Sestra Amateur:
Finally, a Latin phrase I can understand without Google Translate: Amor Fati = Love of Fate. David Duchovny’s fingerprints are all over this one. He really does love when Fox Mulder is the center of attention. Mrs. Mulder is finally on the scene. Unfortunately, Fox can only read her thoughts, not communicate with her telepathically. Cancer Man is bedside too. He is able to communicate with his mind and injects something into Mulder’s temple. CSM also gives him a reality check – and the ability to walk out of the hospital room. Of course he also throws a Vader-esque caveat at Luke … I mean Fox.
Kritschgau wakes up Scully and gives a recap that’ll surely catch up the non-regular viewers. Sculgau don’t work very well together, but Dana gets called to Fox’s bedside by assistant director Skinner. She’s put in charge of locating Fox because Walter is still compromised. Meanwhile, Mulder and Cancer Man are road-tripping to an unknown location. Since it’s raining, the windows are up. So shouldn’t the car be filled with smoke due to that incessant chain-smoking? CSM drops off Fox at his new home in Suburbia, which includes a fridge fully stocked with sunflower seeds.
His first houseguest is Deep Throat, who was presumably shot and killed way back in the Season 1 finale (Episode 24: "The Erlenmeyer Flask"). For once, Deep Throat agrees with Cancer Man: Mulder is not the center of the universe. DT claims to have a happy life in the neighborhood with his wife and daughters. Mulder’s next houseguest is Diana Fowley. It’s pretty telling that he envisions himself in bed wearing handcuffs while Diana strolls in wearing a black nightgown and sporting a handcuff key. I think Duchovny took a little too much inspiration from his Red Shoe Diaries days.
Dana has a houseguest too, but she thinks it’s a burglar. Luckily for her, it’s Albert Hosteen, who was last seen attending a healing ceremony two episodes ago (S6E22: "Biogenesis"). While Scully reviews the video surveillance of Mulder’s departure, she sees Teena Mulder talking with Cancer Man. Dana still can’t reach Mrs. Mulder, but she receives an anonymous gift at FBI headquarters -- a textbook called Native American Beliefs & Practices. Crackerjack security in that place, knowing an unmarked package can be hand-delivered to a basement office without any screening. Did I mention the “alien” language from the alien spaceship last seen on the Ivory Coast is on the book’s cover?
Scully flips to Chapter 3: The Anasazi, which was last addressed in the Season 2 finale bearing that name. Apparently, there is a link between the Anasazi (“the ancient aliens” – an Indian tribe that disappeared 600 years ago) and the Sixth Extinction. Dana thinks it came from Walter and spills her guts. But he has an office guest who causes a diversion and escapes. (It has to be Krycek … no one else would wear a wig that awful.)
Back in Suburbia, Mulder realizes domestic bliss isn’t for him and he wants to confront Cancer Man. Luckily, CSM is also a neighbor. Fox and Diana walk to his house and Mulder finally sees his sister, Samantha, who lives across the street. Finally, he has a perfect existence. Of course, it’s only in his mind. The real Fox Mulder is unconscious and strapped down in a lab somewhere while CSM and Fowley observe him. The newfound abilities killing Mulder may also keep him safe from the upcoming viral apocalypse. (Insert ill-timed coronavirus joke here.)
Scully confronts Kritschgau and is livid that he sent her alien ship photos to the National Institute of Health. She deletes them from his computer but fails to delete them from the recycle bin. Document Recovery 101, Dana. Scully confronts Fowley at FBI headquarters but gets nowhere. Dream-world Mulder’s life has taken a dark turn: He married Diana, got older and attended her funeral. Cancer Man connects with Fox’s dream world, where Duchovny is sporting the worst “old man” makeup job since Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands. Cancer Man wants to see what a little boy on the beach has been trying to show Mulder. Turns out, this boy (little Fox?) made a sand replica of the spaceship found on the Ivory Coast.
