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March 5, 2016

Trump and the Siren Lure of Democratic Bragging Rights

Even the most humble, pure-of-heart and chaste Democrat cannot help but be a little giddy at the prospect of the Republican Party actually nominating Donald Trump. The weaker spirits among us are no doubt salivating in the hope that it happens. These are the natural feelings evoked by political combat when one’s opponent shoots himself in the foot, then the shin, then the elbow, then the eyeball, and so on. It is understandable to feel a little giddy, but instead of acting on these feelings, Democrats should begin to put them in the box with other inappropriate and unproductive emotions. Republican Nominee Donald Trump would not just be bad for the Republican Party. His nomination would also poison the entire political system for years after he has left the stage, if in fact he ever leaves the stage after earning that particular title. This will be bad for the country because it will make governing harder whoever wins elections. Democrats need to be more vocal about placing the good of the country over partisan bragging rights.

There is huge appeal in having those bragging rights. For the moment, let’s consider it a given that a Trump nomination would mean the Democrats win the White House and the Senate. There would be other major benefits.

One is that a Trump nomination would burnish Obama’s legacy. And I am not referring to conservative attempts,some sort-of persuasive and others less so, to saddle Obama with responsibility for Trump’s rise (of course, if Trump wins the presidency, that will be some indelible tar on Obama’s legacy). No, I am referring to the debate around how much Obama is to blame for the epic level of Washington disfunction he has presided over during his two terms. The Republican case is that Obama’s arrogance, aloofness, inexperience, lack of true bipartisan creativity, and extreme positions made it impossible for the Republicans to work with him. The Democrats claim that Obama bent over backwards–and foolishly so–to work across the aisle, but the Republicans were too extreme, too gerrymandered, too beholden to right-wing media, too stubborn and obstructionist for any “common sense, bipartisan” deals to be made.

Aside: I happen to believe that the Democrats have the stronger case on this one. In late 2008/early 2009, the GOP leaders in Congress made a tactical decision to oppose the president at every step, with both short term and long term goals in mind. In the short term, it would keep Republicans from giving their imprimatur to center-left policies and perhaps stopping those policies from becoming laws. At the very least, they could muddy the waters so Obama’s initiatives would not become broadly popular. For the long term, they chose obstruction to rob Obama of the title of “transformational president” that he so desperately sought. It’s hard to remember this now at the end of the Obama era, but at the start of it there was a real sense of possibility, eliciting elation or terror depending on your party affiliation, that Obama’s face would end up on money one day. You can’t be a transformational president if the opposition cements the perspective that you only speak for half or less of the country.

It is worth noting that this debate rankles Democrats more than any other partisan tit-for-tat, as evident by the president himself giving entire speeches on the subject. It is one of those partisan debates that will never really be won by either side, where we just have to agree to disagree–like whether Reagan won the Cold War, or wether Clinton was responsible for 90’s prosperity, or whether Bush willfully cherry picked intelligence to manipulate the country into supporting the Iraq war. In these kinds of arguments, we can only feel the secure (smug?) sense of having won them by deploying a debate-ending talking point, by possessing the better mic-drop, smack-down slogan. For this particular debate, it would go like this:

Republican: Obama failed to deliver on his number one promise of bringing the country together; instead, he tore it apart.

Democrat: Obama tried desperately, but never had a chance. The party that nominated Donald Trump was never going to work with him.

A Trump nomination will hand the democrats the same argument the Israelis have used against the Palestinians: We wanted a peace process, but we never had a partner to negotiate with. When historians evaluate the Obama years, a Trump nomination would tip the scales in favor of the Democratic side of this debate.

Beyond this one issue, Nominee Trump would become a cudgel the Democrats would swing for years to come, their ultimate trump card (pun un… avoidable). When Republicans finally come around to proposing a specific replacement for Obamacare, Democrats will respond with,”But what about that time you nominated Trump?” When the GOP figures out policies that are geared to make successful outreach to minority communities… “But… Trump!” On and on, the Democrats will never let the Republicans forget that they nominated Trump.

Which is why I see peril for Democrats if Trump is nominated. It will foster bad habits in them, discourage a cooperative spirit even as Republicans will be emerging from this dark period ready to cooperate.

Trump’s nomination would prolong the healing that needs to happen inside the Republican Party. Democrats might not give a fig how long it takes for that healing to happen, but they should. A Trump nomination might mean Democrats keep “winning,” but what good is winning if you can’t govern afterward? Our federal system, and our pluralistic sprit, requires both sides to negotiate and compromise. Our system cannot function unless there are two healthy political parties giving voice to their respective slices of American life. The sooner the GOP is stable again, the sooner both parties abandon the idea of absolute domination over the other, the sooner we will begin to come together as a nation and solve the big problems on the horizon that will not be solved any other way. Maybe then we will be worthy of having a truly transformational president who speaks to and for most of us. And Congress… Congress will always suck, as the Founders intended.

February 27, 2016

Jaron Lanier on Star Trek’s Magic

Star Trek’s trademark optimism gets a lot of lip service by us fans, the media, and especially Hollywood producers assigned to Trek projects who feel they must justify their jobs to the fans by paying homage to “Gene’s vision.” It is rare that you see anyone apply more than a surface reading of Trek’s vision of the future: we don’t destroy ourselves; technology is used for good; poverty and famine have been obliterated; abundance for everybody; blacks are okay (but women and gays are still cultural minorities). This reading isn’t nothing; these are all laudable characteristics (except for the still-prevalent sexism and homophobia in the franchise products). Although considering the cultural optimism of the Space Age during the 50s and 60s, it’s not exactly surprising that a show like Star Trek was created.

Today is different. In today’s socio-political/entertainment landscape of Doom & Gloom, there could be no more radical, necessary message than our future will be brighter than our past.

Jaron Lanier explains the lightning in Classic Star Trek’s bottle, and how it might be captured again.

In a brief tangent of his book Who Owns the Future, Lanier tells us what the Star Trek optimism is really about, and I would hope that all of those Hollywood producers would read it. His argument is two-fold: Classic Star Trek depicted advanced technology as no threat to humanity; it was not a threat because real people were always in control, Kirk in particular.

The idea that advanced technology does not ruin us is a backdrop theme of Star Trek, mostly unstated but starkly apparent when contrasted with so much other science-fiction. According to Lanier, technology on Trek results in a “more moral, fun, adventurous, sexy, and meaningful world.” The prime reason that “a more instrumented world” does not lead to the kind of dystopian vision of so much sci-fi is because “a recognizable human remains at the center of the adventure” and not only succeeds but thrives due to factors—human factors—that have nothing to do with technology.

Star Trek says there is something in the human that is essential and cannot be matched or even defeated by even the smartest, most advanced technology.

Trek sometimes—err, pretty frequently, or at least in memorable episodes—makes this theme explicit by depicting technology run amuck free of human handlers. The obvious example is the Borg, but there were many 60’s episodes where super computers took over entire populations and had to be stopped by Kirk and Crew. There were always machines carrying out their program without adult supervision, from the Doomsday Machine to V’Ger. The Trek optimism—even if the overall mood of the story is dark or frightening—shines through when the human(oid) heroes stick it to these amoral algorithms.

As an aside, this is why the technobabble solution—invented by TNG, but on Voyager and Enterprise know as the Act IV Resolution—is not only an affront to what Trek stories should be, but also to the type of optimistic sci-fi that Trek represents. In these episodes where some unexplainable technological gimmick saves the day, the human crew usually comes off seeming hapless and helpless while their technology is superior to their will and wits. In these episodes, you don’t even need a crew. The ship’s Computer could have easily assessed the parameters of the threat and sprayed it with a reverse polarity tachyon beam, or whatever, and called it a day. In contrast, the Doomsday Machine was not thwarted by technobabble. It was stopped because of the distinctly human brew of heroism, vengeance, love and madness that manifested as a will to act in the mind and heart of Commodore Matt Decker. The best of these stories end with an idea sweated out of a human brain, an insight, a whim, a gamble, a sacrifice.

