My 10 favorite movies of 2011 (so far)

What a weird year for movies. Lots and lots of R-rated comedies. A buttload of indies and mostly sequels and comic book movies for the big budget things this year. I kept putting off this list thinking of other flicks from this year I want to see but then the same thing hit me that hits me every year...I am not a friggin movie reviewer. I don't get paid for my opinions and I certainly don't have access to a ton of free screenings (although I did see a few movies for free this year).

I saw 31 movies this year. On the purely entertaining side of things, I have to give honorable mentions to Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Hobo With a Shotgun for just bringing to life things I didn't know I always wanted to see and things I have been dreaming of since I was a kid (that would be Thor). These were really fun, exciting movies that each had at least one stand out sequence. However, my top 10 is going to be movies that achieved entertainment and made me think a bit.

Movies I have not seen that I would like to: Cedar Rapids, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Hall Pass, The Descendents, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Shame, Hanna, Hugo, Tintin and the Ides of March. Any of these (except probably Hall Pass) could end up retroactively in my top 10.

10. Super 8- (Alien causes havoc in small town in the 1980s). This will go down as the year of smart sci-fi for me. Not even counting draggy goodness like Melancholia (probably my number 11), Hollywood attempted to churn out some thoughtful genre work this year. Super 8 pissed a lot of people off because it starts like Cloverfield and ends like E.T. I really enjoyed and was moved by this homage to Spielberg's 80s output. It had some thrills and heart. Way more so than the Muppets, this movie appealed to the nostalgic part of me.

9. Source Code-(Soldier is sent into the last 8 minutes of a dead man's life to solve the mystery of who bombed a commuter train). I wrestled with this one for awhile but, honestly, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Duncan Jones proved he can work just as creatively with a bigger budget as he did on Moon. Michelle Monaghan is my current actress crush (see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or Gone Baby Gone to understand why) and she is the real draw in this movie for me. If you don't believe that Jake Gyllenhaal would immediately fall for her, the story really doesn't work but she really brings the goods without being "sexy." The premise was strong and Jeffrey Wright is a hoot. Not for all tastes but I enjoyed it.

8. Moneyball- (Struggling baseball manager decides to use a new form of player selection with fascinating results). My Social Network award for "topic I didn't think I gave a shit about" goes to this awesome little flick. Although Jonah Hill was in a bunch of comedy this year, I really liked his work here. Brad Pitt turned in one of two pretty cool performances this year as the bedeviled manager of the Oakland A's. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a real prick here but Bennett Miller seems to only hire Hoffman for those roles. Putting a human face on the statistical analysis of baseball players is really difficult but this one pulled it off.

7. Submarine- (Boy growing up in England has his first love affair and tries to keep his parents from splitting). I'm not sure this movie would be in my 10 if you ask me a month from now but, having just seen it, it is one of the few movies I saw this year I could recommend to almost any of my friends with a taste for quirk. Young star Craig Roberts looks a lot like X-Men: First Class's James McAvoy. All of the character beats ring true to me in that way where, as an adult, I can see the guy is making a huge mistake but I can also remember justifying such crap when I was his age. People compare it to Wes Anderson but the more apt comparison is Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. If you liked that, you should really check this out.

6. The Future- (A couple decide their lives are pretty much over when they choose to adopt a sickly cat). This was my first foray into Miranda July's body of work and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I said when I first saw it that I could see people who have their shit together really disliking this movie. The early 30 somethings portrayed here are the kind of directionless people who are imagined to be the core of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their self-involvement and lack of ambition would be annoying if I didn't so readily understand it. Plus, there are really nice little surreal touches like the cat narrator and the boyfriend's ability to stop time (but only for himself). Your enjoyment of this is most likely directly proportional to how discontented you are with your life.