Dana confronts Albert at her house when she is unable to locate Mulder. (Scully has a whole lotta confrontin’ going on in this episode.) Since science has led her nowhere, he suggests she pray. The surgeons work on Fox, who refuses to stay under. He looks pleadingly at Diana and she leaves the operating room. In the dream world, Cancer Man is at Old Man Mulder’s deathbed. Everyone Fox loves is dead and CSM tries to convince him to let go. Too bad dream-world Mulder doesn’t realize Cancer Man never aged a day.
Outside dream-world Fox's room, the alien apocalypse has taken place and everything is destroyed. (Keep a happy thought, Mulder.) And let’s not forget about Krycek, who has been a busy little soldier boy. He shot and killed Kritschgau, burned the files, and thankfully, torched that horrible wig. He also stole Michael's laptop and had zero regard for the other occupants of Kritschgau’s apartment building by setting the fire. There’s no redeeming that one.
Scully wakes from her prayer-induced nap and finds a Department of Defense security card slid under her door. She now knows where Mulder is. Thank you, Diana. Dream-world Fox finally gets to see Dana, who tears him a new one. That’s just what he needed to hear. Real-world Scully finds Mulder post-op. Everyone who participated in the surgery just left him abandoned on the operating table. (Does that mean the surgery to remove the cranial tissue from Fox and transplant it into CSM was a success?)
One week later Scully, who’s sporting a new 'do, checks on a now-normal Mulder. He tells Dana that Albert Hosteen died two weeks earlier. So if Albert visited her, he was there spiritually, not physically, to help Sculder. Diana Fowley is also dead, but there’s no way she died as peacefully as Albert. Our heroes have a touching moment in which they refer to each other as constants and touchstones. All of this in the front doorway of Mulder’s apartment. Invite her in, Fox! She’s not a “vampire” like Cancer Man. And did anyone ever reach Teena Mulder?? Maybe someone should check on her welfare too.
Sestra Professional:
I have many problems with "Amor Fati," but before I start pointing them out, may I first remind the jury that I am not a shipper. I'm not particularly a no-romo either, just not someone who wants the love relationship to be front and center when viewing The X-Files.
As Sestra Am pointed out, David Duchovny's handiwork is evident in the script for the sequel to the seventh-season opener. He's got some interesting ideas about the character he's played for more than six years and a movie. In "The Sixth Extinction," we only saw the outside of Mulder and what he's going through. Now we get a look at the inside, and it's a hot mess.
The child is father to the man: Fox is hearing the inner-most thoughts of those around him. They're not big shocks. Mom just wants him to come out of his catatonia and Cigarette Smoking Man wants him to die ... or does he? Well, he just wants Mulder's martyr component to go away. It's not shocking that new dad Duchovny would work parental dynamics into the mix. Oh, the long-awaited confirmation that CSM is his dad. Well, we all suspected it, so that's the latest remnant of the mythology show creator Chris Carter's been hawking since the beginning to be taken care of.
Teena Mulder and Krycek are totally wasted in this episode. Mama comes in to fret over her son, we don't find out a lot more because of the convenient excuse that she can't be found. Fox doesn't mention her in his dream world. Meanwhile, Krycek attacks Skinner with his hand-held bot machine and seemingly kills Kritschgau. Rebecca Toolan and Nicholas Lea were misused here more than Mitch Pileggi has been for quite a while, and that's saying something.
Before Kritschgau gets fast-tracked to the great beyond, he pulls some of the pieces of our story together, harkening back to the black oil that Mulder was infected with in "Tunguska" and "Terma" (S4E7-8). That's as slick as the oil itself and a deft touch in an episode that could have used more of them. He tacks on that Fox has become biologically alien. That's probably not what Mulder was striving for when he started his quest.
Extraordinary men are always most tempted by the most ordinary things: Cancer Man claims he knows what's going on in Fox's dream world -- the subconscious "witness protection program" -- and he explains it to a tee. Calling Mulder "a man without a name" just like himself is a pretty good dig, even as the nemesis urges Fox to love life's simple pleasures. This is where I think the script could have taken a little more care with the story. It's about halfway through the episode before the reveal that Fox Mulder is strapped down on a table -- that pose is a little too Jesus-like, don't you think? -- with CSM and Fowley moralizing around him. If we knew that earlier, it might be easier to stomach their dominating presences in his alternate world.
