Thoughts in a File Marked X

After spending an entire episode in the water, Mulder is rescued by Scully. Little wonder that it is at the end of ‘ Triangle ’ that Mulder finally tells Scully he loves her. Scripturally and directorially, ‘ Triangle ’ is a triumph. Forty-five minutes of television made up of only 24 individual shots. them0vieblog.com is right to call it a tour de force . I’m not so sure that Todd VanDerWerff, at the A.V. Club , is entirely right in saying that the episode is “’just’ a fun episode”. I am in full agreement with VanDerWerff’s selection of Act 3, in which Scully runs around the FBI building seeking that all important piece of information, and the split screen in Act 5 when the two Scullys cross paths, pause, and look back puzzled, as being highlights of the episode. I do ponder why Scully features so prominently in my highlights list. To dismiss this episode as a dream is to do it a disservice. Mulder is floating face down in the sea. The X File here is how he didn’t drown! That a...

The distance travelled from Washington D.C. to San Francisco is equal to making a return trip across the widest part of Britain 4½ times. Little wonder that the American myth is ‘ Westward Ho !’ and the British is ‘ Anchors aweigh !’ You could make an episode called ‘ Peddle ’ in Britain, but not one called ‘ Drive ’. These vast distances play tricks upon the American psyche. Even today there are wide open spaces creating the illusion of freedom and room to swing a cat : NASA nighttime “black marble” satellite image The wide-open spaces depicted in the NASA image are not as wide and open as they would have been back in the 19 th Century – if for no reason other than that now they have NASA satellites flying overhead taking beautiful “black marble” images. The average pan-handler on his way to the California gold fields wasn’t being tracked by an eye-in-the-sky. In Medieval England, to be born in a village was to live, marry, have children, work and die in that same village, ...

It was supposed to be the end. A five-year story arc ending in a blaze of glory. Then, out of the ashes the Phoenix arose. Out of death comes life. Out of the end emerged the beginning. Perpetual motion is cyclic : Round and round and round we go Will we stop? Fox says No! It should have been the end; all natural life signs had ceased. It was time to just let it go. There are powers in this world, however, that won’t allow for natural processes. A peaceful passing into the “ ineffable bliss ” of the afterlife is forbidden by the machine that perpetuates artificial existence. Denied its natural end, it becomes a distortion of what it once was, monstrous even. What once had flowed lovingly from the source now must rip itself out violently ,* tearing and destroying that which sustained its life. (* viewer discretion is advised) Life may be a cycle of death and rebirth. A life is but a one-way street. Life within a life may be cyclic, with many symbolic deaths and rebirt...

Forget that Gibson Praise can read minds, and is a human/alien hybrid and is the walking, talking equivalent of 42 . Forget that he’s a cute kid who just wants to watch good cartoons. Just look how coolly he manoeuvres himself out of the line of fire and lets another – probably innocent – person take the bullet meant for him. How calculatedly cold-blooded is that? And after witnessing this mere boy let another die in his place, we are asked to sympathise with him the rest of the episode! Actually, let’s not forget that he has become a national sensation by cheating! Chess prodigy, my ass! He reads his opponents minds, God dammit! What is there to like about this kid? No doubt, if ever brought to trial, he would claim it was the alien half of his DNA that made him do it! The kid has no honour; it’s not like he’s going to accept full responsibility for his actions! Why are we asked to see the likes of Leonard Betts as a monster and Gibson Praise as – well, what exactly? Not a mon...

Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment." It is a grand ideal. It is the paradox of humanity that we can espouse such ideals while having no intention of enforcing them. It is the kind of hypocrisy that makes me ashamed to be human. It is the kind of hypocrisy that drives so many of us to extreme action. It is almost idiotic to say such a thing, but, if the world was fair, there would be no need of extreme acts of violence. Or for American workers to go postal . But why is it always just the one who sees the evil lurking in full view? This being the X Files, we fully expect Mulder to be able to perceive a side of reality beyond our line of sight, but, him aside, generally, why is it so few of us are able to catch a whiff of the humiliation and servitude the modern work place subjects us to? Is it really j...

"[T]he greatest threat we face today is not terrorists; it is our own federal government." Richard Mack At the core of modern Western democracy is John Locke ’s ideal of government by the consent of the people. Locke had a profound influence upon those who drafted the American Constitution , a document that enacted the British philosopher’s Liberal ideas . How does any country, founded upon such liberal principles, arrive at a time in its history where ‘the people’ are not only ready to take up arms, but actually doing so with the stated intent of overthrowing the constitutional government any time they feel it necessary? As far as the United States is concerned, it bred this dissension in the Petri dish of its own experiment. Article 1, Section 8 grants Congress the power to call “forth the Militia”, thereby granting Americans the right to form the Militia upon which Congress may feel the need to call. As it is not easy to imagine a true Liberal forming military-sty...

The big problem with God is that He is not as we are. The very use of the gendered pronoun as a means to speak of God should make us realise just how different He is, for it is a phonemic reference to a physical reality which, by definition, would be to place false limitations upon God. Any attempt to speak of God is no more than an articulation of our almost complete incomprehension of His Being . The last two words of that last sentence being a case in point. To speak of God’s Being is to create a distinction between God and Being. For beings who happily inhabit a dualistic nature, this is almost unavoidable. We humans exist between the physical and the metaphysical , the objective and the subjective, the body and the mind. Duality comes so naturally to us we barely recognize it. Duality is merely a consequent of existing physically in a reality that might be something more. To limit and control God, we refer to Him as a ‘ transcendental signified ’, a something beyond which...

