Case 07, File 11: Closure

AKA: Oh Boy! Closure!

Let's be honest with ourselves: There was never a concrete plan for what happened to Samantha. And I don't mean that in the way that David Lynch never actually intended to resolve the question of who killed Laura Palmer, I mean they intended to resolve it at some point, but I don't think they ever knew what that way was. But with the future of the series in flux and Duchovny's exit coming like a freight train, I think they made the choice to just find an ending for it, and I'm determined to approach it as it's own thing. Even if it does contradict one of my favorite moments from Season Two.

Our episode opens with a brief cold open of the FBI digging up the bunch of children's graves from the previous episode and Mulder monologuing about how awful it is and his hope that the kids will find some peace, with it ending with the kids' spirits crawling out of the graves to play. And with that jarring shift in tone setting our speed, we jump into the plot proper, with Mulder and Scully looking through the evidence from the mass grave, looking for Amber-Lynn. Or Samantha.

But neither of them are there and Mulder is still a little messed up from his mom's death, so when Mulder and Scully are approached by a psychic named Piller telling them that he people find missing dead children (who are rescued by spirit walk-ins and their bodies are turned into starlight?) Scully thinks it's nuts and Mulder goes along with it. So while Mulder and Piller are off doing psychic investigations, Scully heads back to DC to try and track down leads on what happened to Samantha.

Specifically Scully finds that there was a massive investigation to find her, up to and including the treasury, that was called off in the late 70s. Oh and Mulder's hypnotist says that he made up the alien abduction story because he couldn't handle what actually happened? But aliens actually exist? I dunno, this thread gets dropped as initially Mulder think Piller is a fraud but then during a moment where Piller says he's getting a message from Mulder's mom, Mulder writes down the name of a nearby air force base, so Mulder remembers that he's believed nuttier things and they head out there to check it out.

Back on the east coast, Scully keeps investigating and finds that the man who called off the search for Samantha is, in fact, the Cigarette Smoking Man. She tells Mulder, but he's already pretty committed to his plan of "Break into the air force base" and besides, CSM has lied to him, a bunch (like, literally all the time about every subject on Earth), so he decides it's not worth talking to him. Anyway, Mulder and Piller break into the military base and eventually come across a piece of sidewalk that has Samantha and Jeffery carved into it, making Mulder realize that the house must have been where Samantha lived with Jeffery Spender.

"We need to make Mulder appear younger, how can we do that?"
"...give Duchovny a really unfortunate haircut?"

After meeting back up with Scully, she reveals that Piller actually has some deep seated mental problems and is a suspect in the disappearance of his son, but he claims he has those under control and that he is looking for his son the way Mulder is looking for Samantha. So, being rational people, they all decide to break back into the air force base and have a seance. I feel like in another show, that would be weird. Anyway, Mulder encounters a ghost child in the house who guides him to a hidden spot where he finds Samantha's journal from when she was held there. The journal reveals that she had medical tests performed on her while she was being held, that she had her memory erased and that she was planning to escape in 1979.

Scully spends some time digging through old records to find a report of an unnamed runaway who matches Samantha's description in 79, but she disappeared from the hospital. So they go to see the nurse, who tells Scully about how she disappeared into thin air, but it doesn't matter because Mulder wanders off into the woods where he sees the ghosts of Amber-Lynn, Piller's son and, finally, reunites with Samantha's ghost. And so the episode ends with Mulder telling Scully he's accepted Samantha's fate and he finally feels free. Sorry those last few paragraphs weren't super funny, it's hard to make jokes about.

Closure is an episode that I absolutely hated the first time I saw it and given that my rewatches tended to trail off around season six, I rarely rewatched it, so I never got much of a chance to reexamine it. So I was surprised that on this viewing I've softened towards it considerably. I still think it has problems and doesn't really work as a conclusion to a long running plot thread, but I definitely think the parts of it that work really work.

"Nah-uh Mulder, I've seen those Insidious movies, I'm out."

The main thing that works with this episode is the Mulder stuff. Duchovny is giving a pretty solid performance, clearly drawn out and exhausted from all the previous weeks' events and just desperately wanting his search for his sister to be over. The moments that sold the episode to me in this watching, Mulder reading Samantha's diary and his final moments, where he feels free, are both held up by Duchovny (and to a lesser degree Anderson) and they make all the difference in making the episode work.

Unfortunately, the rawness of Duchovny's performance bumps up hard against the more fairy tale aspects of the plot and it's here that I think the main issue with the episode wanders in: The episode has some major tone issues. The opening scene shifts from a pretty dark scene of the FBI pulling child corpses out of the ground to a more whimsical scene of the children's ghosts playing in the field and it's a perfect demonstration of how this episode's tone is a little inconsistent. On the one hand, we have Mulder giving a painful and realistic depiction of grief and loss, and on the other we have children being taken by angels and turned into starlight, and occasionally they don't totally gel.

The rest of the episode has a lot of plot, but I'm not certain how much of it works. I'm up and down on Piller as a character; His job is mostly to get Mulder where he's supposed to go via his psychic visions, but they keep trying to make him more than that, so they give a brief hint at him being crazy or his subplot with his son and it all feels like it's just a little unnecessary. I don't need Piller to exit the episode saying that he's going to find his son. Just have him psychic his way into the plot and psychic his way out.

