The X-Files: Scully’s Journey (Season Four)
Well, it’s the Fall 1996-Spring 1997 season. In this time, Mulder and Scully will continue to be awesome everywhere they go, including Springfield, USA, home of The Simpsons, and that’s when you know you’ve arrived. Bucket hats will come back and just as quickly fade away (outside of people who actually find them useful like, say, fishermen), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion will become a personal touchstone for me, as will Daria…
Yes, I obsessively collect gifs and graphics, but only for things that are very important!
In a nutshell…
Our fearless duo were in the midst of protecting Jeremiah Smith at some random shipping site when we last left off and that darned Alien Bounty Hunter had showed up to pfft him to death! From there, we officially get into season four, which seriously has the heaviest concentration of mythos episodes so far. Let’s get crackin’!
So the ABH is bearing down in Herrenvolk and everyone runs, but especially Mulder and Smith, who think they kill him with the pfft-stick (spoiler: they don’t), then ditch poor Scully…
…leaving her to be choked, but ultimately not to death, by our Schwarzenegger-look-alike pal. He then takes her captive and uses her and her trusty cell phone to find out where Mulder and Smith have gone. And where have they gone?
That’s right, Canada. Mulder still wanted Smith to save his mother, but there’s too much heat on her with Old Smoky and pals watching. So they go to Canada and, instead of finding friendly mounties, hockey hooligans, and all the maple syrup you can drink, they find a farm worked by mute drone-clones of Samantha…
… and of some random, creepy, blonde boy.
They also find murderous, kiss-disrupting bastard bees! Yes, I am looking to the future with this vitriol, for I will learn to hate bees after the movie in ways I never did before.
Anyway, Mulder, Clone!Samantha, and Smith trap the ABH in with the damned bees while, back in DC, Mafia Man meets with Old Smoky about that leak and they decide to put out some false information to several of their lackeys, including my boyfriend X…
… to see where the info leak is coming from. Uh-oh. Scully and Skinner and Pendrell look into all the other Smith clones, but they’ve all gone poof! So Scully breaks out the duct tape and does some paperwork while she waits, because summoning X is like this mundane, super casual part of her day now.
She grills him on The Smiths (not the band) and their body of work (but if we were talking about the band, “How Soon Is Now?” is a personal favorite as is “Please Let Me Get What I Want”). He gives her vague hints about a shady smallpox eradication program and then tells her to start digging. Just kidding! This is X, so it’s all “leave it alone… don’t unlock doors you aren’t prepared to go through.” We’re all going to miss your vaguely aggressive warnings, X. I say “miss” because he also gives Scully some of the false info Smoky spread around: that Mulder needs to get back to his mother because someone wants her dead.
Scully takes the smallpox hint back to Skinner and Pendrell and finds that all people are being cataloged, which would mean even more miles of files than she and Mulder found back in Apocrypha. She presents her findings to some higher-ups, who treat her like Mrs. Spooky over it. Spooky, himself, checks in and tells her he’s coming back with Smith and Clone!Samantha, but this happens…
Yes, ABH is out and wants to destroy both clones. He incapacitates Mulder and we fade to black, leaving him to destroy them both. I’m going to miss that Jeremiah Smith. Later, Mulder comes home and to the hospital alone, a broken man.
He mourns the fact that he can’t save his mother and it’s very serious business, but I’m so shallow that I can’t get over how cute it is when giant Mulder and tiny Scully hug.
Meanwhile, those Department of Mysteries bastards have tracked their leak to X. They lure him to Mulder’s place and have the Gray-Haired Man waiting in the elevator shoot him dead… Well, not exactly, he uses his last moments of life to crawl, trailing blood, to Mulder’s door and leave one last message, written in his own blood. It is gross and wonderful and heartbreaking all at once. I’m going to miss you so much, X.
Back at the hospital, Mulder tells Scully about his misadventures in Canada and his feelings about failing to save Smith, Clone!Samantha, and his Mother. He also laments how convoluted the mythos is getting. Dude, me too. But Scully tells him there’s always hope that things will make sense with a lovely quote below. (And I wish I could believe her, but this mythos, y’all…)
A month later, Mulder follows X’s letters to the Special Representative of the Secretary General, who refuses to see him. His crytpic secretary, Marita Covarubixcube (also known as Andrea from The Walking Dead) opens the door for further communication, showing him a picture of another clone farm.
At the hospital, Old Smoky convinces the ABH to heal Mrs. Mulder.
“You see. The fiercest enemy is the man who has nothing left to lose.”
From there, our duo have one of their creepiest cases in the town of Home and we’ll definitely be addressing it in the top ten. The one thing you need to know, on a character basis, is that Mulder and Scully adorably discuss genetics
Mulder: Well, just find yourself a man with a spotless genetic make-up and a really high tolerance for being second-guessed and start pumping out the little uber-Scullies.
Scully: What about your family?
Mulder: Well, aside from the need for corrective lenses and a tendency to be abducted by extraterrestrials involved in an international governmental conspiracy, the Mulder family passes genetic muster.
It also introduces the idea that Scully might want to be a mother, something that will definitely come up significantly later.
Teliko is pretty much like Squeeze, but African. Seriously, a man that lacks a personality consumes body parts of others to survive, replace liver with pituitary gland, and keep the ability to squeeze into tight spaces. The episode keeps trying to act as if it has some kind of point to make about alien citizens or racial differences or government cover-ups, but this is too much of a B-movie MOTW to carry that kind of weight and any attempt at a message seems like a half-assed note scribbled into the middle, then tacked onto the ending. The only thing you need to know is that Mulder teases Pendrell about his crush on Scully and that our duo remains adorable.
