The Grand X-Periment Day 13

10/13/11

35) Gethsemane- Season 4, Episode 24- Talk about a helluva cliffhanger. In the opening stinger, Scully walks into Mulder's apartment where a detective lifts a sheet over a corpse. Scully looks at it and says "That's him." For the rest of the episode we know she probably isn't talking about Mulder. Of course, shapeshifters are pretty prevalent in this universe. By the time we get to the end and Scully admits, yes Mulder killed himself...I could hear all the jaws dropping back in 1997. The echo through time of the WTFs that were uttered when people realized they had to wait all summer to see what really happened were deafening.

But why would Mulder kill himself? This is where Demons becomes more important in retrospect. Despite the fact it included no real information, it set up Mulder's condition that could lead him to suicide. So, the idea was not entirely implausible. Mulder's brain being screwed with may have weakened him but the info that pushes him right the hell over the edge is a man from the DOD coming forward to tell him that aliens are just a big lie.

In his explanation, government vehicles are the UFOs, people are abducted to be experimented on in the US not in space and anything weird Mulder has ever seen was the result of science. All of this comes wrapped up in the story of a geologic expedition finding an alien corpse in the ice in Canada. Mulder gets to see an autopsy but all evidence and witnesses are soon destroyed.

Of course, this finale is meant to shake Mulder's faith in his quest. Science and government conspiracies may be able to explain 80% of what Mulder has seen but there are still weird ass things like the shapeshifting bounty hunter and the death of Max Fenig that make no sense under this new paradigm. We already know, hell, Mulder and Scully both should know that there are things beyond earthly science at play here.

36) Redux- Season 5, Episode 1- This final Canadian season opens with a flashback of Mulder finding a camera installed in his ceiling (remember when they just planted a listening device in his outlet or tapped his phones?). He runs upstairs and shoots a dude in the face. This turns out to be the body Scully IDs as Mulder. Mulder himself ends up using the dead man's ID to get into a DOD facility and then the Indiana Jones warehouse in the Pentagon. He finds an index card with Scully's name and uses the number on it to track down a vial that he hopes holds the cure to his cancer.

The boys at AV Club claim that Season 3 was the most tightly plotted but I have to beg to differ. Every important episode of Season 4 led to this premiere. Scully's cancer, Skinner's deal with Cancer Man, Mulder's madness...it all feeds into the layers and layers of duplicity in this episode.

Mulder and Scully believe that their entire crusade is a lie so they concoct Mulder's suicide to throw off the powers that be. In the meantime, Scully works overtime to prove that her cancer is linked to some weird cells found in the ice the alien corpse was inside. In the course of her research, she begins to suspect Skinner has been lying to them the whole time. On top of all that, Cancer Man suddenly realizes he is being cut out of the decisions by the Conspiracy. I am hypothesizing (since I don't remember how all this turns out) that Skinner was having Mulder watched to protect him and this is causing the distrust between Cancer Man and the Fat Man. By the end, Scully has collapsed due to her illness just as she was about to expose Skinner as an evil genius I am fairly certain he is not and Mulder has seen rooms filled with alien corpses and abductees at the DOD facility.

These last few days have renewed my excitement in the mytharc. Now, if we can just keep hope alive until I get to the X-Files movie this weekend.