X-Files S07 E16–18

7x16 Chimera

It’s Easter Sunday in Vermont and we’re at a kids Easter egg hunt, with various scary looking people in rabbit costumes. One of the mom’s seems to be hated by the other mom’s maybe because of her ugly all denim attire. There’s a mean looking bird (raven?) and then later that night one of the mom’s gets killed by something. Confusing!

M & S are living in some crappy room on a stakeout, which M seems to get a kick out of whereas S is suicidal, sipping coffee and grousing about how much life sucks. Probably because her partner is so unreliable — M gets a call and splits. Skinman wants him on the raven case, because the disappeared/murdered woman is the daughter of a judge who’s putting the heat on Skinman to get this solved. Too bad for stakeout S!

Seems like the husband might be a suspect because he thinks his vanished wife is having an affair, but we already know a monster killed her, making this preamble all fairly superfluous. Biggest suspect is the denim wearing lady, who seems to have a bad attitude about everything, giving various housewives a “you think ya better than me?” type spiel.

Some nice suburban couple insist M stays with them, which doesn’t make much sense, since how far can M even be to drive home, he just drove here. But still, he’s getting a home cooked meal and a warm bed, unlike S who’s sat in a freezing house watching hookers through a long lens and eating food from the 7/11. S is very not stoked by this nonsense.

M finds the dead wife in the backyard, raven (?) scratches all over her face. M speaks to denim lady (DL) and she denies all knowledge, although she seems to be lying about something. S keeps calling M to complain about viewing gross stuff on the stakeout, nonstop. M doesn’t care though, he just wants S to do an autopsy maybe, but stay doing her stakeout work, covering for the two of them. This makes me think probably they are a couple, since who hasn’t, when very bored, called their partner nonstop?

The sheriff’s wife is attacked by the raven/mirror monster but survives. Sheriff tells M that this whole thing is something she imagined, but M, not so much. M has some theory about mirrors and summoning demons, maybe linked to the affair he guesses that the sheriff is having with DL.

M talks over (home-cooked!) breakfast with the sheriff’s wife about how he doesn’t have a significant other and she’s like, you should have a family. Although if he married S, not sure that would be much of a refuge for either of them, they’d drive each other batshit insane. M makes a little dig at how the sheriff was out all night ‘working a case’ and how he knows the sheriff got the other murdered lady pregnant, and is generally a rascal. Right after their last horizontal mambo session, DL is killed by the monster outside the motel, despite managing to stab it in the back a bit. We know she’s a floozy, since she’s wearing a red bra, which the camera lingers on. Harlot!

Damn the sheriff is busy, slamming ass all over town. M isn’t too concerned about all these MILF’s being murdered and leaving their kids orphaned, making a gag about how the sheriff puts the service into protect and serve. Ha! Too bad about the slain women tho! Now all of a sudden the sheriff is onboard about how this must be a demon who did the murders, definitely not a person, right, you’ll testify to that, right, right?

Speaking of the demon, we get a look at a nasty cut on the back of the sheriff’s wife and of course, she’s the one responsible for all this. I mean, your husband banging every housewife in town would probably make anyone want to summon a demon. Maybe kill the dude rather than the women tho demon?

Back on the stakeout, S has cracked the case. It wasn’t an XF, no invisible blonde lady serial killer, it was just a dude dressed as a female hooker. In fact, the hookers aren’t even dead, they’re just in a religious halfway house this dude setup to save their souls. But yeah, nobody cares, this whole B-plot exists only for the line ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ which enables M to now clearly see who’s responsible for the murders in the A-plot. The wife!

M confronts wife and they fight, but she stops when she sees her own reflection as the monster. They put her away in a nuthouse, and this whole thing feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. They could have made it a bottle episode, based around weird goings on at the stakeout house, and also used it to tease the shippers with M & S both staying in the stakeout house. Hey, it worked for Dreyfuss and Estevez. Twice!

But yeah, instead we just got a standard monster episode, no real twists, not even any Edgar Allen Poe gags. As for monster of the week episodes, either make them more inventive or, Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’

Wiki Notes: With Anderson and Duchovny busy directing their own episodes, they had to work around that, hence why she’s barely in it.

7x17 all things

Oh man, I’m never a fan of the episodes where we start with a portentous voice-over by M or S. Here’s S getting ready for work and going on about life is full of moments that inevitably lead us all towards the grave or whatever. But I’m going to give this a real chance because it’s the first episode written & directed by Gillian Anderson, and the first XF directed by a woman, which seems insane and worthy of its own investigation.

S is getting dressed and ready for work and in the bed still sleeping — M! Yikes! We flash back to 63 hours earlier with M messing about with slides of crop circles and listening to Moby on what can only be called a BoomBox.

