X-Files S5E1: The best or worst drinking-game episode?

Sestra Amateur: 

First and foremost, all of the supporting characters who should have been in the Season 4 finale pop up in the Season 5 premiere. Second and … secondmost, I wonder whether anyone has access to the TV Guide that contains the first-run information for this episode, which aired 11/2/97. If it’s anything like Hulu’s description – “Mulder accesses a secret research facility…” – then the drama of his supposed suicide was just ignored altogether. So, big surprise, Fox isn’t dead. 

Time to flash back to Mulder crying and watching the NASA panel on his television set. The impact of a devastated Fox is muted by a Mulder voiceover. I think my attention span trails off every time they do that. Michael Kritschgau calls Mulder, who realizes someone is spying on him from the upstairs apartment. Fox struggles with the man who is his approximate height, weight and physical description. And now we know where the dead body in Fox's apartment came from.

Scully returns to her own home, where Mulder is waiting patiently for her. He identifies his voyeur as Department of Defense employee Scott Ostelhoff from the previous episode. Sculder review Ostelhoff’s phone records and realize he had frequent F.B.I. contact, but with whom? Fox's annoying voiceover carries over to Dana's identification of his body. Assistant Director Skinner intercepts Scully as she leaves and she again lies about dead Fox. Skinner claims it was a shotgun blast, which negates the suicide theory or at least makes it less plausible. I remember Mulder having a handgun, so I don’t know if Walter lied to test Dana.

Useless voiceover continues. Mulder accesses the Department of Defense building using Ostelhoff’s I.D. while Skinner and Scully (Skilly? … I am not calling them Skinny) meet with Section Chief Scott Blevins and two additional F.B.I. higher-ups. Dana admits to contact with Kritschgau, who approaches Fox in the D.O.D. building. He tells Mulder that Ostelhoff had Level 4 clearance so Fox can get, you know, the truth. Back in Mulder’s apartment, the maid hasn’t arrived to remove the blood stain from the carpet yet. Cigarette Smoking Man lets himself in, sees the surveillance hole in the ceiling and quickly puts two and two together. Scully learns Ostelhoff’s F.B.I. contact’s extension is Walter Skinner’s line, but shouldn’t she already know his number?

Kritschgau tells Fox how war motivates the United States and covers 50 years of history in about 60 seconds. Michael claims the line between science and science fiction doesn’t exist anymore. That’s a chilling thought. Kritschgau and Mulder are motivated by each wanting to save the life of someone close to them. Fox enters Level 4 but Michael gets detained by the military.

Outside, it’s a lovely day for a horse race. Cancer Man meets with “The Elder,” who claims Mulder is dead. CSM is perturbed because the Syndicate left him out of the loop regarding Fox's surveillance. Dana is back with Dr. Vitagliano, the scientist who analyzed the ice sample in the last episode. (I’m all for tributes and dedications, but Chris Carter is not making it easy with all of these non-traditional surnames!) Turns out, the cells are creating a new life form. 

And we’re back to the voiceover. I get the feeling Chris Carter includes them for himself because they don’t really add anything to the action, they don’t make the scenes more interesting and they seem rather self-serving. I’m OK with watching Mulder sneak around the D.O.D. with just Mark Snow’s score in the background because I’ve paid attention enough to know why Fox is there and what he’s doing. Although the one time they should have had Mulder’s voiceover say, “holy s***” -- when he sees a room filled with hundreds of possible alien life form corpses, he’s just speechless. And just as Fox inspects one of the possible corpses, it’s time for a Scully voiceover. Inside another room with strobes and reverberating sound effects, Mulder sees table after table of women who are displayed just like Dana when she was abducted.

Dr. Vitagliano takes a sample of Scully’s blood and she pushes him to get her results that same night (before her 7 p.m. appearance with the joint panel). Skinner spies on her and Dana calls him on it. They argue but Walter has the upper hand because he knows Scully lied about Fox's suicide during the official investigation. Maybe she can save herself without the “conspiracy, genetic evidence, blah blah blah” narrative. She doesn’t have to speculate about what Mulder has learned. He’s not really dead, Dana, pick up the phone! 

Fox makes his way into the Pentagon hidden archives, which resemble the world’s largest card catalog. Cancer Man is notified of “Ostelhoff’s” access to Level 4 and heads to the Pentagon while Scully continues performing genetic tests and finds a link. Mulder continues his walk through Level 4 and possibly finds a cure for Dana’s cancer. Scully prepares to blow open a conspiracy of global consequence, but it’s time for her joint panel appearance. Flash back to "Gethsemane" (Season 4, Episode 24)  and Dana's prior testimony. 