Also, Scully saves Mulder’s ass, putting the rescue tally in her favor at 14/8.5.
Next, we learn that Scully speaks fluent German and that she is able to keep her cool remarkably while being threatened with by an amateur serial lobotomist.
It’s a good episode, though not top ten level, but why does every nutbag have to make a play for Scully? I just want Scully to go a few months without having to google “remove duct tape residue.” I will say she’s gotten better at abduction etiquette, with the presence of mind to sympathize with the killer and show off her conversational German. But if anyone has the most unruhe (title drop!) in this partnership, it’s Mulder. I was annoyed at how she was reduced to just yelling for Mulder from inside that trailer, even if was cute how they kept yelling each other’s names back and forth like they were playing “Marco Polo.” They were pretty cute in this episode in general.
And with Mulder rescuing Scully, the tally is at 14/9.5, still with Scully in the lead.
Then we have The Field Where I Died, which I remember hating because of that whole past life/soulmate plot. Implying that Mulder’s soulmate is ANYONE but SCULLY is lies and balderdash! And you know what? It still bothers me! Not even these moments could save it…
I’ll see if I have room to bitch about it more below. You can also feel free to skip Sanguinarium and its cheap gross-outs except for this reminder that our duo is still adorable…
Next, we have a departure in Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man in which our duo barely appears except in voice and flashback.
Long story short: Young Smoky (played by future Jeffrey Spender, Chris Owens) was behind the assassinations of J.F.K., Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy; he also has a hand in controlling the Oscars and the Superbowl. He was kind of conflicted about some of the preceding, but he did it because it’s his job. But, deep down, he’s a frustrated novelist. We also get the first outright hints that he may be Mulder’s biological father.
It borrows heavily from Forrest Gump, but it’s perfectly aware of that and even lampshades this with a “life is like a box of chocolates” speech that is more a rant on the crappiness and futility of Old Smoky’s life.
We also get to see Deep Throat again, whose name is, apparently, Ronald.
It’s a well-made, but far-fetched episode, and it leaves you unsure how much of it is supposed to be taken as true as it has all been gleaned from Frohike gathering and studying Smoky’s sensationalized crime stories, something Smoky briefly considers killing him for. I will say the rejected novelist plot is humanizing (it’s jarring to see him genuinely smile… before he sees the trashy smutrag that published his story) even if it makes him a petty bastard.
Next, we have a mythos double feature with Tunguska and Terma, both of which revolve around Scully testifying before congress. They want to know where Mulder is and she refuses to answer, instead pointing out the “culture of lawlessness” that is messing up her damned work, pointing the finger at those Department of Mysteries jerks. We then are taken on a flashback journey to ten days ago, where we meet the black oil again. This time, it crawls like maggots and burrows under people’s skin.
Mulder and Scully are led to it by Krycek. Apparently, some terrorists got him out of that silo and he joined them in order to betray them and get back in with our duo. His success is dubious and Mulder spends the episode beating him up…
… which is a lot less mean when you remember Krycek killed his father. Anyway, Krycek says he now wants to take Old Smoky down and tips them off to the airport and a diplomat with a special pouch, where Scully is especially badass, leading everyone around and beating Mulder at running… in heels!
They’re pretty pissed off when they find what the pouch contained.
They keep Krycek prisoner at Skinner’s place, where Skinner gets a turn, too…
… while Scully decides to check that rock out, anyway. Turns out the rock is a prehistoric meteorite and contains a bacteria of unearthly origins. When a scientist cuts into it, the oil manages to crawl into his suit and put him in a coma.
Meanwhile, Old Smoky gets wind of our duo having gotten the rock and has a lackey break into Skinner’s in hopes of finding it. Krycek, handcuffed to the balcony, manages to throw him off it. And Mulder goes to see Marita Covarubytuesday who tells him the rock traces back to Russia. When Mulder finds out Krycek speaks Russian, he brings him along, where they almost immediately get captured and tossed into a gulag.
Back in DC in, we get back to the start, where Scully is being questioned over that pouch, that dead lackey at Skinner’s, and where Mulder is. Well, she ain’t saying because she doesn’t know. But it ain’t pretty. Mulder’s gulag neighbor says they perform experiments on the men here. Something he finds out firsthand when they drug him and he wakes up like this…
When we come back with the second part, I have to check for a a minute that I didn’t select the wrong episode. It opens on a senior home in Florida, where some guy is Kavorkianing an old lady. But she ends up black-oiled instead. What? Man, I’m rusty on some of these. Then we go to Russia, but not with Mulder. We meet a former KGB agent turned hitman as he gets an assignment. Later, he kills a doctor working for Smoky and pals (and maybe sleeping with the WMM), who (as Skinner informs Scully) was supposed to get that rock. He works on killing off all her test subjects throughout the episode. The DoM is, apparently, competing with the Russians in all this black oil cure, alien madness, because the mythos desperately needs more stuff.
Back at the Black Oil Funzone, we get back to Mulder (not in a coma, so the Russians have a cure, I guess) and his new prison pal, who tells him he’s been exposed to “the black cancer” and that Krycek is buddying up with their prison guards. Ugh! Krycek is the worst. I’m waiting eagerly for the ending.