So on to the sickening image of Mulder making the first move on Diana, drawing her into a kiss with the promise of more. It feels wrong. If we had a cutaway to Fowley lingering over Fox, I could totally buy that. You know how they see dreams are affected by things going around us as we sleep? In that kind of way. Diana tells him that he's lived life as a child and won't know responsibility until he becomes a father. Duchovny's first child, daughter Madelaine, was born in April 1999. "Amor Fati" first aired on Nov. 14, 1999. So Fox and Diana propagate, and Mulder gets the added bonus of finding out his neighbor is his other biggest quest -- his sister, Samantha.
I'm always thinking: I would have liked a bigger and better confrontation scene between Fowley and Scully. Interesting that Diana blames Dana, but Scully telling her just to think of what Fox was like when they first met doesn't seem like a real impetus for her chucking it all and fighting for Mulder. Nor does her contention that Fox should have been given a choice to come to the dark side.
There were some cool snippets in the dream world -- the quick cuts from wedding to baby to aging to Diana's death with Cancer Man looking the same as everyone ages around him. That last part seems like an apt Fox fear. Totally agree with Sestra Am that the aging makeup was god-awful. I'll draw my analogy within our X-Files universe to "Dod Kalm" (S2E19) with Sculder's health and welfare declining on a crumbling ship.
Traitor. Deserter. Coward: So where has Scully been the whole time in the dream world? Mulder goes through a list of people before he mentions Dana. Again, if we had a catalyst for that -- here's where cutaways to CSM and Diana again could have been used to great effect -- it might have had more of an impact. Eventually she does get to make her appearance and pull Fox back from the brink. That's why he couldn't ask for her sooner, but it doesn't make it any more reasonable.
"Amor Fati" clears away a lot of old business -- Skinner keeps outing himself on the Krycek front ... there's no more Albert ... bye, bye, Fowley ... ouch, Kritschgau, that must have hurt. Even the Jesus wig is history. And speaking of hair, Scully's new do? Eh, I hate it. It's too bad we couldn't have an excuse for that too, like CSM singeing some of her hair or something.
Guest star of the week: Giving it to Jerry Hardin, who offers us a variation on Deep Throat different than the man we've come to know and love. As Sestra Am said, he was only around in body for one season, but he's recurred a couple of times in spirit after that to help Mulder get his groove back. Here he's tapped to do the opposite, to get Fox to buy into the dreamworld myth. Hardin's subtle shift in performance does the trick.
Sestra Amateur:
Good news, you only had to wait two weeks to hear outcome of the Season 6 cliffhanger, not six months like first-run fans endured back in 1999. Scully is narrating her tale on the Ivory Coast of West Africa, but it sounds more like a love letter than a case summary for her partner. Dana is experiencing some weird phenomena -- she sees an African tribal man in a reflection and her tent is overrun with locusts. Hate when that happens.
Back in the Georgetown psych ward, Mulder’s extremely high brain function won’t let him sleep, so he’s left in a padded room. (I wonder how much time has passed from last ep to this one. Scully narrates like she’s been on the Ivory Coast for weeks, but Fox barely needs a shave.) Assistant director Skinner visits and Mulder-with-the-blank-stare attacks him. The staff sedates Fox, but Mulder managed to give Walter a tiny note written in blood: “Help me.” (How did Fox write it so precisely when he doesn’t have access to anything?! And how did the padded room cameras not pick up on that? Remember how I’ve complained about episodes using cell phones -- or lack thereof -- as a contrived plot point? This is the low-tech equivalent.) And speaking of Africa, Professor Amina Ngebe has arrived to help Dana and remind her the locals will think a disappearing tribal man, locusts (and now the burning ocean) are warnings from God.
Skinner and Fox start working together while Scully is desperately in need of Google Translate because she can’t understand what a man has come to tell her. Luckily (?!) the murderous Dr. Barnes arrives and offers to interpret. Dana defends her camp with a machete. Barnes claims he did not murder Dr. Merkmallen and shifts blame to our government (like Chris Carter usually does in his eps). The ocean turns blood red and Scully again briefly sees the African tribal man. It looks like everyone will be working together after all.