Trek’s optimism teaches us that advanced technology is always a positive benefit—the Enterprise is run on amoral algorithms too. But also that technology is the necessary-but-not-sufficient element of human progress. As Lanier puts it, “At the center of the high-tech circular bridge of the starship Enterprise is seated a Kirk or a Picard, a person.” And that person makes all the difference.

The technology on Star Trek was just window dressing, but its presence conveyed a quiet, almost subliminal and powerful message. Roddenberry’s Enterprise was just a futuristic naval battleship. The technology was backdrop to tell space adventure stories. Still, this positive view of technology was a point of view the writers chose in stark contrast with so much popular sci-fi. Even before the 1960s, writers have always speculated about the dangers of powerful, pervasive technology, from Bradbury to E.M. Forester, who Lanier reminds us wrote a dystopian technology story in 1909 called “The Machine Stops” about an Internet-like system that takes over people’s lives. Star Trek refutes this negative view of technology. Or rather it posits a sunny future where technology continues to be used as a valuable tool, and where all of the problems that we fear about technology won’t actually come to pass because those tools will be wielded by decent, gloriously flawed people.

Lanier argues that the optimism exhibited in TOS and TNG-era Trek, which he praises as “pure kitsch, ridiculous on most levels” and “silly,” represented the better angles of a technologists’ nature. He thinks that it is “a shame that there aren’t more recent examples to supersede it.”

Lainer writes that the dominant narrative of our age will be about how so much of our lives are becoming “more software-mediated, physicality is becoming more mutable by technology, and reality is being optimized.” The problem he foresees is “that the humans aren’t the heroes” of this new reality; humans are obsolete, unimportant, slow and in the way of real progress. He argues that this narrative needs to be opposed, and that the importance of actual people must be reinserted into the utopian visions of the role of future technology. He writes, “Drawing a line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the story of our time.”

Of all science fiction out there today, Star Trek is uniquely situated to make this progressive, optimistic but also subversive statement. The reasons it is progressive and optimistic is obvious. The reason it is subversive is because the power brokers of modern society—from Google to Apple to Facebook to the NSA—keep arguing that We the People need to take a backseat and let their algorithms take care of everything. Kirk would not approve.

Lainer’s analysis of Trek’s optimism offers a potential roadmap for CBS as they set out to create the first post-IPhone Star Trek series. The new show’s writers will have to update not just the design of the tech—when Enterprise premiered in 2000, the solution was to make the communicator’s smaller—but how people use and interface with tech. If CBS really wants to express Trek’s optimism, and make a statement that would launch a thousand think pieces because no one else in science-fiction is making this particular statement, they should imagine the technophobe’s worst nightmares and recast them in sunny, glorious, kitschy wonderment. Imagine Google Glass/Tricorder contact lenses. The Ship’s Computer as artificial intelligence that can be wired (or wi-fi’d) directly into people’s brains. No more need for Holodecks—just tell the computer what you want to experience and have her beam it into your temporal lobe. No need for communicators because you are constantly tracking and tuned into the people on your team so that on a mission you function as a hive mind, not unlike the Borg. Starfleet constantly uploads personal data on the crew to better plan missions and design starships to maximize effectiveness. The ship’s Computer collects information from every crew member and operates the ship by reflecting the collective will of the crew, presenting them with options optimized to their likes and needs. All of this and more—so long as the humans using the technology, with their foibles and their genius, remain at the heart of the drama. So long as the humans use the tech to enrich their experience, and not the tech using the human to enrich itself. So long as the human overrides the judgment of the computer algorithms just as often as they accept them, proving that the computer only offers an interpretation/expression of what the human already knows, and while sometimes the algorithm is useful, sometimes the digitized middleman isn’t needed or is just plain wrong. The man or woman in the center seat is still the indispensible hero.

Lainer is a technologist, so he applies that lens to Trek, but this is only one way that CBS could make Star Trek into a relevant social commentary again. There are dozens of other ways that would be just a valid and important, from dealing with xenophobia to gender issues to climate change to economic inequality to imperialism and terrorism and civil liberties, or all of the above. We can only hope that after 15 years of meaningless Trek, CBS will pick a point of view for this show to make it meaningful. It doesn’t have to be Lanier’s interpretation of what worked with classic Trek, but CBS needs to choose something and run with it.

January 25, 2016

Revisiting The X-Files: Chris Carter’s Commitment Issues

When it came time for Chris Carter to write “The Truth,” what was then the X-Files series finale, he must have felt two competing forces in himself. He must have felt compelled to give viewers a finale that revealed the truth, one episode that laid everything out in the open, the entire byzantine architecture of the mythology he had constructed over the years. He also needed to satisfy his own desire, both creative and financial, to keep the finale open-ended in a way that allowed for future story potential. The result was a finale that spent all of its time rehashing the past, while once again opting to kick the can of the alien colonization down the road—way down the road.

I remember the media campaign for the finale promising that the episode will answer every question. The problem is that most questions about the alien conspiracy had been answered for years, namely in “Fight the Future” and “Two Fathers/One Son.” So most of Mulder’s trial in the first hour of “The Truth” is a recap of things we already knew, a clip show. Sure, these answers had never been presented all at once in a sequence of exposition scenes. But were viewers—or even fans—really craving this? Isn’t that what fan pages are for, to research all the details if you are so inclined?

We did learn a few new facts about the mythology, but they are minor details that aren’t that important, nor do they add much to the over-arcing story. For example, Scully tells us that the government learned of Colonization plans from the salvaged “data banks” of the Roswell UFO. Embarrassingly, some information revealed in the trial is simply inaccurate. Spender testifies that the Samantha clone was “part of the cloning experiment done by the conspiracy. She herself died in 1987” by the hands of Smoking Man. The Samantha clone was the product of renegade aliens, not the Syndicate. And the real Samantha disappeared without a trace in 1979, taken by God or some other mystical force, not the Smoking Man.

All of this to say, how could Carter have ended his series differently?

The problem lies in Carter’s approach to writing the mythology, which I characterize as a failure to commit. For all his strengths, one major flaw is his fear of clarity and endings. It is one thing to pepper viewers with intriguing questions and creepy doubts, but eventually there has to be clear answers and closure to some storylines. In the three worst examples, listed below, Carter failed to provide this, in part because he must have been worried that he might not be able to continue the story once he goes on record with those answers. Clarity can be intimidating because once you definitively depict a truth about a plot line or character, this becomes a millstone that you must carry forward. The problem is that when you give into this fear and avoid clarity, you undercut the dramatic impact of your stories.

In contrast, consider how Mathew Wiener of Mad Men describes his approach to writing. He says that each season when planning stories, he always “goes for broke” every season: never hold off on a good story idea for some future season, because that may never come; put it on screen now, and figure out how to top it or add to it next year.

Carter does not follow this approach, and here are three examples that prove The X-Files would have been better if he had:

Mulder and Scully’s Romance:

Their explicit flirtation was strung along from the start of Season 6 with an endless series of teases that got to be pretty annoying by Season 8. Their first kiss—and I believe it was their actual first kiss as characters—did not happen until the very end of Season 8. But even with that, we don’t see them as a couple until the very end of Season 9; and their domesticity is blink-and-you-will-miss-it subtle in the second movie.