S is listening not even 1% while she prepares her salad. She’s about to learn way more about this since M has booked them tickets to England for THAT AFTERNOON to investigate. It’s a Saturday, it’s not FBI related, so I guess he paid for them himself? And the plan was to just do this over the weekend then get back for work on Monday? From England? S is finally like, fuck this I’m not going to England, I want to go home, take a bath, watch some Netflix, or you know, 2000 equivalent. VHS tapes of Friends.

Instead, S heads to the hospital to do a little bit of work and runs into a dude she banged in medical school, an instructor who is in the hospital with a bad heart. He’s older dude who has a family! His daughter is not stoked about S the homewrecker hanging about her dad. Hey S has a sweet old Macintosh, one of those ones with the big, brightly coloured monitors. I always wanted one of those. Nice!

S meets with some lady who’s a giant fan of Buddhism and seems to almost be converted right away, despite the fact we’ve spent seven seasons building S up as a staunch Catholic. In Chinatown, S has some mega weird magical vision about how to save the old guy, who she put in a coma when she used the defibrillator on him. The daughter is real mad S banged her dad back in the day, that’s understandable, but you can hardly be mad about someone using a defibrillator to try and save a life.

Inspired by her new found Buddhism (?) S pushes an ‘alternative medicine’ approach which apparently works 100% (sure) and now old dude is awake and wanting to get back with S even though he’s like 80. How long since S was in medical school? Ten years max, making her early 30’s maybe and this guy is so old. This whole thing is weird and S recognizes this and is like, yeah, no dude, gross, move on.

We get back to the start, where it turns out that M & S had a real deep convo (M sporting a great Stonehenge ball-cap, which is so obvious as to make me think he’s faking the whole England for the weekend thing) about this, and then S fell dead asleep at M’s place. No funny business! Just another tease!

This episode is so slow. Not every episode needs to be Mission Impossible, sometimes a deep character study is good, but this just feels heavy for the sake of it. All the religious subtext and the directly religious stuff, the Buddhist temples and chakras, the cloudy motivations, it just feels slllowwww and a little pretentious for the sake of it. I don’t hate it, because I enjoy any episode that’s different to the regular, but still. So. Slow.

This was Gillian Anderson’s first time writing and directing, so given that, you’d have to say this was a great episode, since I can’t imagine how hard that must be to do. But I didn’t have a very fun time watching it. I think I’d rather have seen what M was up to with the crop circles in England. It would have been fun if they’d done this as a two parter and next week was the flip side, a light episode, from M’s perspective as he goes on his own adventure.

7x18 Brand X

Skinman is in charge of looking after a couple who are clearly on some sort of wit/sec thing, which seems pretty weird. Even if this was the FBI’s top priority, they’d really put a director on the actual stakeout? Tough draw for Skinman. The guy sips from a glass of water which seems to contain a live beetle, and as you might guess, things don’t go well. The next morning the dude is dead in the bathroom with no face. Not great! Bad job by you Skinman!

Here’s the couple who should have been put on the case from the start, M & S ready to investigate and get their boss out of another jam. The guy was due to testify against big tobacco, specifically Morley, which I think is the CSM’s preferred brand, something which we can project, not a coincidental thing.

Skinman & M try to bust into Morley and make trouble, but it doesn’t go well. M is right away onto the whole beetle thing and pushes the scientist Voss on what the deal is. No dice, they’re all lawyered up. The beetles come out of the new super tobacco Morley made or something, and grow inside them, then kill the people. No idea why or what is going on but it probably wouldn’t stop people smoking, even if this was a feature, not a bug, so to speak. If nothing else, all these corpses make for great opportunities for M to make gags about the victims’ decomposed faces. The good doctor Voss seems to feel bad about the whole death beetle thing and is paying off one of the test subjects.

Doesn’t take long until M gets the contagion and he’s in the hospital, intubated with beetle eggs in his lungs. Very gross but maybe karmic, for all the jokes he made about the dead guys. We get another super gross scene where beetles come out of a guys mouth and even Skinman looks like he might barf. Weird that there’s no sign of CSM in this episode. Thought he’d be around pushing Morley for a lifetime of free cigarettes in exchange for one of his patented cover ups.

Skinman tracks down the good doctor to get some help and also shoots the test subject who is spreading around the beetle tobacco. S realizes that actually tobacco might be the only thing that could save M, and yup, it does. Although maybe M is now headed down the path to being the new CSM, since he looks longingly at the pack of Morley’s that get thrown away. That would be a neat twist to end the show, a young agent pushing for the truth and an old M sat in the corner, smoking, shutting down the investigation.

I don’t get this episode at all. It’s sort of a mess and it’s barely an actual XF (I’m starting to sound like S) it’s just some weird science. But when you have so many episodes in a season, hey, they can’t all be winners.

Wiki Notes: Another episode touched by the actors being busy directing their own episodes. That’s why they stick M in a hospital bed for half the episode, so he didn’t actually need to be in it. Also one of the few episodes that was a sort of Law & Order ripped from the headlines type deal, with all the lawsuits v big tobacco being everywhere in the early 2000s.