It’s an all ‘X-Files’ and ‘Millennium’ entry today.
I.
“Unusual Suspects” (a Lone Gunmen-centric episode) and “Sense and Antisense” today in ‘X-Files’ and ‘Millennium’ watching. The former is quite entertaining, a good but not favorite episode, and the type of thing that provides an origin story for both The Lone Gunmen as well as for Mulder himself.
I like to call this era — perhaps directed by R. W. Fassbinder — as “Fox and Friends”.
But as has been argued or at least suggested elsewhere, there’s a sense in which this origin story might be closer in its relation to canon to “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” than to a regular ‘X-Files’ episode. That is, self-mythology, not quite accurate, a story told and retold over time.
“Sense and Antisense” is not ‘entertaining’, per se … but it is fascinating. It’s a mess. It’s over-stuffed. It was rewritten or at least went through rewrites.
Not exactly the same thing.
II.
“Unusual Suspects”, the third episode of the fifth season of ‘The X-Files’, establishes that ‘The X-Files’ exists, in a sense, in the same universe as ‘Homicide: Life of the Street’, as it features Richard Belzer as Munch, a character who also showed up in ‘Law & Order’, ‘Arrested Development’, and ‘The Wire’, among other shows. We also know that ‘The X-Files’ and ‘Millennium’ in a sense exist in the ‘same’ universe, as once ‘Millennium’ is cancelled it will have an unofficial finale/wrapup with an ‘X-Files’ crossover.
But although ‘The X-Files’ and ‘Millennium’ exist in the same fictional world, they exist in different metaphysical universes, as has been made clearer than usual these first few episodes of these new seasons. The thesis I propose (and have proposed rather laxly several times recently) is that ‘The X-Files’ is a metaphysically sci-fi universe and ‘Millennium’ is a more or less naturalistic one; furthermore the driving force in ‘The X-Files’ is a notion of truth, whereas the struggle to cope with — define, recognize, etc. — evil dominates ‘Millennium’.
In a sense this shouldn’t be complicated or controversial; after all, the tag line for ‘The X-Files’ is “The Truth is Out There”, and from the beginning of the series notions of good and evil have been at the forefront of ‘Millennium’, especially but not exclusively through its religious focus. Mulder’s drive is to find the truth — about his sister, about aliens, about government conspiracies –, whereas Scully is a self-defined scientist, a critical thinker. What Mulder and Scully deal with episode by episode are not always ‘crimes’, but they are ‘mysteries’; in contrast Frank Black’s cases revolve almost entirely at this point around heinous criminal acts, usually murder, but also rape, kidnapping, and mutilation.
The positive statement describing the focus of these fictional worlds is rather uninteresting, but turning the situation around or inverting it provides another perspective. That is, instead of considering what these shows are about, look at what they take for granted or exclude. The moral horizon of ‘The X-Files’ is vaguely nihilistic; even its supernatural elements do not inspire much awe or even deep trembling: they are facts of the world, frequently tools (used and misused), and like all else in the show frequently inexplicable. The moral surface of ‘The X-Files’ has no depth and it does not exactly drive narratives; many of its serial or similar killers are driven not by hatred or revenge, or by any overarching, grand purpose but by biological hungers and impulses, or by sudden opportunity and newfound abilities, by the banal desires of their unimaginative lives. These are no Hannibal Lectors. In ‘Millennium’ truth is not a given, but the fundamental comprehensibility of given crimes is. Crimes are matters of cause and effect, of mechanism, and solving them, — even when they are motivated by bizarre religious beliefs (redundant, perhaps), even when it requires the thinking-outside-the-box of a Frank Black — is likewise a matter of cause and effect, and of interpreting data, facts, evidence. Here such evidence can, for the most part, be trusted; it just has to be interpreted, whereas in ‘The X-Files’ almost all is smoke and mirrors.
What is then usually excluded in ‘The X-Files’ is a deep concern with justice, or right & wrong. The main extent of ethics is the immediate circle: coworkers, family, and friends. Mulder’s major moral imperative is ‘the truth’, as he labels it; when he rants and raves about it, about coverups, about government conspiracies, it seems less the abuses of paternalism or of using people as mere tools that upsets him — as these seem to be a ‘given’ in this world, that you can barely trust anyone to do the ‘right thing’ –, but rather that rather that through lies and deception The Truth has been violated, obscured, or lost. Frequently Mulder — and Scully and Skinner — is asked to do what we would consider ‘immoral’ in the name of duty, and he would rather do that than give up the quest for truth. In Frank Black’s world of case solving facts are not immaterial, as they are frequently given, but rather its understanding motives that keeps driving him. It’s a preoccupation with how perpetrators think; even if a case has been ‘solved’ satisfactorily according to said facts, Frank seems to continue until he understands, and that understanding is less a matter of how the facts fit together (or don’t) and more of what was driving those involved.
If this is, more or less, the case, we can expect the two shows to handle similar material in different but somewhat predictable ways, and so far this has been the case. A couple recent instances come to mind: first, a comparative look at parallel episodes, and then an episode of ‘Millennium’ that, at least at first, feels very much like an episode of ‘The X-Files’, except in how it is handled.
