Sestra Amateur:
The struggle continues – literally and figuratively – as the Season 10 finale circles back to the season’s first episode. Remember Tad O’Malley? Sveta? The return of Cigarette Smoking Man? Yeah, I forgot most of it too. But let’s dive in and refresh your memory so you can forget again until we rewatch "My Struggle III."
Unfortunately, the episode begins with a Dana Scully monologue and anyone who actually reads this blog knows how I feel about those. (Hey, I just plagiarized myself!) Doctor/Agent Scully is condensing 10 years of conspiracy theory episodes into a couple of minutes, while we view photographic evidence of the incidents she’s recalling. (Could you imagine if someone actually took pictures of these very private Scully moments: Dana abducted and tied up in a car trunk, Dana unconscious on a hospital bed, Dana being impregnated...) Then the special effects team morphs Dr. Scully into an alien and somehow the show has my attention again. But the biggest lie of all soon appears: Instead of reading “The Truth Is Out There,” we get “This Is The End.” You be the judge if you think it should have ended here or whether Chris Carter needed another season to dig his way out of the hole he created with Sculder.
Special Agent Dana Scully is watching the latest inflammatory video by Tad O’Malley. It’s been six weeks since he went off the air and Sveta was killed. He’s no longer in hiding and he’s now claiming every American citizen has some alien DNA inside them. Scully answers when Tad calls Special Agent Fox Mulder’s office phone. He tells her to come to Fox’s home, which has been ransacked.
Mulder’s nowhere to be found, so Dana involves the local police and Assistant Director Walter Skinner, who’s hanging with Agent Einstein, the alternate “Scully” agent we met in the previous episode. Einstein naively believes no one can tamper with DNA. I guess she never read Jurassic Park. (Yes, I know it’s fiction. Yes, I know it’s about dinosaurs. Just let it go.) Drs. Scully and Einstein head to Dana’s other employers, Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, where they encounter a sweaty, confused man who’s clearly sick. Meanwhile, Fox, who looks like he joined a fight club and keeps losing, is driving to an unknown location and ignoring Skinner’s phone calls.
Dana takes Einstein’s blood and explains how the anomaly in Scully’s blood is, by definition, alien. (Here on The X-Files, people always jump to the “extraterrestrial” definition instead of the generically accurate “strange” definition.) Einstein still isn’t on board, but lets Scully take a blood sample. (I wonder how nu-Scully would have felt about COVID-19 vaccines.) Einstein’s partner Agent Miller arrives to help with the Mulder search and to share the news that O’Malley’s conspiracy theories about killer viruses are gaining traction on the Internet. Based on their encounter with the sweaty, confused man who is a military soldier, Dana thinks it’s already begun. She believes the man has anthrax, something from which he was inoculated when he deployed to Iraq. If Dr. Scully is correct, whatever people have been vaccinated against, that’s what’s going to make them sick. She desperately calls Fox, who continues driving south and ignoring his phone.
But you know what’s really bugging me about this episode? Mulder’s laptop in his FBI office. It’s not locked. The man who was on the TrustNo1 bandwagon for 10 years (except for Scully, and even that wasn’t 100 percent of the time) leaves a signed-in laptop open and unlocked on his desk?! So convenient when Miller uses Fox’s phone finder app to locate him in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Forced plot contrivances still run rampant on The X-Files.
Team Danica meet and Monica admits she left the FBI 10 years earlier because she made some not-so-great choices. Flashbacks show her being called to the bedside of one badly burned Cigarette Smoking Man, who claims to be the most powerful man in the world. His power? To depopulate the planet while the chosen few live. So Monica chose to stick around as CSM’s lackey, hoping he won’t use his weapon, but slightly comforted by the knowledge she (and Scully) are protected.
Tad continues to expose his conspiracy theories, which seem to be coming true but still sound so freakin’ wacky. The hospitals are overwhelmed and losing main power. Einstein gets information but not any help from the Center for Disease Control. Dana, based on information from Monica, hopes to use her protected blood to save others from the “Spartan Virus.” Too bad the hospital doctors are now getting sick too. In fact, poor O'Malley and his crew are also ill. So are Miller and Mulder.
Miller doesn’t seem amused by Cancer Man and rescues Fox. CSM follows them outside with a gun but instead of shooting them, he tells Miller to tell Mulder goodbye for him. Back in the hospital, Scully is working alone to create the serum since Einstein is feverish. Miller calls Dana to let her know he has Fox and is heading her way. Scully finishes the cure and prepares doses for Einstein and the other doctors. O’Malley laments mankind going out with a whimper.
Scully tries to stop looting and encourages people to go to the hospitals for vaccines. She’s trying to get to Mulder but the roads are gridlocked. Miller and Fox are back in the D.C. area but they’re stuck in traffic. Dana finds them but thinks Mulder is too sick for her serum to save him. He needs stem cells from William, the son she gave up for adoption. But before she can even try to figure out where to start looking for him, a UFO appears because, you know, this is The X-Files.
