The Grand X-Periment Day 24

10/24/11

65 & 66) Within/Without- Season 8, Episodes 1 & 2- And here we say goodbye to Duchovny for a little while. All told, he wasn't gone from that many episodes. I like how the falling dude from the opening credits turns into Mulder in this new version.

The creative team had a tough act to pull off here. They had to write out Duchovny, introduce Doggett (Robert Patrick) and turn Scully into the believer. Let us see how they pulled each off.

The overall plot of the thing is basically a search for Mulder. The Lone Gunmen help Skinner and Scully track the UFO that abducted Mulder to Arizona. Scully figures the aliens are after Gibson (!) who we haven't seen since the Season 6 premiere. Kersh has been placed in a deputy director position over Skinner (I don't know if I mentioned Kersh before but he was the seemingly crooked Assistant Director that Mulder and Scully ended up under when they were taken off the X-Files). Kersh places John Doggett in charge of the hunt for Mulder and he immediately pisses of Scully with his investigative techniques.

Doggett separately heads to Arizona because he believes Mulder is after Gibson. Doggett and Scully run afoul of the alien bounty hunter disguised as Mulder and things go south. Gibson is safe and Scully kills an alien making this episode a landmark for two reasons (they save someone they try to save and this is the first alien our heroes manage to kill). Doggett gets teamed with Scully on the X-Files and he is the non-believer paired with the 180 degree turned Scully. Mulder is surrounded by aliens and kind of fucked.

Writing Duchovny out of the show is not pulled off in the most elegant way. The aliens appear to be destroying all evidence of the conspiracy now that there isn't one anymore. Capturing Mulder and the abductees makes a lot of sense in this case. Leaving Scully alone does not. She, herself, is proof of the alien conspiracy so, leaving her unabducted seems nonsensical. Still, from all the hand wringing we got by Cancer Man last season, you would think the aliens would step up their invasion plans now that they know there is a human resistant to their infection.

The introduction of Doggett actually worked pretty well. I was shocked. Chris Carter sets him up as just another pawn of the corrupt power structure but Scully is able to shake him loose from his preconceived notions just enough to make his defection from Kersh's agenda believable. We are so used to other agents being threats rather than allies, the logical flow of these two episodes made perfect sense and seemed true to Scully's character (which is the important thing to maintain heading onward without Mulder).

Speaking of that, while her handling of Doggett makes perfect sense, her conversion to total believer does not. This is the problem with dragging out one's narrative. So, the entire character dynamic of the show is a believer and a non-believer approach scary shit in different ways. They are stronger together by being opposing forces. Both have to step up their fame to persuade the other. No duh, right?

As the seasons wore on, Scully got exposed to weirder and weirder stuff. She saw and survived alien abductions, alien parasites, alien bounty hunters and about 600 other alien related events. But due to the needs of the character dynamic, she had to deny everything she saw. There was that brief time in the...fifth season (I think) where she became less skeptical and Mulder became more but that didn't last very long. Scully just stuck to her guns that there was no such thing as an alien, dammit. Until this season. As soon as Mulder is gone, she is spouting things off to Doggett like "Yep, that was an alien bounty hunter, it can shape-shift and is after this little boy with alien DNA." Granted, she absolutely should believe in all that...it is just that she has made a career out of not believing it for 7 years.

The final turn of her character remains as unconvincing as her narratively convenient skepticism. If she had been shown to be on more of a journey into belief rather than an instant conversion, I would have been more sold. As it stands, Duchovny wanting to GTFO kind of hurt everything. Still, curious to see where this goes.