceremony called “a Blessing Way” to bring him back to life. At one point, he was covered with leaves. I have no idea. Mulder’s spirit goes on a journey similar to Scully’s near-death experience where he reconnects with Deep Throat and his own father, one of them spouting some complete horse shit nonsense (the script is credited to Carter who clearly should never write poetry for dialogue) that convinces Mulder to turn away from the light. Where is Zelda Rubinstein when you need her?

Mulder returns to health, but Scully continues to suffer his absence. Her sister convinces Scully to undergo regressive hypnotherapy where she begins to recall her abduction. Later, she discovers a tiny microchip implanted just under the skin. Continuing her party week, she attends Mulder’s father’s funeral where, get this, she meets a man apparently called “the Well-Manicured Man” (a low-rent Sir Ian McKellen but just as dandy) who tells her “Scully, girl, you in danger!”

Ok, that may have been Whoopi Goldberg from Ghost, but you get the idea. She is in danger, but she wrongly assumes it’s from Assistant Director Skinner who actually wants to share the top secret data tape with her. The real danger comes from rouge Alex Krycek who shoots her sister, mistaking her for Scully. Guess sis wasn’t psychic after all? (Cue Nelson Muntz “HA HA.”) The episode ends with an unseen individual opening the door to Mulder’s apartment where Scully and Skinner are holding each other at gunpoint. To be continued… Again…

First the good stuff in “The Blessing Way.” Gillian Anderson proves herself the MVP of the series by allowing us to see the broken Dana Scully retreating to her mother for comfort. She even cries, which is a great moment for Anderson. And… that’s it. Someone close to me once told me that the mythology eventually overtakes the series, becoming so obtuse and annoying that people longed for the “monster of the week” outings. Count me as one of them. The worst news of the day is clearly there is at least one more of these episodes to go before I can cleanse myself of this journey into the banal. The Navajo ceremony was ridiculously staged and unnecessary – no fault to the actors, it’s Chris Carter’s foolhardy way of forcing mysticism into the mix. Then, if you want to take someone on a mystical journey of reflection and self-healing, then it’s clearly not David Duchovny. These mystical scenes of cheesy graphics with beds made of leaves often resemble modern cologne ads starring Brad Pitt (Fox Mulder’s OBSESSION… for truth.).

And the conspiracy theory lingers and doubles back on itself with the Smoking Man’s “consortium” revealing itself further, and the “Well-Manicured Man” helping Scully for no apparent reason. To me, these scenes are symptomatic of a show that badly needs to get out of his own asshole. I sound infuriated because, well, I am. The X-Files is capable of such amazing brilliance that to deliver these flat mythology-based episodes (particularly three in a row) feels like such a massive waste of time and effort.

Take me back to the Fluke Man or the moths that cocoon you – you can have this alien crap.

Season 2, Episode 25
Director: R.W. Goodwin
Writer: Chris Carter

For The X-Files‘s second season finale, “Anasazi” is thisshort of being a near-total dud. Even if it were a standard midseason entry, it would still be near the bottom of the pile. It lacks any sense of intrigue, urgency, thrill, or audience engagement. For a season ender, that’s inexcusable.

“Anasazi” starts promisingly enough: after an Earth tremor, a Navajo teenage boy finds an object buried beneath some rubble on a Navajo Indian reservation. The boy returns home with a mysterious object in tow – the shriveled corpse of what appears to be an alien. It’s all downhill from there. The remainder of the episode deals with Mulder receiving some encoded information from a source who hacked into a government computer. Mysteriously, Mulder is exceedingly agitated, even going so far as to punch Skinner in the face at one point. Scully tries to help by taking the encoded data to a Navajo translator, but she is referred to a Navajo code breaker – the young boy from the prologue’s grandfather who used to work with the government in World War II.

Mulder’s journey through the episode involves his father who was visited by the Smoking Man, informing him that Mulder has the secret data. Mulder’s father tells Mulder to come home with the intention of revealing the “whole truth,” but he is shot and killed by Alex Krycek before he can share any information with Mulder. Scully takes Mulder’s gun to prove Mulder didn’t kill his father, and Krycek tries to assassinate Mulder but is stopped by Scully who ends up purposefully shooting Mulder in the shoulder. Literally none of that made sense. Scully then drives two days with an unconscious Mulder (his aggression was caused by a chemical placed in his water supply by an unknown source) to the Navajo reservation while the boy’s grandfather decodes the material. The close of the episode shows Mulder investigating the submerged object – surprisingly, a railroad tanker – and discovering a large pile of burned out alien corpses. The Smoking Man calls Mulder and is able to track the signal. He arrives on the scene as Mulder sits inside the tanker and instructs a subordinate to blow up the tanker.

The problem with this particular season finale is that it stuffed way too much fan service into the proceedings. Lone Gunmen? Check. Smoking Man? Check. Aliens? Check. Mulder’s father? Check. It’s the overall mythology that begins to suffocate the material here. Mulder and Scully’s actions are all guided by plot mechanics rather than organic character growth – the biggest evidence of this being Scully’s shooting of Mulder in the shoulder to avoid killing Krycek but losing Krycek in the end anyway. Plus, the entire midsection is dedicated to the unravelling of the Navajo code that encodes the top secret data, and the progress is slow and maddening.

At the end, the revelation of the alien cargo is hardly a revelation at all. Clearly, there are aliens on Earth, and clearly the government has been using their genes and technology to advance the human race as much as humanly possible. So, none of this is particularly surprising or shocking. Perhaps the episode will be rescued by the Season Three premiere, but it has a lot of ground to cover as “Anasazi” now hold the title as the least memorable episode of the series through the end of Season Two.