Anyway, Mulder’s new pal gives him a weapon he’d previously been saving up to kill himself. Nice guy. I mean that. I wish the show had seen fit to let him escape with Mulder. Back in DC, Scully isn’t just sitting on her hands, waiting for that hearing. She’s been working on that comatose scientist.
Back at Black Oil Funzone, Mulder uses his weapon and (completely ABANDONING his new best friend!) steals a truck… also Krycek, though he loses Krycek when this happens.
Don’t worry. Mulder’s fine.
Krycek, not so much. He ends up with a group of rebels who’ve managed to stay out of the experimental gulag by cutting off their smallpox arm. And they very sweetly help him stay safe with them.
Mulder ends up with some other Russians who are also super fans of amputation, but he is much better at communicating in English than Krycek is in Russian. We finally get back to that hearing…
Scully wonders, rightly so, to Skinner and later to the congressmen at the hearing, why, with all the other shit surrounding that rock, the only question they’re asking in that hearing is where Mulder is. I know, right? They’re still total dicks all, “Where’s Agent Mulder? Answer the question!” Then this happens…
Scully and I wipe the hearts out of our eyes and get back to business, telling the men there’s some weird murders surrounding that rock, now including the scientist, after Skinner comes in to tell her all about it (Yeah. Mr. KGB has killed the comatose scientist and made off with that rock). They go to recess and Scully wastes NO TIME.
Our duo hug FOREVER, then head to Florida and end up at that senior home full of test subjects to find them all dead. Our duo go to see a cohort of Krycek’s, thinking he’s somehow behind everything and was using them this whole time. The cohort tips them off to some truck full of black rocks in Terma (title drop!), North Dakota, where Mr. KGB has also gone to destroy them. He threatens to kill Scully, but only leaves with her gun. He nearly does kill Mulder when he triggers an explosion, but Scully is awesome.
Back at the hearing again, our duo try to tell their story and show their conspiracy evidence, but those guys are still being total dicks about everything.
Mulder makes a giant speech about why they are working so hard not to believe, even when they have irrefutable evidence. They recess again, presumably to meet again when they’ve evaluated the evidence. Yeah. That’s the last we see of them, I guess. We end in Russia, with Mr. KGB revealing he was working for the one-armed man.
Next, we have a good and almost whimsically creepy outing in Paper Hearts. Mulder has a strange dream that leads him to the corpse of a little girl.
She fits the M.O. of a sicko he profiled back in the day, John Lee Roche; a sick bastard and traveling salesman, who would cut a cloth heart out of the clothes of his victims. They found the victims, but never found the hearts (and wouldn’t “Cloth Hearts” be a more fitting title?). This newest victim confirms there are more killings than he confessed to. Mulder wants to find them all and give peace to the families.
They dig in and end up finding the hearts in his old car, now with a new owner, and find sixteen hearts, which means there are three more bodies out there. They visit him in prison, but he just wants to play games, like literally...
Mulder has another dream, this one about his sister, replacing the aliens he always saw with Roche and he starts to doubt what he’s always believed. He sees Roche, who claims he sold Mulder’s dad a vacuum back in the 60s. He says he’ll only tell him more if they give him the hearts. Mulder hits him. the guard pretends not to notice, but Scully takes him to task. Mulder wonders how Roche can know all this, but Scully thinks there might be some way he looked it all up and is playing with Mulder. Mulder thinks Scully should be with him on this more likely tale, since Scully never truly bought the alien abduction version of events.
Mulder even makes his mother (Hi, Teena! Glad you’re feeling better! Sorry that no-good son of yours always wakes you up in the middle of the night) look at the remaining hearts to see if she recognizes one, then dig in the storage to find one of the models Roche says he sold them. Skinner chews Mulder out for losing his cool with Roche, which was caught on video. Scully vouches for Mulder and Skinner reluctantly lets him stay on the case, telling Scully to watch that he “treads very lightly.”
They see Roche again and he gives more details about the night of Samantha’s abduction. He has Mulder pick a heart, saying he’ll find a victim, anyway, and that it could be Samantha. Mulder goes right to the burial site and frantically digs without an evidence team, with Scully reluctantly digging in with him.
It’s not Sam. Another visit with Roche has him upping the ante, saying the last body is Sam and he’ll only tell Mulder if he takes him to the house he abducted her from. Mulder does it (!!!!????!!!!) and Roche goes on about how well he remembers the house. But Mulder’s been playing a game of his own. It’s his father’s house, which he bought years later. Mulder realizes that Roche has only been seeing these things through reaching into his mind, profiling him the way he profiled Roche, then feeding him dreams. Mulder’s done with this shit, but Roche gives Mulder another dream, this one giving him the wish fulfillment fantasy of rescuing Samantha.
Mulder wakes to find he freed Roche, who took all his shit and used it to abduct a little girl. They track him to a bus graveyard.
Roche still says the last victim is Samantha and Mulder will never know if he kills him. But he’s got a gun on a kid and is squeezing that trigger, so Mulder shoots first. Back in the luxurious basement dwellings, Mulder is lamenting still having no answers on Sam. Scully tries to comfort him, but with a poor choice of words.
He’s still not sure about that last heart. :(
Next, we have an MOTW that is not worth mentioning (stop naming dropping El Chupacabra in an episode that has nothing to do with it!), but it is worth mentioning that our duo ventured to the small town of Springfield, “Oh, Hi Maude!” that very same week.