Mulder sends Walter to contact Michael Kritschgau (common spelling), who you may or may not remember from his three-episode run beginning with "Gethsemane" (Season 4, Episode 24). The last time Fox asked Kritsch for a favor it didn’t end well for the government employee, so he’s reluctant to help. But Mulder’s psychic ability is still intact because he keeps answering Kritschgau’s unasked questions. “Skingau” relocate Fox to an unmonitored area where Walter gives Mulder a drug recommended by Michael. Meanwhile, Diana Fowley has arrived and is clearly being kept out of the loop. The haters must have loved that.
Dana continues to review the markings on the buried ship, using an old Navajo alphabet to translate the words. Professor Ngebe claims the ship’s markings refer to passages in the Koran and contain the word of God. Barnes denies the word, focuses on the science of evolution and threatens the ladies with the machete. But the doc gets distracted by some fish-related resurrection and Scully's able to clock him with a chair so the ladies can escape. During the getaway, Dana’s disappearing tribal man then warns her, “Some truths are not for you.” Hasn’t Scully essentially been saying that all episode?
She taps out and leaves Africa instead of going with Amina to the local police. While that’s going on, Mulder surpasses Kritschgau's expectations with his psychic ability. Fox goes fugue again so Kritsch shoots him up with more drugs over Walter’s initial objection. Fowley and the doctors find Mulder, who suffers a seizure. When he’s stabilized, Diana confesses she knows he knows she’s loyal to Cancer Man. She also admits she loves Fox, but Mulder keeps his gag reflex in check so Diana will think he’s still unresponsive.
Dr. Barnes hacks his driver to death, but it doesn’t take. The driver gets resurrected revenge on Barnes and he drops dead in the water beside the alien ship. Scully finally makes it home and demands Skinner tell her where Mulder is. He takes full responsibility for what he and Kritschgau attempted. Dana claims Fox is not dying, he's more alive than his body can handle. Mulder hears Doctor Scully in the hallway but she doesn’t even look at his medical chart when she finally gets entry. (Bad doctor!) Dana gets weepy as she tells Fox to hold on, but he doesn’t respond.
Back on the Ivory Coast, Amina and local police find Barnes’ body in the water but the ship is no longer visible. So even when Mulder recovers, there’s no longer a puzzle for Sculder to solve together? Also, Fox should remember this useful tool in the future: Fake a coma and women will come out of the woodwork with their true feelings. Interesting message, Mr. Carter.
Sestra Professional:
I'm ready to dig into Season 7. Truth be told, I've often ranked this the lowest of the original run seasons because of the overall lack of energy and wanderlust that seemed to permeate the show this year, but I'm willing to go all Mulder and keep an open mind to see how I feel about it this time around for this rewatch.
And so we start off with Scully doing the voiceover -- a sign she's progressed far since her skeptical beginnings. And if the words do sound too heavy-handed and out of character -- i.e., talk of what's taken hold of Fox "consuming his beautiful mind" -- it does chart a new course for Dana. (And it also falls in line with the X-Files standard for pontification via narration.) For although she believes what she's found may have been meant for Fox to make sense of with connections denying logic and reason, she'll be still trying to prove the theory that in the source of every illness lies its cure.
His brain is on constant red line: Mulder's fricasseed cerebellum does ring true. The guy has so many facts and figures and X-files trapped in his noggin that it's a wonder it didn't happen sooner. He may or may not be able to control the mind meld he's suffering, but we're seeing a lot of his fighting spirit. Meanwhile, poor Skinner's become a veritable Krycek -- he's the one taking regular beatings now.
Scully's new strength becomes her -- as does not having a hair dryer at the beach. She's starting off the season strong despite the swarm of insects in her tent. But not too strong, because the voiceover moments that feel better suited to a soft-core romance novel continue throughout the episode. That can be jarring when juxtaposed immediately with the image of Dana wielding a machete.
Barnes, he's kind of blah. Well, he was kind of blah. He's imposing in terms of size, but too stone-faced and meandering to serve of real value to the story. With each stilted line he utters, I feel the absence of the likes of Cigarette Smoking Man and Well-Manicured Man more and more.
