The Fractal Hall Journal

Not every funny episode is utter shite, mind. “Arcadia”, where Mulder and Scully go undercover as husband and wife in a planned community, is genius. The humour flows from the believable way Mulder tries to piss his neighbours off in an attempt to provoke them into revealing who (or what) the monster-of-the-week is. For once, it’s a funny episode that relies on the recognisable characteristics of the leads, rather than in trying to subvert them or the series as a whole.

I was going to write a long bit on “Milagro”, the episode that has Scully oddly attracted to a writer who’s moved in next to Mulder, but it annoys me a little too much to spend time on it. Like “Never Again” a couple of seasons ago, Scully is written out of character, and I’m not sure I buy what they’re trying to say about her personality. Essentially, she finds herself falling for someone who follows her around and knows a little too much about her, in such a way that suggests Carter, Shiban and Spotnitz have never spoken to a grown woman and confuse “erotically charged” with “creepy stalker”. And to make it even more excruciating, the character voice-over explains all the amazing skills and insights writers have about everything. Put it away, gents, no one wants to see you doing that in public.

“Field Trip” is a groan-worthy pun of a title, what with Mulder and Scully getting doped by an hallucinogenic fungus and then slowly digested underground. It’s a call-back to other lost-in-the-woods episodes like “Detour” and “Darkness Falls”, complete with hospital time at the end to go along with the whole nightmarish false-awakening sequence that suggests that they may still be under the ground. Never mind the amount of people these two have shot, what the hell does their medical bill look like? I mean, not just physical hospital bed time; how many times have either of them had to consult with a shrink? Who’s paying for all of this? There’s three things I should have kept a tally of when I started watching these episodes- hospitalisations, body counts, and the amount of time Mulder cries. Seriously, he bawls his eyes out more times than he makes witty quips.

There aren’t many arc episodes in the series, but the ones that do turn up are very good, and important. “Two Fathers/One Son” sees the rebel faction of aliens killing the last members of the Syndicate, leaving Cancer Man and Agent Fowley to escape. It’s obviously the production staff’s way of sweeping away all the needlessly complex crap that’s accumulated over the series’ run, in a suitably dramatic fashion. Problem is, as we’ll see next season, it all gets a bit odd again very quickly. Agent Spender is apparently killed, shot by his father in the basement office. I say apparently because we never see it happen, it isn’t mentioned at all in any of the episodes that follow (and you’d think something like that would be big news), and Mulder’s quite happy to pootle along as usual when he gets his room back. I assume this gets cleared up (along with Spender’s brains) in a later series.

“Biogenesis” is certainly a strange end-of-series episode, in that it ends with Mulder gibbering away in an asylum and Scully digging up a bible-quotation covered UFO in Africa. It makes a little bit more sense in the two episodes that kick off S7, but frankly not much. I’ll go into that next time, when the show gets crazy metaphysical.

So, to recap, the global conspiracy appears to have ended, Scully may be immortal, and the two of them could be hallucinating the rest of the series while being digested by a big mushroom. The nostalgia trip’s two-thirds over, and (as of writing) there’s six weeks until the new film’s released. Let’s get this done.