The Grand X-Periment Day 19

10/19/11

50) How the Ghosts Stole Christmas- Season 6, Episode 6- Another great one from Season 6 and another Christmas episode that is reasonable to watch at Halloween. Mulder and Scully go to a haunted house on Christmas Eve where the former inhabitants have one mission: drive the living to murder each other.

Chris Carter wrote and directed this one and it is a far cry from the never ending shots of Triangle. In this one, Carter gives us an old fashioned ghost story. A dark house, a stormy night, fleeting glimpses of shadowy figures in the lightning...all the tropes are here. For the first 20 minutes or so, things are genuinely creepy (especially after Mulder and Scully unearth two corpses in the den that are dressed like them). Eventually, Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner show up as the ghosts of two lovers who died in a suicide pact decades earlier.

Asner and Tomlin expend a lot of effort to convince Mulder and Scully that they are essentially lonely and need to die. Ironically, the ghosts themselves seem pretty lonely as they need to keep killing people so that more people will come to the house.

There are lots of good fake outs and, as an homage to classic haunted house movies, this is a decent one. Things get pretty bleak before an ending I still find heartwarming in the extreme.

51) S.R. 819- Season 6, Episode 9- As entertaining as this one is, it is a mythology episode that just takes us back to a previous point while introducing a new minor wrinkle or two.

We start with Skinner on a hospital bed, covered in purple veins and flatlining. A doctor says to let him die and we backtrack 24 hours to see how we got there. There is lots of drama about senate resolution 819 (which Skinner was investigating), Tunisian diplomats, physicists, nanotechnology and Mulder's old buddy, Senator Matheson. In the end, it is all just a plan by Krycek to bring Skinner back under the thumb of the conspiracy. And it works.

Skinner, as a character, loses a little of his sheen in this one. He has an internal monologue and a conversation with Scully about how he is tired of playing both sides of the fence (it was no coincidence he was portrayed as an American sympathizer within the Nazi party in the Triangle episode). He promises he will be more help to Scully and Mulder if he pulls through his weird illness. He does pull through, but since Krycek can gack him at any time, he goes back on his word and continues to not help our heroes. Perhaps he is thinking he can do more for them alive than dead but he just comes across as a bit of a coward. Not that Mulder needs someone else to die for his crusade, it just seems like a weak stance to take from a dramatic standpoint.

Speaking of, this was a long way to go for just this outcome. We learn nanotech is a thing, Matheson is probably an asshole and we already knew Tunisia was one of the conspiracy bases from the X-Files movie.

Tomorrow night we get to, I think, the last two mythology episodes I ever saw. They resolve enough issues for me that I didn't feel invested in the show anymore. However, some more of my favorite episodes from this season are still to come so I wonder if I saw these out of order?