5. Tree of Life- (The eldest of three brothers growing up in 1950s Texas deals with coming of age). The description I just gave isn't really the whole movie, but it is the part of the movie I like. My contrary nature made me consider not including this movie at all but that would be a mistake on my part. The first 20 minutes and the last 20 minutes are super pretentious and ponderous. They consist of images and dialogue fragments that lay out the themes of the film over and over again. If you have any eye for art or storytelling, you get what Malick is trying to say pretty quickly. Unfortunately, he kind of insults you by willfully avoiding a linear narrative until about 20 minutes in. At that point, a really amazing, well-observed, deftly acted story plays out in a powerful way until it all devolves again. I, personally, think it is worth it to slog through the beautiful but disjointed beginning to get to the middle. But I am not sure staying until the end is needed. Brad Pitt's second great performance made me feel like I was watching a home movie of my father's life (although I don't think my grandmother has ever been painted in such saintly strokes as the mother here). The movie has a lot to say about how we get to be who we are, it just sometimes takes awhile to say it.

4) I Saw the Devil- (A Korean secret service agent hunts down the serial killer who murdered his wife and decides to play a deadly game with him). As much as I liked Paranormal Activity 3, the scares it gave me were the kind I had seen before (twice). This movie just plain disturbed me. It is graphically violent and would almost qualify as torture porn if the man being tortured wasn't a rapist and serial killer. Byung-hun Lee walks a fine line by having to remain the protagonist while absolutely destroying another human being. The weird asides and periphery characters in this make it a kind of odyssey of evil that keeps the viewer a little disoriented. I also don't think I have been more frightened than when the hero looses control of the situation and things start coming apart. Really brutal but worth watching if you like foreign horror. It also goes well with...

3) Drive- (Getaway driver/stuntman/mechanic gets mixed up with the wrong woman and enters a pretty scary world). Although I don't see all his movies, Ryan Gosling has never failed to impress me. In this flick, he has very little to say but has to come across as honorable, intimidating and likable. The supporting cast is pretty great with Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman making something out of relatively small roles. The choice of Nicolas Refn to make the movie as if it were one of the 80s "European Action films" produced by Albert Brooks' character is kind of genius. Like my favorite rock songs, this movie builds slowly until it just explodes. From the nearly silent, sedate first hour, it would be impossible to guess how violent and horrific this movie gets. If you want Fast and Furious driving, look elsewhere. If you want a literally stunning crime drama, you must see this.

2) Another Earth- (When a world just like ours is discovered on the other side of the sun, a woman with a troubled past must confront her guilt). Yet another sci-fi piece that really has nothing to do with sci-fi. The high concept premise is just an excuse for Mike Cahill to examine how we affect each other on this planet and the decisions we make. The ending left me kind of reeling as I thought through all that it implied. William Mapother (Tom Cruise's cousin and Ethan from Lost) does a great job as a man who has lost his family. Brit Marling could give Gosling a run for his money in the quiet intensity genre of acting. This movie probably didn't even need the hook of the other Earth but with it, it elevates a tense, heated drama into something a little more heady.

1) Young Adult- (Truly horrible woman returns to her hometown to steal her ex boyfriend from his wife). Again, ask me in a month if this is still in my top 10 and I may deny it. For now, it is a movie I can't get out of my head. Charlize Theron makes herself even uglier than in Monster, not physically, but just emotionally. She is dealing poorly with the fact that she grew up being told she was a beautiful, special snowflake only to find that her life is kind of empty and unfulfilling. Reitman and Diablo Cody are really careful to show us hints of how she turned out this way. There is just a small moment with Theron at the table with her parents where she makes a bold confession only to have it ignored and laughed off because it doesn't fit the way they see her. I like this screenplay so, so much more than Juno. It has the same keenly realized characterizations but it doesn't lean on gimmicky language. Patton Oswalt does a fine job as the physically crippled man who holds onto his bitterness like a shield. The flow of the whole story and Theron's anti-arc is kind of beautiful to see. I felt like this movie shows in a fairly realistic manner how real people would behave in such situations but I could never really guess the next step. Not for everyone but it worked incredibly well for me.

