X-Files S08 E16–18
8x16 Three Words
We’re at the White House! A man is climbing over the fence, which doesn’t seem super likely. Pretty sure he would be immediately riddled with a thousand million bullets. He does finally get subdued but not before yelling that the aliens are coming and handing over what I can only guess is a bootleg DVD of the XF movie, since handwritten on it is ‘Fight The Future.’ Either that or it’s the plans for an upcoming Republican convention.
M isn’t in fighting shape just yet, still hanging out in the hospital, but the doc does tell him, he’s recovered from all alien viruses, scars, brain tumours etc. He’s good to go 100%! Time to get back to work slacker! How? Don’t worry about it!
Our pal the cult lead Absalom (these names) is serving his time quietly until another inmate hands him an article about the White House thing. He can’t be sitting around here making licence plates, the aliens are coming!
Kush is super stoked to have M reinstated to the XF, immediately saying he’s going to give M the boot. Dog has closed way more cases in a few weeks, than M has in all his years working the XF, and hasn’t spend a million a week on expenses. Kush wants Dog to tell M to take a long walk off a short pier. M doesn’t seem super bothered by all this, maybe this is a great time to open up Fox Mulder — P.I.
Absalom does the weirdest prison break ever, basically just legging it into the brush while on a work detail. It’s not clear why everyone else doesn’t just run away too — there are only two guards and an actual train going right past we’re they’re working. He crosses in front of that and is gone. Old guy can sprint.
He manages to get all the way to DC or wherever it is Dog lives, and hold him at gunpoint to check he’s not an alien. Ab is all, ‘they’re going to kill me!’ Well you did assault a guard and escape from prison and hold an FBI agent at gunpoint so, yeahhhh there’s a good chance. He tasks Dog with spreading the word that the alien invasion has begun, which definitely seems like something Dog will get right on. To motivate him, Ab attaches some sort of bomb under Dog’s shirt and I’m guessing he’s never heard of the term duress.
M surprises S and Skinman by sitting in his basement, legs on the desk, ready to meet Dog and generally being the regular M we all love rather than the softly spoken angry shell we’ve come to know the last season or so. M is all over the White House jumper, right off the bat believing the guy, the conspiracy, the whole thing and suggesting Dog might be involved with it. M gets right on with copying encrypted files and hacking systems and making S an accomplice to it all. Thanks! Great to have you back endangering all our lives and careers!
A not super smart, census employee guard lets Dog into the highly guarded census building, despite Dog having a creepy old man stood right behind him with his hand on Dog’s shoulder and clearly a gun in his back. I have no idea why Ab thinks that the aliens would be included in the census, but sure, why not. Dog tells him, whatever dude, the x-ray scanner showed them you have a gun, we’re about to all get shot anyway and sure enough, seconds later Ab is dead.
M deals with Dog in a totally sane way, storming into the office and shoving over Dog, which smells more like M is paranoid not about aliens but about Dog ‘comforting’ S. How did she get pregnant against all the odds anyways hmmm HMMMM?
TLG are happier to see M though, giving him warm hugs and also speculating on who did get S pregnant. Maybe it was Frohike. TLG are all over the census bureau, a long time keystone for loony conspiracy nuts. Nuts like M! They tell M they can’t get in, but M suspects S told them not to get involved. M then makes an excellent and timely observation; “this is America — just because you get more votes doesn’t mean you win.”
Dog has a meeting with Baldwin where they’re trying to be super discreet about it, standing alone in an empty baseball field in the rain, but they’re facing the other way so clearly not together! Baldwin tells Dog he doesn’t know what’s reallllllly going on and isn’t that always the way in conspiracies. Dog gives the secret code ‘Fight The Future’ to M via S, to try and make peace and demonstrate he’s on the good, alien supporting team.
M and TLG (so much for listening to S) right away use the password to break into the actual facility. TLG are excellently swinging around like Mission Impossible to hack the power or something and this whole episode is already more FUN than every previous episode in the season.
But uh oh, to late Dog realizes the password was a trap and M’s ass is going to be grass. Dog busts his own butt to get M out of there. M does his best to be a jackass, nonstop saying YOU SET ME UP when all Dog is trying to do is get M the fuck out of there and not be dead. They should be pals, that could be a fun show.
The whole thing goes nowhere, there are heavily armed dudes coming to kill Dog and M, but TLG get them a way out of there, phew, but nothing is learned really, apart from, yeah they can trust Dog. Back in the super discreet baseball field, Dog confronts Baldwin about the setup and Baldwin now seems to be some sort of young deep throat (OK, we’re going to need a better nickname) mumbling nonsense about the tip of the iceberg and the answers are out there until Skinman and Dog are like fuck this jazz.
We end on a shot of Baldwin’s neck which has the alien marks! To be always continued!
8x17 Empedocles
Always with the big cities recently. This week we’re in New Orleans, where a dude is getting fired. He sad. Then a totally normal thing happens when he walks outside, he sees a crazy crash where the car blows up like it was full of dynamite and then some fiery skull dude walks out of the burning wreck and right into office guy, making his eyes burn! Now that he has, uh, fire in his belly, he decides to go back to the office and shoot the boss dead.
Since we’re in New Orleans, follow the breadcrumbs here, who said they worked out of the N.O. office? Why it’s Reyes the S replacement! It’s fun that they decided to swap the genders, making her the believer and Dog the skeptic but also not direct replicas. They’re their own characters and I think the plan is/was to have them bleed into this season before fully replacing M & S in season 9. Reyes has a fairly straightforward example, the devil pictures aren’t what drove the guy to murder folks, getting fired is what led him to do this. It’s America. He probably won the gun with a scratch off ticket at the 7–11.