Mr. Carter, why not go for broke and fully explore their blossoming romance? Why must it happen off screen? If you are going to put them together, why not use all the narrative tools at your disposal to fold their romance into the dramatic themes of family, faith, love and loss that you have so expertly woven into the tapestry of this show from the beginning? This could have been one of the great TV romances, and we would have known such a richer, more interesting Mulder and Scully than we saw at the end of Season 9.

If your answer is: We can’t show that level of detail about their romance because it would have changed the dynamic of the show—you would be right! Then either don’t put them together, or decide that you want to change the dynamic of the show and go for broke, make it work! But don’t try to have it both ways.

By the way, Gillian Anderson agrees with the idea that the dynamic of the show cannot be sustained with Mulder and Scully as active lovers. In a recent interview during the filming of episode 5 of the new season she said: “Part of what is enticing about the duo is the fact that they are against each other [Laughs.] at the same time they are for each other. It’s just too domestic a scenario to have it being that they live in the same house, and they go home every night to the same house while they’re doing The X-Files during the day. It leaves a much more intriguing and interesting dynamic to have us still maybe be in love and have that spark going, that question mark.”

William’s Origins:

William is the major element of the mythology that closed out the series. It was an incoherent mess from beginning to end. Despite being repeatedly told ad nausea that he is a “miracle child,” we still have no verified truth about how Scully came to be pregnant by him, or why he was so special. After two seasons of speculation, the series finally seemed to land on the explanation that William is a kind of Alien Jesus, a savior who will bring about colonization. But Carter never committed to this explanation. Forget whether or not the Alien Jesus idea is inspired or silly, it is the writer’s job—especially in sci-fi—to make us accept outlandish ideas. I could get behind William as a human-alien baby growing up to lead Colonization as both a mythic and epic story—but the writers have to sell me on it. Carter never tried. In fact, he seemed so eager to get Scully’s baby out of the picture. When William was supposedly cured of his miracle-ness and then given up for adoption in late Season 9, we were still being told that colonization will only happen because of William, and now that the aliens no longer have access to him colonization has been stopped. Yet, three episodes later in “The Truth” we are told that colonization is absolutely going to happen on December 22, 2012, and William is not mentioned at all in relation to this.

Which brings us to…

Alien Colonization of Earth:

Hey, I get If the end game of your mythology is that every human will gestate an alien in their belly and then be ripped open by said alien, and this is how the human race will go extinct and be supplanted on Earth by aliens… it is hard to actually depict this battle on screen without altering your TV show into Independence Day (Remember the gag in “Fight the Future” when Mulder is in an alley behind a bar and pees on an Independence Day poster?).

But if that is where you have set up your mythology to go, you eventually have to go there. You don’t have to have the UFOs blowing up the White House. Maybe colonization is halted, as it was by the rebels for a brief period in Season 6. Maybe Mulder has a sit down with an alien and convinces them to call it off. Or maybe the screen fades to black just before the world ends. Or maybe you do have UFOs blow up the White House. Eventually you have to decide. As a story, by stacking more and more elements and pushing the payoff further away, the mythology falls apart under its own weight, as we saw in Season 8 and 9.

Carter has recently admitted that he wrote a third X-Files film script just so he could know how the mythology plays out. He has also said that the story in that script is too big for TV, and could only be realized as a big budget blockbuster. That may never happen, even if the new season gets good ratings for FOX. The lure of a future film franchise—which must have seemed like such a sure thing after the success of “Fight the Future”—has exacerbated Carter’s commitment issues. He should have used Season 8 and 9 to end the mythology, but he assumed he would get more movies. He should have used the second movie to end it, but he assumed he would get more movies. Now that the show is being resurrected again, Carter probably should have used these 6 episodes to end the mythology, but all indications are that he hasn’t. And now he is dropping hints to 20^th Century Fox that the next film script is ready for filming. I hope it happens, but I’m prepared for the reality that the X-Files may never get a proper finale.

For the last time… Implications for Season 10:

On the first two commitment issues, Carter has apparently landed on a firm resolution. Mulder and Scully are no longer a couple, and they are still mourning the loss of their son. While this part of their past isn’t ignored in the new episodes, it is not teased out in new directions with some tantalizing climax kicked down the road.

But with the mythology, not so much. Carter has admitted that the last episode of Season 10 is a mythology show and a big cliffhanger. Concerning, since there is no guarantee there will be a Season 11. When Anderson was asked whether Season 10 is the end of the X-Files, she said this: “From what I hear it’s a good beginning [Laughs.], which I guess in the end can be an equally good ending. You know, if the question mark is so big…”

We may be forced to agree. In the end, a question mark may not be the best way to end this series, but it will likely be the only way Carter will end it.

January 22, 2016

Revisiting The X-Files: Mythology vs. Stand-Alone

It is a puzzle that many of the stand-alones of Season 8 and 9 were considerably more entertaining than those of Season 6 and 7, and yet the last two seasons saw ratings decline, long-time fans like me not even giving them a chance, and finally cancelation.

I used to scoff at the quote by Chris Carter from the early 2000s that The X-Files could have continued for another ten years without Mulder and Scully. But after watching Season 8 and 9, I see what he meant. If you doubt that this show still had juice, go watch “Release,” the penultimate stand-alone episode of the series, which contained as much conspiratorial intrigue, paranormal psychology, and emotional punch as any episode. Go watch “Hell Bound” from late Season 9, which was so scary I had to pause Netflix, harkening back to the first X-Files I ever saw, “Squeeze” when I had to walk out my grandparents living room and seek refuge in the kitchen. Watch the finale stand-alone, the sweet send-off “Sunshine Days” and the chemistry between Doggett and Reyes is undeniable.

The writers, directors, and actors pulled out all the stops in these episodes. There is no sense of anyone phoning it in. There is a lot of energy from the beginning of Season 8 until the better end. “Release” in particular could be an early first season episode of its own series.

So what was the problem? Carter’s dream of further seasons died because there was none of that energy in the latter mythology episodes—which is also proof that the mythology is the most essential aspect of the show. Without the mythology, even though most of the other episodes are not serialized with it, the series unravels.

From the Season 7 finale through the end of the series, the mythology episodes were either incoherent, or slapped-together contrivances. Few of them achieved intrigue, thrill, or even melodrama. I can imagine how casual viewers or new viewers watching these as they aired would have had no idea what was even happening in these episodes. I’m a fan who literally studies this show, and I’m not sure what is happening. In Mid-Season 9 there is a two-parter that reveals that Scully’s baby is basically Alien Jesus, but seeing it for the first time last week I missed this reveal. I didn’t understand the episode until I read the teleplay on the Internet and scrutinized bits of dialogue like I was back in one of my English Major courses in college (which was when I stopped watching this show, now that I think about it).

So many “answers” are given off hand in mumbled lines, or put in the mouths of extremely unreliable characters, like all the UFO cultists that pop up in these seasons. (What the hell is a UFO cult anyway? Do these exist anywhere in reality?) Most of the answers we are given are spoken in riddles, lines of dialogue that could have come out of the Oracle of Delphi. The leader of the alien cult tells Scully that William is “a miracle child. A future savior coveted by forces of good and evil.” An FBI agent who infiltrated the cult tells Scully that if William lives “all Mankind will perish from the Earth.” Krycek presumably believed this too, but also contradicted the idea when he told Mulder that the aliens are “afraid of [the child’s] implications. That it is somehow grater than them.”

Well, which is it? And how could either be true? How will William bring about colonization? How is he greater than the aliens? The mythology episodes never tells us.

All we can conclude from this is that the writers are mumbling the answers to us because they don’t really believe in them and are somewhat ashamed of the story corner they painted themselves into. It’s like they are saying, ‘Ok, after dragging this out for a year and a half, Scully’s baby IS Alien Jesus, now can we please move on to our Spring block of stand-alones.’