The Grand X-Periment Day 30

10/30/11

80) Jump the Shark- Season 9, Episode 15- By this time, the show knew it was over. Duchovny was gone and the series just wasn't going to survive without him. Finally watching the "Threads of the Mythology" documentary that was spread throughout the DVDs, I learned two interesting things: everyone hated Duchovny for making them leave Canada and that, if the show had gone on, it would have been without Mulder or Scully and not been about aliens anymore. How is that even the same show?

At any rate, this episode served as a way of tying up the Lone Gunmen TV show (itself cancelled the year before). Apparently, Morris Fletcher (Michael McKean of Dreamland fame) popped up in one of their episodes to con them into finding a girl they knew as Eve. Well, he pops back up here and cons them again.

The actual story is about bio-terrorism and men with shark body parts grafted into them. For a final Monster of the Week (at least for me) it was pretty odd. Timmy (the character clearly killed in the Three of a Kind episode) pops back up with no explanation. The Gunmen apparently had an "intern" on their show who filled the "classic handsome guy" requirement and he comes back.

The weird thing about the entire episode is that, like most Lone Gunmen eps, this one is mostly light-hearted and whimsical. When it comes time to kill off all three of them, it hits a really sour note and seems needlessly cruel. These are the comic relief characters and the exposition providers...not vital cogs in the war against alien invasion. This just seemed like an instance of breaking one's toys so that they can't be used again.

81) William- Season 9, Episode 16- This one was co-written and directed by Duchovny and features a nice fake out. A scarred man is caught breaking into the X-Files office to steal Samantha Mulder's file. Doggett believes the man is Fox Mulder feigning a new identity to avoid getting killed by the powers that be. Scully does not believe it is Fox. In the middle of all this, William (Scully and Mulder's baby) is thrown into the spotlight.

All the drama and melodrama that went into this one actually results in a nice pay-off (even if it is a cheat). After a DNA test reveals that the scarred man is a match for Mulder, we find out that it is really Jeffrey "Cancer Man's son" Spender. It seems Spender survived being shot in the face by his father and was subjected to gruesome experiments that left him disfigured. He is on a bit of a Krycek kick and is trying to ruin everything his father has done to precipitate the alien invasion.

Spender injects William with that same metal that kills Super Soldiers, thus robbing him of his powers somehow. No longer able to be the keystone in the prophecies, William is still in danger because no one will believe he is no longer special. At the end, Scully sends the baby to live with another family in order to protect him. Man, two downers in a row...I'm sure the finale will be all rainbows and sunshine.

82) The Truth- Season 9, Episode 19 or 19 and 20 depending on who you believe- This is it, the double sized last episode. The show has been very careful to close up loose threads and resolve long standing plotlines. This one is all about Mulder.

Mulder comes into conflict with...sigh...Knowle Rohrer and seemingly murders him in front of a whole mess of government employees. Mulder is arrested, tortured and put on trial in a military court for his very life. Skinner is the defense attorney and Kersh (along with Charles Widmore) is one of the five FBI judges listening to his case.

Throughout the trial, Scully, Spender, Marita C., Gibson and every other living supporting character is marched through to basically recap the entire series and explain what everything has to do with everything else. The move from Shapeshifters to Super Soldiers is still never really explained but most everything is as I had figured...

