Case 09, File 15: Jump The Shark

AKA: You Said It, Not Me

Between Millennium's finale, The Lone Gunmen's finale and its own two separate finales, The X-Files might be the only show with 4 separate series' finales in its own run. Thing is, series finales are actually quite hard, having to tie up all of its loose plot threads (or as many as it can gather) while still delivering a thematically coherent and satisfying ending. And when the series you're ending is a spin-off show, with a very different tone and style to the main show, some gears are going to end up grinding in a way that causes problems.

Our episode begins (after a Morris Fletcher narrated recap of The Lone Gunmen's entire history, going all the way back to Season 1) with our boy Morris hanging out in the Bermuda triangle, with a lady, apparently working for the private sector. Before we can even deal with the idea of Morris Fletcher having a girlfriend, some dudes show up, tell Morris they're working on behalf of his employer, kidnap his girlfriend and blow up his boat.

He makes it back to Florida and calls for Doggett and Reyes by name, saying he's willing to flip on the government in exchange for protection. They're ready to leave him there but then he says he can give them a super soldier; Yves! Remember Yves? From The Lone Gunmen? Yeah there you go. Anyway, he says she's a super soldier now. They go to the Lone Gunmen for help finding her, only to find them broke and not really publishing anymore.

Anyway, the Gunmen agree to try and track down Yves, while Yves infiltrates a college and shoots a professor in the chest, and then...carves something out of his chest. Some dude catches a glimpse of her running away though. Back with the Gunmen, Morris is an asshole and then Jimmy shows up, saying he's been tracking Yves since The Lone Gunmen ended and he knows she killed that dude. Also both he and Morris know her name is Lois Runce. That's one of those plot points that is just kinda pointless, but fun. I'm gonna keep calling her Yves though.

This boat was significantly smaller in the previous shot.

The gang track Yves to a hotel room and figure that she's about to kill the dude she's following, and thus bust in to stop her, but she gets bonked on the head and the dude bolts. And here comes our big twist; Morris was actually working for a bad guy to find her, and the bad guy is her dad and also the reason she's killing those dudes and cutting them open is they have a...virus encased in shark cartilage in their chest? Everyone follow that? Okay good, cause the virus will go off in a few hours and kill thousands.

So they track down the dude who escaped but he hasn't got it, turns out he was a decoy. So they figure out that the dude who actually has it is the professor who saw Yves and they go to find him. But he bolts too before they can grab him and he ends up cornered by the Gunmen with no time to stop the virus. So they pull the fire alarm and it...seals the hallway with them locked in with him? That makes no sense, but whatever, the episode ends with the Gunmen's funeral.

Jump the Shark is despised by the fanbase for the fact that it kills off some beloved secondary characters for basically absolutely no reason, but that crime kind of disguises the fact that it's just not a very good episode of The X-Files and it's a TERRIBLE episode of The Lone Gunmen. I get that trying to wrap up their comedy flavored spinoff in the main series is a tall order, but maybe that should have been the sign they needed to not even attempt.

And the tone really is the issue that I think makes the whole episode doomed from the start. Despite the jokey title, Jump the Shark is a very serious episode, which makes it kind of awkward as what amounts to the series finale of an otherwise very comedic series. Not that The Lone Gunmen didn't have decently serious moments, it's just kinda tonally dissonant to watch characters like Yves (Sexy Hacker Ninja) and Jimmy (whose name was literally a James Bond joke) try to have a serious character beat like being traumatized by Yves cutting a dude open to stop a terrorist virus.

"Shut up man, I have to give a speech about how important it is that your work lives on after you di-oh we're fucked, aren't we?"

The terrorists are also a major weak point in that the episode doesn't really seem interested in them at all. Maybe it's just the timing of the episode, but the reveal that Yves' father runs the terrorist organization does not matter one whit, and we never get any sense of the terrorist's ideas or motivations, they're just gonna kill a few thousand people because...well they just love killing so darn much. Maybe it's a sign of the fact that it was early 2002 that they thought they could get away with that motivation for a terrorist group, but that doesn't make the writing any better.

The saving grace should be the characters and their interactions, but they're somewhat muted too. The core of The Lone Gunmen was taking its trio of nerds and their jock friend and watch them bouncing off each other, but here they mostly just stand around and do their thing without any real banter, and Jimmy just wanders in at the midpoint basically an entirely different character, without any of his doofy charm. I have no idea how they reached the decision to do a sendoff for these character and not include any of the aspects of the characters we all found charming.