They also frequently commit the writer’s faux pas of telling instead of showing. The early mythology episodes depicted striking sequences of creepy images and creepier ideas, exciting cliff-hangers, and memorable villains and oddballs. In Season 8 and 9, we were told to believe that Scully’s baby was so important, but all we were shown was that he moved his mobile with his mind. And the more we saw of the super soldiers, the less interesting they became.

Another sign of the decay is that the latter mythology trafficked in glorified cameos of past favorites: Deep Throat; Albert Holstein; Michael Kritschgau; Jeffrey Spender. But these characters were not given anything to do that was nearly as interesting as their original roles. And no new memorable mythology characters were introduced, unless you count Toothpick Man. Toothpick Man!? Please.

In a non-serialized procedural like The X-Files, a strong mythology is essential because it conveys the message that there is more to the show than meets the eye. There is more at stake than the monster of the week. It allows for the regulars to form deep emotional bonds with one another (and the viewers), and it allows the show to develop deeper, more meaningful themes than it could with a string of stand-alones. But to work as narrative, a mythology has to be depicted in personal terms, shown not told. This is why Mulder’s family has multiple connective points to the conspiracy, and to a lesser extent Scully’s family. This is why the shadowy men of Season 1 and 2 were eventually depicted as a Syndicate of Elders by Season 3—another kind of family. The Syndicate put a face on the conspiracy and clarified what it was all about.

So it is no wonder that Smoking Man became so important to the show, and such a pop icon. Remember that smash hit 90s pop song with the lyric: “Watching X-Files with the lights off/ Hope that Smoking Man’s in this one.” I remember that feeling of watching episodes in anticipation that C.S.M would appear in the corner of the frame shrouded in cigarette smoke. It happened so rarely, three or five times a season, but when it did, it was always awesome. I once attended a lecture by William B. Davis and he said that he had to watch every episode because he would find that his character was in episodes that he never filmed a scene for. Some important document would be mysteriously burned, he joked, and the implication was the Smoking Man did it.

smoking-man

The reason we wanted Smoking Man to be in the episodes was not just because he was a classic villain played by an amazing actor. It was because he symbolized so much of what the show was about: the dark forces at work in the world that we cannot see but that pass us on the street; the forces that control the world but will never make it onto the front pages, that appear as obscure stories in a small notice in the back pages; dark forces that commit terrible crimes, but that we just might need in order to save us. The alien conspiracy was akin to an unstoppable God-like reckoning, and the old, white post-WWII men were doing all they could to control the planet’s fate—these are analogies with all manner of interpretations and implications.

The mythology is the bigger story that encompasses all other stories. And if the mythology doesn’t work, then the show will fail no matter how good the stand-alones are. You can probably think of other shows that have struggled getting their mythology right. It makes a big difference for the entire show.

Implications for Season 10: Well, we are getting the mythology back in full force, and with a new, presumably updated twist. I’m excited to see what they will do. The baggage of Season 8 and 9 doesn’t trouble me because, more than anything, those episodes were the product of the headspace of the writers at that time. Carter has had many years to think about how to do this right. And besides, the Smoking Man’s in this one!

January 19, 2016

Thoughts on The X-Files Season 9 Finale (formerly known as the Series Finale)

The X-Files mythology usually did a good job of setting its ducks in a row before the big season finales. A mystery was built up piece by piece, to be knocked out in an “answers episode,” which either resolved the mystery or spun it off in a new direction.

So how did Chris Carter and his team set up the Season 9 finale? What was this last big mythology two-parter, titled “The Truth,” going to resolve? Considering that the alien-Syndicate conspiracy was completely resolved by Season 6, and its role in Mulder’s family was fully explained by Season 7, where was the new trail of breadcrumbs through Season 8 and 9 leading us?

I am going to withhold editorial comment until later. But it is important to consider the headspace of the writers at this stage in the show’s lifecycle. They knew the show was ending with “The Truth.” Like any series, they certainly must have felt the need to send it off on a positive note that was representative of the entire series. They were also confident that the franchise would continue in films (similar to what Star Trek: TNG had pulled off eight years earlier). But unlike TNG, and unlike the first X-Files film and the Season 5 finale that preceded it, there was no film script and no film deal on the horizon due to Carter’s lawsuit with 20^th Century Fox. And we cannot discount the effect of burnout in the writer’s room. Frank Spotnitz said about Season 7—two years earlier: “There was a pretty strong sentiment inside and outside the show that it was time to call it a day.”

But with this series, hope springs eternal. They made the decision that the finale had to be a mythology episode that was open-ended, with the promise of more to come.

Which brings us back to that episode’s title, “The Truth.” The truth about what? The writers are saddled—I realize that is an editorial term, sorry—with what they gave us in Season 8 and 9. The various mysteries of the last two seasons—if they can be called that—are all the writers have to work with.

Below is a list of the top 3 open questions of The X-Files just before “The Truth” does its job of closing out the series—I mean, closing out Season 9:

There is a “new conspiracy”—according to the third episode before the finale—that evolved after the Syndicate was destroyed, which involves alien/super soldiers, who are humans transformed into indestructible alien-human facsimiles who have infiltrated the U.S. Government, from the FBI to deep within the ranks of intelligence and national security.
The alien colonization plan is still underway—despite the rebels attempt to thwart it in Season 6—but they need Scully’s baby, William, to succeed—for reasons that have yet to be explained.
Mulder is in hiding because his life is in danger. He had to hide because if he stayed with Scully and raised his son, he would raise his son to fight the aliens and not allow William to be their messiah (my phrase—but this connotation is strongly implied in several episodes). In any case, William is no longer carrying whatever special powers would allow him to aid the aliens, and through the anonymity allowed by Wyoming’s closed adoption laws, he is no longer able to be found by all the various forces out to get him.

This is where “The Truth” picks up. I have never seen it, until this week. My editorial comments will follow shortly.

December 31, 2015

Revisiting The X-Files: Episodes that Give Answers, and Those that Don’t

The reason The X-Files mythology was so much fun—and takes on such a significant portion of popular memory even though it was a minority of episodes of the show—was because these episodes comprised spooky, intriguing, well-told mysteries. These mysteries were allowed to unspool over an entire season but always received clear and satisfying resolutions (at least for most of the series’ run).

The show’s typical rhythm was to sprinkle early episodes with bizarre and intriguing hints about a larger mystery, and later give viewers an episode that tied all those enticing clues together into the whole picture. These ‘answers episodes’ either ended that particular mystery or spun it off in a new direction.

I suspect the latter seasons are not as highly regarded as the previous ones because this mystery-telling rhythm eventually broke down—more on this later.

The first ‘answers episode’ was the Season 1 finale The Erlenmeyer Flask. This is the first time we have proof that Mulder is not crazy, that there is a government conspiracy about the existence of aliens. All the tantalizing clues sprinkled throughout the season coalesce into a clear picture: we see an alien for the first time, in the form of an alien fetus, and we learn that the government is trying to make alien-human hybrids.

The next answers episode is in mid-Season 2, End Game. Here we are given the conclusion to the mystery of the alien clones: they were trying to create a colony, procreating using alien DNA and human abductees’ DNA, but the Gray Aliens did not sanction this so they were destroyed by the Bounty Hunter.

Season 3 further developed the role of the Syndicate. In Paper Clip we learn that William Mulder was involved in a project, with CSM and the other Syndicate regulars as well as Nazi doctors, to create an alien-human hybrid, and that he was also involved in Samantha’s abduction.

Season 4’s Terma finally explains the Black Oil as a medium that allows alien consciousness to body jump, and that the Syndicate is developing a vaccine to expel it.