Yes. I am counting The Simpsons The Springfield Files as canon. It all complies with canon. Our duo deadpans delightfully, they deal with small town weirdos trying their patience, Scully can’t wait to get out of the podunk town, Mulder monologues endlessly until everyone leaves. Just like in the show!
Then we have another excellent episode, which will be in my top ten. I mean, I could call it “Tooms, but with cancer-eating” like Teliko, but it’s just better. It has a certain pathos that works as you can see Leonard Betts (title drop!) is conflicted about what he does if it involves harming someone. And there’s a humor that’s never obtrusive…
…like with how Quirky Photo Guy makes another cameo or how Mulder, who never hesitates to stick his hands in or even taste random goo, is suddenly so squeamish about sifting through medical waste.
Okay, long story short, there’s a guy who survives by eating cancer. He works as a paramedic, so he can get access to dig tumors out of medical waste and he can regenerate and regrow his own parts. The fact that he keeps existing after he’s “dead”, more than anything, causes him to kill someone in the course of the episode, to harm his own mother, and almost kill Scully in a moment of desperation.
This was tough. I recognize that this was set up with previous episodes, as far back as Nisei, that Scully was at risk of developing cancer. That didn’t make it any easier to take. I can see why they decided to air it on Superbowl night. It’s definitely a good outing that shows X-Files in its comfort zone… and then there’s that final soul-destroying twist that, I imagine, got plenty of those casual viewers to tune in again.
Then, we have another solid outing in Never Again, which a lot of shippers hate and which I actually have a certain respect for. This was scheduled to air before the previous, but they nixed it for being an atypical outing, which I agree with. It’s an MOTW that’s out of the usual pattern. That doesn’t make it out of character, though, in my opinion (which might differ from a lot of hardcore MSR shippers).
To sum it up, Scully is feeling sort of lost in this partnership and she acts out by fooling around with a crazy man in the middle of a drug-induced breakdown. That man’s name is not Mulder, so a lot of shippers hated this episode. And I understand that, but I also understand this episode. I do realize I’m giving Scully a total pass for sleeping with Jerse (I assume she did, even as hard as I fly my MSR flag, and it’s not the end of the world). I’m also aware this episode was supposed to air before the above, so it’s not the cancer that’s making me give her a pass whereas I was super petty about Mulder sleeping with that vampire chick in 3. Am I being sexist or operating with double standards that favor women? Well… maybe a tiny bit. Is it just a pass because she’s drunk and under chemical influence? Well, that may help, too. But I get why Scully goes for Jerse in a way I don’t get why Mulder goes for Kristen (Kristin? Kirsten?) in 3. And it’s not because of Jerse. Never Again is a better episode than 3 and it gets me, as an audience member, where I need to be to understand her state of mind.
We see it from her first scene, surveying this office that has all the trappings of Mulder and nothing of her. She has lost a lot to this work, but has nothing with her name on it. And she does a damned lot of work, considering how so many interactions go…
Mulder: Hey, Scully, do this medical and/or sciency thing for me real quick
Scully: While you do what?
Mulder: (runs off to greet DANGER and EXCITEMENT!)
…so she might also be feeling a bit taken for granted, the desk aside. The episode kicks off with Mulder being forced into vacation and telling her to follow up on a lead in his stead, one that she rightly thinks is going nowhere, so it’s just more of the same. When she’s in Philadelphia and the lead goes, as she thought, nowhere, she decides to go on an impulsive date with a handsome stranger.
A few drinks and a tattoo laced with drugs later, they end up in bed. The part she doesn’t know is that he’s been driven insane by his drugged-up tattoo and killed someone, and that the tattoo is telling him to kill her next… in the very trusted voice of Jodie Foster, so can we blame him?
Well, yeah we can. Those impulses must exist for him in a way that they don’t exist for Scully, who does not murder anyone in her tattoo-bender. Anyway, I have more to say about this, but I’ll go into it below. Suffice it to say, Scully gets her name in the X-files… the files, at least, and on her return, Mulder is a bit passive aggressive and Scully is a bit defensive.
Yes. We will definitely be discussing this further.
Next, we have the universally-loved Memento Mori, which won Gillian an Emmy and which consists of Scully being diagnosed with and dealing with the reality of her cancer, all framed within a letter to Mulder, telling him to keep fighting without her. I am crying already.
When she tells Mulder, he wants to investigate further because he needs something to do about this bullshit. Scully is more into just treating it and accepting it, but she indulges him as they try to find Betsy Hagopian. She’s dead. So are almost all the other ladies with alien implant keychains or charm bracelets, as they find out from Kurt Crawford, a fellow MUFON member in contact with all of them. He’s into all the same conspiracy theories Mulder is. They also meet Penny Northern, another one of Scully abduction alumnis, who gets Scully on the same chemo regime she’s using, pretty much right away. Also, Scully tells her mother.
Turns out Crawford is a hybrid/clone and one who’s a bit more in the Jeremiah Smith mold (like not a drone asshole). So of course, he gets killed by the Gray-Haired Man, because we are not allowed to have nice aliens like ever! Then GHM takes Crawford’s form and uses Mulder to hack and find info on a fertility clinic that linked most of the abduction sorority. Mulder gets the Lone Gunmen (finally getting some screentime again!) to help him break-in, with all the security-hacking, black-ninja outfit-wearing, and last minute saves they could want.
