X-Files S06 E20–22 & Wrap-Up
6x20 Three Of A Kind
A Lone Gunmen episode! We get a flashback to that episode (S5-E03, Unusual Suspects) with Susanne that started at a Defence Convention, and ended with Susanne being taken away from Byers in a black sedan. In Byers dream during the opening we see him with Susanne living a happy life in a white picket fence America. In reality he’s stuck with those other two nerds writing conspiracy theories before the internet took them mainstream and made them uhh, not so fun.
Las Vegas baby! It’s Def-Con ’99 and Byers & Frohike are getting chucked out of a high stakes poker game with Byers giving away that he’s not really a defence contractor, by asking subtle questions like “so like, what top secret projects are we all working on?”
All Byers cares about is finding Susanne and he spazzes out when he sees her, kissing some dude, Grant, from the poker game. For some reason this leads TLG to tricking S into coming to Vegas by spoofing M’s voice over the phone. S flies to Vegas on the next flight out without checking anything. Expense reports for the XF (which we saw M & S ducking meetings for in the ‘Monday’ episode) must be the highest in the entire government.
TLG do some HACKING and learn that Grant works at a top secret facility where Byers believes they do mind control and therefore brainwashed Susanne. Yup, that checks out.
Some uber-nerd/TLG rival called Jimmy says he can get into the super really top secret room where Susanne is in some brainwashing TED talk. Jimmy does actually manage this, simply by climbing into the air vents, therefore circumventing both a casino’s security and the entire defence industry, and films the whole thing, only to get busted by one of his buddies who it turns out is actually a spook! Bad news for Jimmy, they inject him with something. That’s never good! It makes him step in front of a bus! Really bad new for Jimmy. Jimmy dead!
TLG tell S that M told them to work with her because he’s indisposed for a bit and S just goes right along with this lunacy, no questions asked. She gets right into an autopsy of Jimmy, which Langley pukes through. Maybe Susanne isn’t brainwashed, since she knows Byers right away and lets him know Grant is her fiance and she’s working inside the government with him to bring it all down. Hmm. S gets injected by Jimmy’s Killer (JK)! The injection seems to not really bad side effects, but rather just makes her sort of drunk and dumb.
Susanne tells Byers, she was tortured and she wanted Byers to save her, but Grant saved her and now she trusts him to work with her to bring the shadow government down. JK is luring Langley away to a deadly game of Dungeons & Dragons (aren’t they all) meanwhile Frohike hits the jackpot, finding a seemingly wasted S at the bar surrounded by men she’s flirting with. HA one of them is Morris Fletcher who swapped bodies with M back in the Dreamland episodes. It makes sense he’d be at a defence convention, trying to get laid.
Turns out — big surprise — Grant is not the good guy Susanne believed, he’s in on it too, since S is clearly on the substance that only Susanne and Grant have access to. Nobody is really clear what the larger purpose is here and it seems like that’s just as true for the writers of the episode.
OK maybe this is it, Langley has been injected and he’s being told by Jimmy’s Killer that he’s going to assassinate Susanne tomorrow. Langley’s hair is cut short so you can tell he’s suggestible. Jimmy was right, this whole thing is about secret wet work! Even S can’t get into the ballroom to intervene! Langley shoots Susanne dead! Oh shit TLG are all going to prison for ever.
No wait, Langley’s hair was just pulled back, not cut, and S is in on this scam. She calls in Frohike and Byers, posing as fake EMT’s, Ocean’s 11 style, who take Susanne away. But not so fast, JK’s tastes the blood. It’s not real! No fresh start for Susanne, and even worse, her beloved Grant is like, yeah I had to give you up, or it was my ass. Thanks!
Too bad his life isn’t worth that much, since JK plugs him and this convention really has a high body count, not too many cities are going to want to host this bloodbath next year.
TLG get the mind control stuff juice into JK, he turns himself in, everyone thinks Susanne is dead, happy ending. But wait, so this whole thing was just a plan to kill Susanne? Seems overly complicated, no? Why not just inject her at her home and have her have an accident? S finally gets M on the phone, who is somewhat confused to find out she’s in Vegas with TLG.
S is going to kick TLG’s asses!
Wiki Notes — M isn’t in this episode because DD was off working on the last episode that he wrote and directed.
6x21 Field Trip*
A couple are showing off after a good hike. They head to bed.
Cut to their skeletons in a hole in the ground in the same position! I bet you there’s a guy in an FBI basement who has a theory about this!
It’s all to do with the Brown Mountain Lights (UFO’s basically) but S is like nah, clearly it was just a regular murder who then boiled the bodies in acid and took them out to the middle of nowhere and arranged them like this. Both seem likely. S is pushing abductive, logical reasoning. M makes a good gag though: every week S tells M he’s off his nut and yet almost every goddamn week, 98% of the time, he’s dead right. This is accurate!
M heads off hiking on his own, leaving S to examine the bodies. Right away (in the middle of this giant wilderness) he spots the dude who was a skeleton and chases him into a cave. The dude claims that the skeletons are fake and they were abducted and it’s all a cover up and he and M need to hide deep in the cave and not leave and the walls seem to be shifting around them and alien lights are all over the place. S, having found worrying stuff in the samples at the lab, can’t find her way into the cave.
Cut to err, M back home in his apartment with the couple and S coming over to be like huh, well this sure is odd! They explain to S — it was aliens all along! And even better than the dead couple, M has in his bedroom, uh, a fucking ALIEN. Long gray fingers, full on Mac and Me little dude, with whom M can communicate telepathically. Something is rotten in Denmark here. It’s not the fact that he captured an alien that makes M doubt things, it’s that S actually agrees with him. She was wrong all these years, M was right. Hmmm. S would never admit to being wrong! He sees things melt away and oh shit, this was all an illusion, he’s being digested Sarlacc style in the cave!
