![]() ![]() When Mulder confronts his nemesis once more - a sequence staged to recall similar showdowns from season two’s “One Breath” and season six’s “One Son” - CSM makes every attempt to justify his actions. It’s fun to be bad, though Davis continues to play CSM as a man absolutely persuaded of the correctness of his convictions. “Is it hard to look at me?” CSM asks Reyes, with a malevolent lilt. Carter again focuses intensely and closely on the characters’ eyes as they portentously talk through things. ![]() “They haven’t killed me yet, as hard as they may try,” CSM says to Reyes during a flashback seduction to the dark side. She gets in touch with Scully to explain the origins of the current plague, and reveals that CSM approached her a decade earlier with an offer to protect her from the coming epidemic. CSM has also made a Faustian bargain with former Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), an X-Files investigator during seasons eight and nine. He not only has his hooks in Mulder, who seeks out his allegedly dead antagonist (and biological father) after being nearly beaten to death in a superbly staged fight scene straight out of the Bourne movie series. Davis), henceforth CSM, who oversees the immune-system apocalypse from an isolated house in South Carolina. I’m speaking, of course, of the villainous Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. This is an episode, after all, that features a character who miraculously survived a missile attack in the original series finale and puffs tobacco through a hole in his throat. Here, I think the real-world facts go a long way toward giving Carter and his actors a sturdy frame within which they can fully embrace the pulpy elements. The X-Files has always struck a strange balance between the ridiculous and the sublime, often depending on the ability of its performers to appear as if they know what they’re talking about while spouting rapid-fire, jargon-heavy dialogue. Margaret Fearon, collaborated with Carter on this story, though the authenticity they impart doesn’t make any of the plot twists seem any less absurd. Scully, who is also shielded because of her abduction experience, spends the bulk of the episode alongside Agent Einstein (Lauren Ambrose), both of them working through the science that undergirds the impending cataclysm. Basically, the alien DNA is an immunological shield for the one percent elite. This all goes back to one of the original series’ prominent plot points: The government’s use of smallpox vaccinations to catalogue and, as it now becomes clear, tamper with the immune systems of the citizenry via a so-called “Spartan Virus.” Once the Spartan Virus is activated, anyone who doesn’t have alien DNA will fall victim to all manner of diseases, paving the way for a new world order. It is inextricably related to her own long-ago abduction experience, as well as to what appear to be a series of mass infections that have struck the American populace. The alien DNA uncovered by Scully after she sequenced her genome in the season premiere is a key piece of the puzzle. The story is simple at heart: Scully and Mulder need to reunite, but per the title, they struggle mightily to get there. Myself, I was more than willing to go along, in full lockstep, for the breathless series of events that follows. Like Scully, Carter either has you in his mesmeric clutches, or he doesn’t. There’s a wonderfully pulpy shot during this sequence, the camera zooming deep into Scully’s eye as O’Malley’s paranoid aria reaches its apex. He’s dropping another bombshell about the elite group of men who are using alien technology to facilitate a global takeover, though the convoluted substance of what he says is less important than the hypnotic effect it has on Scully. It’s the latest broadcast from conspiracy-theorist talk-show host Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale). The only clue to her partner’s whereabouts is an open webpage on his computer. “You just have to know where to look.”Īnd look Scully does, prompted by Mulder’s absence when she gets into work one morning. “The answers are there,” she said to Mulder in the original series’ pilot episode. This time, it’s Scully recounting her work on the X-Files - how it challenged her faith in science and spirituality, even as it reinforced one of the core beliefs she’s clung to from the start of her career. “My Struggle II” opens with a monologue similar to the one in the season premiere. The season finale, written and directed by creator Chris Carter, plunges us straight into the portended abyss. ![]() Last week’s X-Files episode, “ Babylon,” ended with a sign from above. ![]()
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