Mulder also finds a bunch of other Crawford Clones in there, and that they are working for Scully’s doctor to save the abduction sorority, who are their birth mommies. It’s weird and almost sweet. Mulder is pretty much only there for a way to save Scully. They don’t have it as yet, but they do show him her harvested ova, which he swipes before that GHM shows up to kill everyone, very nearly killing Mulder. Ugh. I miss the real ABH. At least he spared you if you weren’t on his hitlist. This one is just mean and bloodthirsty. Anyway, Mulder makes it back to Scully in the hospital, where she shares that Penny is gone…
…though he doesn’t share that he’s got some of her ova (something which won’t come up again for YEARS), but they do share a tender moment together, when she tells him she wants to fight on and keep working as she’s treated because they both love that delightfully elusive truth.
I almost forgot. At one point, Mulder talked to Skinner about making a deal with Old Smoky to save Scully. Skinner was all…
… so Mulder didn’t. But, apparently, Skinner didn’t take his own advice. That’s going to work out wonderfully for everyone.
Next (in important episodes, at least), we get another mythos double-header in Tempus Fugit/Max. Yes, Max Fennig is back. Except, not really, because he’s dead almost as soon as we see him. It starts with this bit of adorableness…
…where Mulder gifts his fair lady with an Apollo 11 keychain.
But all the fun ends when this chick shows up claiming to be Max Fennig’s sister. Spoiler: she’s not. She’s a former scientist and current mental patient, but there’s more to it. Just to boil it down: Max was on a plane and it crashed and all passengers are accounted for except Max. We go through lots of twisty evidence gathering until Mulder finally that Max was abducted mid-flight while carrying some kind of radiation-heavy alien device.
There was a Man In Black on the plane who wanted to kill him for it. There were also some military guys who shot at the UFO. They turned what would have been a standard nine-minute abduction into a plane crash. Another MIB goes after Mulder when he gets Max’s device and boards a plane. The MIB gets it from him. Apparently, those aliens really want that device, so they interrupt that flight and take the device and the MIB. This time, no one shoots it down and Mulder loses nine minutes. Also, that second MIB jerk kills Pendrell by accident (NOOOOOO!!!!!). Besides that tragedy, they’re solid, well-done, and very cinematic episodes with a sweet ending, where Scully theorizes on why Mulder gave her that Apollo 11 keychain.
Mulder: I just thought it was a pretty cool keychain.
Next, our duo deal with a time-traveling scientist in Synchrony and a shapeshifting pervert in Small Potatoes.
We’ll be getting into the funny (though problematic) latter in the top ten. The main thing you need to know is that he poses as Mulder and boozes Scully into talking about herself in an attempt to get in her pants.
Creepy, but it does show us that, if Mulder were to have tried to kiss Scully at this point in the show, she would have let him. Mulder knows this now and I think he also kind of wishes he had the guts to try. More on all that below.
Next, we have a Skinner-centric outing in Zero Sum, where everyone’s favorite daddy bear, runs around reluctantly doing Old Smoky’s bidding. He gets in way over his head, stealing evidence from Mulder, cleaning up experiments those DoM jerks are conducting on innocent civilians, and even gets framed for murder as a fail-safe. Those murderous, kiss-interrupting bastard bees are hanging around, too. Mulder is investigating and is two steps behind him the whole time, till he catches up and wonders if Skinner’s been a douchebag this whole time.
If you’re wondering where Scully is in all this, (Gillian got a week off?) she’s hospitalized because her tumor may be spreading. Skinner finally confesses to Mulder that Scully, and him taking the same deal he told Mulder not to take, is why he’s doing this. Mulder helps Skinner, at the least, get out of that murder Old Smoky was framing him for. Skinner decides to get out of the deal completely.
Skinner nearly kills Old Smoky, even leaves a few bullets behind inches by his head, but doesn’t just in case Smoky might deign to save Scully. It’s also revealed that Marita Covarutabaga is working for Old Smoky.
Next, we get Scully back in Elegy, an episode that is creepy and effective… with the stupidest, most ass-pulled villain reveal ever. The main take-away is that there’s Harold, a high-functioning mentally-disabled man that sees dead people (insert tired Sixth Sense joke of your choice). It’s theorized that people who are close to death, themselves, can see the dead, possibly warning them. And Scully sees herself some dead people. :(
Thank goodness, Scully is still seeing that therapist from season 2. She confides more about her supportive, but conflicted relationship with Mulder.
Not that she tells Mulder any of that. But she does tell him she saw a dead girl, even if she doesn’t want to believe the implications of that.
When Harold ends up dead, at the end, she sees him and ends the episode crying a single perfect tear while I let out a few buckets worth.
Next, we have Mulder waking up in a motel, covered in blood, and with no memory of how that came to be. Doctor Scully makes house calls, even to motel rooms in Rhode Island.
He’s in shock and she wants him to go to a hospital, but he wants to figure out what happened. They follow the clues to a missing couple and a house in Mulder’s old neighborhood, where Mulder has a painful flashback to Old Smoky and his parents arguing, they also find that couple dead and it looks like Mulder may have done it. I know this is hardly the time and place, but the only thing as nice as half-naked, is Mulder in a tight T-shirt and jeans.
