The X-Files mini-series bows out with another mythology-led episode – a pandemic conspiracy of convenience that, like its title, proves a struggle to get through….
After discovering that her own DNA has been somehow re-coded following her abduction years before, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) comes to realise that what seemed like a bizarre curse may yet be a blessing. Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale), the cable-show conspiracy-theorist that Mulder and Scully met several weeks before, resurfaces on the internet – claiming that there’s a recent surge in diseases is being caused by the alien DNA in everyone’s genetic make-up. The hospitals to begin to fill up as word spreads. Even agents such as Einstein and Miller begin to feel the effects. Scully seems unaffected… but there’s no sign of Mulder (David Duchovny). Her partner, not sharing Scully’s immunity, is busy facing off against his nemesis who tells Mulder of his global endgame at last…
And so we reach the end of the current X-Files mini-series and we do so with a bookend to the revamp’s troubled opening episode, My Struggle – imaginatively entitled My Struggle II.
It’s not a promising start – everything before the opening credits also shares a similar format to the first episode’s reminders: a muddled montage of a decade of the The X-Files’ conflicting conspiracy-arcs complete with convenient episode publicity-shots pretending to be an actual file… and Dana Scully providing the exposition in the mannerism of an official report. It’s the kind of slanted delivery – and let’s be blunt, Chris-Carter-penned dialogue – that often infuriates viewers and comes laden like a laundry-list of googled global grievances and imaginary lines between distorted National Geographic references. It continues throughout the episode with Anderson ( a consummate actress when given the right circumstances) having to deliver tortuously-convoluted words and concepts like a dry thesis. ‘It’s all too plausible…‘ sighs Scully, surrounded by patients and talk of aliens… and doing so in a manner which is convincingly implausible to even the most casual viewer. After all, the idea of a global pandemic, caused by alien DNA, which so panics Scully and a growing section of the public, comes from a cable chat-show host who we’ve already been told has less credibility than Glenn Beck. Would you head down to the local medical facility because of ‘aliens’ if Beck told you to? (Well, okay, maybe if it was Jon Stewart…)
THE X-FILES: L-R: Robbie Amell and Lauren Ambrose with Gillian Anderson in the season finale episode of THE X-FILES ©2016 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Ed Araquel/FOX
There’s a huge effort made to tie-in as much mythology as possible and it comes like an avalanche of half-heartedly conceived fan-fiction, eager to leave no turn unstoned. Miller and Einstein (Amell and Ambrose reprising last week’s roles) run interference but provide little more than needless, hapless targets for exposition. William B Davis is back at the Cigarette-Smoking Man – shown to have been burned to a crisp but surviving his previous on-screen ‘demise’ like a phantom of the soap-opera… and once again somehow forced to smoke through a tracheotomy-tube in his throat (yet miraculously able to talk normally when required). What he has to say is pantomime dialogue only just resisting a full-on ‘Bwahahaha‘ and moustache-twirling. One-time series replacement Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) unexpectedly brings Dana a clue and talks of where she’s been for a decade though there’s no sign of her own X-Files partner, Robert Patrick who was probably busy having far, far more fun with his Scorpion duties over on CBS.
When it comes to end-of-the-world portents and pandemics, Carter explored something of a similar-theme in The X-Files underrated sister-series Millennium… and did so in SO much better form. The degree of pseudo-science – even for a show about alien invasions – is breathtakingly silly here. Scully talks of ‘amplifying DNA’ to beat the existing, fragile human DNA that has been coded to create a breakdown of infection-resistance on a certain date.(Seriously?) The Scully that die-hard fans know and love would have been more than capable of explaining, even in layman’s terms, why that’s not what the human genome nor any disease does. It’s all… well, a bit silly… convenient, unquestioning apocalyptic nonsense with no connective tissue to warrant or excuse it.
Like a conspiracy theorist with his foot on some mythological pedal, the episode barrels along with an avalanche of quickie, incoherent claims and little recourse for logic – Mulder and Scully are separated so there’s not even their chemistry to save it. And the final scenes, while pure X-Files in style, offer nothing but unapologetic bait for a renewal from Fox … all for a show that hasn’t really earned it and which has ironically painted itself into a corner which makes it all the more compromised and unable to continue as we know it.
This ‘Best of….‘ mini-series has been scattershot at best – sometimes scoring points with the faithful and hopeful, but all too often merely playing to the nostalgic cheap-seats and gesticulating widely in hope of looking enigmatic. This finale is no different and while it has been good to see Mulder and Scully in action again, it’s been disappointing to see how casually this reanimation experiment has been presented. It’s largely Carter’s fault, the worst of the recent run being when he was the man in charge of camera and keyboard.
A renewal could still be out there given the decent ratings, but if so, it will be generated by financial rather than creative imperatives. If neither Duchovny or Anderson can muster palpable enthusiasm on-screen and Carter can’t bring himself to rein in his preaching monologues and provide us with legitimate answers by the time the credits roll, maybe it’s time the X-Files were left out there for good.
6/10
