Let’s break out the Google Translate for the last time this season. Sestra Pro doesn’t need such a device because she speaks French. Je Souhaite means "I Wish" which is pretty much how I feel about this episode. I wish this bottle ep will be better than last week’s bottle ep. Luckily, the bar is set low, Vince Gilligan is in control and Mark Snow’s opening score sounds whimsical. In a Creve Coeur, Missouri self-storage facility (I feel like I should be translating that city name too), slacker employee Anson Stokes -- played by familiar face Kevin Weisman -- is dreaming of a better life. Hounded by his boss Jay Gilmore, Anson is cleaning out a storage locker when he finds a woman wearing a black leather jacket wrapped up in a rug. (Where’s Storage Wars when you need it?) Anson’s boss won’t shut up, but it’s no longer a problem; poor Jay no longer has a mouth.
One month later, after seeking medical attention (at least I hope he didn’t “fix” the problem himself), Gilmore ends up in Sculder’s office, accusing Stokes of making him “shut up.” Scully has medical explanations for Gilmore’s affliction, but Mulder doesn’t buy them. They travel to Anson’s trailer in Missouri to interview him and find a yacht in the adjacent lot. Anson’s wheelchair-bound brother and roommate Leslie Stokes – played by the suddenly everywhere Will Sasso – claims they’re just holding it for a friend. Fox spots the woman in black but a panicky Leslie abruptly ends the interview. The agents check out the storage unit, which still hasn’t been emptied. Are Jay and Anson the only two employees in the place? Mulder finds a photograph inside which implies the woman in black is a lot older than she looks. Back in the Stokes trailer, Anson is debating how to use his last wish. How about wishing your brother doesn’t have to be in a wheelchair, you selfish jerk? Apparently, the woman in black is a genie who thinks like I do. Anson goes with invisibility instead. Her job complete, the genie has vanished. And stupid Anson gets flattened by a truck that couldn’t see him.
Dana inherits the challenge of autopsying an invisible man. He should probably smell horribly, based on the number of flies that were swarming his unseen carcass. But Scully gets creative and giddy as she brushes powder on Anson’s face. I wonder how many jars it took to cover his whole body. Finally, Dana is a believer. By the way, Anson’s body should have been way more mangled since he was hit by a semi. Meanwhile, Fox reinterviews Leslie to ask about the “jinniyah” – a female genie – but Leslie outsmarts Mulder and retrieves the genie from the storage unit, where she is wrapped in her rug again. Thanks to facial recognition software, Fox finds the genie in archival footage with Benito Mussolini and Richard Nixon. Jinniyah gets around. Leslie now has three wishes but, surprisingly, it doesn’t cross his mind either to wish for his body to be healed. He thinks he has a better plan for his first wish; to get his brother back. Too bad it makes Scully look like a crackpot to the medical community she was hoping to impress. But Leslie wasn’t specific enough because this is post-hit-by-a-truck Anson, animated but rotting and smelly. (I wonder if Gilligan was influenced by The Monkey’s Paw, one of the creepiest short stories I’ve ever read, but chose to give it a humorous spin.)
Leslie wastes another wish to get his brother to talk again and a suffering Anson blows up the trailer before Leslie could make his third wish. Hopefully the yacht’s OK. Mulder finally gets to talk to Jenn (his nickname for Jinniyah) who relays her origin story to Sculder. Because Fox “unrolled” her, he’s earned three wishes, so he takes Jenn home with him. His first wish -- peace on Earth. Too bad the only way to achieve that (at least with this particular genie) is to erase all humans from the world. Mulder wastes his second wish by undoing his first wish at a very inopportune moment, during an FBI staff meeting led by Assistant Director Walter Skinner. Fox starts treating his third wish like a legal document until Dana arrives and talks some sense into him. Mulder wishes for Jenn’s freedom, then enjoys movie night with Scully. Maybe his post-genie thought was for a sense of normalcy because Sculder seem to have it for one night. But it won’t last long. Next week is the season finale and we all know how those affect our intrepid heroes. As the French say, “je veux croire.”
