Maybe it’s wise not to overanalyze Chris Carter or Frank Spotnitz’s thinking processes, but the curiosity is still there. We’re finishing up a two-parter here and last week’s episode had a German title, so why not do the same thing this week? Is it because "Closure" doesn’t accurately translate with the American alphabet? (SchlieBung isn’t correct because the "B" is really an eszett or "sharp S" sound. Funny how my smart phone probably has the right character but my computer keyboard does not.) And since it doesn’t accurately translate, did Carnitz think fans would not understand the closure of this long-running storyline? Makes me wonder.So last week, Assistant Director Skinner chased their suspected kidnapper into a cemetery loaded with unmarked graves. This week, while we watch the feds dig up the dead children, we must listen to Mulder’s voiceover. The scene would have been more powerful with just the visual sights and Mark Snow’s haunting score, especially when we see the children’s souls gathering in a circle at nighttime. But I’ll try to “believe to understand” so I can reach the end of this story arc.
Scully reveals to Mulder that Ed Truelove admitted (off camera) to 24 murders, but denied taking Amber Lynn LaPierre. Dana doesn’t reveal whether Truelove confessed to taking Samantha Mulder, as Fox searches through decades-old reel-to-reel tapes hoping to find a connection. She had to have asked the killer that question, hoping for some type of response. But I guess if we get that answer now then what would we watch for the next 39 minutes? Police psychic Harold Piller, played by the entertaining Anthony Heald, arrives to help Sculder with their investigation. Scully quickly writes him off, but Harold’s timely explanation of the phrase "walk-ins" catches Mulder’s attention. I’m surprised Dana is so easily willing to return to D.C. and give up on little Amber Lynn, who is still an active missing child! Hopefully the FBI’s Behavioral Unit keeps looking for her. Fox takes Piller to the burial site where Harold explains how matter transforms to starlight. Poor Piller claims he can feel how the murdered victims suffered before they died. Harold senses a connection between Amber Lynn and Mulder’s sister, and once again, Fox has hope. Scully meets with Agent Schoniger to watch video footage of Mulder’s hypnosis session dated June 16, 1989. (I’ll bet you didn’t know Schoniger means "more gentle" in German. Yep, still have the Google Translate page open.) He notes that Fox didn’t first regress until 16 years after Samantha’s disappearance, which gave Mulder time to incorporate alien abduction into his own beliefs. Schoniger believes Samantha is dead because a huge government effort (including the Treasury Department, for some reason) failed to locate her during the original investigation. Dana is right about one thing: Fox deserves closure. We all do at this point.
Mulder is hearing timely words of wisdom from the original Planet of the Apes movie when Piller arrives with a "visitor" -- Fox's mother. (Good thing she/they didn’t arrive during one of Mulder’s adult movie times.) Fox doubts Harold’s ability, but we can see Teena Mulder in the background trying to say something. Fox absentmindedly writes "April Base" and now we know how Billie LaPierre and Kathy Lee Tencate wrote their notes in the previous episode. Scully lockpicks her way into Teena’s house and finds an original torn document in the scorched garbage can. Dana calls Mulder to tell him about the Treasury Department investigation and the initials of the person who closed Samantha’s investigation -- C.G.B.S., the Cigarette Smoking Man. Fox is convinced that’s a dead end and hangs up on her. Mulder and Piller arrive at the decommissioned April Air Force Base, but there is still a security guard on base. Scully arrives home and encounters Cancer Man in her living room. She tells him to put out his cigarette. He tells her to stop looking because Samantha is dead. Neither listens to the other. Fox and Harold sneak onto the base and search an abandoned neighborhood. They stumble across cement palm-print memories of Samantha ... and Jeffrey Spender. (Why would Cancer Man let her keep her first name if there was such a huge investigation? He should have changed it to ... Paige!)
The next day, the agents compare notes in California. Fox does a poor job explaining everything he learned. One disposable camera would have gone a long way; it would have shown what he and Harold saw at the base. It would have shown the size of Samantha’s hands (Mulder's acting like she put them there last week, but it would have been decades earlier). Cancer Man never said Samantha died the day she was taken, Fox. Sculder confront Piller, who Dana learned is under investigation for killing his own son. How tormenting must it be to get answers for other people’s loved ones, but not your own? Sculder and Piller go to the base where Harold tries to reach the spirits. They end up with a roomful and one little boy leads Mulder away. The next morning, Fox finds his sister’s hidden diary from 1979 and one passage explains that she decided to run away. He still doesn’t know what his mother was trying to tell him, but luckily, Teena talks to Mulder that night while he sleeps.
