X-Files S04 E05–09
4x05 The Field Where I Died
M is standing in a field speaking nonsense, reading from some civil war letter.
Post credits we’re in some Waco style federal storming of a compound, led by M & S who are looking for some dude. In a field out back they find a trapdoor where the cult leader is having all the ladies drink some poison. Skinman is warning about Waco, Jonestown the whole deal. They speak with the arrested cult leader, who seems like a cool dude, trying to seduce S. The women all talk about how sacred it is to have a child by messiah dude. Standard cult type stuff, pretty uninteresting, aside from the one lady doing the whole multiple personality shtick is pretty fun.
M loves it, she’s totally real! Without missing a beat for any consideration, S is like NO WAY LIAR LIAR! SCIENCE! It’s a nice little acting showcase by the actress, whose multiple personalities are of course, her past lives living inside her. One is Fran Drescher, one is a lordy lordy civil war widow, who saw M die in that same field during the civil war. M 100% buys into it and is fully crying about when he died in the civil war but S is like this is bonkers it’s all lies (fair point for once). M gets hypnotized and apparently does recall all this past life stuff, sure OK, cool. Apparently he sees his dad shot by CSM or something.
There’s some good looking cinematography in this, long views of corn fields and evocative light shining through trees; they do a pretty good job of Ken Burn’s Civil War doc recreation. M says he’s Sullivan Biddle, married to Sarah and S finds a couple of old pictures where I guess we’re meant to see them, if we squint, in the faces of those ye old time folks. The preacher is released and they all commit suicide and M is sad again, reading the poem from the start in the same field. Aside from the pretty photography, I didn’t really care for much of this one. A lot of sentimentality, self righteousness, over acting and no humour.
4x06 Sanguinarium
Some doctor is scrubbing in way too hard and has bloody fingers which is pretty gross. Then he goes and hacks away at some fatso, energetically draining fat then blood from him which is fantastically gross. M is onboard with it being demonic possession, S is like nah it’s just these sleeping pills.
The next possessed doctor zaps some laser tool through some poor chaps brain and kills him. M sees a pentagram on the guys stomach. Aha! It is witchcraft! The other docs are pinning the blame on a rogue nurse/witch, who has gone missing. Some doctor gets attacked by the bloody nurse, literally bloody, she hides in a giant bath of blood then leaps out at him like a super great cheap horror movie.
This whole episode is pretty gross & not much else. Plot twist the doctor framed the nurse or something and he’s floating six inches over his covers like he’s the gatekeeper. The nurse was not the killer, she was trying to protect people! Another person is grossly murdered at the plastic surgery clinic (because sure, it’s still open after two unexplained brutal murders and also people are still wanting to get surgery there) and now they’re like the bad doc is def behind it, he’s doing a blood sacrifice to take over a younger body. Of course! The bad doc does a Nic Cage Face/Off and escapes with a new face, to start over at a new place. I guess he’s eternally young provided he does insanely gross things every ten years or so? Average episode, heavy on gore, light on plotting or interesting things happening.
Hey Wikipedia tells me this one started off life as a spec script by a couple of fans. Cool. Apparently this was common practice in the 90’s when they were looking to fill out 24 episode seasons.
4x07 Musings Of A Cigarette Smoking Man*
“For nothing can seem foul to those that win” is an awesome Shakespeare quote I could definitely use for something. And a great quote for the early years of the CSM, which this classic episode covers.
He’s secretly listening to a convo between the LG and M & S and they engage some super blocker so he can’t listen but aha! He has counter counter measures and he still can. They have the whole history of the CSM and are going to reveal it! So the episode switches between them talking about it and us seeing what was actually happening — pt1 is Dealy Plaza of course.
A young CSM is virulently anti-smoking because his mother died of cancer before he was born. He’s in the army and a loner badass who likes reading. He’s clearly done a lot of shit so far, bay of pigs, assassinations etc, all of which he smartly denies to the higher ups. He’s offered an assignment which will assassinate a US civilian who is called John Kennedy. They set up Oswald, then CSM is the second shooter, in a storm drain by the grassy knoll, which I’m pretty sure is in Victory Square Park. After he does it uh oh he smokes his first cigarette. Dark side.
Next up he seems to now be in charge of whatever shadow operation this is. He respects King and feels sad about what he has to do, but feels he has to be killed because MLK is encouraging Negroes to not join up for Vietnam and so, America will lose. The guy playing a young CSM does a great job in this episode, looks aside he personifies the real guy, dead on. It’s darkly funny that he keeps failing as a novelist in secret. After the MLK shooting, we jump forwards to him as we know him, a few years ago, running the super top secret operation panel.
They talk about how he never wants the Bills to win the Super Bowl, how he drugged the Russian goalkeeper so the Americans won the Olympic hockey, and how he doesn’t care who wins the Oscars this year. He also tells Saddam Hussein to call back, ha. He gives everyone the same crappy tie for Christmas then turns down party invites and ducks out to spend Christmas alone. Another good aside, ‘that Spooky kid has just opened the XF’. He’s back to his place for another novel rejection letter. Hey, I feel you CSM. I guess we’re meant to take that this is the one area he can’t secretly fix?