Sestra Professional:My best memory of watching "My Struggle II" for the first time involves being one of the first to comment on social media about the episode's opening teaser posted during the halftime show of the 2016 Super Bowl. I had the top post on the official X-Files Facebook page, and someone from the XF team even responded to me. As it was a literal teaser, it didn't stay on the site long, disappearing like Monica Reyes' drive and determination to the annals of time.
"My Struggle II" just continuously reminded me of when and how the show used to do everything so much better. Like Sestra Am, I don't really like voiceover monologues as a plot device. Even in the heyday, they were clunky and overutilized big words no one ever uses on a day-to-day basis. I did think Morris Fletcher's in 'Dreamland II" (Season 6, Episode 5) was pretty stellar, though. Nevertheless, I did recognize the beginning teasers as serviceable tools for the greater good. Dana's to start this episode? It was just basically a more colorful way of doing "Previously on," which was also tacked on there anyway. Oh well, it had been a while since someone used the word "debunk."
So while every tried-and-true X-Files fan -- and even the most casual observer -- knew of the history that brought Scully to this point, the idea of morphing her head into an alien was something that wasn't on our radar. Here I'll insert a special caveat for any artist/fanfic writer who had done such a thing. What I mean there is just based on the standard viewing habits of your common household X-phile. I do wish the alien head was a little more shadowy, as though shown in a dearth of light, and didn't rely so heavily on CGI.
Long ago, seemingly in a galaxy far away, the mythology stories used to be the ones the fan base waited on. Whatever the Cigarette Smoking Man and his cronies were up to, that was what we wanted to see, and all the monster episodes were just stopgaps between the greater story. For me, that ended somewhere in the sixth season. I was watching more for the bottle episodes, and rolling my eyes when the Syndicate played into the action. Note: I did give it more of a pass when Alex Krycek was around, but those appearances got more sporadic as Nicholas Lea got his own series work.
The biggest failing of "My Struggle II" is the absence of Mulder and Scully together on the canvas for most of the show. In fact, there's kind of an overall dearth of Fox period. That
was all fine and dandy for Season 9, it doesn't play as well in a six-episode revival. David Duchovny does get to show off what fine shape he was still in
during a fight scene that brings Mulder back into his real father's orbit. But Sestra Am made a fine point about Fox's computer and phone tracker earlier, these are certainly not footprints such a paranoid personality would leave behind.
I made certain choices: And the second biggest failing would have to be the change that's come over Monica Reyes in the ensuing years. Even with the alleged flashback to how she joined forces with Cigarette Smoking Man, we're missing the person I once deemed as the most forthright straight shooter in the
show's history through the end of the regular run. This person bears little resemblance to that woman, although I suppose we get a glimmer of it in the fact that Reyes clues Scully in on what's actually going on.
This episode makes better use of Dana than we've seen in some time, although it's a little surprising she can't recognize the voice of the woman who delivered her baby on the phone. After discerning that something may have been given to each and every human being who got a smallpox vaccine, Scully listens to Einstein's input, she doesn't discount her outright. Dana is working the problem, and unlike the way Fox would play it, she does take Einstein's theory that something is being removed from DNA and not added into account.
When this first aired, the possibility of measles, mumps, rubella ... basically anything and everything at the same time seemed like some scary but outrageous science fiction. But now in the wake of coronavirus and all its variants with monkey pox coming up behind it, it seems downright prescient. I'm longing for the days when all our heroes were called upon to do was clear a building under a bomb threat.
You don't want to believe: I'm willing to buy Cigarette Smoking Man's premise of depopulating the planet with science given by aliens. Of course, there's the trademark pontifications penned by Chris Carter (with assistance from science advisor Anne Simon and Margaret Fearon) about how the hottest year on record, bird population and decimation of megafauna has nothing to do with CSM's machinations. I'm not quite sure why the master manipulator would want to restart the world with the two people who have given him the most trouble, I guess he's assuming they would fall in line the way Reyes ridiculously did.
I was today years old when I put together how close the words Dana and DNA are to each other. That seems like something I should have picked up on eons again. Scully realizes what needs to be done to literally save a world suffering from widespread depleted and/or disappeared immune systems. It all gets a little too scientific for me. Even with my advanced Orphan Black genome knowledge, the explanation starts to elude my grasp.
What I do understand is the advice to stay indoors. If only all these people had masked up and worked from home. We had knee-jerk reactions to that happening when COVID shut everything down, but it prevented an even more pervasive kind of spread happening on this episode.
And that brings us to the climactic scene. You would think Scully would try to treat Mulder with the IV she brought with her while trying to solve the greater problem of locating their child for his stem cells. But there was no time for that ultimately, as a UFO dramatically appears overhead. I didn't consider it a godsend when the episode originally aired. I thought it was the aliens having intel on what was needed and appearing at that moment. As we'll soon find out, it wasn't that. It was ... other.
Guest star of the week: When the revival started, Joel McHale gave the proceedings a jump-start with the forthright decisiveness of Tad O'Malley. We recognized his character from an array of conspiracy theorists we inevitably run across in our daily lives. That made it all the more impactful as the reality of the situation dawned upon Tad here.
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