Which leads us into yikes, they find another skeleton and S identifies it via the dental records. It’s M! He got eaten up by the cave, he dead, them his bones! I wonder how they will ever replace David Duchovny.
S talks to the coroner who starts parroting back her original theory from the XF basement about ritualistic killings. S and Skinman sort out the funeral and they have the wake and even TLG agree with S’s findings, again talking about the ritualistic killings, acid etc. S is freaking out a bit, yelling how it’s all fake and yeah here’s M banging on the door at his own wake, which is now an empty apartment and this isn’t going to help S’s state of mind any.
Forget all this, M is hallucinating and turns out S is too, some sort of joint hallucination. M first when he drove over the mushrooms initially, then S when she went looking for him. They wake up together, underground being eaten by the mushrooms! Then a hand out of the ground and the pair emerge. Huh, they were buried this whole time?! It was all a dream within a dream, Inception style?
Back in the office with Skinman they detail what happened and how they cleaned it all up. What a weird job Skinman has, getting weekly briefings from these two on the absolutely insane shit they’ve been up to. But wait! Final twist! M isn’t clear on how they escaped.
He pushes S on details of how they were buried —it’s another dream level! They’re still in the ground! M decides to push this wild theory to it’s natural end by fucking shooting Skinman in the chest!!
I mean, he’s right of course, and goo comes out of Skinman and they are still buried, but Jesus Christ man! There wasn’t a safer way to test that hypothesis than potentially murdering an FBI station chief in cold blood?? Now M & S really awaken and it’s even grosser, covered in goo, but with government people there to drag them free. At the end, the pair touch hands in the ambulance which is a nice touch but also I guess posits the theory that everything from here on in could just be a hallucination?
This was a good place to put this episode, since it initially seems to play right into the season ending mythology of M uncovering a giant alien conspiracy and one of them getting killed, where you might believe it. It’s just a really good episode overall. Grounded in place, in the relationship of M & S, in the fun twisty plot, and in the resolution. Really good episode!
6x22 Biogenesis
Season Finale so of course that means aliens! We also know it’s a serious episode because we start with a voice over from S and images of the world and oceans and flowering plants like we’re watching a Terrence Malick movie or something.
We’re going back to the very beginning of, uh, the world. Which for XF sake seems to centre around the coast of West Africa where a prof finds a bit of metal that fuses with another bit, then flies across the room and gets stuck in the Genesis part of the bible. Foreshadowing!
The dude brings the stuff to the US and meets with some scientist. Quickly he gets murdered — that wasn’t the real scientist! M puts forward the theory this scientist has, which S is also weirdly familiar with, that life started on Mars or something, and space dust kicked off humanity etc. The rubbing they examine from the space junk seems to be having a bad effect on M, making him space out, ignore S, and get a massive headache.
M now has some sort of new magic ability to know what happened through reading minds or something, which tells him that the dude in charge of the department, Barnes, was the guy who murdered the African prof. However it’s being setup that the real scientist, Sandoz, was the murderer, he’s being framed for this. They even find the African profs body chopped up in Sandoz’s apartment.
M is certain it’s Barnes who is to blame but Skinman is like nah, do one, it’s Sandoz. Of course, remember the episode where Skinman nearly died? Call back to that, he’s being controlled by Krycek! M knows this on some level, but sounds absolutely bonkers, raving to S about how he can hear the voices that tell him the real truth! Maybe keep that to yourself and just say you have a hunch?
S heads to New Mexico on the trail of Sandoz, who is working with the Native American codetalker dude from a previous mythology episode, end of last season. Codetalker guy is near death, but he translates a bit of the rubbing front the artifact and they seem to believe it proves life started on Mars and also that Genesis was created by aliens, everything was created by aliens. OK!
M, in civilian clothes so you really know he’s going nuts, tries to chase Barnes the real killer, but the voices in his head make him pass out. M is not in good shape, not at all, and it turns out Mimi Rogers is back and monitoring M and that can’t be good.
S has to fly home because M is now in serious condition in the hospital! M has full on lost his mind and is in a padded cell and hospital gown wandering about his cell. They gave him a bunch of drugs but he’s still wandering around with brain activity in new areas. Mimi offers to help and Skinman lets it slip that he’s seen reports S never even sent him. Duplicity afoot!
Out in the desert Krycek is doing Krycek things, murdering doctors, covering things up, his usual horseplay. Dude has to make a living!
S is like fuck this, everyone is lying and just goes to the source, yup, another great expense report incoming, she flies to the Ivory Coast (probably business class), where there on the beach, in a nice overhead shot, we see a full on alien spaceship sticking out of the sand. No wonder M was going off his nut.
Cliffhanger! Of course!
Season Six Wrap-Up
I really wanted to not like Season 6, with it abandoning Vancouver. Heresy!!I figured it would lose some quintessential XF quality, the rain, the dark pacific northwest atmosphere, the gloom and mystery.
But there are just so many solid/good episodes, stacked up across such a wide variety of genres, it might be my favourite season. As always, when you have 20+ episodes there’s going to be some duds but even those aren’t egregiously bad, just not that interesting. Even the mythology episodes were decent/good, as they finally wrapped up the whole alien invasion thing, which meant they could start off on hopefully a more interesting arc, with the season finale of the African stuff.
In fact, if I was telling someone to watch a season of the XF, I would probably tell them to surprisingly, go with Season 6.
Best Episodes:
Triangle, Dreamland 1 & 2, How The Ghosts Stole Christmas, The Rain King, Monday, Arcadia, The Unnatural, Field Trip.