He gets a phone call! It’s original DT, they have an alien. They’ve clearly worked together and share some more musing; they can’t ever tell anyone how they changed the course of history many times. They flip a coin on who has to kill it even though CSM says maybe they should let Bill Mulder into it because this would help the world. But DT says they must kill it and he does after losing the coin toss. Next we have a little Karate Kid style history retelling — footage from the pilot where we see S getting assigned to the XF, as he silently watches on and it’s revealed he has the XF office bugged.
Finally, it’s 1996, he gets a letter — they want to publish his book! He gets ready to resign, types out and signs the letter. The book is a thinly veiled roman a clef which will appear ironically in a magazine called Roman a Clef, under a pseudonym ‘Bloodworth’. However when he picks up the magazine from the stand (some hilarious crappy Playboy type rag), they changed the ending! They screwed him!
He sits on a park bench like Forrest Gump and gives a classic line reading: “like is like a box of chocolates; cheap, perfunctory, and nobody wants it”and launches into a big speech to a hobo about how worthless life is. Sneakily, Frohike reveals at the end this whole thing is based on a story he read in a magazine, presumably the actual story CSM wrote, so he’s right, but this I think, shows us that the whole thing might be all fake or all true or a mix of everything in between, which is a further awesome touch. And right at the end he has the chance to sniper Frohike but chooses not to. Apparently Wiki tells me in the original ending he did kill him but they decided against it.
Such a good episode, the tone, the secrets, how it has dark humour weaved in, the background to such a crucial character so important, and they nail it. And how in the end maybe it’s all made up? Ha! Probably top 5 all time.
4x08 Tunguska
S is giving an address to congress or something, reading a speech. But they don’t want to hear it! Where is M? The government needs to know where he is! But she won’t tell those old white men, she says that the real target should be the secret dudes, the guy behind the guy! Then of course we’re like ‘a few days earlier’.
At customs in Hawaii a diplomat won’t open his top secret briefcase so the customs guy does, then immediately (and hilariously) drops the contents, smashing the black ooze all over the place and boom, they’re all dead. The black ooze! Krychek is back! And he’s with M & S (looking like goons in full tactical gear) storming some domestic terrorists. Turns out he got free of that missile silo and is now tipping off M for stuff. But M calls him a scum sucker and doesn’t want his help. But hey K wants to take down the CSM. Together they find what might be a Mars rock with maybe alien fossil DNA in it. M keeps being a jerk to K to his face, but still he’s like, aliens OK, I’ll do whatever to whoever, let’s go to deepest Russia together.
CSM and the special group are mad because M is onto the BIG ONE. They’re out there digging and looking for something, chatting about of course, the Tunguska event (a real thing, a meteor) where a comet (or aliens?) blasted into earth and flattened trees for 000s of miles etc. The two of them manage to bust into some Russian gulag where the men are chopping rocks and wearing grey and being whipped like it’s 1850. In like five seconds they’re captured and for some reason thrown in the gulag even though they’re Americans. Now it’s all on the Russian speaking K to get them out and not leave M stuck forever in there. But uh oh, some friendly prisoner tells M that K is betraying him, shocker. And oh shit M is stuck in some chicken wire type coffin and infected with the black oil! Cliffhanger!
4x09 Terma
Part two of M being stuck in Russia in oil. In his cell the dude tells M he has been infected with the black cancer, which lets face it, does not sound so great. With the help of a shiv from nice Russian prisoner, M shoves K in the back of a jeep and manages to cheese it from the gulag. He almost immediately crashes it, destroys the jeep, and they go their separate ways. M hides in the bushes, K falls in with a group of dudes looking to hide from the bad gulag dudes.
Cut back to the start of the last episode, S giving her address to congress, and the back channel CSM who is calling the whole thing off by exerting influence on the congress dudes. Back in Russia M is taking with some peasants about how to escape this goddamn hell hole. Apparently they don’t do tests on people with no left arm which is something to do with the smallpox vaccination identifying them (via the left arm). Bad luck for K his gang chop off his left arm to ‘protect him.’ Thanks.
CSM and his gang realize that the Russians are working on the same thing they are, some sort of vaccination against the alien ooze. It’s all getting a little complicated like how is there a fucking congressional hearing about this thing which is presumably fifty levels above top secret and S is getting hammered by this random committee when ohhhh shit in strolls M with a bump on his head but otherwise suited and ready to go.
Skinman says sure thing, during this committee hearing you two can fly to Florida overnight to solve some related mystery and I’ll cover it up, no big deal. At this Florida/Burnaby care home, there’s a bunch of dead old folks with the black stuff coming out of them. No idea why this is happening and this whole arc seems like it should be far more interested and compelling than it actually is. It’s kinda dry and boring. Of course, it all turns out K was behind it from the start he is bad and it’s all a conspiracy behind a conspiracy etc. So then M & S are somewhere in Canada and there’s a big explosion and the rocks with the Mars DNA are destroyed or something. The old Russian guy that K hired was behind it and now he goes back to Russia and I don’t really care. But at the end, haha K has a weird fake hand. I’m sure we’ll see him again, great. And of course it’s all covered up by CSM as usual. So I guess this whole thing was entirely pointless.