Aliens are the first life on earth but they die out in the Ice Age. The black oil lurks within the ground and can infect living organisms. It can control you or, if it incubates long enough, can transform you into a monster alien and then a shapeshifting gray. There is a metal on Earth (magnatite?) that can harm aliens and it is the high concentration of such that made a UFO crash in Roswell in 1947 (why 40 other UFOs have crashed since, I have no idea). The government killed the aliens and stole their technology. In the 1970s, the aliens make contact with the men who would become the conspiracy. They make a deal, the aliens will spare the conspirators if they make a slave race of alien/human hybrids. Bill Mulder and Cancer Man were involved with this. All the conspirators have to turn over a family member to gain the aliens' trust so Cancer Man gives up his wife and, since Mulder won't choose, his daughter (Samantha) is chosen for him. The conspirators and the Russians are in an arms race to find a vaccine that will counteract the effects of the Black Oil. Rebel aliens (who have altered themselves to avoid the oil) killed the conspirators and the aliens are scrapping the whole cloning/abduction program. Other men fill the void of the conspiracy and the whole new invasion plan seems to hinge on turning people into super soldiers or something.

All throughout the trial, Mulder gets helped by the ghosts of X, Krycek and the Lone Gunmen. X even provides information to Mulder that he otherwise would not have been able to get. This continues the show's spiritualism and the idea that the invasion can be defeated by a higher power. If the story is ever concluded, it will end up with love conquering all, I promise.

Scully finds out that the body the military has produced isn't even Rohrer. Without the alleged victim, it would seem Mulder should go free. However, he is railroaded and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Skinner, Doggett and Kersh break him out and tell him to take Scully and skip the country. Instead, he goes to New Mexico and confronts the "wise man of the hills" who sent him to the secret base where he fought with Rohrer. Of course, it turns out to be Cancer Man (his family is hard to kill). He forces Mulder to admit in front of Scully that Mulder has seen the date the alien invasion is to begin...December 22, 2012. Sound familiar? It would be super sweet to get the last movie released on that day.

Doggett and Reyes get to kill Rohrer once and for all. Black helicopters blow up Cancer Man (and we see the flesh being melted off his skull just to prove that this time he is really dead). Apparently on the lam, Mulder and Scully recreate their hotel room scene from the Pilot but end this time in an embrace, with Mulder agreeing that there is hope out there.

All told, this story did not get resolved. The aliens are out there. Charles Widmore is deep in the FBI. Kersh, Skinner, Doggett and Reyes are in danger from having aided Mulder and Scully. Mulder and Scully are on the run. Apparently, the next movie picked up with them being brought in to consult with the FBI on a monster of the week case and none of the mythology plot is resolved. Oh well.

It was a fun trip. For a show with lots of explosions and murders, it never felt like an action-oriented show. Perhaps because all the kills were so dispassionate and felt like housekeeping. For a horror show, it did produce some genuinely creepy moments. When the show delved into comedy, it was pure gold. As science fiction, of course, that was where it shined. In the documentary I watched, the writers talked about how ridiculous a show can sound if the characters are just babbling about aliens. They tried to keep things in the shadows and obscure. It was nice of them to lay everything out before they went off the air. With only three months lead time, they crafted a slightly more satisfying finale than Lost (and they knew where they were going for three years). Major conflicts were resolved, all the big name villains were done away with and the characters ended up in a mostly believable place. I ended up liking Doggett a lot. Reyes never really grew on me. The always endangered supporting cast was tons of fun. Altogether, this was a very entertaining show that got a little too convoluted for its own good. Once Mulder left, everything should have been pointed towards an end game.

Will we ever see a full-on attempt to stop the invasion? I kind of hope so. I think these characters still have some life in them.

Thanks for joining me on this grand experiment. It was mostly fun. There was some slogging to get through and, as I worked my way through the seasons, I realized there were other great episodes I was neglecting to focus on the mythology. Season Six remains the one with the highest number of episodes I love. Home was still the best standalone episode and Two Fathers, One Son remains my favorite mythology eps.

Join me next year for 12 months of such shenanigans.