The ultimate ‘answers episode’ was the first movie, Fight the Future. In the extended cut the Well Manicured Man explains just about everything: aliens are ancient Earth inhabitants who are now coming back to recolonize the planet; they will infect the population with an alien virus through bees that will cause aliens to spontaneously gestate inside the human hosts; the Syndicate was playing both sides of the street trying to work with the aliens but also against them to create a vaccine; that the vaccine was William Mulder’s big idea, and that he gave up Samantha in an abduction so he could realize it.

By Season 6 the show begins a phase of settling accounts, as opposed to spinning new mysteries. In One Son, the Syndicate is finally destroyed by rebel aliens; we are given the complete explanation that its main purpose was to create on an alien-human hybrid by sacrificing its family members to the aliens, while secretly making the vaccine. Cassandra Spender was one of these family members so sacrificed (as was Samantha) and she turned out to be the first successful alien-human hybrid and thus the key to the Syndicate members surviving colonization. Jeffery Spender is revealed to be CSM’s son, and is then murdered by him. Pretty much everything the mythology has been about since the first season is resolved here.

By Season 7 there is one last loose end to tie up: what happened to Samantha? In the masterpiece episode Closure we learn that Samantha lived for a time with CSM and young Jeffery Spender; that she was experimented on, and then mysteriously disappeared—it is heavily implied that she was rescued by God, or some unnamed benevolent universal force. Mulder accepts that she is dead and so ends his quest to save her.

So far in this survey of ‘answers episodes’ there is an evident trend. After the first film, starting with Season 6, there are no new compelling mythology mysteries. By this point the show had cycled through the clones, the alien-human hybrids, the Black Oil, the alien rebels, the killer bees, the Syndicate project, even a season (successful in my view) where Mulder stopped believing in aliens and explored the depravity of the military-industrial complex. Season 6 & 7 were about providing satisfying conclusions to the overall mythology that had been constructed over the first five seasons. In my view this was a necessary narrative shift—you can only pile on so many new mythology elements before it gets ridiculous. But it did mean that the early seasons benefited from the energy of building anticipation that season 6 & 7 lacked, though I argue the payoffs of those two seasons were satisfying in their own way.

Season 8 & 9 was something else entirely. Because FOX chose to renew the series beyond Season 7, combined with Duchonvny’s desire to leave the show, Chris Carter and his team had to start telling mythology mysteries again in a kind of X-Files Mythology 2.0. The problem lay in the fact that the previous mythology was so well established (and all but finished except for the inevitable alien invasion); plus, any new stories would have to explain Duchovny’s limited screen time. As a result, the new mystery elements were reduced to plot contrivances in service of these pre-existing realities, and this was so obvious to viewers whether you watched them live or rerun on Netflix.

Because the new mysteries were contrivances—for example, to explain Mulder’s abduction, or Scully’s pregnancy—there was no longer the payoff in the form of ‘answers episodes.’ Too often in these seasons, The X-Files did not even attempt to provide answers. Or when answers were given they were not a payoff but half-baked rushed jobs so the show could move on to the next set of standalone episodes. Without a satisfying conclusion the attempt at a compelling mystery unravels.

Take, for example, the explanation for Mulder’s abduction. There were various contradictory answers given for why he was taken. Immediately after he was abducted the explanation was that the aliens were rounding up all the evidence of their presence on Earth, and since Mulder had been infected with the alien virus he had to be taken (never mind that Scully had been infected with the same virus). When he was returned, the reason was given that the alien’s new plan was to abduct people and replace them with facsimiles. By the end of Season 8, we are told that those facsimiles are in fact unstoppable alien super soldiers whose job it is to bring about colonization. These answers were not revealed in any believable way. It was so obviously made up as they went along, unlike the better-planned mysteries of earlier seasons.

Those answers were shifting and contrived, but they were at least solid and complete answers. Worst was when the writers refused to give us solid answers at all, and expected us to be satisfied with not knowing. This happened with Scully’s pregnancy and her relationship with Mulder.

Season 7 to the end of Season 8 was built around an often well-executed mystery, scattered with many tantalizing clues, about how Scully came to be pregnant, and the exact nature of her relationship with Mulder. The Season 8 finale Existence looks and sounds like an ‘answers episode’ in accordance to the show’s well-established mystery rhythm, but no answers are actually presented in this episode.

If you have not seen Season 8 in a while it may surprise you to know that there are no clear answers to the following questions, but only a list of options that the viewers are forced to guess between:

How did Scully become pregnant?

Option 1: Scully’s first attempt at in vitro fertilization failed, but the second attempt was successful, and Zeus Genetics used the pregnancy to continue their tests to create a designer baby impervious to human disease.

Option 2: Scully’s first attempt at in vitro failed, and she became pregnant by Mulder because she was not 100% barren only a little barren (this happened to my cousin). This option implies Mulder and Scully were having sex in the Spring of 2000 before any overt sign of their romance was shown on screen.

Option 3: In vitro failed and Scully became pregnant through Immaculate Conception, for the purpose of God proving His power to the aliens.

If this uncertainty is frustrating, the next question is even more so. Before reading the next set of options, remember that there was no verifiable, overt, indisputable evidence that Mulder and Scully were romantically involved until the passionate kiss in the final seconds of the Season 8 finale Existence (which also happened to be Duchovny’s last appearance on the show until the series finale one year later).

Mulder Scully Kiss

When did Mulder and Scully begin their romance, or did they?

Option 1: The kiss in Existence is the beginning of their romance; Baby William is not the product of them having sex; Mulder, seeing Scully with the baby, finally decides to make his move.

Option 2: The kiss in Existence is just a kiss shared in a weak, emotional moment, a reflection of their love and their attraction to one another, but nothing more. In other words, they were never a couple before or after this kiss.

Option 3: Their romance began off screen during Season 7, when William was conceived by them having sex.

Option 4: Their romance began off screen during Season 7 before Mulder’s abduction, or in Season 8 after his return; William is not the product of them having sex, but their romance began at some point after Scully asked Mulder to donate sperm so she could conceive.

None of the above options is the result of my wild speculation. Each option has clear, unambiguous evidence—events and lines of dialogue scattered between Season 7 and 8—that support its case. For example, Krycek and Mulder explain that the aliens are afraid of William because he “could somehow be greater than them” because he is proof “that there’s a God, a higher power.” But it is also true that the scientists for Zeus Genetics, which did Scully’s in vitro, believe that they are responsible for creating William. Furthermore, it is clear by the way the late Season 8 Mulder and Scully scenes are written and acted that Scully had no expectation that Mulder is the father of her child or that he should in any way act in that role. And yet, it is also strongly implied that Mulder is the father, either through sperm donation or old-fashioned sex.

The show does not tell us which option represents what actually happened. X-Files mysteries have always given red herring clues that force us to speculate on different possibilities. With these two all-important questions, unlike the first seven years of the show, there is no ‘answers episode’ to tell us what actually happened. It is galling, and a cheat to the fans, that Existence, the episode that should have given us the truth, ends with this exchange just before the passionate kiss:

Scully: From the moment I became pregnant I feared the truth about how and why. And I know that you feared it too.

Mulder: I think what we feared were the possibilities. The truth we both knew.

Well, that’s just fricking great that you two knew the truth! But all we have—still!—are the possibilities.

It is possible that Season 9, which I have not analyzed yet, provides ‘answers episodes’ to these two questions, but by then the viewer already feels strung along, and any answers would feel even more contrived. If the writers had any answers, the last satisfying moment to provide them would have been the Season 8 finale. By Season 9, the show has moved on to other sets of mysteries and contrivances, only one of which is explaining (rather, not explaining) why Mulder has disappeared yet again.