The bit with the Cigarette Smoking Man is better, since he is much more responsible for the plot, but it feels truncated (it might just be setup for future confrontations). It turns out he's the one who was holding Samantha and also ended the attempts to find her, but that never gets properly dealt with, he just gets one scene and leaves. Honestly, I really like the bit where Mulder says that doesn't even want to talk to him, since he's lied to both Mulder and Scully all the time (didn't he bring in a fake Samantha at one point? I feel like they just dropped that) but I do feel like they should be a little angrier at him once they finally have a complete picture of what happened.

I'm not crying, you're crying.

Whatever, the episode's plot is jerky and not well put together, but it comes together nicely at the end. The last 10 minutes, with Mulder reading Samantha's diary and their emotional reunion smooth out a lot of the bumps (and I'll admit I got choked up during The Hug). Most fans are with the show at this point because they feel an emotional attachment to the characters, so having an emotional ending to the episode will go a long way towards making the final moments of the episode feel special, even if all it's ultimately doing is hacking off a subplot so that they can keep the show going without worry about Samantha anymore.

In retrospect, the disdain I had for this episode seems to be more focused around what we lost to it, rather than the actual ins and outs of the episode itself. Samantha was a major plot line, running through the entire series, from literally the first episode. To see it resolved out of nowhere, somewhat  anticlimactically, feels like we lost something, like all the setup from the previous seasons has gone nowhere. Maybe that feeling will never totally go away, but now that I'm a little older and a little more willing to approach a story thematically, I like it better.

Case Notes:

• Mulder's opening monologue switches gears from being a grim meditation on how horrifying it is that all these kids were killed to a bit about souls and reincarnation that I nearly got whiplash.
• The visual of the ghost kids all standing in a circle, after 2 minutes of shots of police officers digging up corpses is kind of jarring tone wise.
• Mulder admitting that he wants his search for Samantha to be over, for him to just know what happened to her even if she's dead, is kind of darkly human.
• I like the fact that a police psychic just walks up and joins the investigation. I guess he heard Mulder is that kind of weirdo. Or maybe since he's from California he heard of that Shawn Spencer guy.
• Piller opens up talking about how the dead bodies he was looking for on a previous investigation were transported in starlight. Anyone other than Mulder would give him the boot and maybe a psych referral.
• Scully basically tells Mulder that working with Piller is too crazy even for him. I mean, she's not wrong, it's nuts, but she should be more used to that by now.
• Piller might be right in the context of the show, but he resembles so strongly a real life conman that it's a little awkward.
• Their way of making Mulder look younger in the video tape of him being hypnotized is to give him a deeply unfortunate haircut.
• The FBI hypnotist is basically saying "Mulder invented the alien abduction in his head to give himself a reason to look for Samantha" but also like...it turns out there's an actual alien conspiracy. So he had good reason to think that.
• It doesn't surprise me at all that there was a lot of effort put into finding Samantha, so I'm not sure why the episode treats it like a reveal.
• The idea the treasury department got involved is very funny to me though, especially since it's really important.
• Mulder watching Planet of the Apes at 3AM is very Him for some reason.
• Pilller's methods might be too weird even for Mulder.
• I like Mulder kicking out Piller when he thinks he's full of shit (even if we get the message a moment later). It's good that Mulder has limits.
• Scully finds out that the Cigarette Smoking Man called off the search for Samantha and Mulder is like "Yeah I know, but he's useless, so I'm not going to go after him."
• Scully and the Cigarette Smoking Man verbally sparring is fun, they don't interact much, so it's nice to get to see them sniping back and forth.
• Getting chased out of the driveway of the Air Force base is what convinces Mulder to return and check it out, which is completely predictable. I guess if the guards knew it was Mulder they might have considered that he'd break into the base, because of course he would. Mulder's never met a fence he didn't want to climb.
• Finding Samantha's handprint next to Jeffery's is such a massive coincidence that if it weren't for the fact that they're following psychic visions, it would feel contrived.
• I like that Mulder is using the handprints and names as proof that his sister lives there. My dude, it is 100% possible that two unrelated children named Samantha and Jeffery lived there.
• The reveal that Piller is schitzophrenic (and possibly murdered his son) is such a left field twist, it's basically just giving Mulder an excuse to distrust him in the last act and drag Scully back into the base to investigate.
• The seance where the episode just does a tiny bit too silly for me. I get what they're going for, but I don't think it works.
• The reveal that Samantha was being held and tested on for years is really grim and really sad, and Duchovny just seems so sad from it.
• The episode is basically over when they decide to go looking for the nurse who signed Samantha into the hospital.
• Mulder being emotionally incapable of going up to the house and hear what happened to Samantha is very human and kind of raw.
• Once again, the episode makes a big deal out of Cigarette Smoking Man uh...smoking, when he showed up at the hospital in 1979, but smoking was very common back then, so it's still amusing to me.
• Piller refusing to believe Mulder is again, very human and very sad.
• The last line of the episode being "I'm fine, I'm free" is very very solid.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. I was gonna make a joke about needing the money because of Coronavirus, but they actually cancelled work, so yeah, check it out.

Current Celebrity Watch:

This is a minor one, but Piller is played by Anthony Heald, who played Dr. Frederick Chilton in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. You remember him, he's the douchy doctor that Hannibal hates? Yeah, now you remember him.