The Grand X-Periment Day 6

10/6/11

16 & 17) The Blessing Way & Paper Clip- Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2- So, Mulder gets out of the death trap...by...tunneling? Or something? It is never really explained. Way to write, writers. These two are halves of a whole so I am just lumping them together.

Cancer Man goes after everyone in a big way. He has Krycek kill Scully's sister (actually he was trying to kill Scully), he has Skinner beaten and robbed, he has the Navajo who helped Mulder beaten, and then he tries to kill Krycek. We get introduced to the rest of the conspirators and there is another seemingly useless alien sighting. The big reveal of these eps are that Skinner has used Navajo oral tradition to spread the classified MJ files so that Cancer Man can never retrieve them. The international conspiracy has been using Nazi scientists to experiment on people and make alien/human hybrids (which is what those bodies were). The Well-Manicured Man makes his first appearance and seems to be pretty damn helpful (his monologue about Operation Paper Clip is, I think, entirely true as opposed to nearly every other explanation we have heard so far.

Carter really seemed to be drawing a line in the sand here and saying, this is where we kick things into high gear. Mulder finds out that his father was threatening the experiments and was made to chose which of his children would be abducted for experimentation. Scully finds a microchip in her neck which she then has extracted (big mistake) and finds that her name is in the conspiracy files in West Virginia. Everything still seems to be pretty one sided with the conspiracy using alien DNA for experiments and even the purpose of the experiments is hinted at (building better soldiers). So, even the super soldier crap from the end of the show is all right here.

Essentially, if you have been paying attention, almost the whole conspiracy is revealed now. Only about three pieces of info are missing: where is Samantha? What part do the clones play in the hybridization experiments? Are we at war with the aliens?

And from all the info we have, it seems like the answer to the third one is yes. But that is misleading. Really, for all the hoopla about figuring out the master story, there isn't much left to figure out. The supporting cast (of the heroes' extended families anyway) is whittled down to only Mulder's mom and Scully's mom. Skinner has proven himself an ally and X is still out there somewhere maybe being helpful. Meanwhile, Krycek is running around like a wildcard pissed off at everybody. It seems like the only move left is to just have the two sides clash and fight it out for the fate of the Earth or something...but that will not come close to happening for a long time. Scully and Samantha's abduction will still be big parts of the storytelling engine but (if I recall correctly) a lot of the coming mythology episodes are based around figuring out that the aliens aren't just being harvested and exploited by mean old governments.

To be continued...

Note that I didn't even talk about Mulder's hallucinations of his dad and Deep Throat speaking really eloquently and vaguely about being dead. Not a series high point.