Well that's not fair, it's not totally dire. Morris is still a great character, with this oily slimeball charisma that carries a lot of his scenes, and I do like watching him bounce off various characters. This might not be a totally worthy sendoff to his character, but getting to see him fail to apply his charms on Doggett is a delight. And while we don't get much of Jimmy's doofy charm, he can't quite hide the energy he brought to the show, especially towards the back half of the episode when he gets a bit more bounce in his step.

But it's all for naught when the script is just weird and unfocused. I already mentioned that the reveal about Yves' father comes out of nowhere and adds nothing (and then never gets resolved) but most of the plot points are like that. The bit where the virus is contained in shark cartilage inside people's chest is neat I guess, but also kind of pointless and feels like it was just slammed in there to make the episode a bit more X-Files-y. Hell, Morris is revealed to be working for the villain and every just skips past it, he even comes to the Gunmen's funeral. Also cartilage is a word that always looks like it's spelled wrong and I resent the episode for making me write it so much.

"Who the hell invited Morris?"

I haven't been able to uncover a lot of information about when word officially came down that Season Nine would be the last season, but I suspect that the urge to wrap up The Lone Gunmen's story was driven by that. The thing is, I don't think it did that; The episode doesn't really build on any storyline from the spinoff, actively ignores plot points from it (it's heavily implied at one point that Frohike knows Yves' real name, but here it's a surprise to him as well) and just doesn't feel necessary. The series premier just had them walk in without explanation as to what happened, and I feel like that's how they could have ended it as well. The Lone Gunmen, both the show and the characters, deserved a better ending than this.

Case Notes:

• Not sure Morris should get to be the one to recap the entire history of The Lone Gunmen, both people and show.
• Post-cold open playing a slightly remixed version of The Lone Gunmen theme is decent.
• Morris getting to go private sector with a hot babe sucks a lot, so it's nice that he instantly gets boat-jacked, although it sucks that his girlfriend got kidnapped.
• The size of the boat changes DRASTICALLY between shots.
• The fact that Morris is ready to roll at the first sign of trouble is really in character and I like it. I also like that he's in trouble because he bullshitted a billionaire to get to hang out in the Bahamas.
• Frohike's reaction to Doggett and Reyes is a fun inversion of their relationship with Mulder.
• I can't tell if Frohike is covering by saying they never learned Yves' real name or if the show genuinely forgot that he basically said he knew it back in The Lone Gunmen pilot.
• You'd think Morris would be less of a shitheel to the people he needs to find Yves to save his bacon.
• Langly's little speech about how Joey Ramone never got ground down and lives on forever is basically the episode telling us that the Gunmen are gonna die.
• Yeah they just forgot that Frohike knew her real name.
• Her real name is Lois Runce?
• Jimmy following Yves all around the world is funny, and I don't mind that he's smart enough to track her but dumb enough to mix up geology and geography, it's very Jimmy.
• I can't promise you I won't make a joke about George Costanza being a marine biologist since the victim is a Marine Biologist, I only promise I will try.
• They bring Kimmy in primarily to give him one last appearance and to bark exposition at him.
• I actually like the idea of leaving Jimmy with Morris since unlike the Gunmen, if he fucks around, Jimmy can just beat the shit out of him.
• The dead professor having bioluminescence and a massive something inside him is a pretty neat twist.
• I like that the paper Morris is looking at is a callback to The Cap'n Toby Show. Lotta callbacks in this episode actually.
• It is kind of annoying that the Gunmen never even consider that Yves might have a reason for doing what she's doing and just let the guy get away.
• Morris playing everyone from the start is a nice twist, he's such a doofy character it's fun when he's genuinely dangerous.
• Frohike being a smoker makes a certain amount of sense, and it's a decent moment with Morris. Plus it means that with the CSM dead (well ish) we can have another smoker in the X-Files universe.
• The scene where they catch the (what turns out to be fake) second killer is pretty rad, not gonna lie. Lot of good atmosphere.
• Jimmy apologizing before he headbutts the security guard is pretty funny.
• The fire alarm dropping down big metal doors in the hallway makes absolutely zero sense, and just exists to give the Gunmen a heroic death, so both its execution and purpose suck.
• It sucks that Mulder can't be at the funeral, he was the main character they interacted with. Scully sells her part of it, but she wasn't as close to them as Mulder.
• As always these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I won't have to do experiments with shark DNA to make ends meet.

Future Celebrity Watch:

The second terrorist is played by Marcus Giamatti, older brother of Paul and who was about to go on to a main role in a tv show called Judging Amy as Peter Gray. Never watched it, dunno if he was good or it's good, but there you go.