Implications for Season 10: If the rhythm of X-Files mystery-building is to sprinkle clues through a number of mythology episodes that culminate in the ‘answers episode,’ that will be hard to do in a six-episode season with only two mythology episodes. It can be done, but the mystery will have to be tighter and more economical than the mysteries Carter and his team told during the first run. BBC’s Sherlock succeeds brilliantly at this focused storytelling in what is about an equivalent amount of screen time as Season 10 will have. If I were Carter, I would be studying that show, as well as Luther to get the pacing and tone right.

The lesson I hope that Carter learned is that his show was strong when it spun sprawling mysteries but also gave satisfying resolutions. These build-ups and payoffs were staggered across many seasons like a relay race, which the new format, even if there is a Season 11, will not be able to support. But since there are going to be new mythology episodes, the build-up and payoff has to happen in truncated form. If all we get is build-up and the last episode throws up its hands and asks us to guess, not only will the long-time fans feel cheated (again), the show won’t connect with a wide, new audience.

December 12, 2015

Revisiting The X-Files: Mulder’s Return from Abduction

An Emotional Punch

Usually when a lead actor departs from a TV series (be it over contractual, personal, or mortal reasons) the departure is permanent. The character that actor played must be written out of the show with degree of finality, usually killed off. Since Duchovny’s desire was to only lessen his episode load during Season 8, the writers were given a rare dramatic gift. They could lead Scully and the rest of us to think that Mulder was ‘killed off’ while also teasing the audience with visions, nightmares, and flashbacks with Duchovny playing Mulder in the flesh.

Doggett and Scully each have moments where they imagine they are seeing Mulder standing before them, and in the filmed scene Duchovny is clearly on set standing before them. These are jarring images that capture both Doggett’s desire to find Mulder and Scully’s suffering at the loss of Mulder, not to mention our own desire to have him back.

Mulder Ghost

In the first episode of the season were Mulder is in full scenes, The Gift, the entire teaser is devoted to a big reveal of Mulder as a concealed shooter. The mystery of the episode is about why Mulder would shoot someone in cold blood. The answer has to do with the fact that he was dying from his brain surgery with Smoking Man in Season 7, and involved an unusual and great monster-of-the-week. It was fun in the midst of his absence from the series to watch Mulder solving an X-File in flashback, while Doggett solved the same X-File in an interwoven plotline set after Mulder’s abduction.

One of the best elements of Season 8 is watching Scully grieve. Mulder is gone but not gone. He might return, but then again he might not. Like so many mysteries on this show, no satisfying answers are forthcoming. It is heartbreaking to watch, especially because we know as viewers that Mulder is so close. In the second episode, Without, Scully is in an empty desert just outside of an invisible UFO. We know Mulder is inside that craft—Duchovny is filmed strapped in the alien laboratory—but she doesn’t even know the UFO is there. Mike Snow also wrote a haunting choral theme that played whenever Scully was shown contemplating her loss. These scenes truly capture how painful an abduction feels for the people left at home with nothing but their questions.

scully in desert

This pathos—‘so close yet so far away’—is surely what inspired the writers to return Mulder only to kill him off. The scenes between Scully and Skinner—just before Mulder’s return where Scully is recalling that Mulder once told her that souls of the dead reside in starlight, and at his funeral where she can’t believe she is standing over his coffin—are heart-rending. Of course, Mulder is not dead. He is nearly dead—to borrow a phrase from The Princess Bride—and that makes watching Skinner and Doggett solve the mystery of how he could be in a grave for three months but still alive kind of fun to watch. It is the pleasure of watching what you know is highly improbably but narratively inevitable unfold before your eyes.

One Contrivance Too Many

Now, as with so many mysteries, the full explanation is so less satisfying than the slow unveiling of it. According the what we see in these episodes, the new alien tactic of colonization—or whatever they are up to—is to abduct groups of people, return them nearly dead and infected with “the alien virus,” and have them be reborn as alien-human hybrids, or as “alien facsimiles.” This happens to poor Billy Miles. There is no information, not the slightest suggestion, as to what these reborn aliens are supposed to do to further the alien agenda.

At some point you realize that the entire crazy idea exists only so that the writers could kill Mulder, have a funeral and then bring him back to life. This is the definition of a plot contrivance.

Trouble is, The X-Files has always trafficked in these contrivances. It is just that the series was much better at wielding them for dramatic effect earlier in its run. It’s an unfair criticism to say the writers are making it up as they go along. All TV is made up episode-by-episode, and so long as the stories are good, who cares? The X-Files writers always started planning mythology stories by asking: what is a scary or bizzarro concept that could adequately carry the drama for one hour of television? Once that concept was established, only then did they bother to explain it in context of the overarching mythology, usually in dribs and drabs over a season or two or three.

I imagine the writer’s room sounded something like this over the years:

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a human who is spliced with an alien, who has super-human strength, can breath under water, and has toxic green blood—we’ll call them alien-human hybrids, or alien clones.
Let’s have an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type creature—we’ll call it the Black Oil alien virus.
People are scared of killer bees, let’s do killer bees—we’ll say the aliens are growing bees to deliver the alien virus.
Uh, we’re making a big summer blockbuster, and our spindly gray alien isn’t much to look at on the Big Screen. Let’s make an alien that is big and slimy with long claws and teeth—but when we get back to the small screen next season we will reveal that the long-clawed alien is nothing more than a gray alien at an early stage of its development, just after it rips itself out of its host body.

long claw alien

The exact details of the alien colonization conspiracy don’t matter all that much. They are secondary concerns, mere vessels for delivering scary, creepy, weird stories. This is not a criticism because the show would not have been a hit without the approach. But it is an important thing to understand as we evaluate the later seasons, and the upcoming Season 10, because the writers can only keep adding new elements to the mythology arc so many times before the process itself gets old. There are a lot of balls in the air to begin with.

The Season 8 concept of abductees returning as corpses that come back to life, shed their skin and become reborn as aliens is no more or less ridiculous than any of the previous alien storylines. And it is genuinely unsettling to watch Billy Miles’ corpse get out of bed, get in the shower and have all his rotting flesh wash off of him. This might have been a fine addition to the mythology if it had been introduced in Season 2 or 3. It then would have been given some nefarious purpose that contributed to the whole colonization story—like the clones, black oil and bees were. But this particular contrivance is introduced in late Season 8, and it’s clear that once the writers use it to resurrect Mulder, they want to forget about it. There is not better evidence for that than the fact that reborn alien Billy Miles is allowed to walk out of the hospital and go do whatever he is designed to do—and the episodes never even hints at what that might be. Mulder and Scully know he’s an alien, and they let him go. They don’t even care about this story line.

We are left to wonder: “Man, I thought I hade the colonization plan all figured out. The virus will be spread to the population. The aliens will gestate inside of the hosts and then kill them. They will take over the planet. Now you are telling me that the aliens will first abduct people, return them dead and have their bodies become reborn with alien consciousness? How does that fit with everything else we know? Oh, you’re not going to tell me, not even a hint? [Throws up hands in frustration] I give up!”

A similar break down of narrative sense happened with the Season6/7 bridge episodes, the ones where we learn that the aliens gave us the world religions. Great sci-fi concept! But the writers never give us any insight into why the aliens would do this. After Mulder and Scully are out of danger at the end of the episodes, the whole concept is never brought up again.

In fact, very little about the alien stories make much sense after the official end of the Syndicate Conspiracy arc in Season 6, when the rebel aliens supposedly dealt a blow to the Gray’s colonization plans—which is yet another major plot point that was dropped and never mentioned again.

In summary: Loved how they used Mulder’s abduction to create genuine pathos, but hated how they eventually explained it all.

