The Red and the Black
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 bet on the red and Scully on the black.
Or maybe there is some kind of divine justice at play in the game of human affairs. Both Quiet Willy and Dmitri – the latter against his will, admittedly – played out their roles on the side of the Conspiracy working towards human annihilation, the Conspiracy against which the Rebels are fighting. However cosmically unfortunate, Dmitri and Quiet Willy are justifiable casualties of war. Though they might not know it – or even care – Scully is the enemy of their enemy and therefore their friend. As such, if she had been incinerated, she would be a casualty of ‘friendly fire’.
Or are we really at the beck and call of winsome fate?
What are the odds of the Alien Bounty Hunter taking on Quiet Willy’s appearance during his attempt to capture the Faceless Alien? Of all the hundreds, if not thousands of faces to choose from and he picks one that is instantly recognizable to Scully – it’s a spooky gift she has, this recognizing drivers of trucks (cf. ‘Red Museum’ in which she recognizes the Crew-Cut Man as he drives by.) It’s almost like history repeating itself. Not quite Nietzsche’s extreme ‘eternal return of the same’, but cyclical for all that.
It is the whim of fate that Scully survive the roasting at Ruskin Dam, for no reason other than the restoration of the status-quo. There will be a couple more moments before Season’s end that might lead us to believe that finally Scully is not so frightened to believe anymore. But Scully hasn’t been bitten on the ass just yet! All must return to how it was – which might be a nice way to hold the mirror up to real life but hardly the way to produce a cutting-edge TV series.
It’s all enough to make one feel true progress will never be made, that life is not so exciting but is, rather, just a little too boring. Anyone who has been watching closely this far must by now have realized that none of this is going to make any sense, that there will be no satisfactory all-explanatory ending to the great mythology – there simply can’t be. And since when did mythology make sense, anyway?
Speaking of mythology - what culture has ever produced a mythology which is a cohesive whole? Chris Carter’s inability to bring the mythology of the X Files to a well-defined conclusion is no more a fault than the Ancient Greeks having no story arc at all to their mythology or the total confusion that is the end to that cult classic, ‘The Prisoner’ – with only seventeen episodes to play with there was all but no chance of a logical, coherent, satisfactory ending to be had.
If life is a game in which we are the pieces shuffled around some board at the whim of fate, or the gods, or the Syndicate, the status quo becomes almost attractive in that it provides stability in a world of chaos. Even into Season Nine, there were some excellent stand-alone episodes (cf. ‘John Doe’). The restoration of the status quo allows for Scully and Mulder (or Doggett or Reyes) to be ready to go at the beginning of each episode.
It may be good to have some excitement and change in life. To have too much is to risk the fate of the mythology – to lose one’s sense of direction, become lost in the moment, heading nowhere of any great import.
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 bet on the red and Scully on the black.
Or maybe there is some kind of divine justice at play in the game of human affairs. Both Quiet Willy and Dmitri – the latter against his will, admittedly – played out their roles on the side of the Conspiracy working towards human annihilation, the Conspiracy against which the Rebels are fighting. However cosmically unfortunate, Dmitri and Quiet Willy are justifiable casualties of war. Though they might not know it – or even care – Scully is the enemy of their enemy and therefore their friend. As such, if she had been incinerated, she would be a casualty of ‘friendly fire’.
Or are we really at the beck and call of winsome fate?
What are the odds of the Alien Bounty Hunter taking on Quiet Willy’s appearance during his attempt to capture the Faceless Alien? Of all the hundreds, if not thousands of faces to choose from and he picks one that is instantly recognizable to Scully – it’s a spooky gift she has, this recognizing drivers of trucks (cf. ‘Red Museum’ in which she recognizes the Crew-Cut Man as he drives by.) It’s almost like history repeating itself. Not quite Nietzsche’s extreme ‘eternal return of the same’, but cyclical for all that.
It is the whim of fate that Scully survive the roasting at Ruskin Dam, for no reason other than the restoration of the status-quo. There will be a couple more moments before Season’s end that might lead us to believe that finally Scully is not so frightened to believe anymore. But Scully hasn’t been bitten on the ass just yet! All must return to how it was – which might be a nice way to hold the mirror up to real life but hardly the way to produce a cutting-edge TV series.
It’s all enough to make one feel true progress will never be made, that life is not so exciting but is, rather, just a little too boring. Anyone who has been watching closely this far must by now have realized that none of this is going to make any sense, that there will be no satisfactory all-explanatory ending to the great mythology – there simply can’t be. And since when did mythology make sense, anyway?
Speaking of mythology - what culture has ever produced a mythology which is a cohesive whole? Chris Carter’s inability to bring the mythology of the X Files to a well-defined conclusion is no more a fault than the Ancient Greeks having no story arc at all to their mythology or the total confusion that is the end to that cult classic, ‘The Prisoner’ – with only seventeen episodes to play with there was all but no chance of a logical, coherent, satisfactory ending to be had.
If life is a game in which we are the pieces shuffled around some board at the whim of fate, or the gods, or the Syndicate, the status quo becomes almost attractive in that it provides stability in a world of chaos. Even into Season Nine, there were some excellent stand-alone episodes (cf. ‘John Doe’). The restoration of the status quo allows for Scully and Mulder (or Doggett or Reyes) to be ready to go at the beginning of each episode.
It may be good to have some excitement and change in life. To have too much is to risk the fate of the mythology – to lose one’s sense of direction, become lost in the moment, heading nowhere of any great import.
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