Case 06, File 05: Dreamland Part II

AKA: The Scully And Moris Variety Hour

Endings are tough in The X-Files, especially in Monster of the Week episodes. You want to have an exciting climax and a solid ending, but you can't have a real ending where they catch the monster and prove it exists, or the base premise of the show will be undone, and we're not ready for that. Still, you want to feel like the characters accomplished something or the ending with feel unsatisfying. Which is why the ending to this duology is...contentious.

After a brief monologue from Morris about Mulder's life, we kick off right around the time place our last episode concluded, with Mulder (in Morris' body) being dragged away by the men in black having been betrayed by Morris (in Mulder's body) while Scully (in Scully's body) watches on and starts to think she made a mistake. Mulder gets dragged off to the Area 51 holding cell, where he is held with the pilot who's stuck in the old Hopi woman's body.

But no sooner has he gotten there before the other men in black find out the flight data recorder he stole is fake and they assume he was trying to trick Scully and since the alternative is being locked back in the basement for a decade, he goes along with it, letting a guy named Grodin (or so wikipedia tells me, I never caught his name) take the blame for blowing it. 

Back in DC, Scully gets two weeks suspension for her insubordination and Morris offers to cook her a home cooked meal. When Scully gets there she finds that he's changed the setup, put in a waterbed and mirrors above the bed and done everything short of painting "I'M NOT MULDER" on the walls. This finally gets Scully to realize he's not Mulder and, after some handcuffs and her pulling a gun on him and a call from Mulder's source, they head out to go meet Mulder's source at a bar in Nevada.

Mulder being a Trekkie when he was younger makes so much sense to me, it's scary.

While all this is going on, Mulder is fighting with Morris' wife (he tries to come clean to her about his identity) and is being followed by the men in black and decides to...go out to a bar with Morris' wife (I didn't totally follow this logic train). So he and Scully and Morris and Mulder's source (who turns out to be the general on the base, to Morris' delight) all meet at the bar and help Morris sneak the actual flight recorder out of the bar.

While Mulder and the general meet and discuss how the general doesn't know shit about the UFOs either, Morris and Scully meet with the Lone Gunmen, where we get some antagonistic banter and also information. Mulder and Scully meet up again and discuss how, even if they could crash another UFO, they have no idea how to make it go right and give a tearful goodbye, sure that this is irreversible.

But there's no time for that as they immediately discover that things caused by the crash (the gas station blowing up, the Hopi woman and the pilot switching brains) are reversing themselves. Before they can get Mulder and Morris back to the spot where they switched however, they get arrested and then immediately stopped at the spot by Grodin, who wants to not have taken the blame. Everything gets undone, Mulder and Scully (both in their own bodies) head home but discover that some elements of the events of the previous two episodes (like Mulder's new apartment furnishing) remain.

Dreamland Part II has something of a reputation of having a shitty ending, and that's not undeserved. I get that they need to come up with a way to undo everything that happened, but making it so that none of the characters even remember what went on feels...cheap. It's not that it and the previous episode aren't fun, or even that they're bad, they just amount to nothing. So I guess with that mark against it, we can examine the rest of the episode.

I have nothing to add to this except I love the nickname "Grandma Top Gun."

While the previous episode was mostly devoted to Mulder, this episode spends more of its runtime devoted to Morris and Scully, which makes sense since they're the ones who actually move the plot this episode, but it's also fun to explore the other half of this equation. And it's a good thing dynamic to explore. I wouldn't watch a whole spinoff about it, but it's fun to watch for about 2/3rds of an episode, Morris' flippant disregard for everything pairing well with Scully's disdain for him and everything he stands for. It's not complex, but it's amusing, which is what this pair of episodes has going for it.

It also manages to make pretty solid use out of its supporting cast. JoAnne (Morris' wife) was mostly just used to yell at Mulder last episode, but in this one we get more hints of the human underneath and even a pretty sweet scene between her and Morris. I also like that Grodin's motivation to release Mulder and Morris is that he wants his perfect record back. It's a nice little human touch to make the secondary characters feel a little believable. And yeah, getting a whole scene of the elderly Hopi woman is great, as is her interaction with Mulder. 

The problem is, the plot doesn't have much forward momentum. Even discounting the ending, once Scully figures out that Morris is Morris, the plot kinda just wanders around. Scully and Morris go and get the flight recorder (a scene with some theoretical tension that Morris will get caught, but which practically just ends up being a lowkey scene of characters bouncing off each other) and then it's just sort of there. We theoretically get some stakes when things start snapping back, but by the time we get what's going on, it's mostly over.