Even though we haven't seen Kritschgau for two years, he's contributing more to the process than Barnes. Not a bad idea to factor him back into the equation so he can explain all about remote viewing and CIA investigations into minds working harder than brains can sustain. Side note: Don't you love it when a character says "I'll never do that" and then does the very thing he/she said they wouldn't do later in the same scene?
It's the most beautiful, intricate work of art: Meanwhile back on the Ivory Coast, Scully's dealing with locusts, a sea of blood and discovery of passages from religion and the complete human genome. So everyone's banking on the day of final judgment being some kind of combination of science and mysticism.
Barnes gets a little more interesting near the end. He seems to have a pretty good handle on everything except what his fate will be ultimately. Hitting him with a chair could be the least effective method of taking care of a threat the show has ever produced, but I guess that was so he could be taken care of by a more mythical faction. What all this has to do with spacecraft etchings escapes me, since I'm obviously not working at Fox's current brain speed.
Who ya gonna call? This episode finally finds a niche for Fowley. Mulder's powers confirm his suspicions that Diana is allied with CSM. His state provides the added bonus of getting Walter off the hook. And for the last time, I'll point out that the exciting episode which initially put Skinner under Krycek's thumb (Season 6 Episode 9's "S.R. 819") has been all but wasted since. We didn't see much of Walter after that, and he minimally proved to be a stumbling block to our heroes before this reveal.
Sestra Am's certainly right that the "some truths are not for you" uttered to Dana by the tribal man was chapter and verse what she was saying the whole episode, but it's still a creepy moment nonetheless. And the last scene with Scully imploring Mulder to hold on is quite affecting -- much more so than Fowley's confession of love. So if Fox knows all the truths inside everyone, he certainly knows what's in Dana's heart too now, right?
Meta mites: According to "The Sixth Extinction" director Kim Manners, insects wouldn't swarm Gillian Anderson on cue, so the team had to "blow popcorn and packing foam at her with big fans." The critters were added in postproduction, he said in the official episode guide. ... In the not-a-bad-theory department: If the spaceship Scully touches has healing powers, might Dana now be able to conceive a child?
Guest star of the week: Kritschgau hadn't factored into the proceedings in quite a while, but John Finn's appearance fit in well here. And not only because he served Mulder, the inkling of what helping Team Sculder the first time cost Michael was nicely played with nuance.
Sestra Amateur:
It’s a good thing Hulu has The X-Files since Amazon Prime no longer carries the series, but I'm contending with commercials gumming up the stream when I rewind scenes for this blog. And no, I will not pay extra for commercial-free since I’m fine with them for every other series I watch that I’m not reviewing which includes, well, all of them. If Hulu wasn’t an option, it would have been funny to try and find Season 6 at a library for the purpose of watching the finale.
Bad news: This episode starts with a voiceover. Good news: It’s Scully’s voice, not Mulder’s. She gives us a Cliffs Notes version of our planet’s affection for extinction while we try to determine whether the next extinction event is coming soon … or has already begun.
In West Africa, something allegedly amazing has washed up on the Ivory Coast. We don’t get a clear shot of it, but the score and camera angles indicate it’s something worthwhile. It’s part of a larger tablet, and when Dr. Merkmallen connects it to his own piece of the tablet, they fuse together, fly across the room and impale a Holy Bible. (The pieces, not the scholar.) He’s weirded out by that behavior, so he books a flight to Washington, D.C. (yep, let’s just bring that thing into the United States and make it our problem) and meets with Dr. Sandoz, who has a third piece. But that's a fatal mistake and Merkmallen is killed by Sandoz’s imposter.
The case falls in Mulder’s lap because of Merkmallen’s theory life originated on another planet and flourished here. (Maybe Ridley Scott acquired his origin theory for Alien prequel Prometheus from this ep.) Familiar with the ideology, Scully doesn’t discount it. The original Sandoz is also missing – along with Merkmallen’s body -- so Dana thinks it’s a case for local law enforcement, not the feds.
