Case 09, File 06: Trust No 1

AKA: Nothing Compares 2 U

The problem with Season 9 isn't Doggett and Reyes. While perhaps not as good as Golden Age Mulder and Scully, they're both perfectly cromulent actors and they have decent chemistry, they could easily coast for a Season on that until people got to like them. The problem is, the show is not fully committed to them; Not only is Scully still hanging around (despite Anderson very visibly having one foot out the door), but the show keeps obsessively talking about Mulder. It's the TV show equivalent of trying to start a new relationship while your ex is still crashing on your couch.

Our story, after some very overwrought monologuing from Scully, begins with Scully going to an internet cafe and getting an e-mail from Mulder talking about how he wants to come home. Before she can deal with that, a woman with a child gets into an argument with her husband, but then the woman leaves, so Scully just goes back and writes a sappy e-mail back to Mulder. And wouldn't ya know, Doggett and Reyes have just gotten communication from some mysterious person who can tell them all the names of the super soldiers, but will only talk to Mulder.

Scully is understandably nervous about contacting Mulder and making him come back on the suggestion of some rando she doesn't know. She is not nervous about inviting the woman from the cafe into her house to spend the night when she runs into her on the street and sees her husband...kidnap their kid? It's very low key, but I think that what happened is basically a kidnapping, it seems someone should be angrier about that.

Also while all this is going on, Doggett and Reyes have tracked the dude they're in contact with to a city block which only has one used building in it. And like 2 minutes later, the kidnapping husband shows up and goes to work in a surveillance office, with a mysterious boss. And in case you were thinking that might be a coincidence, the next morning the wife, who is still staying with Scully, tried to kidnap William and the husband drives off to Scully's house.

They both get pretty instantly captured and after the gentlest of interrogating, admit that they both work for the NSA to spy on Scully, so they know that William showed off psychic powers. And, twist, their kid showed off psychic powers at one point too and their boss, the guy trying to contact Mulder (who goes by the moniker Shadowman, because Darkman is taken by a Liam Neeson movie), thinks that's what being done is wrong. The alien invasion stuff is wrong that is, he's down with the surveillance stuff. And then Shadowman contacts Scully, because he's listening in too, so yeah, cool with the surveillance.

I'll be honest, given these other e-mails, I'd assume "Dearest Dana" is spam too.

Scully demands that she get to meet this Shadowman before she call up her boyfriend and make him come out of hiding and he takes her on a long series of "Go here, get in this car, drive here" dealies before he finally pops out and gives her a new car and new clothes before telling her that Mulder has to meet him now or he's going to disappear. And Scully, at least partially cause she's desperate to see Mulder, agrees. Meanwhile Doggett, who thinks that this is a bad idea, takes some of the clothes she got from the Shadowman to the FBI lab to get something checked.

Doggett is right to think this is a bad idea, because when the train carrying Mulder shows up, so does the Shadowman and he shoots the husband (who doesn't have a name, like he says that explicitly) and is about to shoot Scully, when Doggett shoots him and he falls under the train which doesn't stop. But, it turns out the Shadowman was a super soldier and Mulder jumps off the train into a quarry. Scully, Doggett and Reyes chase but Mulder escapes, even while the Shadowman gets completely annihilated by...magnetic attraction to some metal in the quarry? Whatever, the episode is over.

Trust No 1 has a purpose in the larger series narrative, namely to establish further what's going on with William and to show that the super soldiers do have a weakness. And it's pretty lucky it has those reasons to justify its existence, because this episode just kinda sucks. It doesn't have any one major flaw that sinks it, but it also just doesn't have anything that really recommends it. It can't even summon the might to be hilariously bad, it's mostly just dull

"When you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself, cover blown or no."

Take, for example, our main villain the Shadowman; He's a potentially terrifying opponent, given the extent of his surveillance but outside of the segment at the middle where he instructs Scully on where to go, the episode doesn't really utilize that. And then to have him turn out to be a Super Soldier and just show up at the train station to shoot Scully, the husband and (presumably) Mulder kinda sucks all the air out of the room. They established him as someone careful enough to make Scully change cars three times, why would he just shoot three people on a crowded train platform instead of sending someone else?

This is the kind of thing you could solve on the script level by splitting him into two characters, the watcher and the super soldier, but the episode doesn't really have time for that, because it uses its time very poorly. The first chunk of the episode, before the Shadowman shows up, seems to take forever (especially the "Follow instructions" sequence which I mentioned above, which is MUCH too long) so Scully rushes through the decision to bring Mulder in and then the episode just kinda has to bolt to the quarry to get the metal revelation out, which is especially weird given that it feels like the plot should is over after the shootout at the train station, since the entire episode is about bringing Mulder back.

And that really is the issue with the plot of this episode, it's obsessed with Mulder and his relationship with Scully, but the episode has to make so many compromises with how that is portrayed because they don't have access to Duchovny and they can't move it forward at all, just keep the relationship in a holding pattern, so the episode keeps inventing reasons to keep him off screen. The funniest is when they have a clearly-not-Duchovny shot at a distance in fog, like he's a celebrity they couldn't afford instead of their lead actor for 7 years, but the fact that a shooting at the train station means that the train keeps going is also pretty contrived.