"I know you're not Mulder, cause if you were, you'd know I solve most of my problems by shooting them."

And then there's the ending. Look, I get why they needed to undo everything that happens in this episode (Morris straight up tells the Lone Gunmen that their work is bullshit, which we all just agreed to forget) but it was always going to feel cheap, The X-Files' equivalent of telling the audience that the episode was all just a dream. It's not all undone (the waterbed, in particular, comes back later in a big way) but it still feels weird to get our nice little wrap up scene summarizing the emotional journey the characters have taken, when the journey they actually took was...driving down a road in Nevada and get told to turn back. The journey is more important than the destination, but the in-universe journey was essentially nothing.

Are the Dreamland episodes good? I have no idea. I've always been fond of them, but there are plenty of episodes that I like that aren't particularly good, just enjoyable, and Dreamland certainly is that. Maybe it would look better later into Season 6, with the memories of Season 5 more distant. Or maybe it's just a pair of pleasant but unremarkable episodes that mostly stand out for introducing a recurring character. And maybe that's not a lot, but it's enough.

Case Notes:

• Morris opens his monologue about Mulder's life by making fun of his name. And yeah, Fox Mulder is a silly name, but uh, your name is Morris Fletcher. Glass houses man,
• Morris says that Mulder lived a pretty normal life pre-Samantha's abduction but he was still caught up in the conspiracy man, the Cigarette Smoking Man stopped by his house regularly.
• The end of Morris' monologue is a poor substitute for Mulder's speech in Fight the Future.
• Scully sort of realizing she may have screwed up by sending Mulder away is communicated entirely by Gillian's acting, which is great.
• Honestly, Morris offering Scully a "Home cooked meal" should be a huge tip off he's not Mulder. I love Mulder dearly, but I wouldn't eat anything he cooked.
• Is the pilot aware that he's in the body of an elderly woman and that in an actual confrontation with Mulder he would get his ass kicked?
• Mulder adapts to the fact that everyone suddenly thinks he was trying to trick Scully really quickly, I like it.
• Wait, how has Morris not realized Mulder doesn't have a bedroom yet? He's been in his body for days. Or am I just overthinking it?
• Wait, as long as I'm overthinking it, doesn't Mulder have a bed in Jose Chung's From Outer Space? He's lounging in bed watching Bigfoot footage.
• Morris: "[Mulder] hasn't been laid in ten years." Me: Four actually, he slept with that girl in 3.
• The guys following Mulder are really bad at hiding the fact that they're following him.
• Terry (Morris' kid) says that Morris' wife is taking out a restraining order which...she does know he hasn't done anything abusive.
• I like Mulder coming clean to JoAnne, but uh...what did he think was gonna happen?
• I know why Morris tries to seduce Scully but the idea of having sex on a water bed sounds like a nightmare to me, honestly.
• Scully tricking Morris into putting on the handcuffs is A++ Scully, love it.
• I like Morris and Scully's first conversation with everything out in the open, it's a great moment of whinging from Morris and Scully being furious.
• Mulder wants to go someplace with a lot of people with JoAnne and she makes a crack about Rachel, Nevada not having a lot of people. Just for the record, Rachel, NV has a population of about 50 permanent residents.
• Despite the low stakes of the episode, I love the scene in the bar; Morris' glee at seeing the general be the informant, Mulder and Scully seeing each other for the first time in days, Mulder and Morris interacting in the bathroom. It's a great exploration of the concept.
• Frohike being the cook of the Lone Gunmen makes a lot of sense to me for...some reason?
• Morris' glee at being in the Lone Gunmen's place is honestly how I think I would react to it.
• The crack about Saddam Hussein being an actor has, uh, aged poorly.
• I feel like the air force general could have stood to have been a bigger character. There's a lot of pathos to him (especially the reveal that he doesn't actually know that much) but I guess involving him too much would have blown the reveal.
• The scene with the Lone Gunmen and Morris makes me really wish there was a version of this episode with Duchovny and McKean playing their proper characters.
• The scene with the UFO watchers getting fused together is pretty pointless. It's basically the episode going "Oh shit, we need some more stakes."
• I love the meeting with Mulder and Scully after they look at the data recorder. Scully sounds so upset at the prospect of having to deal with Morris going forward (or more accurately, not having Mulder around). It's a really good scene, and a much better examination of the stakes than the previous scene with the UFO watchers.
• It is only upon seeing Morris acting like Morris in front of Scully that I understand he was actually putting a lot of effort into pretending to be Mulder.
• There's a real moment of humanity when Morris and JoAnne see each other for the first time in 2 episodes, it retroactively makes JoAnne (who was not a well realized character) into more than she was.
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