Implications for Season 10

Chris Carter has said the new episodes will stay true to the mythology of the series. To which I reply: Great, but which part of the mythology? The clones? The Black Oil? The virus-carrying bees? The gestating long-clawed aliens? The faceless rebel aliens? The corpse-facsimile aliens? Surely they won’t risk losing contemporary viewers by rehashing all of that in the two out of six episodes that will be devoted to the mythology.

No, the writers will start the process like they always have, by asking what will make good, scary TV? The show’s science advisor has said that the last episode, a mythology episode, will introduce some “scary science.” The hard part—and I hope they figure this out—is to start with that question and come up with an answer that doesn’t have the same feeling of contrivance as the later seasons, but feels as fresh, scary and even awe-inspiring as the early seasons.

November 23, 2015

CBS’s New Star Trek Series Red Flags

It is premature to engage in any fanboy handwringing over the new Trek series since we don’t yet know if CBS Access is creating a show that will be worthy of our interest. For all we know it could be a cartoon. Talk of Star Trek being CBS’s “crown jewels” aside, if their goal is to attract viewers to their streaming site they might figure they don’t have to pull out all the stops to increase usage over what it is now, which is apparently no one.

But since fanboys love to wring our hands, here goes.

Here is my list of red flags that—if I hear them from CBS’s marketing and eventually from the show runners—I will consider bad omens about the new series.

Characters

Token Person of Color: I won’t go so far as to say that we should expect and demand the captain not be a white male. I don’t care who plays the captain, or even if there is a captain. But I would find it hard to watch another Star Trek show where people of color are represented by one, poorly drawn, dull or dimwitted minor regular. The cast should reflect Earth’s diversity with similar ratio that Ridley Scott got for The Martian.

Vs.

Token Gay Guy, or Trans: I’m also not suggesting there must be a gay or trans character, partly because I fear how they would be depicted by the straight, white male writers who will most likely be writing such a character. Not that they should have an excuse. It is not surprising to me that TNG never had a gay character. It premiered in 1987, the height of the AIDS epidemic, when most gay professionals were in the closet, when few gay youth were out in high schools and colleges, when there was no political or social support for gay rights. It would have taken a supreme act of imagination for men of the 80s and 90s, who were not personally close to any gay people, to take the popular impression of gays at the time and project what a gay person would be like three hundred years in the future. As a gay man, I’m grateful they did not try. They probably would have come up with a cross between Liberace and Boy George.

Writers today don’t need much imagination to picture what a gay Star Fleet officer would be like. Still, I cringe to consider the likely scene where it is shockingly revealed that the handsome and dashing Number One is gay when he goes into his quarters, strips his uniform off of his washboard abs and jumps into bed with his hot young twink boyfriend from stellar cartography. There are many ways to depict gay people without sexualizing it, but I’m skeptical the writers’ imaginations will extend that far.

The Women: There is a lot riding on how this show portrays its women characters. It has the potential to bring Star Trek into the 21^st Century so far as gender is concerned (let’s forget for argument’s sake that DS9 already did this). The new show’s women characters can put to bed the 60’s overt sexism and miniskirts, the underutilization of Troi and Dr. Crusher, the mixed bag gender politics of Janeway’s captaincy, the truly awful cat suits and decon. gel of Enterprise. This show needs to get it right.

Token Vulcan: No more Vulcans for a while. Be your own show with your own aliens. Stop trying to carry “break out” characters on Spock’s long coattails. Create actual break out characters. And let’s remember that an actor playing a Vulcan must be as difficult as playing Hamlet. The only actors to effectively portray Vulcans were named Leonard Nimoy and Mark Leonard.

Setting

The Enterprise: Go ahead and set the show on a starship if you must, but don’t make it the Enterprise-H or any other version. If they do go with another Enterprise it will be a sign that the writers do not have faith in their ability to tell stories that will get people’s attention unless those stories harken back Kirk and Picard’s ship. It was one thing for Roddenberry to do it in 1987 when he wanted to stress continuity to the original series. But that is no longer necessary. Nothing Archer ever accomplished on the Enterprise NX-01 was made remotely more profound because it happened on a ship named Enterprise. It felt cheap, that we were supposed to care about silly stories simply because they were happening on a ship with that name.

Theme

“We’re going to stay true to Gene’s Vision”: If CBS says this, I sure hope they do what people who have said it in the past almost never do, which is explain what they think that vision actually is. Too often the executives pay lip service to the fans with hollow praise of whatever we think made Trek great, but they don’t actually share that vision or even have a vision of their own. To them it is just a brand. They need to take Trek’s vision of the future and update for our time.

“We’re not going to stay true to Gene’s Vision”: The most simplistic expression of Trek’s message is optimism for the future, and CBS may decide that optimism is not hot right now. They might want to make a Trek show that can compete in the “gore Olympics” (and Binge-watching Olympics) with Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Trek is malleable, but it’s not build for apocalypse and cynicism. If it was turned into that kind of show it could only reasonable be called Star Trek during its title sequence.

Time will tell. As CBS starts to divulge more details, we will be all ears.

November 8, 2015

Agent Doggett and Stepdad Syndrome

I hated Special Agent John Doggett’s guts. Everything he did and said annoyed me. It was nothing against Robert Patrick’s portrayal, which was fine. I didn’t care for Doggett’s average joe “just-a-New-York cop” shtick. I rolled my eyes at all the things he was written to say that showed he was the opposite of Mulder. I hated the self-referential Terminator 2 reference in one of his early episodes. I really hated that he had an entirely new alien mythology concocted around his character—the super solider arc. I hated that poor Scully had to deal with this man, how the new role changed her. I hated the he wasn’t Mulder. I wanted Mulder. Why, oh why, did Mulder leave and stick us with this guy?

I stopped watching the show—after being a weekly viewer since mid-Season 1. I never finished the series. It was all just too sad.

At the time, back in 2000, Duchonvny leaving the show seemed so final (even though he was only absent from nine episodes). The series had only just been renewed at the last possible moment. The Season 7 finale was filmed and about to air when FOX renewed, so it was possible that they could have pulled the plug and Mulder’s abduction in finale would have been the end of the series. We did get that renewal, but fans weren’t exactly clamoring for it. The prospects for a hoped-for film franchise were suddenly murky. It felt like the end, but with a replacement cast to steer the ship into harbor. There was no energy around the show or in fandom. As one TV critic wrote at the time, without Mulder you are left with “half a show.” How wrong we all were.

Now I am watching Season 8 for the first time and with fresh eyes. The old bitterness is gone. I’m excited about Season 10 premiering in January, when Mulder and Scully are back on the case. And from this perspective, the first half of Season 8, and Patrick’s Doggett in particular, are terrific. All the things that annoyed me about Doggett (when I was still smarting from my Mulder daddy issues) I now see were strengths.

I love how Doggett approaches X-Files cases with a hardboiled, sometimes unethical, cop mindset. I love the way he simply ignores evidence of the paranormal that is right in front of his face. His tendency to refuse to believe is something that most people would do in his case. It is a reaction that Scully was never able to have because of her scientific method. She had to grapple with Mulder’s questions. Doggett refuses to even listen. It’s fun and satisfying to watch Scully come into her own and fully and merge her scientific practice with the evidence of the paranormal she has amassed all these years: “I have observed phenomena that I cannot deny. And that as a scientist and a serious person it is a badge of honor not to dismiss these things because someone thinks they’re BS.” She gives herself a desk for the first time, and thus corrects the subtle sexism of the Mulder-Scully dynamic of old. And that episode that referenced Patrick’s character in Terminator 2—Salvage—is actually a pretty solid monster show.

The surprising fact—and wonderful discovery for an X-Files fan who has never seen them—is that all of the episodes in the half of Season 8 are solid, and most of them are excellent. Roadrunners is a thoroughly creepy murderous-cult story with a monster quite unlike anything the series had done before. It’s got a twist reminiscent of Season 1 and 2.