Josh

The Grand X-Periment 29

10/29/11

77) Trust No 1- Season 9, Episode 6- This is one of the more clever ways to build an episode around your former main character who is no longer there. Scully gets drawn into a squabbling couple's lives only to find that they are part of an NSA project to spy on Scully's every move. Terry Quinn (AKA John Locke) continues the run of Lost guest stars that started with Mr. Friendly and ends with Charles Widmore next episode. Keep in mind, Quinn was in the X-Files movie. Rather than trying to explain that Michaud (the dude who blows up at the beginning of the movie) was a super soldier, Scully just acts like she has never seen him before. Were there just no other actors you could trust? For a show that likes to bring back characters 6 seasons apart, just assume we will remember a character from the movie, ok?

Anyway, Locke wants to draw out Mulder and dangles the bait of a list of Super Soldier names. Scully falls for it, arranging to meet Mulder on a train at midnight. A shoot out leads to the train not stopping, reports of a man jumping out and a nice scene where Doggett calls out "Mulder!" to a distant figure who stops and looks before running some more. The end result is that the Super Soldiers can be killed by some kind of lead that was present in the quarry. So, now there is a way to fight these convoluted menaces....yay.

The other big piece of news is that Locke taunts Scully with his knowledge of her sex life vis a vis Mulder. He confirms that the two of them did get it on so, just in case everyone was still wondering who the father of William is...this is just further spelling it out.

78 & 79) Provenance & Providence- Season 9, Episodes 9 & 10- Adding to the needlessly complex mythology is this little stinky chunk of crap storyline. So, we can all tell William the specialist little boy on earth. He can move his mobile with his mind. He also can commune with alien spaceships.

An undercover FBI agent is blown up sneaking into the US. He survives and tries to kill William. Scully shoots the shit out of him. Before long, he lays out an absurd prophecy in that there is a UFO cult who believes that William can either lead or repel and alien invasion. If Mulder is killed, he will lead the invasion but if Mulder lives, William will be against it. So, the FBI guy was trying to kill William because there is a rumor going around that Mulder is already dead. However, when the cult gets their hands on William, the cult leader demands proof that Mulder is dead. It is all confusing and stupid.

At first, the fate of the world rested with Mulder, now it rests with his offspring. Of course, the cult ends up killed by aliens as a kind of "we don't need your help on this one."

Gillian Anderson plays pissed off momma well. Doggett and Reyes get some nice moments. Cary Elwes slimes his way back and Kersh gets more tolerable (while Skinner descends further into uselessness). The religious component of the show keeps creeping back in. At first, we were told that lots of the writing we know as the Quran and the Bible are found on alien spaceships that are millions of years old, implying that they somehow originated religion and that there is no God. Krycek implies that the aliens want William dead because he represents a real miracle and, therefore, proof of a higher power than themselves. During this two parter, several of the heroes turn to Jesus for help and seem to get it.

I only remember a few things about the finale but something tells me that, if X-Files had gone on a few more years, we would have been watching a very touchy feely, Lost style of ending to this show. Oh well, tomorrow I finish all this noise and watch that damned documentary that should explain all these episodes.

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?

The Grand X-Periment Day 27

10/27/11

I know, what happened to Day 26? I skipped yesterday but doubled up on episodes the day before. I am in the home stretch and I can taste my freedom.

71) Three Words- Season 8, Episode 16. Hint: the three words aren't "I love you." Doggett finally meets Mulder in this one. Unlike Scully, Mulder immediately assumes that Doggett is working to screw over the X-Files (much as he assumed Scully was trying to do but, to be fair, she was). Through a series of carefully leaked clues, Mulder is lured into the Census database to find out why certain citizens with certain DNA profiles are being tracked (if you guessed it was because of the alien invasion you are right). Doggett realizes it was all a setup and saves Mulder from being killed. Mulder still doesn't care for him much.

If the census thing seems familiar it is because we learned that Jeremiah Smith was tracking certain citizens using the Social Security database way back in season 3. The whole plot hinges on a password ("Fight The Future") that happened to be the tagline of their movie. It all plays a little hokey and is sort of devoid of tension since we know Doggett is not evil. Mulder just comes off more hard-headed and dangerous than usual.