In the second episodes of season five of ‘The X-Files’ and two of ‘Millennium’, “Redux, Part 2” and “Beware of the Dog”, respectively, we are presented with multiple avenues of interpretation. At the end of “Redux, Part 2” Scully’s cancer goes into a remarkable and sudden remission; the question is why, and three alternatives are offered. Her doctor is giving her an aggressive, last-ditch therapy (naturalistic, traditional medicine); via Mulder’s work and discussion with the Smoking Man she is implanted with a microchip whose function and working is otherwise not understood (science-fiction, perhaps alien technology); and Scully has a chat with the family priest and seems to regain her faith … perhaps it was a ‘miracle’ (the religious angle). The fourth, null-option might just be spontaneous remission, no other answer forthcoming or necessary. In typical ‘X-Files’ fashion, the probing question is this ‘why’, it’s about wanting that truth, but as is almost always the case, that truth is out of reach, perhaps even an illusion or mirage. In “Beware of the Dog” Frank ends up in a small mountain town where an elderly couple was killed by dogs in their RV; the bare mechanism of what has happened is never really in question. The dogs have been there for a long time, practically forever, and in the past some sort of ‘deal’ was reached, and the dogs stayed out of the town proper, but elsewhere after nightfall it was there territory. Then they started coming into town after nightfall, and toward the end they even invaded the home of a transplant from L.A. Frank meets up with a wacky old mountain man who has connections to the Millennium Group, and through him an explicit answer as to ‘why’ is provided, though in vague, somewhat mythical terms. Evil is to be respected, but also you have to show it that it has to respect you; furthermore, he argues, theft and murder and the like … those are ‘bad’ acts but hardly qualify as ‘evil’ in a deep or real sense, as they’re just mechanistic events to which anyone could be driven in need or out of anger … they are explicable. But true evil? That’s the question. And evidently these dogs are part of it or perhaps it. There is a balance to be maintained, and it has to deal, furthermore, with that matter of mutual respect. The arrival of the L.A. transplant has upset this balance, but furthermore he came out of fear and without respect; this is our ‘cosmic supernatural’ ‘explanation’, a matter of ‘metaphysical depth’ in or to the world of ‘Millennium’. And, going further with the theme of balance, the intruder from L.A. wandered carelessly and arrogantly into nature, into the domain — habitat — of the dogs; he was even pleased at the good deal he got, though he was dismayed at the old man living on ‘his’ land; yet turning it around, were the dogs not just the rather literally natural extension of nature intruding, in response, into the supposedly civilized realm? Poetically, symbolically, the dogs were a matter of natural, not cosmic balance, and so ‘Millennium’ provides us with mundane, cosmic-spiritual, and poetic interpretations; one at the surface level, one that digs deeply into a mythology, and one that exists mainly at the ‘meta’ level. And in “Beware of the Dog” (and I’m hesitant to read anything into the dog, god anagram) all three interpretations can be and probably should be layered, accepted at once as facets. In ‘The X-Files’, though, of the three substantial explanations only one can be true, as the validity of any one of them renders the others not so much invalid as superfluous: either medicine, alien or otherwise advanced technology, or divine intervention sent Scully’s cancer into remission. Choose Your Own Explanation; turn to page 47 if … and so on. Each explanation is a mask, and whereas in ‘Millennium’ they coexist as facets, here they are facades. That having been said, ‘we’ all ‘know’ that the chip was responsible … it’s just that those unable to ‘believe’ must shield themselves — in-universe — with faith or with the illusory efficacy of traditional science.
And then there is “Sense and Antisense”, an episode of ‘Millennium’ that more than any so far feels like the draft to an ‘X-Files’ script. It’s frantic and conspiratorial. People appear and disappear; something shadowy is underway. But even if we imagine that it had been an ‘X-Files’ script or inspired by one, perhaps a castoff, a hand-me-down, it’s ‘Millennium’ through and through in worldview. Once Frank discovers that he’s been ‘used’ to help abduct a mentally ill man whom they had taken as ill with some sort of virus, he insists on continuing the case, and indeed the Group takes it up. But the reason here is not he truth, it’s not to uncover the truth, not to find out what really went on … it’s because Frank was used. Deceived. His moral sensibility has been offended. As he says, he was used to abduct a man, and he is now responsible to and for him. It is this sense of responsibility, not of duty, that drives Frank in a manner less at home in the ‘X-Files’ universe.
While I’ve watched all of ‘The X-Files’ before, each episode of ‘Millennium’ that I watch is new to me, and I have little reason except induction from past events to make me suspect that this division in how stories are told or interpreted will maintain as we go along. After all, both bottom-up and top-down factors in the shows would seem to act to confound this. On the one hand these shows are not master-planned-and-plotted Gesamtkunstwerke, but rather the results of scripts by various writers and rewriters, the products of any number of directors and competing producers, of last minute changes on set and in the editing room. And on the other hand they share creators at the highest levels; Chris Carter’s “vision”, such as it is, is sure to shine through and determine what the shows are about, we might say; likewise the appearance of Wong and Morgan as show-runners would indicate their creative vision migrating from one show to the other. But could it not also be the case as so often in the realm of ‘the aesthetic’ and related endeavors that these shows develop their own entelechy, a kind of organic or ecosystem nature with feedback loops that brings them into focus around core moods and concepts, and not exactly immune but at least resistant to certain kinds of tampering?
III.
Tonight?
Perhaps “Toy Story” … one and two? Who knows? Something light for this Friday evening. “Toy Story” and the second episode of “Ripper Street”, for example.
But before leaving, a few reviews for others to follow up on:
- “Redux” / “The Beginning of the End”
- “Redux, Part 2” / “Beware of the Dog”
- “Unusual Suspects” / “Sense and Antisense”
The A.V. Club reviews are comprehensive enough and provide good ways of looking at the respective episodes.
