3x01: The Blessing Way
(I barely remember having these opinions)
The one with the Navajo resurrection spell (lucky Mulder found a high-level cleric out here on the borderlands, eh?) and the unintentionally brilliant couplet, ‘It wasn’t a dream?’/’Yes.’
One of those episodes where it’s clear why people love it, but…but…
For some unknown reason we retreat from the vivid (comparative) naturalism of late Season Two to a schlocky, stagey, stentorian style that almost matches the schematicism of the plot but, y’know, doesn’t. At all. For some reason Deep Throat and the elder Mulder talk in a laboured pseudo-classical prose style and Melissa Scully sounds like a piece of talking wood. Gillian Anderson endures the indignity of a hypnosis scene, which comes off well, and (by his own account) Duchovny does almost nothing at all, leaving Mulder’s characterization in the hands of his dad and Deep Throat, which is an…interesting, not necessarily brilliant choice. I quite liked the brief Mulder/mom scene on Martha’s Vineyard, though — Duchovny’s voice goes from ‘wounded child’ to ‘ragged lunatic’ inside of a minute.
I don’t particularly want to talk about Albert Hosteen, the Navajo Miracle Max, or Carter’s ham-handed monologues; nor will we speak of the Mitch Pileggi’s operatic jaw clenching.
It is good to see John Neville in anything. Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen was an important movie for me growing up, and I’d watch it over and over again. Neville is brilliant in it. I miss him.
This is beginning to sound like a plain ol’ ‘review,’ isn’t it. Well, let’s see what we can do about that.
I found the floating-in-space effects groovy and creepy, the gas-chamber sequence less so (the more human the aliens seem, the less interested I am, and whipping out Holocaust imagery this early in the story seems…disproportionate). In fact there’s almost nothing in this episode that I liked without reservation — yet in the context of the evolving story, this episode feels like a revolutionary turn, the sudden expression of dormant genes that reveal the ‘hidden nature’ of the organism. Mulder floats through the astral plane surrounded by extras from The Prisoner and visits Scully in her dream! A medicine man does the goddamn voiceover! And none of it is all that surprising, if you’ve been paying attention to what’s come before. Remember the middling vengeful-ghost story in Season One? The old folks tripping and seeing the dead? The invisible zoo animals? The vampires? New Age frippery and a groovy mythic sense of things are all over the first two seasons of the show, and while 3x01’s outer/inner realms stuff is the purest expression of that interest yet, it differs in intensity but not in kind from what’s come before.
The trouble with so many occult bookstores, for me, is that they’re not occult enough — too much self-help/crystals/yoga, not enough Lemurian/Enochian weirdness. Forteana without irony, credulous Keel, Jacques Vallee played for comfort. Ugh. But there’s no separating the strands. ‘The Blessing Way’ is the most of-its-moment episode of the show so far, directly addressing premillennium American mythology of the most intimate domestic sort. You don’t have to buy into that mythology to appreciate the way it widens the story’s scope.
I can’t decide whether it’s good drama, but it feels like it might be clearing the way for good drama in future. Fingers crossed.