Meanwhile, Mulder is trying to get out of the Pentagon but Ostelhoff’s I.D. card has been deactivated. However, Cancer Man lets Fox escape without arresting him. Scully gets worked up as she tells the panel about Mulder’s suicide and claims to have proof of a link between her illness and the alien hoax. And just when she is about to reveal what she learned … she’s too weak to continue and falls into Skinner’s arms. At the same time, Mulder brings the “cure” to The Lone Gunmen, but it’s only deionized water. Here’s hoping next week’s episode will contain less pandering to the viewers. Voiceovers, be gone! By the way, I’ve decided the excessively expositional voiceovers were a necessary tool Carter used to reach and update a larger audience for the series as well as the upcoming movie. Sestra, does that theory hold (de-ionized) water? 

Sestra Professional:

Asked and answered ... the TV Guide description for the premiere was a close-up that more than gave away the details. "A Lie to Find the Truth: The fifth-season opener reveals events up to last season's cliffhanger, in which Scully (Gillian Anderson) announced that Mulder (David Duchovny) committed suicide. In fact, her report was a ploy to buy time." 

So good day and welcome to Season 5. I have to agree straight off with Sestra Am on a couple of fronts. The voiceover thing always gets my goat. Maybe because it's just considered lazy, or maybe because they're inherently verbose, prone to pontification and downright hokey. It just makes me roll my eyes. There's no better way to get this information across? Well, all right. Maybe it was indeed to clue in the growing legion of X-Files fans, but it's so heavy-handed.

That makes "Redux" tailor-made for a drinking game. Another "Scully originally assigned to the X-Files to debunk Mulder" reference, drink! A gulp for every voiceover, and it wouldn't take long to get completely crocked during this episode. A Dana narrative leads right into a Fox one? Down the bottle. It's way too much, particularly when Mulder explains how and why he's in the bowels of the Pentagon and his plans for getting out of there. This couldn't have been written by anyone but the show's creator/executive producer. 

My beliefs seem more and more improbable: When we rewatched "Gethsemane," I found myself, if not disappointed, then not particularly engaged. On a rewatch, we obviously knew Fox wasn't going to die, and there wasn't terribly much to keep us engrossed beyond that. "Redux" might have gone that way too, if a lot of the regulars hadn't been worked back into the mix. But how did Section Chief Blevins -- the guy who originally assigned Scully to the X-Files -- become such a major player? He's been kinda out of the loop for a while.

Dana's not kidding, folks. She's reallllly not happy to find Fox in her apartment. There go all the shippers' Season 1-4 pipe dreams. Mulder convinces Scully to lie to find the truth, as the quote TV Guide commandeered attests and the voiceover mentions again. No need to recap things we've just heard, even a brand-new viewer can hopefully retain information that long.

But it was strangely affecting to see Smoking Man weeping at what he initially thought was the loss of his son. However bizarre it was to have the series' greatest villain not in the Season 4 finale is more than made up for by his return in the Season 5 opener.

The business of America isn't business ... it's war: Kritschgau seems to be doing a take on Oliver Stone with his fully detailed look at how the conspiracy and covert operations progressed to this point. The Cold War got particularly frosty because the country was scarred by the McCarthy hearings and the government used Roswell UFO sightings to take attention away from the global concerns and further its covert cause. It continued on with the use of biochemicals in the Gulf War and unsuspecting citizens have been abducted -- and tested -- by the government, not aliens.

Love the introduction of Mark Snow's incidental theme music for our lead characters. We'll be hearing a lot of it in the upcoming seasons and it fits perfectly into the mix. He's proven as deft in the quiet moments as he has been with underscoring suspense. 

The American appetite for bogus revelation: The Skinner-Scully confrontations aren't working for me here, aside from the fact that Mitch Pileggi and Anderson are rocking them, performance-wise. That could just be a byproduct of knowing what happens in the future, but I thought the connection between those two -- and the agents, in general -- had progressed past this point. The business with the extension doesn't seem like proof, if it's not Walter's number (which Dana should know) then it's a bunch of digits that seemingly anyone could access. Scully herself has certainly seen Cancer Man in Skinner's office.

So Scully reports to the joint panel that her partner was a victim of his own false hopes and his belief in the biggest of lies and the plot was designed and executed to bring about both their demises. At its heart, that provides a great jump-start for the premise and the fifth season. Mulder no longer believes and the alleged proof the dynamic duo has been shown -- well, mostly Fox cause we know Dana usually doesn't get to see anything definitive -- was at the behest of the conspiracy. And if he finds the cure for her, that would seem to negate so much of his quest.

In The Complete X-Files, Kim Manners hypothesized that Mulder was Carter's alter ego. "I think David understood that because David played Mulder as Chris plays Chris. Mulder stayed very calm, cool and collected and that's very much how Chris Carter is in real life," the director said.

Guest star of the week: What a nifty way to get to see the lovely countenance of Julia Arkos once again. It's nice to renew ties with the little woman who kicked Skinner's ass in "Pusher" (S3E17). Holly's still a federal employee and she's utilized in the perfect way too, being tapped to access phone records for Scully. I just wish she was able to pop in again for similar assistance in future episodes as well.