Assistant director Skinner gives them a rubbing of the tablet. While riding in the crowded elevator, Fox’s hearing is distorted and he tunes out Scully. Maybe he was in proximity to the tablets? Sculder arrive at the American University crime scene where “Dr. Sandoz” is now Dr. Barnes, head of the department. Dana shows Barnes the rubbing and Mulder again experiences a painful effect from it. Scully calls someone to authenticate the rubbing, but Chuck claims it’s a fake and identifies the doctor as a debunker. Chuck witnesses the rubbing’s effect on Fox, but he can’t explain it. Somehow Mulder knows Barnes killed Merkmallen.
The agents check out Sandoz’s apartment and learn he’s been meeting with Albert Hosteen in New Mexico. You remember Albert, don’t you? He’s the king of the voiceovers whose storyline covered three episodes beginning with "Anasazi" (Season 2, Episode 25). Was he helping Sandoz read the tablets or helping him create fake ones? Either way, our heroes have to put a pin in that because Fox managed to find Merkmallen’s corpse – well, most of it -- shoved in the kitchen garbage can.
Sculder later update Skinner and we learn about cosmic galactic radiation. Merkmallen likely had exposure to it and it’s possibly what’s causing Mulder’s tinnitus/mind reading ability. Clearly his condition is progressing and it’s making him very short tempered with his superior. Of course, paranoid Mulder is right; “traitor” Skinner gives his office surveillance tape to Alex Krycek.
Dana tells Fox to rest, then treks to Gallup, New Mexico, and learns Albert is dying of cancer. Scully finds another rubbing in Hosteen's hospital room which has been translated into Bible speak, “And God said … multiply and replenish" … yada yada yada. Mulder obviously is not resting, he’s looking for evidence in Dr. Barnes’ campus office. The doctor returns and somehow knows something is off in his very cluttered room. Maybe he also has mind-reading capabilities, because he almost finds Fox hiding in the lab. Mulder tries to follow Barnes, but the headaches are too much and he collapses in a stairwell.
Back in New Mexico, Scully chases Sandoz, who was shadowing Albert. There’s such an extreme closeup of her face that I thought it was going to be one of those David Lynch-ian I-see-the-suspect-in-the-reflection-of-your-iris moments. Dana “catches” Sandoz while Krycek walks right past a writhing Mulder to meet with Barnes and hand him Skinner’s videotape. Meanwhile, Sandoz is updating Scully about the extraterrestrial origin of our recorded history. He shows Dana a third piece of the tablet that starts spinning on its own. Scully calls Fox to update him and almost gets sidetracked when Diana Fowley answers the phone. Luckily, Dana remembers to argue with him about Genesis and aliens. Diana then calls Cancer Man with an update. Put your shirt back on, Fowley!
Albert is brought home to the reservation for a healing ceremony. Skinner calls to tell Scully that her partner is in bad shape in a Georgetown hospital. She leaves Sandoz with his piece of the tablet and hightails it to Fox’s bedside. Turns out, he’s in the psychiatric ward suffering from abnormal brain function. Mulder looks like he’s losing his mind and it doesn’t help his paranoid state that there’s a visible camera in his padded room.
Unfortunately, Dana learns Walter had access to a report she hasn’t sent him yet and calls out him and Diana for being liars. She goes to Mulder’s FBI office and finds a camera in the smoke detector. Scully gets distracted by Sandoz, who calls with the revelation that the human genome is part of the code on the tablet. Too bad he gets shot to death for his trouble. Dammit, Krycek! Back on the Ivory Coast, Dana makes contact with the people who found the original tablet pieces and unearths way more than she anticipated. Jeez, did this just become Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers? Unlike Ridley Scott, King got there first.
Sestra Professional:
With The Syndicate predominantly dispatched of midway through this season, The X-Files had to come up with a different facet to anchor the mythology. On paper, it looks like it should work -- Mulder might have fallen ill by the very thing he's been seeking all these years, Krycek is finally utilizing the upper hand (Alex in-joke!) on Skinner, Scully's got some physical evidence and the one person the shippers don't want anywhere near Fox seems closer to him than Dana.
But these puzzle pieces they're trying to fit together don't really click into place as easily as components of that tablet. Take five shots of Mulder, a couple of Scully, a tablespoon of Fowley, a teaspoon of Skinner and a pinch of Krycek ... and try and mix it together. It's all rather staid and I wish it worked better than it did, because this is the foundation of the mythology for the rest of the regular run. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to setting the stage for Season 7.