Scully looks into the bodies with due haste and finds there are drugs in their systems and holes in their skulls. Long story short, the couple was undergoing a creepy ass treatment that involved psychedelic drugs and holes in their skull to more clearly remember abduction experiences. Mulder, when he went to interview them, must have decided to try some of that action and has himself some vague, grainy flashbacks.
Mulder sees his mother and, like with all his visits, brings no fruit baskets or flowers, but demands answers, damn it! I see what you mean about him, Teena. He wants to know if Old Smoky made them choose Samantha because Mulder was his son.
It’s definitely a question he should ask, but Teena refuses to answer. So Mulder goes for more skull drilling and drugs, then ends up at his old house with a case of the crazies.
Scully takes that doctor to task over his creepy ass treatments, then tracks Mulder down and talks him down until he, like me, he resigns himself to being more confused than ever about the mythos and weeps openly.
Also, Scully has saved his life again, as he was in real danger of killing himself like the others, so the rescue tally is 15/9.5, still in Scully’s favor.
Finally, we get to the finale. We begin with Scully, identifying a body in Mulder’s apartment and sadly confirming it’s “him,” though we don’t see the “him” in question. Later, she collects herself before a panel that includes Section Chief Blevins, who we haven’t seen since Conduit.
She starts it off pretty shockingly, by saying that Mulder is victim of false hopes and lies and that the X-files are illegitimate. What is this foolery?
We flashback to some scientists in the Canadian mountains. They’ve got an iced-up alien corpse, then back to Scully, saying Mulder was duped by one of the scientists. We flashback again to a Scully family dinner, where we meet Bill, and where Scully’s mom has roped in a priest to talk to Scully about her faith and health issues. She’s not totally there, as far as coming back into the fold or talking about anything ever… with anyone.
Mulder calls and interrupts and Scully pretty much drops everything to meet him at the Smithsonian.
This scientist, Arlinsky, has sent him an ice core sample, but Mulder isn’t necessarily buying, considering this guy has been part of a hoax before. Naturally, Scully is also not buying, but they agree to have the samples tested.
Back to the panel, Scully shares that her cancer has spread aggressively, but that she didn’t share that with Mulder (Gah, Scully! Stop this madness and talk to your boyfriend!) before we go back to those scientists, prepping to cut the alien out of the ice, but some jerk shows up and shoots them up in their sleep. When Mulder and Arlinsky get there, all but one is dead, and he hid the corpse.
Back in DC, that core sample turns out to be ancient and containing DNA not of this earth. Later, some douchebag steals it and tosses Scully down a flight of stairs. Later, Bill visits her in the hospital and guilt trips her for doing stuff like her job and making people worry. The nerve! He’s also not a big Mulder fan. She’s not having any of it.
Later, Scully finds out that douchebag who stole the sample and pushed her works for the Pentagon. She chases him down in a parking garage and is, as usual, a total badass.
But he tells her not to arrest him or he’ll be killed by “the same people who gave you your cancer.” Meanwhile, Mulder and his two pals have brought the corpse back to DC, all secretive-like, for some autopsy playtime and it looks pretty legit. Scully calls him and wants him to meet with her attacker. Of course, this all might be to draw Mulder away from the corpse, as a guy shows up RIGHT THEN to kill Arlinsky. That other scientist was in on it, but he gets killed, too.
That attacker douche worked for the Department of Defense and tells a story that involves them both being manipulated by lies and disease all this time. All the alien stuff was fabricated, including that alien corpse, with the purpose of Mulder exposing it to distract people from a shadow government’s evil doings. Mulder goes back to find his new buddies dead and the corpse gone and he doesn’t buy that DoD guys story.
That stops him short. Later, Mulder sits at home, miserably watching an old conference arguing about the existence of aliens. I’m assuming it’s from his personal collection — the very small non-pornographic portion.
When we get back to Scully, she recounts that morning when she identified Mulder’s body, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Now, I’m trying to remember if viewers believed this, like for real, when it came out. I kind of doubt it, considering the show was now a big old hit, that anyone believed they’d kill off a lead. I mean, it could have happened, considering Mulder’s mental state in Demons, the seed planted that Scully’s cancer is his fault, and the idea that his entire quest has been based on manipulations and lies. It just totally didn’t. See you next season!
Top Ten Episodes of Season Four…
Now, this is all just in my opinion. But here we go…
10. Terma
You know, I’m going to go ahead and say it, you could easily insert another mythos outing here. They were all okay, but not exceptional (except for a pairing we’ll get into below). Mostly, I am annoyed with them for adding more STUFF to what was, by now, an already convoluted mythos. The only reason Terma ranks over Gethsemane or Tunguska or Herrenvolk is because of the moments above and my shameless shipping.
9. Demons
This episode finally brings a lot of things home to roost and it makes sense, even with that elusive truth still dancing out of reach. It makes sense that Mulder finally confronts his mother about Old Smoky’s way-too-close ties to their family and its fate. It makes sense that he might turn to radical treatments to unlock his own memories. And it also makes sense that Scully is the one to tell him to stop looking into the past, where memories can be clouded and manipulated.
8. Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man
I like when the show steps out of its mold of MOTWS or globe-trotting mythos and gives me something different. It’s a bit silly in suggesting how far-reaching Old Smoky’s influence goes, juxtaposed with his lonely, mundane home life, but that’s kind of what I like about it. You can take it as truth or just Frohike’s wild imaginings, but you do know one thing is true: he is a very unhappy, unfulfilled man, despite all his power. It does humanize him as a character, whether you want it to or not.