"Wait, my weakness is a naturally occurring metal? That's fucking lame!"

Some of these issues could be overlooked if the writing was solid but well...it's kind of weirdly off? Good Mulder and Scully romance writing is hard to nail down, but a lot of it comes down to their chemistry and back and forth, and it's just not here at all, at least partially cause it's just Anderson talking to herself. The letters they write to each other are really overwrought, it feels more like a romance novel than a good X-Files episode. Mulder is a pretty funny guy, you'd think he'd end his letter with a joke or something, but no, we're dead serious the whole time.

So we're just left with the effects the episode has on the overarching plot and I guess that part is pretty good? William's plotline is very vague in my memory but keeping the fact that William has psychic powers in our head is probably smart. The super soldier stuff is much better though; The worst part about the super soldiers is how boringly invincible they are so giving them an actual weakness is good, even if it does feel like someone said they needed a Kryptonite and someone took it very literally, making them weak to a specific metal.

We're in the endgame of the series original run at this point and most people who thought the series overarching story had some planning behind it were getting some pretty major buyer's remorse by now, myself included, at least on my original watch. I'm inclined to be a little more kind to the late series on this watch; Bringing a show this long running in for a landing is a nearly impossible job, especially when you've been dragged out past where you originally thought you were going to call it. So I'm more interested in how individual episodes work or don't work and this one just does not work.

Case Notes:

• That opening Scully monologue is over black and white montage of Mulder and Scully with sad piano music, which makes it feel like it's out of a VERY different show.
• That said, the footage chosen feels very much like it's fanservice.
• This episode gets an alternate title too? Jesus, are they just tired of The Truth Is Out There.
• Scully is using an internet cafe, cause it's 2001 and they want us to know it.
• Scully reading romantic e-mails from Mulder is um...well it's very fanservicey. Big fan of "TrustNo1@mail.com" being his email.
• Heh, Scully's e-mail is queequeg0925@hotmail.com. That's GOOD fanservice.
• I feel like "I have a file that contains the names of all the people that are hunting Mulder, but I'll only give it to Mulder" is a pretty obvious setup.
• I kinda like that Doggett knows Scully can contact Mulder.
• For what amounts to a kidnapping, the bit with the lady's husband taking her baby is pretty low key.
• Scully just straight inviting a stranger into her house and telling her she wishes Mulder was there feels really weirdly off.
• Okay I actually kind of dig the surveillance outfit being run out of a derelict building, it feels like real actual spy stuff.
• It better turn out that the lady having problems with her husband is intentionally setting up Scully, cause otherwise him working for the surveillance outfit is a HUGE coincidence.
• The flash forwards to the train station are not as cute as the episode thinks they are.
• Did the lady sleep in that MASSIVE sweater? Jesus.
• Okay she's there on purpose, that makes it a little better.
• Wait, William sleeps right by the front door? That seems odd.
• It's really amusing to me for Scully to pull the shades down, a bit, and that to make it okay for the couple to talk
• It seem kinda odd that the person assigned to watch Scully also have a psychic baby?
• The NSA guy casually saying that he doesn't give a shit about violating the Constitution if it means stopping terrorists...hoo boy, maybe The X-Files was more relevant to early 2002 than we knew.
• The fact that the dude could have just read Scully's e-mail to Mulder to her is a little chilling frankly.
• Hey, I wonder if that's the same car remote control technology from the pilot of The Lone Gunmen.
• Scully is being way too trusting, and Doggett has to be the voice of paranoia which feels wrong. The episode tries to justify this with "Scully just desperately wants to see Mulder" but it's just not working.
• I'm not gonna lie, the train scene is pretty tensionless, to the point where they can cut to Doggett doing something unknown and it doesn't even break the tension.
• Okay, I gotta say, the Shadow Man just showing up to shoot the dude who broke into Scully's apartment is a lame ass way for him to act after he's been so omnipotent.
• Wait, someone gets shot at the train station so they keep the train going? What kind of goddamn sense does that make? It's very clearly a lame excuse to keep Mulder out of the episode and underground, and it does not land at all.
• Wait, the episode is still going? That felt like an ending, why is this still going?
• So is this the climax? At the rock quarry Mulder jumped into?
• Okay, it took 40 minutes for something cool to happen, but the Shadow Man getting fucking obliterated by the metal in the rock was pretty goddamn cool.
• God the dialogue of these letters are bad. 
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can afford to fight our nightmarish surveillance state...oh no that bummed me out.

Current Celebrity Watch:

Allison Smith, who plays Patti, was in almost every episode of a CBS sitcom called Kate & Allie as a character named Jennie. This show ran for 122 episodes in the 80s, almost twice as many as Moonlighting and appears to have left absolutely no cultural mark. Incredible.

Future Celebrity Watch:

The FBI lab lady is played by Kathryn Joosten, who was in the midst of a recurring character role on The West Wing and had just appeared in a critically acclaimed episode of Scrubs, but wouldn't get real notoriety until she got a main character role on Desperate Housewives as Karen McCluskey, which she got two Emmys for (IE the same number as Gillian Anderson has as of 2 nights ago).

Also Terry O'Quinn is in this episode, when he was in a previous episode AND the movie, both in pretty major roles. If you assume the Shadowman is his character from Aubrey this episode gets a lot funnier though.