Case 8.5, File 13: All About Yves

AKA: How Many People Have Actually Seen All About Eve?

Season finales for shows like this are tricky, especially if you're unsure if you're getting another season. You want to leave enough plot to pick up next season if you get another, but definitive enough to be a proper ending if you don't. That's a hard needle to thread, but it's one that the first season of The X-Files managed to thread really well, in my opinion. And it's one that the first and only season finale of The Lone Gunmen dramatically fails to thread.

Our episode kicks off with one Morris Fletcher (remember him?) at a bar trying to get laid. He is failing miserably of course, but as soon as he steps out of the bar, he gets abducted by aliens, who ask him about some military thing he's doing. But it turns out the aliens are the Lone Gunmen who tricked him! Don't think super hard about that, the writers sure didn't. Jimmy does wear an alien suit for a bit, so that's fun.

Anyway, before they can run off with their story they get arrested by the military police because of course they do. Morris is about to have them killed when they tell them they got an e-mail from something called Romeo 61 about him and they all freak out and leave. After having Kimmy over to hack into the military (don't think super hard I said) they find out who Romeo 61 is; A terrorist group responsible for everything from the Lockerbie Bombing to the JFK Assassination.

Naturally this freaks them out a little so they track Morris back down and demand he explain. He says they're a government op but that he has his own problems; His presentation on alien weapons tech was stolen by a beautiful brunette with a name that's an anagram of Lee Harvey Os-it's Yves, okay? Yeah they figure it out pretty quick. Meanwhile Yves is telling Jimmy to get the Gunmen to drop it, and cloning Frohike's voice to call Mulder! Dun dun dun! I mean, they've done the same thing with Mulder's voice to call Scully but it's more sinister when she does it, I guess?

Anyhoo, the Gunmena and Morris track Yves to her hotel room where they find the location of Romeo 61 and Langly gets blued in the face. At the hotel, Jimmy has a fight with the rest of the Gunmen and storms off, but finds an e-mail from Mulder back at the base and goes to meet him. Yves is also going to meet him but has to vacate when she's chased by a mysterious dude, who wants her to go with him to save the Gunmen. She refuses and also it turns out Morris is setting the Gunmen up, but hey, we do get a fun scene where Jimmy and Mulder meet. That was cute.

This works, incidentally, on Morris. No one said he was a smart man.

Hokay, here we go; The Gunmen decide to break into the building where they think Romeo 61 is (they use the blue paint as a chroma key to get past FRS, it's cute) while Yves shows up at the Gunmen's hideout to give Jimmy the disc she stole and help Kimmy find where the Gunmen have gone. When they get there Jimmy wants to break in and help them, but Yves knocks him out and bolts. And so the episode, and the season and the series, end with the Gunmen locked outside a vault with Morris about to arrest them.

All About Yves is, A, not actually about Yves that much (although we do get a nice glimpse into her life outside the Gunmen) and B, a pretty weak ending to what was otherwise a pretty solid season of television. Half season, whatever. Whether they were confident they were going to get another season or just knew that if they didn't they could wrap it up in The X-Files, they blew their landing on an unsatisfying cliffhanger that, combined with the uh...not great reception their finale in the next season of The X-Files got, leaves the whole series on a kind of sour note.

The problem is that the finale has been saddled with a plot that undercuts itself in an attempt at being clever for the cliffhanger. The reveal that Romeo 61 is fake and the whole thing is a setup is obvious from the get go, but what it means is that the whole episode is a lot of buildup to nothing. It also really undercuts the idea that the episode is all about Yves, when the Gunmen seem really eager to trust Morris (a dude they don't know and have no reason to trust) over Yves (who has helped them out of multiple jams, even if she often did it for a reward).

He blue himself before dinner.

Morris' presence is also a little odd, in that I think that he's actually a brilliant addition to The Lone Gunmen (an entire show where he's basically the Deep Throat figure to the Lone Gunmen? Great) but he's not at his best here. First off, he's in a LOT of this episode; A little Morris Fletcher goes a long way, and second, putting him in situations where he's in control gets rid of that crucial element of patheticness that makes what an awful person he is more bearable. As such even while he's fun, he's not hitting the kind of A game material where he was whining to Scully about how awful his life is, and that's a shame.

That's not to say that the episode is devoid of good elements. It's mostly known for the Mulder cameo and while that is the basest fanservice (complete with an X-Files theme music cue on the soundtrack), yeah that scene kinda rules. Jimmy's big dumb kid energy forces Mulder to be the straight man, which is not a role he's used to playing, and I like that he clues in that Jimmy might know Frohike. It even plays into the plot in an appropriate way; It makes sense that Mulder is the dude that Yves would take the info she got to.

