The Grand X-periment Day 28

10/28/11

73 & 74) Essence & Existence- Season 8, Episodes 20 & 21- Although the whole enterprise is teetering on ridiculous, a couple of solid episodes like these can keep me locked into the mytharc. It proved to me that there is still a pretty big cast even without the conspirators running around.

Billy Miles is going around and killing OB/GYNs that were part of the conspiracy. I liked that, even though there is no more conspiracy, their projects are still running independently. Scully's pregnancy is looked at questionably again and it seems like everyone wants her fetus.

Adam Baldwin's Knowle Rohrer (who I called Noel because that is an actual name) proves to be in league with Billy and Krycek(!) who makes his final appearance here.
Using lies built within lies, the whole two episodes are designed to draw out Scully and her baby. Mulder keeps getting access to the FBI even though he is a civilian. He and Doggett, Reyes, Scully and Skinner are all scrambling to kill the unkillable Billy and Knowle.

Here we get introduced to the concept of the super soldier. In past episodes, the conspirators used the idea of the super soldier to throw doubt on the idea of human/alien hybrids. The same basic premise is used here. The "weird" explanation is that these guys are alien replicants and the "sane" explanation is that they are government designed terminators. This is the abduction storyline with a different twist. Are those aliens in the UFOs or Air Force pilots?

Unlike the alien bounty hunters, there is no way to kill a super soldier. So long as one piece of their vertebrae remain, they can rebuild themselves (ask Billy, who ended up in a garbage compactor). All of this confuses me since we were told earlier that Cassandra Spender was the end all of the experiments. Now, we have a completely different branch of experimenting coming to light with mutated ova used to produce alien babies in barren mothers.

So now we have the gene-spliced hybrid clones, the actual aliens, humans with access to their alien DNA (like Mulder and Gibson) and super soldiers who are somehow the product of more testing. Oh, and Scully's baby has magic powers and the aliens may be afraid of God.

The mythology is so convoluted and contradictory now that Scully and Mulder are messianic figures. Mulder can resist the black oil (remember that?) and Scully gives birth to a telekinetic baby (more on that in a minute). The backstory really isn't the satisfying part here, it is the payoff to long running plots.

The least interesting one was Knowle finally being outed to Doggett as evil and the resulting fight that ends with Knowle getting blown the hell up. Secondly, Skinner and Krycek have their ultimate showdown and the moment is kind of touching in that the writers finally remember that Krycek has one arm. Thirdly, we get pretty much a confirmation that the baby is Mulder's (which may explain why it is so special). The final shot of the episode is the freakin' kiss everyone has been waiting eight seasons for. This was meant to be Duchovny's swan song but, soon we will see, this show just can't live for long without him.

75 & 76) Nothing Important Happened Today Parts 1` & 2- Season 9, Episodes 1 & 2. The final season starts about 48 hours from the end of the last. Doggett believes Kersh is in with the aliens. Lucy Lawless is a super soldier killing water based researchers. Scully is home with her telekinetic baby and Mulder has vanished again. This leaves Reyes and Doggett to take over all the work.

Season 8 tried to pull off the old switcheroo but it didn't entirely succeed. The gender dynamics have flipped now with Reyes being Mulder and Doggett being Scully but Reyes is still too new to get a grip on. To flesh out the cast, Cary "Princess Bride" Elwes joins as the former romantic interest of Reyes with an eye towards screwing over Doggett just so Doggett and Reyes don't fall love. It is nice to get an officious jerk gumming up the works out of misguided romance rather than malevolent conspiracy. The other big reveal is that Kersh may be on the side of the angels.

While that last development is shocking, it poses a problem...where does Skinner fit in? With Cary Elwes holding up progress and Kersh secretly helping it along, Skinner has no power to help or hurt the X-Files anymore. There is a nice moment when Elwes let's Skinner off the hook. While Elwes and his men are chasing Doggett and Skinner, Skinner falls behind. Elwes says to him, "looks like we are both chasing the same man!" That was a nice little touch to show us that Elwes has no intention of screwing over anyone he doesn't see as a romantic rival.

The new, jazzy opening credits don't mention Duchovny for the first time. Anderson gets top billing and Mitch "Skinner" Pileggi gets his own title card. Adam Baldwin is getting set up as the big bad of the season. With Cancer Man gone from Season 8 and Krycek now pushing up the daisies, all of our old familiar villains are history. These episodes state that the US water supply is being altered so that women become more fertile and give birth to super soldiers. How all this fits in with the bees and the black oil, I have no idea. In fact, as simple as the invasion plans have always seemed, the whole abduction side of things has gotten really too complicated.

Women (and men, Duane Berry) are being abducted by the government using alien influenced aircraft. Fine. They take out the women's ova so that they can experiment on them to create alien/human hybrids. Fine. These hybrids are meant to help in the invasion and be resistant to the black oil. Fine. Tell me what in the hell the super soldiers are needed for? They are called "alien law enforcement" at some point but the bounty hunters were doing that pretty well. It seems we just needed a new wrinkle in the plans (maybe Brian Thompson didn't want to come back?)

So now, the questions are, where is Mulder? What's the deal with Scully's baby? Why wasn't he taken if he is so special? We get the weak tea explanation that Scully FORCED Mulder to go into hiding because his life was in danger (this is presuming Mulder would ever listen and leave the love of his life and his son exposed to harm). Whatevs. When stories like these muddy the myth waters, it is time to circle the drain.

This weekend: the final 6 episodes. What, if anything, will be resolved?