72) Vienen- Season 8. Episode 18- This had all the earmarks of a classic X-Files episode...a remote location, a "who is the real enemy" premise and a new character dynamic between Mulder and Doggett. After the black oil infects everyone on board an oil platform in gulf of Mexico except for two Mestizos, Mulder (unofficially) and Doggett (officially) go to investigate. Not a lot happens as our two heroes are even more passive than usual. A lot of the action seems to take place in the radio room with various parties destroying and repairing the radio for the oil platform.

I understand why there is only one real set, the budget is kind of blown on the entire platform going up in flames. By the end, this little stunt is the thing that finally gets Mulder fired from the FBI. At least he trusts Doggett not to screw the pooch anymore. I liked this one ok. They didn't do much with the premise. There is apparently a whole breed of Indian who are resistant to the black oil (good for them). Mr. Friendly from Lost is one of the chief black oil guys here (good to see him). I was also glad they remembered that black oil guys can irradiate people (a thing they seem to have forgotten since the first appearance).

With only three days to go, I have no idea how all this is going to get to the ending I remember from watching it the first time but I really hope they wrap things up well.

The Grand X-periment Day 25

10/25/11

67) The Gift- Season 8, Episode 11- This is not considered a vital episode but one website I went to said it was. They were kind of wrong. Doggett had found out that Mulder was dying of a brain illness before he vanished. He was in Pennsylvania a week before his abduction and, apparently, shot something or someone there. ALL SORTS OF SPOILERS FOLLOW...

This episode may have had one of the grossest monsters of the week. The soul eater is a shaman who eats sick people and throws them back up without their illness. But, he takes on whatever illness they had. Mulder tried to mercy kill him and but the guy survived, somehow. He never ate Mulder and never cured him.

This was, essentially, a monster of the week episode with Mulder's actions being used to draw Doggett into the story. Scully isn't in it at all. Pretty inconsequential, all told.

68) Per Manum- Season 8, Episode 13- This one is considered important. Women are giving birth to alien babies and Scully wants to make sure her baby is ok. We finally get the backstory (sort of) of how she got pregnant and who the father is (hint: it's Mulder). Adam Baldwin shows up as Rohrer (I believe he gets important later on).

This episode raises a lot of questions and pretty late in the game. Who is coordinating this vast web of doctors and military if the conspiracy no longer exists? Why bother impregnating women with alien fetuses if the black oil can just make new aliens out of humans without the 9 month gestation? It seems like doctors were harvesting these alien babies to study but this implies this is another faction working against the invasion. I guess I will see.

69 & 70) This Is Not Happening and Deadalive- Season 8, Episodes 14 and 15- I went ahead and watched these because I will be too busy to see them tomorrow. This two part episode brings Mulder back to Earth and introduces Reyes (the really open new female Mulder to John Doggett's skeptical Scully 2.0). Jeremiah Smith (remember him?) is picking up abductees and healing them before they succumb to comas and turn into aliens. Unfortunately, the FBI busts in on him and a cult who helps him before he can heal Mulder. So, Mulder appears dead.

They bury Mulder and everything then skip ahead by six months or so. Scully is visibly pregnant and about to go on leave. Billy Miles and some of the other abductees form the pilot return. Honestly, this one kind of pissed me off. The whole point of the time Cancer Man captured Mulder was because Mulder was resistant to the effects of the Black Oil. Krycek comes back in this one dangling a vaccine he says will cure Mulder but then Scully just finds a way to cure him with anti-viral treatments. MAYBE Cancer Man's operation left Mulder vulnerable again but then, how can Scully recreate the effects of the vaccine with common treatments when it took Bill Mulder and the Russians 40 years to make a vaccine? Or, if Mulder is still naturally resistant, why was his body still going through the stages everyone else was? This made no real sense to me and just seemed like a way to write Mulder back in with a bit of dramatic tension.

I am still on board, but just barely at this point. Shit better start making sense again soon.

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.