On that note, the actual value this episode has to the show, especially if it were to continue, is giving us a glimpse of Yves life outside the Gunmen, and how her life with them is affecting it. I love the constant hints we get throughout the series that she is hilariously more competent than the Gunmen and I like that moment we get indicating she's been damaging her relationships with other people to help them out. Hell, they even managed to make the romance between Yves and Jimmy seem more plausible here, just because she seems pretty sincere when she says she thinks he's the smartest.

The entire series is building to the moment where Mulder looks at Jimmy with befuddlement.

And that's the thing, there is good in this episode; The Gunmen are entertaining bouncing off Morris, the blue paint thing is clever, I even really dig the opening scene where Morris thinks he's being abducted by aliens, just because it shows a very different way of dealing with aliens than we usually see. But the episode ending on an unsatisfying cliffhanger makes it all feel pointless, like we were being jerked around for nothing. And while I'll see how said cliffhanger gets resolved in a few months, I don't recall being fond of Jump the Shark, and discussing it with other people tells me that opinion is not rare.

So what was The Lone Gunmen in the final analysis? A comedy show with a conspiratorial edge or a conspiracy show that tried to be funny? I feel like it hewed more closely to the comedy elements, while the attempts are more serious stories generally fell flat. The characters were built for comedy, given that they were comic relief in the original. Maybe it could have lasted longer if it had tried to pretend to be more tied to the main plot of The X-Files but, on some level, that would have been inauthentic. And say what you will about The Lone Gunmen but it was always authentic to itself.

Case Results:

• Best Episode: Tango De Los Pistoleros
• Worst Episode: All About Yves

Case Notes:

• I recognize Morris' voice before we see him, but I like the detail of him pulling off his wedding ring mid conversation.
• Morris pretending to be the basis for the movie Men in Black is so fucking funny given how much we know he hates his life.
• Morris being kidnapped by the aliens and positing it as an important part of the Myth Arc might have been a good way to sell the show if they'd done it earlier.
• I love the way Morris treats what he thinks are aliens, it's a weird little glimpse into his life.
• I'm honestly shocked the Gunmen didn't expect they'd get caught when they kidnapped Morris.
• Morris is just straight ready to have the Gunmen whacked, which honestly makes him pretty scary all told.
• If they got a second season they were probably planning on making Kimmy a more recurring character, which they shouldn't, a little of him goes a long way.
• I love Kimmy wiping the keyboard with his shirt when he freaks out, it's such a viscerally pathetic thing to do.
• Jimmy getting mad and having cold feet feels weirdly authentic, since I think that was the first time he's ever felt like he's about to die doing this job.
• Morris using a variant on the same pickup lines is again, very authentic.
• Frohike's method of getting the girl out of the room is very very very funny.
• I like the brief callback to Morris' disdain for the Lone Gunmen, it's a good moment.
• I feel like Yves just coming whenever Jimmy asks could undercut her as a character, but her casual disdain for the entire group kinda sells it.
• It's pretty obvious from the moment Morris mentions that his info got stolen by a woman that it's gonna be Yves. She really needs to drop the Lee Harvey Oswald thing though.
• Yves is contacting Mulder! That's a meeting that would be entertaining to see.
• Langly gets blasted in the face with blue paint, and we're over 2 years before Arrested Development starts even.
• The fight between Langly and Jimmy feels very real, especially since both of them are already in bad moods.
• I like Jimmy mistaking an e-mail from Mulder for an e-mail from Yves just because he doesn't know Mulder's first name is Fox.
• Remember when Braveheart was a contemporary reference.
• The bit with Yves confronting the dude in the ally is mostly just general mysterious tension building, but it's well done and Yves sells it.
• You'd think Morris would be less of a jackass given they're doing him a favor and he needs them to in the building. What's he gonna do if they decide they're not helping him anymore cause he's a jerk.
• Romeo 61 being a lie isn't a surprise, but I like that Yves turns out to have stolen files on how Morris uses disinformation to give to Mulder.
• The climax of this episode spends a lot of time showing us that Morris set up the Gunmen which is information we'd basically already absorbed, but I guess it's okay.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out before I get cancelled after one-Jesus that joke doesn't make sense, I've reviewed like 9 seasons total of this stuff by now, my god.

Audio Observations:

During the montage where the Gunmen are tracking down Yves, they play Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim. Honestly that song totally fucking rules and it was awesome to hear it here.