Sestra Amateur:
Are there any pop-culture enthusiasts who do not know the origin of the phrase “Jump the Shark?” It always amuses me how it evolved from a literal act into a figurative one. I’m interested to know where most X-Philes think the show passed that infamous milestone.
There are familiar faces in this amusing episode, which feels more like one from The Lone Gunmen’s spinoff series than The OG X-Files. I’m sure we can all use a break after seeing Monica Reyes in excruciating pain while she imagined monsters crawling around inside her stomach in the last episode. Now we get a return appearance from Michael McKean as Morris Fletcher, the man who briefly swapped bodies with Fox Mulder back in the "Dreamland" two-parter (Season 6, Episodes 4-5). I guess he didn’t get his marriage back on track because he’s in the middle of the Bahamian ocean with a beautiful blonde who is not his wife. Thugs in a speedboat threaten Morris, kidnap the woman and blow up the boat. Luckily, he and his UFO blueprints seem to survive the explosion.
Fletcher requests a meeting with FBI Special Agents John Doggett and Monica Reyes, but they are unimpressed with him at the outset. Monica reveals his female companion is fine and his UFO blueprints are bogus. Team Johnica are leaving when Morris admits he knows about super soldiers. Doggett and Reyes ask Frohike, Byers and Langly to help them track down a female super soldier named Yves Adele Harlow, played by Zuleikha Robinson. (Wow, this really is a Lone Gunmen ep!) They take umbrage to Fletcher’s presence and involvement. Meanwhile, Yves kills college professor Douglas Houghton by shooting him in the chest. Sort of.
Langly unsuccessfully searches for Yves in an airline database. Morris claims her real name is Lois Runce, but the guys don’t believe him. They get a surprise visit from former intern Jimmy Bond, who promptly loses consciousness. When he wakes up, Jimbo confirms Yves’ true name and is upset because she may have committed murder. Meanwhile, Yves burns her victim’s heart in a furnace. (OK, this isn’t as light-hearted as I expected it to be. No pun intended.)
Team Johnica learns Yves’ victim was an immunologist who studied sharks and other marine life. Langly, Frohike and Byers seek assistance with tracking Yves from Kimmy the Geek while Doggett and Reyes meet with the coroner who performed Houghton’s autopsy. They learn the chest wound contains bioluminescence and cartilage. Kimbo reveals to Team Johnica and Fletcher that the Lone Gunmen are broke and no longer publishing their newspaper. Fortunately, the boys have located Yves in a D.C. hotel and prevent her from murdering another person. Unfortunately, they apparently screwed things up for her because they don’t understand. (None of us do yet, sweetie.)
John and Monica arrive at the hotel room. They learn Morris lied about Yves being a super soldier and set everything up since the boat incident in the Bahamas. His plan for the Lone Gunmen to locate Yves worked. It turns out, the man Fletcher works for is a billionaire terrorist … and Yves’ father. Harlow killed Douglas Houghton because he was also a terrorist. In doing so, she destroyed the virus located inside Houghton’s chest. The second man she tried to stop has the same virus inside his chest.
Back at Lone Gunmen HQ, Kimbo and Langly are trying to locate the human timebomb while Morris continues to verbally abuse Frohike and Byers. Team Johnica locate and secure the man but he’s clean. Guess he was the decoy, but now Doggett isn’t too trusting of Yves. The true human timebomb has entered a conference hall filled with people and easily passed through security. Our non-FBI heroes find the terrorist and try to talk their way into the conference, but a security guard refuses to let them enter the conference hall.
Jimbo spooks the virus bomber, John Gillnitz, by calling out his name, just like Riggs tricks villain Jack Travis into leaving a packed hockey arena in Lethal Weapon 3. Gillnitz bolts while Jimbo head butts the security guard to chase after him. They corner him with only one minute and 40 seconds left before detonation. Then our heroes do something amazing: They trap themselves with Gillnitz by pulling the fire alarm. Jimbo and Yves find them but can’t save them. They have a bittersweet farewell as Gillnitz starts leaking bioluminescence, infecting everyone in the room. At least we don’t have to watch them suffer.
It’s a beautiful day at Arlington National Cemetery, not a cloud in the sky. Byers, Langly and Frohike are laid to rest side by side by side. So much for being a light-hearted amusing episode. They didn’t even get to take Dana Scully along on their last adventure. A 60-second cameo appearance isn’t enough. And no Mulder at the funeral? Unless he was in Morris Fletcher’s body again, I’m pretty sure that’s where they jumped the shark.