Like Sestra Am, I could seriously do without a voiceover teaser -- even Dana's. These have always leaned to the pretentious side, even in the best of times. Appreciate the quick glimpse at the cavemen from the beginning of Fight the Future, but illustrations of dinosaurs mixed with clips of the Apollo 11 mission seem to overstep the bounds. (Great, now I'm thinking about a T-Rex craning its neck to try and look at a UFO hovering over its head.) But the opening's ending revelation of the extraterrestrial piece in the water ... now that grabs my attention.
I am just a hired gun for the FBI: It's all too serious. Even in the bleakest of conspiratorial times on the show, there was something breezy about Fox's quest or at least something invigorating about finding any nugget of information. We get very little of that here, even in the early conversation between our leads. Scully tells Mulder he's won. But since Fox still doesn't know what happened to his sister, he doesn't see it that way. This interaction is nothing like the energized scene we got to open Fight the Future. It doesn't feel like they've won to me either.
Not to totally paint "Biogenesis" in bleak terms. David Duchovny does a nuanced job with Mulder's descent into whatever he's descending into. I would have hoped a Fox breakdown would come with a little wackiness, with some emergence of the part of his character that has always been dicey. (For example, the way he went off the rails in the previously mentioned "Anasazi.") With his defenses down, his penchant for speaking before he thinks could have been utilized more here.
Over the course of six seasons, Skinner became Sculder's ally. And the way the powers-that-be realized they could mess with that equation was through Krycek's threat to his life. Compromised Skinner is something that could have been utilized a lot better than it has been to this point. Then again, we haven't seen much of Walter since he almost died in "S.R. 819" (Season 6, Episode 10). His inclusion in this episode is something of a throwaway for moments of clarity for both his charges -- separate but equal realizations that Skinner might not be telling his agents everything they need to know.
Could we too become extinct? I agree with Sestra Am, that was a mighty strange closeup on Dana. Still not understanding what the point of it was, but from there on, Scully vaults from merely following in Fox's footsteps to a more active part of the investigation. It's heartening that she's no longer missing out on the key discoveries, even if she doesn't believe that a passage from Genesis' inclusion on the artifact means the aliens put us here in the first place.
I'd have liked for Diana to have been a more formidable foe/obstacle to Mulder and Scully's relationship, particularly since Duchovny's real-life friend Mimi Rogers should have been a great get for the show. But she really never was. She doesn't provide the same charge that seeing Cigarette Smoking Man or Krycek does. Even though we want those two to ultimately be defeated, we can still revel in their machinations.
You're both liars: So off to another Dana voiceover and it's just as pretentious as the start of the show. Couldn't we have just skipped the meanderings about the "audacity of the invention" and gone right to the part in which Scully witnesses Fox's breakdown in the padded room? That's a truly frightening concept, the smartest woman we know can't figure out to help the person she wants to help the most. She knows she can't count on Walter and Diana and that has her verging on Mulder territory (when he's his usual self anyway).
So Scully has to go it alone, right after she finds out artifacts seem to contain the map to our genetic makeup. And then she gets the moment all of us have been waiting for six seasons, she's touching a spacecraft. If only Mulder had been there to witness it. Or at least coherent enough to hear about it. ... Unless they're still in the mushroom from last episode.
Meta-llurgy: In the official episode guide, Chris Carter said starting a new branch of the mythology enabled the show to advance the characters. "...There would be a scientific basis to the search for extraterrestrials, which plays perfectly into both Scully's scientific bias and Mulder's willingness to believe in the supernatural. Which means that Mulder's and Scully's belief systems will finally begin to come together -- which is where we're going to go in Season 7." Executive producer Frank Spotnitz added in the guide that it was important to clear away the conspiracy in "One Son" and "Two Fathers" (S6E11-12) in order to facilitate that. ... The beach scenes were filmed at the Leo Carrillo State Park in Malibu, California, the same site used in the opening of the 1978 film Grease.