Sestra Professional:
Thank goodness Vince Gilligan is here to remind us how a comedy episode of The X-Files should be done. It might have otherwise been wiped from our minds with a flashy thing that the Tobacco Dragging Guy always uses to make Jackal Muldoon forget what he's seen. Wait, what? That object is from Men in Black? Not that "Je Souhaite" ranks among my favorites, just that it feels much more righter. Last week's dud, "Fight Club" apparently really took a toll on my recall ... and my grammar.
The teaser was concerning, though, the characters seemed cardboardy (still working on getting my words back from the brain degradation) and that mouth gag seemed a little much. But then again, we're talking about a writer who has crafted tails on babies and a teen vampire to start off previously highly regarded episodes.Scully's reaction to seeing the state of the "mouth thing" provides the first clue that everything is going to be OK in The X-Files universe for them and us. Gilligan writes with a lighter touch, one that leaves room for Gillian Anderson to react in a way that's natural for Dana. Sufficeth to say, Vince really knows how to write for Gillian, and in his first directorial effort, he shows he can shoot her in the best light as well.
How many centuries now has disco been dead? But Mulder isn't left out in the cold. This season had a lot of light-hearted offerings early on that allowed Fox to quip, then it got rather serious until the 19th ep, Duchovny's "Hollywood A.D." Here, Fox gets to investigate "Mr. Saturday Night Fever" and he realizes the mystery woman is the spiritual link. He's on to the fact that the previous wishers got all the power they ever wanted and lost it, including Mussolini and Nixon. OK, it's not the most subtle thing Gilligan's ever penned.
The non-centuries-old bottle-ep characters are pretty one-dimensional. Even the most narrow-minded individuals should have realized the genie was gesturing to Leslie's wheelchair. But if they had, that would have left us without the singular death of Anson and the ensuing autopsy scene -- the funniest one this side of the second tourist one in "Bad Blood" (Season 5, Episode 12), also written by Gilligan. Unless you count the elephant in "Fearful Symmetry" (S2E18), decidly not penned by Vince.This takes the cake: In my favorite scene of Season 7, Scully gets a sense of how gaga all the conspiracy stuff used to make her partner, bringing Anson into view brush stroke by brush stroke. She doesn't want to leave the late Stokes alone for fear of him disappearing like so many their leads have before, even saying a quick "bye" to him when closing the door on him in the morgue. It's almost heartbreaking when she opens it again and Anson's no longer there.
So we watch the travails of the two worst wishers in the history of wishing. Did Leslie take a mailbox to the head while hitting the postal objects with a bat? Considering a solid gold wheelchair over asking her to fix his legs seems rather misguided. Then again, if he hadn't gotten all blowed up (residual, I can't just been instantly cured), Leslie probably would have wound up with Secretariat's gams or something like that.
It's like giving a chimpanzee a revolver: Eventually Mulder has to get a hold of Jenn to show he's so much better at wishing than everyone else. There's a protracted sequence in which Fox realizes he can't just say "peace on Earth" without ramifications. We get hit over the head with the "people are cursed with stupidity" sentiment, lest we not have figured out that Jenn spent 500 years listening to people ask for the wrong things. The greed, the shallowness, the propensity for self-destruction. We get it, even without a prison tattoo. The larger point is taken, though. Even without a jinniyah around, we should say what we mean and mean what we say. So wishing for more Gilligan-scripted episodes should be good, just stipulating that they are Vince Gilligan episodes and not ones featuring the first mate of the S.S. Minnow.
Guest star of the week: With respect to Will Sasso, effective in spite of Leslie, the nod goes to Paula Sorge. Gilligan wrote the part for Janeane Garofalo, who was unavailable. Sorge does a remarkable job in her stead. Initially, she gets to react comedically to the abject ridiculousness around her, but as we find out what Jenn's been through, Sorge gives a more resonant look at a thankless job. The genie, not the role. Specificity is indeed important.
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