Case 11, File 01: My Struggle III

 AKA: This Is Why You Plan How To Handle A Season Finale Ahead

The X-Files' odd mix of overarching story and episodic adventures means that the status quo has to be god, but it also can't feel like it's god. Mulder and Scully can get kicked off the X-Files, Scully can get abducted, the Conspiracy can get incinerated, but at the end of the day we have to get back to Mulder and Scully (or, I guess, whoever our agents are) fighting monsters. But when you reset us back to zero, it can't be too obvious that that's what you're doing. Cause if it is...hoo boy.

Our episode opens (after a Cigarette Smoking Man monologue) not where we left off, but with Scully getting rushed to the hospital. She's had a seizure, and with it, a vision that was the entire last episode. Yeah just deal with it now. Mulder and Skinner try to figure out what's going on with her, but there's nothing they can do until she wakes up. Which she does. Immediately. And tell Mulder and her doctor about the vision she had. Immediately. Kinda cutting a lot of the tension here, huh?

Meanwhile, we check in with Jeffery Spender (no, really) who gets attacked by some random dude. He Spender to find William which is...odd? Why would he know where-oh no, we're moving on. Spender calls Mulder, but Cigarette Smoking Man is listening to the call and when Mulder drives home, there's a guy following him. But after a quick car chase, Mulder is the one following him out of town. Those two things turn out to be unrelated, but they sure are put together.

After a bit of of fussing about with Cigarette Smoking Man monologuing to Reyes, Mulder driving after the guy and Scully trying to check out of the hospital and then collapsing in the X-Files office, and getting in a car crash, Mulder finally arrives at the house he's going to. Turns out CSM ain't there though, the dude was sent by another group of former Conspiracy members who hate CSM but want to colonize space rather than wipe out humanity (I will update my flow charts). They offer to help Mulder out in exchange for a space in uh, space, but he thinks they're full of shit and bolts.

I feel like if I dig deep enough into X-Files canon it'll turn out this is contradicting canon, but I don't actually care.

Skinner, meanwhile, is looking for Scully but is immediately held at gunpoint by Reyes. And then immediately gets her gun away from her. And then Cigarette Smoking Man shows up. Jesus this is moving fast. He wants Skinner to find William in exchange for immunity for the upcoming virus (which, despite being from Scully's vision, is real) but when he tries to bolt, Skinner demands that he stay and explain himself. About time someone did that.

Back at the hospital, Scully is back in bed, having been saved from her car crash from Miller and Einstein (who are still in the show, apparently), when the assassin Mulder followed shows up to try and assassinate Scully. But Mulder slits his throat, which is honestly pretty hardcore by Mulder standards. When Skinner shows back up, he's cagey because he's learned that the Cigarette Smoking Man is actually William's father, having secretly impregnated Scully during the events of En Ami. Oh and it turns out that William is sending Scully the vision psychically.

My Struggle III is an episode behind the 8 ball from the word go and it does not manage to get out. If anything, it makes matters worse. The solutions they come up with to solve unsolvable problems do not solve those unsolvable problems. They add another set of threads to the web of the ongoing story, which feel so redundant at this point that I'm not even going to address the secondary conspiracy outside this paragraph. But then there are the retcons they hit the older episodes with, which is one of the worst ideas in the episode. Maybe the whole series.

The two big elements, the two millstones around the neck of this episode, are the reveal that the entire previous episode was a seizure vision, and the reveal that Cigarette Smoking Man is William's father, and they're both just fucking awful, in completely different way. The vision reveal is just cheap, a desperate way to write themselves out of a corner they wrote their way into, and while it does get them back to the status quo, it costs them more than they think. How can I take any plot developments seriously when I know they're both willing and able to just take stuff back that blatantly.

This is a neat shot, I like this shot.

The second twist, the reveal that Cigarette Smoking Man impregnated Scully, is just gross and awful. For starters, turning William from an expression of Mulder and Scully's love for each other into another example of the Conspiracy controlling everything is awful; Hope that the characters can actually gain something, can carve out some small part of this often terrifying world, is an important emotion and stripping that with this twist is an incredibly hard thing to fight through. Also, while I get that it's well within the boundaries of the Conspiracy's plans, the specific way this one went down makes it feel visceral in a way that makes the twist feel icky in a way it never did before.

Outside of those two elements, the episode is...kinda bad? Probably below mediocre, I honestly have trouble telling, even a great episode would struggle with those two issues, but even accounting for that, the episode is just kinda dull. There are moments where it seems to be trying to come alive, like the chase, but a mix of low budget and Chris Carter's own middling directing ability means that those ideas mostly fall flat (the shots are too disconnected and the scene is too long and too repetitive) Although I do like Skinner's confrontation in the car, it's tense and tightly controlled, although I feel like Skinner should have had a stronger emotional reaction to Reyes working with Cigarette Smoking Man.

