I think my X-Fest experience is going to affect my reviews, but I’m not yet sure if it’ll be in a good way or a bad way. Maybe it falls under the umbrella of “knowledge is power.” Now that I’ve met some of the behind-the-scenes creative forces and managed to have one-on-one experiences with them (well, two-on-one since Sestra Pro was with me), maybe I will appreciate them more (or less). I guess we’ll have to see.This is the way to do a bottle episode. Chris Carter can keep his ongoing, ever-changing mythology, especially if he give us fun stand-alone episodes like this one. Plus, it gives us yet another original score from Mark Snow that perfectly fits the mood.
Scully meets Mulder outside an abandoned Maryland house on a foggy Christmas Eve night. (Funny how the fog looks more authentic in Vancouver than it does in Los Angeles.) Dana claims she’d rather be wrapping. Don’t you wish she really meant “rapping”? No one would see that coming. Fox claims he wants to go apparition-busting and tells Scully the tragic tale of Lyda and Maurice, the deceased homeowners. Mulder goes inside while Dana tries to leave, but she loses her car keys. Or did they get stolen?? It’s a moot point because Sculder get locked inside the “haunted” house. We could turn this episode into a drinking game -- one shot whenever Scully says she wants to go home, one beer every time she says she’s not scared, one glass of wine when she tries to rationalize a haunting with science. Wait, you’ll die of alcohol poisoning. Nevermind…Sculder enter the library, which was dark and empty before but is now well lit with a recently extinguished fire in the fireplace. Fox discloses how there have been three double murders in the house, all on Christmas Eve. You know, it is actions like this that can convince me Mulder doesn’t really like (or love) Dana: He brings her to the house on the one night she could be murdered?!?!
Fox discovers skeletal remains under the floorboards that are not only dressed like Sculder, they are Sculder! They bolt from the library and enter … the same room. They stupidly decide to split up and end up separated. (I realize that’s what happens when people split up, but clearly our intrepid heroes did not see that coming.)Mulder is bricked into the library. He meets an old man played by Lou Grant himself, Ed Asner, who is annoyed that an armed person broke into his house. Fox tries to show him the skeletons in the floor, but they’re gone. The old man zeroes in on Mulder’s personality soooo quickly. (“Are you overcome by the impulse to make everyone believe you?”) Fox tries to deny it, but you can see Maurice is getting to him.
Meanwhile, in the “other” bricked-in library, Scully finds an old lady – played by the truly original Lily Tomlin – who tries to convince her there are ghosts in the house. She messes with Dana’s head to the point that Scully threatens to shoot this lovely, unarmed couple. Luckily, Dana realizes something is amiss when she sees Lyda with a hole in her stomach and Maurice with a hole in his head. So how does she react? Scully faints dead away. Mulder is a little more accepting when he finally meets Lyda, who shows Fox the leather-bound story of their lives … well, deaths. Fox claims he won’t murder Dana or let her commit suicide. And they say romance is dead.
Scully regains consciousness only to have Maurice get to her with the truth about Mulder’s lonely, dark existence. Fox attempts to enter Dana's room while Scully forces Maurice at gunpoint to open the door. Mulder enters and shoots at his partner, who tries to talk him out of his psychosis. She fails and take a shot in the gut for her trouble. Just when he’s about to turn the gun on himself – well, Lyda-as-Mulder – Maurice stops him … her. The real Fox then enters the room and tends to Dana, who shoots Mulder in the chest with one bullet. But it’s actually Lyda-as-Scully because the woman gets around."Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" starts to play as Sculder leave bloody trails while crawling through the house. Our heroes have one final standoff (so to speak), but choose not to shoot each other. Then Fox realizes they’re not actually shot, it was just mind tricks. Even their white shirts are white again. They finally wise up and get the hell out of there. “Maurda” (Lyrice?) wax nostalgic about the evening in front of their fireplace.
Back in his lonely apartment, Mulder pathetically watches A Christmas Carol until Dana arrives unannounced. They talk it out and exchange gifts. Scully gives Fox a videocassette (you can hear it when he shakes it). I’ll bet it was that alien autopsy special Jonathan Frakes hosted in 1995. Either that or Scrooged so he can update his keep-acting-this-way-and-you’ll-end-up-alone video collection. Final note: It was a little disconcerting to watch and review the Christmas episode on the first day of summer (aka the longest day of the year). Too bad the summer has just begun.
Sestra Professional:
"How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" has long ranked near the very top of my list of episodes for the entire run. It's also a time-tested popular selection when Sibling Cinema considers which episode of The X-Files we should watch when we're together and not under the guise of the rewatch blog.
