Sestra Amateur:
X-Philes waited 14 years for more episodes (eight if you count the movie I Want to Believe). On Jan. 24, 2016, they got what they asked for. Sort of. Unfortunately, it begins with a Fox Mulder monologue and anyone who actually reads this blog knows how I feel about those. Twenty seconds into it, my mind started wandering and I had to order myself to pay attention. Meanwhile, by typing this during Mulder’s 2+-minute monologue, I actually lost track of what he was saying and had to restart the episode. Multitasking is hard, but that’s my struggle. (See what I did there?)
In 1947, a UFO crashes on a beautiful day in northwestern New Mexico. The humanoid inside is moving so that’s a good sign. Which leads me to another point: Do aliens use insurance? Life, travel, vehicle insurance could all have claims resulting from one flying saucer crash. But I digress. Military and government officials have converged on the site to investigate, but put a pin in that for now.
In the present, Dr. Dana Scully receives a phone call from FBI assistant director Walter Skinner. (Jeez, he’s never going to get a promotion, is he?) Walter wants to talk to former special agent Mulder about Tad O’Malley, a right-wing enthusiast who believes current conspiracies date back to Roswell cover-ups. Tad wants to meet Fox. Mulder agrees as long as Scully comes with him.
Sculder and O’Malley meet in Washington, D.C. Tad, played by the always-entertaining Joel McHale, requests they talk in his stretch limo to avoid any spying, prying eyes and ears. O’Malley wants to discuss the X-files, which are still considered closed by the FBI. Mulder isn’t impressed by O’Malley’s ability to make big bucks off of creating controversy and tries to test Tad’s knowledge. O'Malley passes and brings Sculder to meet Sveta (Annet Mahendru), a woman who Fox interviewed as a child abductee. Sveta reveals she was taken repeatedly and impregnated by aliens several times. Mulder wants Dana to test Sveta’s blood for the presence of alien DNA.
Back at the Roswell crash site in 1947, soldiers find a wounded alien crawling away from the UFO. A Man in Black claims it’s dangerous and shoots it. The soldiers follow suit until the alien dies. A compassionate army doctor carries the alien body away from the scene. In the present, Dr. Scully examines Sveta, who believes Mulder suffers from depression and that caused the end of Fox and Dana’s relationship. Sveta knows about Sculder’s baby and realizes Scully has also been an abduction victim, but Dana doesn’t want to talk about it. Mulder and O’Malley have a boys’ day out when Tad brings Fox to meet some paranoid acquaintances of his. They visit a Farraday cage housing an alien replica vehicle. Mulder seems giddy as he inspects the ship. It runs on free energy, not fuel, a technology that has been around for 70 years. Yep, it’s all a conspiracy by the oil companies. This ARV also has a gravity warp drive, thanks to the Roswell UFO.
Tad surprises Dana as she finishes taking her own blood sample. They talk about her surgical work and history with the X-files, but it seems like Mr. O’Malley is taking a personal interest in the unattached Ms. Scully. Meanwhile, Mulder visits Sveta to clarify some of her earlier answers. Sveta now claims men on ships took her babies, not aliens, and there is no one she can trust with the truth. Fox calls Dana to tell her everything they’d been led to believe may be a lie. Too bad he’s interrupting her date with Tad.
Mulder goes to the former X-files office in the FBI building with Walter Skinner, but all of the files are gone. Skinner claims no one has been in that room for 14 years, but that’s clearly not accurate. Fox stupidly asks who Walter is taking orders from now. Doesn’t he realize Skinner is the one who reached out to him in the first place? Mulder really does come off as a crackpot more often than not. Walter says he noticed a change in the government after 9/11 and he wants Fox to do something about it. Mulder takes the first step by ensuring future contact with his former boss.
O’Malley burns his bridge with Scully by sensationalizing her current surgical work on children born without ears. Pretty sure Dana doesn’t want her patients’ photographs appearing on Tad's (or anyone’s) web show. Unfortunately (luckily?) she’s distracted by the blood test results, which she wants retested ASAP. Scully’s hoping to hear from Mulder, who is having a covert meeting with an old contact at the National Mall. Turns out, the old man is the compassionate army doctor from the Roswell incident, who, 10 years earlier, reached out to Fox because he didn’t want to take his secrets to the grave. Mulder reveals the alien conspiracy doesn’t involve actual aliens, but humans abducting other humans and subjecting them to experimentation. The old man tells Fox he’s close. Apparently he’s not close enough to expose everything because the old man leaves with the final answer still hanging in the air.
Scully goes to see Mulder’s house to check on him. She assumes he’s having one of his usual “save the world” manic moments. He claims O’Malley has been right all along about the human conspiracy, but Dana’s not buying it. Their moment is interrupted by Sveta, who is staying with Mulder. Scully, acting like she was punched in the gut (heart?), gives up and is about to leave when Tad arrives. They convince her to hear out Mulder, who gives Scully a history lesson dating back to World War II and leading to eventual world domination. (Yes, really.) O’Malley plans to go public on his show with their theories. Scully adds to the momentum by telling Sveta her blood shows no evidence of alien DNA. But what a difference a day makes; the next day, Sveta publicly recants her allegations and Tad blames it on the government. Sveta disappears, the ARV and the scientists who worked on it are blown up by the military and O’Malley’s website has been shut down (gasp!)