The main plot is devoted to a search for William, but doesn't actually devote itself much to the actual search, more interested in setting up whose doing it and why. I don't know if that's a problem, if the season is gonna be devoted to that, it makes sense to spend your opening getting all your ducks in a row. But this means the season premier has no momentum, and little energy. It just kinda wanders around, every new group popping up to make it clear why they want to find William, and the episode goes to some odd places (why would Spender know where William is? I feel like he and Scully parted on uh...not great terms).

"Hi, I'll be your assassin today."

Honestly, it feels a little bit like The X-Files is, more blatantly than ever, falling back into old patterns. There's a new set of conspirators, Skinner is back to being an ambiguous ally, Cigarette Smoking Man is the main villain again. Yes, these two seasons are basically an exercise in nostalgia bait, but I personally would rather they at least try to move the story forward, try new ideas rather than rehash old ones.

Honestly, the Cigarette Smoking Man is the perfect symbol of the show at this point; There from the first episode, he used to be a mysterious and intriguing element. But now, his backstory detailed, retconned and detailed again, having been supposedly killed 3 separate times now, he's incredibly hard to take seriously. Sometimes he can still surprise us, and there is always a shot of joy seeing him wandering around, doing stuff. But ultimately, that's mostly nostalgia. And while that can keep you going for a while, it's ultimately not enough.

I feel like I lost the metaphor there.

Case Notes:

• Just a quick note: You might have noticed last review, I didn't have a Best and Worst of the season. The reason for that is, given the abbreviate nature of these two seasons, I didn't want to give them separate Best and Worst, and will simply be taking the revival seasons as one. I probably should have announced that beforehand, but whatever, I make my own rules.
• Oh hey, we get the Cigarette Smoking Man's full name: Carl Gehard Busch. I'm not calling him that.
• Cigarette Smoking Man getting an opening monologue to match Mulder and Scully's? Good. The monologue itself is bad though, and while it flashes up a lot of pictures of Trump and Putin, I have no idea what it's trying to say.
• Cigarette Smoking Man helping fake the Moon Landing is, I'll admit, very funny.
• "I Want to Lie" is a decent change to the opening credits.
• I like the episode keeping the reveal that the previous episode was All Just A Dream to the post-cold open because they want to hold off on that bomb for as long as they can.
• Scully's brain flashing "Find Him" in Morse Code is absolutely the dumbest thing in the world, and the episode knows it.
• I gotta say, trying to play up the events of the previous episode as something that COULD happen is the worst possible thing they could do, it's going to be impossible to take seriously once they had it go into effect and then took it back.
• Spender is looking pretty decent for a dude who got his skin mostly burned off, and he brushes off getting hit by a car like it's nothing.
• The doctor is taking "I had a seizure vision that precited the future" from Scully pretty well.
• I don't think they should be retaining elements of the vision, its making the whole thing feel kinda cheap.
• Going kinda heavy on the Mulder monologue, and its pretty redundant, just him recapping what's happening.
• Reyes job in this episode appears to be "Give Cigarette Smoking Man someone to monologue to."
• Mmmmm, don't like Cigarette Smoking Man doing a rant about the nature of the media landscape in 2018. It's not inaccurate but it feels preachy.
• The reveal that Scully saw the conversation between Mulder and CSM is funny to me, did someone edit the vision for her?
• Reyes gives CSM a lecture about all the people he's going to kill is also funny, did they never discuss his plans at any point in the last 15 years?
• I actually dig the shot of Skinner calling Scully's phone and the camera being beneath it with it ringing, that's a neat shot.
• Scully goes for a drive mid-seizure and it goes about as well as you expect.
• The aliens having decided not to colonize earth because we fucked it up so hard is, again, very funny, and much better social commentary than CSM talking about Fake News.
• Mr. Y gives Mulder what, the 4th or 5th retcon of CSM and the Conspiracy's backstory.
• Mulder learns that the alternate conspiracy wants to transport a few, specific, people to space and immediately groks that this just the same genocide plan, with more steps. I feel like that might be relevant to the current Moment.
• I honestly have no idea why the secondary Conspiracy wants to kill Scully, but their assassin is terrible at smothering people with a pillow.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can keep bringing you seering insights like "Don't turn an entire season finale into a dream dipshits."

Current Celebrity Watch:

One of the members of the second conspiracy is played by Barbara Hersey, a very well known actress, who got an Oscar nomination for Portrait of Lady (no, not on fire) and a Golden Globe nomination for The Last Temptation of Christ. That's not the full picture, obviously, she's been acting steadily since the 60s.

Young Mulder in one of the flashbacks is played by Billy Boyd, whose entire career is overshadowed by the fact that he played Pippin in The Lord of the Rings.