Be prepared, it’s another voice-over ep. That practice usually doesn’t fare so well, but I guess it depends on whether it’s exposition or recitation. At the beginning of the episode, Mulder is standing in a field, staring at old photographs with the saddest look on his face. Considering the title of the episode is "The Field Where I Died," it makes you wonder who he’s talking about … or for. (I know I could avoid ending with a preposition but to write "for or about whom he’s talking" just seemed really stuffy for this blog.)
Now we’re at the Temple of the Seven Stars in Apison, Tennessee at the crack of dawn as the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raid the place looking for cult leader Vernon Ephesian and his cache of illegal weapons. After the forced entry, Mulder is drawn to a nearby field. He somehow locates Vernon and his wives hiding in a storm cellar and preparing to literally drink the Kool-Aid. No weapons, though, so the raid is a bust -- at least by the Feds’ standards. And Assistant Director Skinner is concerned because they can’t find their informant, Sidney. During the interrogation, Scully has little patience for Vernon, who uses the Bible to justify his Jim Jones and David Koresh-like views. Sculder then interview wife No. 1 Melissa (Wife No. 4? Wife No. 5? No one really knows.) She soon exhibits Sidney-like traits. It’s not a typical split personality situation, though. Melissa seems to be reliving a past life. Fox argues the multiple personality theory to Walter, not the past life one. Dana thinks the trigger is Melissa/Sidney’s concern for the safety of the children at the compound.
Skinner gives Sculder some leeway to get more answers from Melissa, so they take her back to the compound. Melissa turns into Lily, a scared little girl who can touch her tongue to her nose. (Does that mean Melissa and Sidney can do that too?) Sidney makes an appearance and leads Sculder back to the field. Now she’s a nurse named Sarah in the Confederate Army in 1863. She claims Fox was there with her and he died in that field. At least Mulder managed to have a non-Scully romantic relationship in one of his lives. Our heroes argue about Sarah’s claims on the way to a regression therapist’s office. Sidney comes out during the session to talk about the guns, but Mulder wants Melissa back. Her nurse persona isn’t very helpful this time around, so Fox goes under himself. He says Samantha is his son in this past life. He adds Scully to the mix by claiming she was his father. And, of course, Cancer Man is there as a Nazi officer. (They’re now playing fast and loose with the timeline, depending on how old Cancer Man is supposed to be on this show.) Mulder’s wallowing in his past lives and is of no use to Scully, so she goes to the Hall of Records – at 4:12 a.m., mind you – to try and locate the bunker through old battle plans. She can’t resist peeking at the county register and finds the names and photographs of Fox and Melissa’s former selves.
Mulder tries to convince Melissa, but she’s not buying it. She tears up Sarah’s picture and returns to the compound with her crazy husband. Ephesian's not happy to see the ATF still creeping around the fields surrounding his home. Luckily, the Feds bugged his temple and hear Vernon is again preparing his disciples for mass suicide. ATF agents try to make contact, but some of the men shoot at the agents while everyone else – except Sidney – drinks the Kool-Aid. Ephesian, bastard that he is, has a glass waiting for Melissa when she wakes up. Fox runs into the compound and finds dozens of dead bodies, including Vernon and Melissa, who is holding Sarah’s picture in her dead hand. And now we know why Mulder looked so sad in the beginning.The writers tried a little too hard with this one. Shippers must have been livid to learn Scully technically isn’t Mulder’s multi-life soul mate; Melissa the one-and-done wonder is. And Sestra, does Fox ever refer to his past lives again? Considering how many familiar people in his current life supposedly crossed his path over the past lives, you’d think Mulder would become addicted to regression therapy, using that science as a means to get as much information and as many answers as he can, when it’s nearly impossible for him to get “the truth” in his present time. Although I would love to know who The Lone Gunmen would have been in Fox's past lives.
Sestra Professional:
Dead right, Sestra. Even before the modern-day social media enabled fans to share their thoughts .2 seconds after they had them, the disdain for "The Field Where I Died" was palpable. Back then, it was largely done via online mailing lists and message boards, but the assertion that Mulder had a different soul mate was jarring to a large cross-section of the population.
Even no-romos seemed to have trouble with that concept. I'll admit I wasn't a huge fan of the episode myself.I've changed my tune on a couple of fronts. It doesn't help to start off the episode with voiceover of Robert Browning's poem "Paracelsius." It feels pretentious. I'm sure that was meant to help get viewers into this show's serious nature -- this is not gonna be a traditional Mulder quipfest -- but it's jarring and a little off-putting.
But I can get behind this central idea -- the compound and the suicide pact were interesting and relevant concepts for the time and place. Ephesian's a monster that we may not know personally, but that we've heard of. It's not the most far-fetched idea we've run across in The X-Files to have a man who comes off as smarmy to us exhibiting control over eight impressionable women and the others in his compound.
It's an unusual sell to have Sarah standing in the middle of field for a large part of the second act, with Mulder and Scully just listening and reacting to her like we do. But it's not a wrong move -- as Darin Morgan expanded the boundaries of the show with comedy, so too do Glen Morgan and James Wong in this more serious vein. The writers returned to the fold in the fourth season with more on their minds than doling out monster-of-the-week episodes. And this particular episode must have given Carter confidence enough to entrust them with the Millennium reins for Season 2.
Sculder spend long portions of time listening to what Melissa has to say in her various incarnations, and when they're not doing that, they're kind of arguing between themselves about Fox believing too much and Dana believing too little. They certainly don't seem to be displaying a soul mate-sort of connection. Morgan and Wong made it more like a family-type bond thing by design.We will live again: "Evil returns as evil." "Souls mate eternal." "We're always taken away." In truth, and after having watched Cloke do a similar scene, Mulder's hypnosis begets more from the words than David Duchovny's performance. It's almost hurtful to consider Scully not only the male authority figure in two of Mulder's lives, but also dead in both of them. Plus, uh, this hypnosis thing is really not helping out the case at all.
"The Field Where I Died" is definitely an alternate universe. Here, Dana gets to make the quips. When asked about how she might have altered her life if she knew she'd be with the same people, she delivers this trope: "Even if I knew for certain, I wouldn't change a day. Well, maybe that Flukeman thing. I could have lived without that just fine."
Meta blockers: I gotta "awwww" here. "It was just my feelings about Kristen," Glen Morgan said of writing the episode in The Complete X-Files. "We got engaged about a week before she went up to shoot it." ... In the official fourth-season episode guide, Cloke said Morgan was heavily influenced by a love story told in Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series. ... Two more of Melissa's personalities wound up on the cutting-room floor since 18 minutes needed to be taken out of the original cut, according to the episode guide. ... Vernon Ephesian's name is a combination of David Koresh's real first name and a title from the Bible. ... Gillian Anderson didn't have any problem with the story, saying in the episode guide that the script made her cry. "And the concept of Dana and Fox meeting in a past life -- it's something that, for once, I'd truly love to believe," she said. ... Not so much Entertainment Weekly, Morgan has often alluded to the fact that it's the only episode The X-Files-loving magazine gave an "F" to. (You're right about that 'ending with a preposition' thing too, Sestra.)
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