Sophocles ’ Tiresias is the very archetype of the blind seer . Tiresias was blinded by a goddess – either Hera , who allegedly blinded him after he agreed with Zeus ’ argument that women gain more joy from sex, or Athena after he saw her naked in the bath. Greek mythology is no more thought out than Chris Carter’s X Files mythology. In Sophocles ’ ‘ Oedipus Rex ’, Tiresias plays the role of emphasising the blindness of those who, while sighted, yet fail to see. Oedipus calls upon the blind seer’s wisdom, but Tiresias, though he claims to possess the information required, refuses to answer, for he is tired of having knowledge of things that cause only pain to those who claim to want to know. Inevitably, he does give Oedipus the answer he seeks and, as predicted, it causes nothing but terrible pain. Jocasta, Oedipus’ mother and wife, commits suicide and Oedipus plucks out his own eyes for failing to see what he should. It is no wonder that Freud choose this myth as the foundati...

Ah, the 50 s! A time of Rock ‘n’ Roll , the Jive and the Twist , the Chevrolet Bell Air convertible , Mom’s apple pie – McCarthyism , the Rosenbergs , and xenotransplantation ! The Republican Senator from Wisconsin and the current incumbent of the White House prove that ( Republican ) political strategies never change – when in need of the vote, scapegoat ! If strategy remains the same, allegiances shift. Where once the GOP would hound American citizens out of home and employment for so much as a sniff of connection with the Soviets, today, they welcome all the Russian aid and assistance they can get – and no one need be executed. Not even the President’s term of office! Scapegoating is nothing new, of course. From the literal use of a goat (cf. Lev. 16:10 ) to the victimization of any group deemed undesirable, scapegoating has always been about making a particular group feel better about itself at the expense of another. So basic a human need is it to feel good about the sel...

Life is a risky business. Life is a gamble. Place your bets and pray the little ball drops the way you hope. How high are the odds against you? Sometimes, astoundingly, the odds are in your favour. Scully should be crispy critter along with Quiet Willy and Dmitri and all the other abductees tragically called to Ruskin Dam . A touch over- sautéed around the edges she may be and temporarily oblivious to the horror but, on this occasion, the roulette wheel spun in her favour. If life is a game - with the odds so heavily stacked against us – what twisted rules it must be played by! What irony that the chip that saved Scully from cancer now brings her within inches of being incinerated! How terribly unfortunate to have survived a mass incineration in Kazakhstan only to be barbequed without basting in the USA. And poor Quiet Willy! He was only there to make sure Cassandra Spender caught her flight – a good turn never goes unpunished , as they say! Dmitri and Quiet Willy must have ...

What makes a person who they are? The X Files asked this question back in Season One’s ‘ Ice ’ when Richter announced, “We’re not … who … we are.” It has continued to ask this question through Mulder and Scully, both of whom have had plenty of cause to question just who they are, who they would like to be, and whether they like being who they appear to be. Mulder’s crisis of faith has forced him to face this question, as Scully has had to face it after meeting Emily and the choices she felt she needed to make for ‘her’ child. All of us are faced with this question, probably more often than we know. In a toxic relationship, we must ask ourselves if we wish to be the person we seemed forced to be? In a job that makes us unhappy, we must ask if we wish to force ourselves to be someone we’d prefer not to be? Returning home after many years away, we must ask ourselves if we are the person remembered by those who stayed or someone who has grown beyond what they can know? Who is Alex K...

Ordinary decent people don’t go chasing pizza delivery boys through the woods at night and, upon catching them, stake them through the heart. Whatever else ‘ Bad Blood ’ may be, it is a testament to Mulder’s belief in the supernatural. So firm is his belief that he unhesitatingly does what needs to be done. Van Helsing would be so proud – but Van Helsing had the luxury of others’ belief. Mulder lives in a world where the default is unbelief, a world just waiting for him to make the kind of misstep that Ronnie’s killing appears to be. Season Five, of which ‘ Bad Blood ’ is the twelfth episode, is the season in which Mulder loses his faith. ‘ Redux ’ and ‘ Redux II ’ spun a version of events which apparently persuaded Mulder that his life had been given over to a fruitless task. This loss of faith is very specific though. Aliens and their conspiracy to take over the world can now be explained by Kritschgau’s elaborate alternate history. Ironically, just as Mulder ceases to believe t...

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. William Gibson , Neuromancer , 1984 Transfer of memory, of consciousness to the distributed system maintained by the AI. Imagine being mingled so completely with another, you no longer need your physical self – you’re one. Esther, Kill Switch , 1998 Imagine being so infatuated with technology that you actually believe the future of the human race lies in discarding our physical bodies in order to meld with a computer. What does it take to turn humanity away from itself? To reach a point where the physical becomes superfluous? As romantic as it sounds, to lose self in order to become ‘one’ is death. Great achievement is not born out of being one amorphous mess. It is a perversion of the sense of self. By definition, romance is the coming together of two. Despite the difficulties of families or fate, two individuals believe they are meant to be together so much that they are willing to forego famil...