The next morning, Scully finds a California Highway Patrol police report from Oct. 23, 1979 involving a 14-year-old runaway girl. Dana and Harold talk to the nurse who signed her in, Arbutus Ray. She tells a similar story of seeing a vision of the girl dead, even though she was sleeping peacefully. CSM and his men came to take her away, but the girl had vanished. While Scully learns this, Fox is led by the spirit boy (Harold’s son) to a circle of spirit children in the nearby woods. He sees Amber Lynn and Samantha, who apparently can recognize him even though he’s 27 years older than she remembers. Mulder finally has his closure, but unfortunately he couldn’t convince Piller his son was there. Fox certainly hasn’t convinced me those children are in a "better place." But if it means I can wipe my hands of one of the most convoluted, inconsistent storylines in TV history then ich bin dabei (count me in).
Sestra Professional:
So we've literally (and figuratively) come to the end of the road with the Samantha storyline. While it may not have been the ending we wanted and have been picturing lo these many years, Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz were banking on it being the one we needed. The way David Duchovny sells it, I buy it too.
I guess I just want it to be over: "Closure" starts with an overblown voiceover so we know it's important to The X-Files mythology. In the sixth season, the show dispatched The Syndicate mid-year, and in the seventh, the powers-that-be decided to do likewise with Samantha. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn between Fox Mulder and Harold Piller. The latter is a psychic who often works with the police. He seems to be so good at delineating things but can not see what's right in front of his face. Sounds a lot like someone we all know, right?
In the conclusion of the two-parter, Carter and Spotnitz double-down on a line of thinking that we all really would like to believe is true -- that children who die before their time aren't shackled by pain for all eternity, they turn into starlight. It's the way they come to terms with the "fate too cruel even for God to allow."
Taking the pin out of our discussion from last week's "Sein und Zeit," now we're getting a closer look at everything we know about Mulder's quest to this point. He wasn't regressed until 1989 -- when his hair was really bad -- and by then, his guilt and his fear about Samantha's abduction had overwhelmed him. According to Agent "More Gentle," that was compounded by the Close Encounters of the Third Kind/E.T. effect and his finding of the X-files.She was here, she had a message: There's much to be gleaned from the scene in which Harold visits Fox to tell him that his mother is near. In an oh-so-subtle way, it harkens back to Scully's moment with her late father all the way back in "Beyond the Sea" (Season 1, Episode 13). Mulder gets his message because Harold was there to help him receive it. Dana might have done likewise in similar circumstances.
Fox is a bit off the rails in this episode, an appropriate state considering where he was at the end of the previous one. That leaves Scully to deal with ol' CBG Spender. She thinks she's on to something in regards to him calling off the hunt for Sam in 1973, but for once, he actually is telling the truth. The Cigarette Smoking Man explains why it was OK to not tell Mulder the truth for seven years, but it is now: "There was so much to protect before. But it's all gone now."
In an episode of fine touches, another one is the sight of Samantha's hand prints right above Jeffrey Spender's. Yes, she was abducted, but she was returned -- and not to her own family. She went to CBG's family and was raised with CSM's other kid. That doesn't negate all the adult Samanthas we've seen over the course of the labyrinthine journey. All the Megan Leitch variants were grown-up versions of Sam. But the real one -- apparently subjected to more invasive tests than can be imagined -- never reached her 15th birthday.Mulder should really get where Harold is coming from. The psychic has been discredited to the point that Scully doesn't believe what he's telling her partner -- she has paperwork that says otherwise. But Piller is resolute. He doesn't know how he sees the things he does, but he thinks it's so he can help. What a fine and sad touch that in the end, we realize the only thing he can't see is what he wants to see the most.
I'm fine ... I'm free: The finding of the diary seems rather clunky, it's the falsest note to me in "Closure." Dana finds what she needs in the police blotter, so the facts are revealed, but there was no way to get across Sam's emotional state without the words in her journal -- even with the ER nurse's candid recall of events. It leads Fox down the path he needs to go down -- again, figuratively and literally.In a series that has been so dependent on Mark Snow and his music cues, I can not overstate how key I consider Moby's "My Weakness" to wrapping up this part of the mythology. I find its use so profoundly moving that it eases any qualms I have about the resolution to the story, as does Kim Manners' direction -- coming up with a way to make that work visually could not have been easy. I compare "My Weakness" here to the seminal use of John Williams' score in Jaws. "My Weakness" drives the denouement like Williams' two-note motif did in the world's first summer blockbuster.
Guest star of the week: If not for Anthony Heald's amazing -- and rather unheralded -- performance as Harold Piller, I would have been giving this nod to Moby. In one episode, Heald gives us a look at someone so familiar to us and he winds up having the opposite reaction to finding out the truth. Harold can solve everyone's pain but his own, and it takes a special actor to give us an emotional look into his character in 45 minutes that aren't all his.
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