For me, the reason is two-fold: First, Chris Carter finally found his footing for bottle episodes. Between this and "Triangle" (the other Sibling Cinema top pick) a few episodes ago, he has stopped trying to write in the vein of Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan and really developed a style and language befitting the characters he created. Second, it's an acting showcase. We have David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who know Mulder and Sculder inside out by this point, matching up with legends Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin. It's particularly sweet how Carter's script mixes and matches them up over the course of the episode. And the actors apparently just had a field day with that.Speaking of firing on all cylinders, Mark Snow contributes a completely fitting score to the proceedings. At X-Fest, the master composer told us he thought he always hit at least an 8 on his own ranking scale and sometimes an 11. This one is definitely an 11 for me. Snow uses the harpsichord to add eeriness and heighten our anxiety. It's completely different from what we usually hear in the series and also feels different from other stories of this ilk.
It was a time of dark, dark despair: Mulder does unveil the story of the star-crossed lovers in a most convincing manner. The scene is beautifully shot by director of photography Bill Roe, I may add. Anyway, Maurice and Lyda made a murder-suicide pact that would enable them to spend all of eternity together. That story alone draws so many parallels between the ghosts and the heroes we've spent over six seasons with. Maurice, the brooding heroic figure, and Lyda, the sublime beauty, seem a lot like Fox and Dana to me.There's some discussion about Dana not believing in ghosts, but we've certainly covered that territory a few times during the series. What about when you saw your father's image around the time of his passing back in Season 1, Episode 13, Scully? Dana offers up some of her usual rationality with talk about how people conjure up ghosts because they need to believe in something beyond this mortal coil and don't want to be without their loved ones. She deems it the essence of being human in general and of Christmas specifically.
What a majestic set Mulder and Scully find themselves trapped in -- and in the case of the mummified bodies, under. (Credit production designer Corey Kaplan for that.) But Fox is right, Dana. They really have been in scarier circumstances than these, it's funny to us and unusual but perhaps appropriate for her to become exceedingly unhinged by a creepy house with a disappearing staircase and identical rooms.
Most people would rather stick their finger into a wall socket than spend a minute with you: Maurice's analysis of Mulder hits pretty close to home. Before he blew a hole in his head, Maurice was in the field of mental health dealing with a lot of people who fall into the category of narcissistic, overzealous, self-righteous egomaniac. Sound like anyone we know? He goes on to detail Fox as single-minded and prone to obsessive compulsiveness, workaholicism and antisocialism. And he warns that if Mulder keeps chasing paramasturbatory illusions to give his life meaning that he's heading for a "total wacko breakdown." Speaking of that kind of descent, Dana's pretty much lost it before she encounters her first ghost, Lyda. I know I'd hate it if corpses under the floor disappeared, though. And then to be told she has a small life chasing things she doesn't believe in had to be a tough blow. Hmmm, intimacy through co-dependence. That has kind of a true ring to it as well. The Death Becomes Her holes in Maurice and Lyda's persons were too much for the overly analytical mind to take, I suppose.
I don't show my hole to just anyone: Another of the reasons this story fares so well is because Carter does have some interesting theories to posit when it comes to the idea of the star-crossed lovers. He blows a hole in Scully's theory about people needing the ghosts to look the same as they did in life. Carter's script dismisses the poetic illusions, although if the romance was the first thing to go for the ghosts, we see the bond they forged in life still remains in death. And Lyda-as-Mulder's line about "365 shopping days to even more loneliness" provides a sad insight that none of us probably want to consider.Metaphysical mashing: In The Complete X-Files, Anderson recalled how much fun the dynamic duo's non-stop bickering was in this show. ... In the official episode guide, Kaplan said the plan was to make it like the one-set My Dinner with Andre and save some production money in the process. ... Kaplan won an award of excellence from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors for this ep. ... According to the guide, Tomlin was a longtime fan of the show who met with Carter about two years before he wrote Lyda for her. He had Bob Newhart originally in mind for Maurice, but the comedian didn't want to do the role. So Asner was tapped and blew everyone away with his performance. ... Maurice tells Fox he knows people at the ACLU. Of course, Asner does as well as a longtime activist. ... So Fox's present was a videotape, but what the heck did he give Dana? That question has baffled fans for decades. ... Oh, and Mulder, you were never shot first in any scenario.
Guest stars of the week: Like I can choose between Asner and Tomlin. Both of them ensure Maurice and Lyda's story is indeed well told. They match wits with our leads so well, voice fans' sentiments -- well, we probably wouldn't thought of "paramasturbatory" -- and play off each other just perfectly.
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