7. Leonard Betts
We’ve got an MOTW with a sympathetic villain, a creepy premise, our duo both at a loss and working frantically for answers, and real life stakes. It just works. The premise challenges Scully’s skepticism and Mulder’s lack of scientific know-how, and the ending makes Scully a believer in something she personally doesn’t want to believe. It’s very well-done and emotionally wrenching at the end for what seemed to be a standard MOTW at the start.
6. Never Again
I, a certified shipper, am going to go to bat for this seemingly ship-sinking episode. And it’s because I don’t see it as a ship-sinker. I see it as a needed catharsis, even if Mulder chickened out of taking it to that point (It’s my WHAT? Damn you! I assume he was going to say “life” and I would have loved to see them have it out instead of sitting in stony silence). Scully has had the burden of being the rational, dependable party and she needed to act out, even if it was to see if she still could. Mulder needed to see that he couldn’t expect Scully to make the X-Files her entire life without her having a stake, even something as simple as a nameplate or a desk. Besides all that… Well, it can’t be her life. Back in Jersey Devil, she got on this train of lifelessness with Mulder and she woke up to find she doesn’t have much else. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise her. And maybe one ill-considered night and a tattoo doesn’t equal a personal life. But it was something outside of work. I’ve got even more thoughts on it below.
5. Tempus Fugit/Max
It’s impossible to separate these two episodes as they depend on each other to make a whole. I actually welcome this return to old school mythos. Abductees and missing time and cover-ups. It’s like it’s season one again. Black oil is creepy and effective, but so is the idea that real people like Max are caught up in this mythology soup, trying so hard to feel validated, since the idea of living a normal life is lost to them.
4. Memento Mori
It’s just an emotional, evocative, and effective episode. It’s a mythos episode, but with more personal stakes, action and pathos all blended together in a way that could have been a mess, but wasn’t. All the running around Mulder’s doing is both to help Scully’s cancer and avoid thinking about it. Scully’s treatment is also forcing her to face buried memories of the abduction that brought it on. And Gillian’s soft voice-over, and the fact that it’s all to Mulder in the event of her death, is haunting.
3. Small Potatoes
I know this episode is probably higher on the list than it would have been if this were season three or five. It’s just that it’s the ONLY comedic episode this season. Also, Christine Cavanough (Dexter! Babe! Chucky! Gosalyn Duck!) is in it and I love her so much and am so sad we lost her (I’m a voice-actor fangirl). It’s also kind of a Darin Morgan episode, except starring him rather than written by him (Vince Gilligan did the honors). It does almost capture the same, quirky energy, but… let’s just say this episode makes me slightly uncomfortable in today’s climate. Several women are duped into sleeping with a shapeshifter posing as their husbands or, in Kristine Cavanaugh’s case, Luke Skywalker, before giving birth to babies with tails (a genetic defect that first piques Mulder’s interest). The episode does classify Van Blundht as a rapist and makes no bones about that, but the comic energy is a bit unsettling. Yet it’s hard to judge a show from 18 years ago by today’s standards. Let’s just say the quirky treatment would be unwelcome these days and leave it at that. It’s a clever episode if you can get past that.
2. Paper Hearts
I don’t know if this episode would rank so high for me if it weren’t for the music. Mark Snow sets his keyboard to whimsical in the creepiest possible way. Damn it, Snow, you just nail it sometimes — now stop with the fake oboes and clarinets from here on out (I know he won’t, though). The playful nature of the dreams is even creepier when you see them as manufactured by Roche, trying to draw Mulder into his Alice-in-Wonderland-tainted fantasy, his idea that what he’s done to these girls is magical or some shit. It’s scary and effective. Sometimes, all this show needs to do is scare the hell out of me and I am its slavish devotee, which brings me to my number one…
1. Home
This is one of the most disturbing hours of television I have ever experienced. I can see why the censors clutched their pearls and put up just all the warnings when it came out. Even outside the incestuous premise, it’s violent and dark and hard to watch at parts. It’s so scary, I can even forgive Scully misquoting one of my top five movies of all time, Babe (it’s “baah ram ewe,” not “naaah.” I thought you were a woman of science and accuracy!). Also, fun fact (easily learned from Wikipedia, but one I didn’t know before looking it up), the version of “Wonderful” we hear is not Johnny Mathis. He bowed out of letting them use his track because he found the episode too violent. They found a sound-alike. Also, we’ve got a distinctive HITG in Karin Konaval, who also gave motion-capture performances in the Planet of the Apes prequels. Great casting, here.
Scully’s Journey…
This was a great season for Scully and Gillian’s Emmy win was richly deserved. Scully is not a naturally emotive character. She is deeply reserved and all of her emotions are in her expressions and in the things she doesn’t say. I have never seen an actor more skilled than Anderson than saying so much with so little.
At this point, for Scully, she’s lost as much as Mulder has to the X-files and the DoM’s machinations, and now she stands to lose even more. I know that the end of this season makes it seem like her cancer was about manipulating Mulder, but we all know that isn’t true from what comes later. If Scully hadn’t removed the implant, as with the other abductees, it wouldn’t have happened. Yet removing the implant seemed like the reasonable thing to do at the time. If Scully hadn’t been carrying Duane Barry’s implant, she wouldn’t have been abducted in the first place. Yet she was just doing her job in investigating it. Scully has been “punished” for doing the right and reasonable thing in a world of chaos. It’s not fair and I don’t blame her for feeling it. So I guess that’s why, bringing it to Never Again again, I appreciate that so much as a Scully episode. This isn’t the Scully of Memento Mori, desperately trying to be strong. She always has to be the grown-up, the rational one, rein Mulder in, save his ass (the tally is at 15/9.5 as of the end of the season), and Mulder’s sometimes an ungrateful ass about it. Never Again gives us a Scully who knows she’s gotten a raw deal, even from the show.