Redrum is a well-executed time travel story where the main character lives each day of the week backward until he arrives at the point in time of his wife’s murder. He is able to save her, but the twist ending results in a sci-fi morality tale worthy of classic Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. Invocation is the series’ creepiest use of a demonic child. Via Negative is a scary and suspenseful story of people being killed in their dreams. And Badlaa gives us one of the most unusual murder methods of any magically-powered killer in the series, and he is played by the great Deep Roy.

Here is what is interesting: all of these episodes are legitimately scary television. I remember reading media reports that Carter wanted to use Duchovny’s departure as a means to get back to basics and “scare the pants off people.” At the time, I was not having any of it. Bring back Mulder! But Carter delivered.

I have a theory as to why the first half of Season 8 worked like gangbusters, and why some episodes, particularly Roadrunners and The Gift, captured the sublime weirdness of Season 1 and 2 X-Files. It all comes back to the chemistry of the leads. Doggett and Scully have chemistry alright, but it’s like two flint stones rubbing together. They don’t see eye to eye, they don’t trust one another, and they don’t like one another. But they are professionals who do their job. The result is that we the audience get to focus on the spooky story that revolves around them, and not the psychodrama between them.

While I praise Season 6 and 7, especially the great conclusion to the mythology arc, so much of Season 6 was about the fact the Mulder and Scully kissed in the movie, and they were actively flirting through much of Season 7. From a storytelling perspective, it is hard to scare the pants off of people when your main characters are falling in love with one another. There is a reason horror movies—to the extent they deal with romance at all—depict sex in a carnal way. Sex can be scary, can portend foreboding and doom. Love, however, is all about hope, the antithesis of horror. For all those who claim that The X-Files can still remain The X-Files with Mulder and Scully in an active romance, they have to answer to the fact that Season 8 rejuvenated the series by ejecting—or at least postponing—the Mulder-Scully romance. It is really hard to tell a good horror story when your main characters are flirting.

Implications for Season 10: Patrick is not interested in coming back to the series, so Doggett won’t reappear in Season 10. In one sense that is too bad because I really like the character. But it’s for the best because with only six episodes I don’t won’t to devote too much time to other characters, and it would be wrong to give him a brief cameo.

More importantly, we know Carter is capable of upping the horror and weirdness ratio of the X-Files formula because he did it in Season 8. Can he do it again with Season 10? I suspect this is why he split Mulder and Scully up for the new episodes. With the romance put behind them, the new shows will be able to focus on the aliens, the monsters, the conspiracies, and solving the mysteries of the Universe—which is what The X-Files are all about to begin with.

November 8, 2015

Revisiting The X-Files: Like many characters, this show had multiple deaths

In the late season 7 episode “Fight Club” Mulder is giving another one of his slide show expositions for the case they are investigating. Scully interrupts his line of questioning with this:

“What I’m thinking, Mulder, is how familiar this seems. Playing Watson to your Sherlock. You dangling clues out in front of me one by one. It’s a game, and… and, as usual, you’re holding something back from me. You’re not telling me something about this case.”

It was a nod to the audience that, while it had been a satisfying season, the formula was straining credibility. We were starting to ask ourselves: how long could Mulder keep this up? How long would Scully put up with it? If the answer to both questions was a good while, then how long would we want to watch it?

In the season finale “Requiem” two episodes later, in one of his finer moments, Mulder tells Scully: “The personal costs are too high. There is so much more you need to do with your life. There’s so much more than this. There has to be an end.” He is suggesting that she quit the X-Files. By the end of the episode, he is the one who leaves the X-Files in the form of being abducted.

The series had a simple TV procedural formula: a brilliant but paranoid believer in the paranormal partnered with a skeptical scientist assigned to the FBI’s caseload of unsolvable crimes. This formula churned out episode after episode, but the writers always seemed to be aware that if left alone this formula would get old quickly. It is easy to forget that part of the X-Files storytelling formula was to always mix up its formula.

As early as the season 1 finale, Mulder and Scully were taken off of the X-Files. They are reinstated during season 2, although they continued to be harassed by their off-and-on nemesis Assistant Director Walter Skinner well into season 3. The formula is intact until the season 4 finale when Mulder has a crisis of confidence and decides that he no longer believes in aliens. Scully’s beliefs in the paranormal deepen. The two switch roles. This continues until the season 5 finale when Mulder fully returns to his belief in aliens. But in the same episode, Mulder and Scully are reassigned from the X-Files yet again, and CSM literally burns the X-Files in their filing cabinets. Next, in the first movie, the X-Files is reinstated. But then, in the season 6 premier, Agent Spender is put in charge of the X-Files, who lets it wither by ignoring paranormal cases, and Mulder and Scully are assigned to Assistant Director Kersch, who does not allow them to investigate paranormal cases. This state of affairs lasts half a season. By mid-season 6, Kersh and Spender are gone, and Mulder and Scully are back on the X-Files under Skinner.

Even though the events described above happened during so-called mythology episodes that generally do not impact stand-alones, the formula switches were felt and even repeatedly mentioned in the intervening stand-alones. These elements were designed to shake things up, to keep the stories fresh in the season that followed.

The only time during the series when Mulder and Scully were allowed to investigate X-Files with the full backing of the FBI was the latter half of season 6 through all of season 7. It is satisfying to watch them be able to perform their job as they always wanted (although there are no “classics,” all but a few of these latter episodes are excellent tales). It is also evident that the two characters are at their happiest by the end of season 7. They are professionally at the pinnacle of their careers, doing work they love. The secret Syndicate has been uprooted, and the alien invasion potentially thwarted by the alien rebels. Mulder has made peace with his sister’s death. Mulder and Scully become much more openly loving with one another. It’s no wonder their love affair began around this time in their lives.

In the penultimate season 7 episode “Je Souhaite,” where Mulder is granted three wishes from a genie, the moral of the story is to not wish for things that are out of reach, but to enjoy the life you are living. The episode ends with Mulder spending the evening with Scully watching his favorite movie, “Caddy Shack.” This is basically a date. For those who thought it would be impossible to show Mulder and Scully on a date—including me—this is what it would look like. They know one another completely—it was never going to be like a typical TV version of an awkward first date. This moment, and the entire season, would be the happiest time they would ever share, considering what happened next—the next formula switch.

In the end—in this end—Mulder is abducted by the Gray aliens who are trying to clean up the evidence of their work with the Syndicate. Scully is pregnant. It is deliberately open to interpretation whether they were both aware of this during the episode, or that they were together. Based on how the scenes were written and acted you could argue either way.

As the “Fight Club” quote hinted at, a change in formula was needed—in fact expected, because the X-Files had always made changes at similar points in its run. It was publicized that Duchovny was leaving the show, but FOX had not decided to renew the series. So when “Requiem” aired I truly believed that I was watching the series finale, and that the movies would continue the story. Even as the season finale aired, I was not expecting it to change the formula, but to end the show. I held this belief right up until the last frame. This was the experience of many fans because FOX did not renew the show for an 8^th season until just before “Requiem” aired. The producers didn’t even know if it a season finale or a series finale when they were making it.

It felt like the right time to end the series. According to Frank Spotnitz: “There was a pretty strong sentiment inside and outside the show that it was time to call it a day.” Even a rabid season 1 fan like me was not hoping for a season 8. The show seemed to have run its course on the small screen.

What’s interesting to me now is that re-watching “Requiem” for the first time in 15 years, without any of the baggage about renewed contracts and ratings, etc., the episode is a pretty exciting re-set button. I’m actually excited to watch season 8 for what will be my first time. Wish me luck.