Fox meets with Dana in her hospital’s parking garage. He implores her to not give up, but she’s worried about Sveta’s safety. Scully tells Mulder she retested Sveta’s blood (and genome) as well as her own and their results were the same. Dana’s now on board to help stop the human conspirators. At that moment, Skinner conveniently calls them into action. Meanwhile, on a dark, deserted road, Sveta’s car shuts down. She thinks she’s being abducted again (the UFO above her with the green laser light certainly supports that theory), but she actually gets firebombed instead. At the end of the episode, information is relayed to one of the conspirators, an elderly man with a nasty smoking habit. Hey, isn’t he supposed to be dead?!
Sestra Professional:The Sestras saw the first episode of the revival at New York Comic Con in October 2015, but it didn't air on Fox until late January. The predominant memory I have of watching it with legions of other dedicated X-Philes was how excited everyone got at having the original credits music back with Mitch Pileggi's name finally included in that incarnation. That's kind of backed up by my blog from the event, and I'm having a similar reaction six years later.
Life's become a punchline: Fox's voiceover says -- in the typical Mulder overbaked voiceover fashion that we'd come to know and even miss (everyone except Sestra Am) in the years since we last saw Sculder -- that we must ask ourselves if UFOs are a hoax. Are we truly alone or are we being lied to? And then there's an example that the technology for showing a UFO crash on television has gotten a lot better since the original series went off the air.
In similar fashion, Dana and Fox are shoehorned back into the action -- seriously, a medical doctor about to go into surgery has to act as Mulder's agent? With the rest of the next two seasons already in my rearview mirror, I'm willing to pinpoint this tiny sliver of a moment as when the character once deemed one of the best female role models on TV started to get pushed off that mantel.
That doesn't take away from getting to see Mulder and Scully again, even with the opening eye-rolling attempt at banter about Fox's choice of transportation. I'll admit it, I'm always happy to see them too. Joel McHale's arrival infuses some air into the proceedings, even if Tad O'Malley isn't willing to roll down his windows.
Aliens couldn't find this place: So Tad brings our reunited heroes off to see Sveta, who seems a little demure but relatively calm for someone who has been abducted multiple times and been repeatedly impregnated by aliens. Sveta says she has alien DNA, not sure why that would be a thought rolling around her head, but still going with it, cause ... Fox and Dana are working the case!
Sveta's got an intermittent mind-reading thing going on, so while that solves my previous question -- she knew it would intrigue Scully and Mulder -- it's another bit of a weak premise with no prior reasoning behind it. Still with them, though, cause my X-Files interest overcame killer cats and goat suckers. It can certainly survive a problematic UFO starter story.
I've never felt so alive: Much more interesting to me was the free-energy gambit. (Show creator Chris Carter, the writer/director of this episode must have gotten some really good intel in his downtime in this regard.) The spaceship hovering in an electromagnetic field and then seeming to vanish has piqued my interest. Well, mostly.
The flashback scenes coming out of the desert don't up the ante immediately, as they're rather formulaic and clichéd. And while I can't blame O'Malley for hitting on Dana, it's not something I particularly want to see. Sveta continues to show insight that helps move along the story, but it doesn't feel organic. And we couldn't very well have an event kickoff without the immortal words that "(Insert name here) is the key to everything." Why must there always be a key? I'm eager to get to the Darin Morgan episode, because he never builds his story foundation in an obvious manner and it always retains its structure and integrity.
I was being led by my nose through a dark alley to a dead end: My concerns get waylaid when we finally see Skinner. David Duchovny and Mitch Pileggi do a nice job delivering some chunky bits of dialogue designed to melt away the 14 years since the characters have been in each other's orbits. They've still got it, and I'm jonesing to see more of it.
More good groundwork is set. Scully's concerns over her blood work raises eyebrows, and we finally find out the connection between the crash at the beginning of the episode, the obliteration of the alien and Mulder's informant. This should have segued perfectly into the "You are on fire" scene between Fox and Dana. But even that's impeded by the need to throw out the old chestnuts -- "you want to believe" and "the truth is out there." It's done with such a heavy hand that it undermines what should have been the highlight of the episode and the hallmark of the return.
Next, Mulder spews a lot of interesting information that bridges the gap between the H-bomb and where we are now. There's just so much there -- ideas amassed by Fox for so many years -- that it's too much to take. O'Malley piles more on top of that with concepts Carter uses to bridge the distance between the end of the regular show and the event series. I thought Dana would bring us out from under the weight of this oppression by saying that going public with the fear-mongering claptrap was incredibly irresponsible.
We have a small problem: But then there was some kind of total particle reversal. Not sure why the guys who solved the free-energy problem were blown to bits and returned to the atmosphere, isn't that technology that could be of use in the longer term? O'Malley's disappearance was abrupt, but I can go along with that in the name of the continuing story. And, of course, the biggest news of all -- Scully had just said a test proved Sveta didn't have alien DNA, only to do another test that proved they both have it. Um, if we're talking about fear-mongering claptrap, perhaps a medical doctor who thought a particular test's results weren't conclusive shouldn't give the result out as fact. And finally, hey, there's our old hollowed-out nemesis seemingly intact. Maybe he had used some of that super-soldier technology that's been otherwise disregarded to regenerate, and it just doesn't work on the part of the body abused for decades by tobacco.
So I'm left totally confused and overwhelmed with information ... and I'll admit that I like that. Welcome back, X-Files! Oh yeah, are you gonna get around to telling us what happened on Dec. 22, 2012 -- the planned date of colonization?
Guest star of the week: Joel McHale enters the fray with a lot of energy and charm. Tad O'Malley could have come off as even more of an annoying know-it-all than he does. What McHale actually accomplishes is giving us a glimpse into how people like O'Malley become legends to the public.
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