Sestra Professional:
In spite of -- or maybe even because of -- the funerals at Arlington, it was an unceremonious end for the Lone Gunmen. Let's face it, they had been trending downward for a while, possibly since the Vancouver years. When the trio came on the scene, its members were distinctively quirky but intelligent naysayers. Somewhere along the line, they turned into bumbling do-gooders. Even on their largely overlooked spinoff series, they were shadows of their former selves, and resolution tended to come in spite of their actions. This episode's opening montage bears that out. Yet they still deserved better than this.
Some might maintain that three men who railed against the government for years might not want to be buried on hallowed grounds. I'm not sure I agree with that hypothesis. By this time, they might have been proud to rest in the same vicinity as John F. Kennedy, Jr., and brother Robert, or at the very least, Abner Doubleday.
That's really a moot point because the fact they had to be laid to rest at all is the true problem. When this show jumps the shark, it realllly jumps the shark. (Although, harkening back to Sestra Am's original inquiry, I know I can come up with jump-the-shark spotters for every single season since the production moved to Hollywood.)
Three more unlikely heroes there never were: But I digress, because with the series coming to an end, this episode -- first and foremost -- is an attempt to wrap up Byers, Frohike and Langly's story with recurring Morris Fletcher and sexy-villain-turned-ally Yves St. Laurent. (Yeah, I know that last one's not right. But the show's apathy is wearing off on me.)
I still think there was something to the concept of a Gunmen series. The chemistry between the trio was always strong, and there were enough differences between the characters to be able to delve into different stories. I wasn't watching the spinoff at the time, but years later, I did binge it. And ... it's not bad.
Both shows got mileage out of Michael McKean's presence as former Man in Black Morris Fletcher. So bringing Morris into Doggett and Reyes' orbit isn't a bad first step. But when John and Monica walk into the empty Lone Gunmen bunker, we start down the irrevocable road to ruin. Kind of reminds of another bad move, attempting to wrap up the Millennium story within the confines of one X-Files episode in the fourth episode of the seventh season. Should we feel grateful that we didn't have a Harsh Realm terminus as well? (I still say that show might have worked with Nicholas Lea (Krycek) in the lead. Chris Carter, you couldn't have bent to fan pressure on that one, like you folded like a house of cards on the Sculder personal relationship front?)
Guys like that, they live forever: I really used to enjoy the Gunmen doing their thing. But over time that concept got worn down to the nub, and their penchant for snappy dialogue apparently went along with it. Morris provides the cringeworthy image of watching those guys trying to find their butts with both hands, which hasn't been much fun for us either. As with the aforementioned "Millennium" episode, The Lone Gunmen square peg doesn't quite fit in The X-Files' round hole.
Morris crying "super soldier" is the most thin of threads to knit the two together and it's all down hill from there. It did look promising when John and Monica used all due diligence but ultimately boxed in the wrong dude. The Lone Gunmen don't have those kind of resources at their disposal upon smoking out the real one. They can't even talk their way into a conference room with the end of the world at stake. And so they wind up where they do, conveniently spawning what Byers had talked about just minutes earlier. They went out on their own terms.
As Sestra Am said, this dismal turn of events is made worse by the fact that neither Scully nor Mulder are involved in the denouement. Kimmy's bilingual gravesite reaction doesn't really register. Still not sure what to make of Walter Skinner's deed, but it was an attempt at some kind of amends. And as far as Scully wondering whether the Gunmen knew how much they meant to her, I'm not sure they did. I didn't get that read and I've been watching closely the whole time. Fox's absence for the trio's series wrap didn't help in the slightest. So this ep winds up at the bottom of most X-Philes' lists, whether or not we believe this is where the series actually jumped the shark.
Although Bruce Harwood (Byers) said in The Complete X-Files that he was glad the Gunmen were killed off in the end, it remained a thorn in co-writer Vince Gilligan's paw. "To this day, I still think we made the wrong choice on that one," he said in the show's comprehensive guide.
Guest star of the week: While Zuleikha Robinson (Yves) and Stephen Snedden (Jimmy) slip seamlessly back into their spinoff characters, Michael McKean once again gives an ep any life it has. He's gotten kudos in this spot twice, but the veteran actor easily could be a four-time winner. Maybe Morris Fletcher should have been the focus for a sister show.
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