But wait! Now Reyes sees the corpse burn up in front of her? Or something like that, because when she looks back it’s back to normal. Something is afoot! Less exciting is M paying a visit to S and I guess they’re not romantically together like we were led to believe last season? He did bring her a gift though, that’s nice and he paid for the pizza! But no time for pizza, S has to go to the ER, baby problems!
I guess we can’t have 3 of them on an XF so we need a weekly reason why one of them can’t be involved. Reyes calls M but M pretends he can’t do any XF’s, double BUT, Reyes can’t speak to Dog because it’s about Dog, so she flies (?) to DC to fill M in. When Dog’s son died, Reyes worked on the case and saw this same thing, the body changing for a second, burning up. Dog saw it too but since then has been like, ‘nope I def did NOT see that.’
Things aren’t going well for office shooter, his face is melting away to pure fire. I mean, kinda cool but it’s really going to make it hard to interview for another job. That and he might struggle to get a reference, being that he shot his old boss.
Dog gets wind of M and Reyes poking around in the fire murder and therefore Dog’s dead kid and (reasonably) freaks out and is ready to wail on M for sticking his nose into his business. Reyes placates Dog and they all get onboard with looking back into it like reasonable adults.
Siiiiike Dog is like you all need to go boil your fuckin’ heads. But he does ask his pal S, how did you get onboard with all this wacky shit and opennnn your miiiiind? Dog needs to not be afraid to believe!
I’m not clear why M is allowed to be in the basement working on cases, or how Reyes was approved to travel to DC to work on this, but here we are. They’re tracking this case back to the fiery man and Reyes is goading M that the XF needs someone with an open mind and that is clearly not him. Ha! M and Dog investigate fire man killing someone in the woods. This is all a bit much for Dog who keeps seeing his dead son everywhere and yeah maybe this isn’t the case for him. Not super helpful maybe to have M making gags and undercutting the serious stuff Reyes is trying to help Dog with.
Office murderer guy tries to get help from his family like ‘hey I’m going crazy I know the FBI are looking for me but I didn’t murder anyone on purpose!’ But hmm, I feel like even your family turn you in at this point. Too bad for him, Reyes catches up to him and shoots him, almost dead. He’s on life support and uh oh, the fire is his sister now! She’s going to kill Reyes! Dog saves her and the fire might be out now? Where is Mr. Freeze when you need him.
Dog keeps wrestling with the idea that there is some other force out there in the world linked to his son’s death etc and finally M offers some words of support. Look at the poster on the wall! Get onboard the XF train my guy! Become a basement dweller with Reyes! Kinda an interesting episode where they try to find the place for each of the now foursome (?) in the show.
8x18 Vienen
We’re out on an oil rig and once upon a time I’d be optimistic we’re in for a ‘The Thing’ type episode. Remember that great early episode where M & S investigate an ice monster, stuck at some frozen outpost? These days though, oil only means one thing: the goddamn black oil that has plagued the show, lo these many years. Some dude is going bonkers on the rig and his body is glowing or something. Better call the Feds. I bet we see Krychek somewhere.
Dog and M are down in the basement, M being his typical dickish self, provoking Dog about what he doesn’t know. Kush doesn’t seem to be able to say M can’t work on the XF — it sort of feels like Kush has zero authority unless required by the plot. Anyway, the oil guy in charge of the rig gets a personal meeting with everyone here, and warns M off the whole thing. There’s oil down there and American want to get it before Mexico! End of story!
Kush tells Dog, investigate this very mysterious death, on your own, and then get the hell out of there. But before we feel cheated that M isn’t going to be on this rig in the middle of the ocean, here he is! I guess he chartered his own helicopter earlier in the day. Expenses be damned!
Plenty of bickering between Dog and M, as both want to be the alpha dog on the XF. It’s actually a pretty good back and forth. It shows what a good job Robert Patrick has done in a short time that we don’t automatically root for M. Back on shore, S finds black oil inside the dead guy (90% of S’s time these days is spent chopping into dead bodies) but the oil is not active because, radiation or whatever.
You might think this would lead M to want to leave the infected rig, but no sir, him and Dog are in it to win it. Skinman shuts down the rig, but the oil boss guy (not onboard) is like nah don’t worry about it, then men are just tired, there’s no deadly virus out there! Let’s get it back open ASAP! But one of the big guys on the rig is clearly infected and he’s off his nut smashing up the place and starting fires. Doesn’t realllly help the all is fine perspective. Also, the rig workers have the oil inside them!!
I have no idea how Kush doesn’t know that M is on the rig and fooling around with all this stuff, but apparently Dog has kept his secret and Kush has just no other way to track an FBI agent under his direct command. Dog and M work together against the bad oil rig workers/alien invaders (?) and try to finally flee the rig, being outnumbered by murderous aliens. They manage to get the radio running and speak to S about how Kush has broken the quarantine and is sending a bunch of workers back to the rig and then they’re going to get infected and that is all very bad. Contagion!
The only way to avoid the contagion spreading and I guess, destroying the world, is to blow the rig and have Dog and M jump off. I don’t think Kush is going to take this well. But it was worth it for the slow motion huge jump the two guys do, like we’re watching an 80’s action movie. Back in the basement M has to pay the piper. He’s copping to the whole thing and is fired. Kush has finally given M the boot. Blowing up a US oil rig being the final straw of his lengthy career of straw destroying.
M passes the torch to Dog, telling him he must now answer the call. Kinda sad but I mean we’ve also seen M and S leave before and the whole damn basement literally burn up so who knows. I don’t think that’s the last we see of M in a dark grey suit.