Mulder has suffered, too, but the plot favors him. He makes wild, theoretical leaps and the show almost always bears him out. We as the audience always end up along for Mulder’s ride because we see all that dancing frog action poor Scully gets left out of. She only has the hard evidence to work from as, largely, the burden of proof is on her. The lion’s share of hard evidence is left to Scully to catalog in a lab or autopsy bay, as she ends up trying to make sense of all these unanswered questions without much glory and now, we realize, without a desk. So maybe it is a little bit about that desk.
Hair Check-in…
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Scully! It’s sleek and professional, straight but with body and lift at the roots. It’s chin-length with careful layering at the ends for a rounded fall, and it’s appropriate for work or play… but mostly work. This is the hair I envision when I think of Dana Scully and it’s going to be around for some time, so get used to it.
Ship Check-in…
We have hit an iceberg this season, folks. Actually two icebergs and, while neither of them has the power to sink the ship, they do have the power to make it sit waiting for repairs in the middle of the ocean to avoid taking on more water and… Yeah. This metaphor is too belabored. I’ll stop. Look, the first delay is belligerent sexual tension and, with Never Again and Small Potatoes, our duo has hit it. Some relationships start out that way and some relationships get there because the two available, obviously attracted people involved are too stubborn or busy chasing conspiracies (or both) to make out violently as nature intended. They want more from each other, but they don’t know exactly what or they don’t know how to ask for it or the timing is never right (or all three as with our duo).
Then we have our other little iceberg: the pedestal. By Small Potatoes, Mulder saw himself/Eddie ready to kiss Scully, something Mulder wouldn’t have considered even trying because he knows Scully well enough to be intimidated by her in a way Eddie Van Blundht isn’t. He’s been flirting with his terrible jokes for years and all Scully does is laugh, roll her eyes, or ignore it. In his mind, Scully is too smart and awesome for him and now her dignified suffering through cancer has made her even more unreachable. She’s so hiiiiiigh above him. So Mulder suffers the humiliation of being jealous of a slimy asshole like Eddie. Even though he knows he respects and maybe even reveres her too much at this point to try something as simple as a kiss, I think maybe he wishes things were simpler.
As for Scully, she probably knows she has his professional respect, maybe too much in how heavily he leans on her on the scientific end. As of Never Again, she resents it and the inherent pressure. I don’t think she actively thinks of sleeping with Jerse as sticking it to Mulder, but there’s shades of it in there. In Small Potatoes, it’s not like Van Blundht’s flirtatious skill got her there. It was that he was Mulder — also that he got her boozed up enough to talk about herself (something Scully doesn’t do enough).
The only thing that had her ready to receive that kiss was that it was Mulder. But Mulder doesn’t know that. He only knows he walked in on some skeeze getting to a point with Scully that he couldn’t or wouldn’t. So we have Mulder thinking Eddie had some kind of special trick and even resenting Scully for falling for it, then resenting himself for not being able to access this magic Scully-seduction ability, and probably also feeling guilty for wanting something so crass, considering she’s dealing with life and death since her diagnosis.
Then we have Scully who, dealing with life and death, could probably do with Mulder being a little less about the quest and the conspiracy and a little more about enjoying life, bringing over bottles of wine and talking about something other than work. Look, it’s complicated and the gist is that our ship is docked and awaiting repairs (Yes! I terribly sailed that metaphor home!).
Other Notes…
Here’s the thing about The Field Where I Died: it does not hold up under scrutiny. When Mulder is under hypnosis/regression, he’s pointing out which person is which (Scully, Samantha, and Old Smoky all show up in various roles) all consciously. By this episode’s own logic, Mulder under hypnosis would be each of the people he is without knowing of his other future lives, like his supposed soulmate, Melissa, was. It’s just dumb and that’s a shame because, on paper, I should love this. I’m fascinated by cults, but the cult isn’t the focus, more the macguffin to support this past life, soul mate, ship-sinking nonsense where Scully is either his father or his sergeant. I wish this show had dealt with cults in some way that didn’t suck.
Sanguinarium was tough to watch. I like to think of myself as having a high tolerance for gore, but there’s something about surgical gore and self-inflicted gore that I cannot handle. No idea why. Seriously, I can’t handle watching surgery at all, let alone satanic murder surgery and a guy peeling off his own face. I spent this entire episode cringing and checking that my skin was still attached. But I did giggle at Mulder spending the entire episode assessing himself in mirrors and trying on virtual nose jobs.
As much as El Mundo Gira was plodding with all that dead serious presentation, I enjoyed that ending where everything evolved into a melodrama, with everyone sharing their version of the ending with super dramatic telenovela-esque delivery. I wish the entire episode had been Mulder and Scully gathering the story from unreliable narrators, all adding their own dramatic license. As it was, the episode was confusing in tone… also in location. Ah, sunless, wet, Canadian California!
Next up: A little holiday surprise or my version of an X-files Cheat Sheet. Or you could just move onto Season 5.
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