Finally, a Latin phrase I can understand without Google Translate: Amor Fati = Love of Fate. David Duchovny’s fingerprints are all over this one. He really does love when Fox Mulder is the center of attention. Mrs. Mulder is finally on the scene. Unfortunately, Fox can only read her thoughts, not communicate with her telepathically. Cancer Man is bedside too. He is able to communicate with his mind and injects something into Mulder’s temple. CSM also gives him a reality check – and the ability to walk out of the hospital room. Of course he also throws a Vader-esque caveat at Luke … I mean Fox.
His first houseguest is Deep Throat, who was presumably shot and killed way back in the Season 1 finale (Episode 24: "The Erlenmeyer Flask"). For once, Deep Throat agrees with Cancer Man: Mulder is not the center of the universe. DT claims to have a happy life in the neighborhood with his wife and daughters. Mulder’s next houseguest is Diana Fowley. It’s pretty telling that he envisions himself in bed wearing handcuffs while Diana strolls in wearing a black nightgown and sporting a handcuff key. I think Duchovny took a little too much inspiration from his Red Shoe Diaries days.
Scully flips to Chapter 3: The Anasazi, which was last addressed in the Season 2 finale bearing that name. Apparently, there is a link between the Anasazi (“the ancient aliens” – an Indian tribe that disappeared 600 years ago) and the Sixth Extinction. Dana thinks it came from Walter and spills her guts. But he has an office guest who causes a diversion and escapes. (It has to be Krycek … no one else would wear a wig that awful.)
Scully confronts Kritschgau and is livid that he sent her alien ship photos to the National Institute of Health. She deletes them from his computer but fails to delete them from the recycle bin. Document Recovery 101, Dana. Scully confronts Fowley at FBI headquarters but gets nowhere. Dream-world Mulder’s life has taken a dark turn: He married Diana, got older and attended her funeral. Cancer Man connects with Fox’s dream world, where Duchovny is sporting the worst “old man” makeup job since Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands. Cancer Man wants to see what a little boy on the beach has been trying to show Mulder. Turns out, this boy (little Fox?) made a sand replica of the spaceship found on the Ivory Coast. 
Outside dream-world Fox's room, the alien apocalypse has taken place and everything is destroyed. (Keep a happy thought, Mulder.) And let’s not forget about Krycek, who has been a busy little soldier boy. He shot and killed Kritschgau, burned the files, and thankfully, torched that horrible wig. He also stole Michael's laptop and had zero regard for the other occupants of Kritschgau’s apartment building by setting the fire. There’s no redeeming that one.
One week later Scully, who’s sporting a new 'do, checks on a now-normal Mulder. He tells Dana that Albert Hosteen died two weeks earlier. So if Albert visited her, he was there spiritually, not physically, to help Sculder. Diana Fowley is also dead, but there’s no way she died as peacefully as Albert. Our heroes have a touching moment in which they refer to each other as constants and touchstones. All of this in the front doorway of Mulder’s apartment. Invite her in, Fox! She’s not a “vampire” like Cancer Man. And did anyone ever reach Teena Mulder?? Maybe someone should check on her welfare too. 
As Sestra Am pointed out, David Duchovny's handiwork is evident in the script for the sequel to the seventh-season opener. He's got some interesting ideas about the character he's played for more than six years and a movie. In "The Sixth Extinction," we only saw the outside of Mulder and what he's going through. Now we get a look at the inside, and it's a hot mess.
Before Kritschgau gets fast-tracked to the great beyond, he pulls some of the pieces of our story together, harkening back to the black oil that Mulder was infected with in "Tunguska" and "Terma" (S4E7-8). That's as slick as the oil itself and a deft touch in an episode that could have used more of them. He tacks on that Fox has become biologically alien. That's probably not what Mulder was striving for when he started his quest. 
There were some cool snippets in the dream world -- the quick cuts from wedding to baby to aging to Diana's death with Cancer Man looking the same as everyone ages around him. That last part seems like an apt Fox fear. Totally agree with Sestra Am that the aging makeup was god-awful. I'll draw my analogy within our X-Files universe to "Dod Kalm" (S2E19) with Sculder's health and welfare declining on a crumbling ship. 
