TXF Season 10 so far
It's so easy to slip into the old pattern, doing at least half of Carter's work for him. Or maybe the proportions go more like 40% me, 40% Gillian, 15% Duchovny, and 5% Carter. And hell yes, part of me is resentful. Part of me feels like I really should not have to work this hard to find meaning in a show, meaning that is slippery and almost certainly not fully understood or intended by the creator.
But on the other hand, there's a pleasure in it. It's a pleasure I've found in surprisingly few other shows (the BSG reboot probably came closest to providing the same type of experience). I rarely watch prestige dramas like The Wire or Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Partly it's because they don't speak to my imagination; they don't use the symbols of sci-fi and fantasy that have emotional meaning for me. But another factor is that their narrative pleasures are so well-ordered and obvious, so acknowledged and expected. When a show is consistently good, when it's clear from interviews that the show runners have set out to do a particular thing and they are successfully doing it, then the crazy tightrope energy is gone. There's no mystery to it.
On the other hand, I watch a lot of cheesy sci-fi and fantasy shows that provide momentary diversion, but that I never think about in between episodes. There's simply nothing there to think about. So, for better or for worse, The X-Files, you've got me. I'm back in.
One of my favorite comments about the show so far (besides every comment that draws hearts around GA) is this one from Abigail N over at
coffeeandink's journal: What got me about the latest runaround of Mulder's sudden willingness to throw his previous claptrap beliefs out the window in favor of a host of new claptrap beliefs is that the more the show tries to be topical, the less relevant it makes itself. I've been saying for weeks that the biggest problem with resurrecting The X-Files in 2016 is that at this point it feels quaint, not to say naive, to believe that the biggest thing the government is hiding from us is proof of the existence of alien life. When Mulder and Joel McHale's character (who I'm choosing to believe is an AU version of Jeff who never got his soul saved by the study group) started spouting off about how the military-industrial complex is immiserating, anesthetizing, sickening, and encouraging the consumption of the masses in order to set us up for the violent takeover of the planet, I really wanted Scully to point out that that lest step is completely unnecessary.
Because here's the thing about the aliens in TXF 1.0: they created a strange sort of hopefulness underlying everything else in the show, because they relocated the source of evil. Yes, men were carrying out like 90% of the abuses of power in the show, and not even under alien control, but still - their flawed and terrible choices were being made *in response to* the alien threat.
People were being tested, and people were failing, and in their failure they were giving free rein to their most selfish, destructive impulses. But the thing that was testing them came from outside of us, outside of every single force that humanity had evolved in context with: an awful, incomprehensible power that we were never designed to cope with. We failed, but it really wasn't our fault. That's the first hopeful thing.
And the second hopeful thing was that if that truth, with enough proof, ever did succeed in getting out to the public, people would WANT to fight. People would profoundly feel the wrongness of it. ALIENS ARE TRYING TO TAKE OVER OUR PLANET. This is outside the normal order of things. This is the definition of not okay. People would unite, people would mobilize. Change is possible.
TXF 2.0 seems to be taking that away. The aliens aren't a threat. They just stopped by to check us out and see if everything was okay, and we killed them and stole their stuff, and now we're using it to be awful to each other in exactly the same ways that people have always been awful to each other. That truth is pretty much public knowledge already: people have sucked, do suck, and will probably continue to suck. Some people have more energy than others for fighting against that endless ocean of suck, and sometimes surprising little areas of success are carved out, giving us all a bit more space to breathe.
If Mulder and Scully manage to prove, "Look, people are continuing to suck, only now with bonus alien tech!" is that really going to form the nucleus of a revolution that will change the way the world works? Probably not. I guess it's worth a shot, maybe?
Scully knows it's probably not going to work. I really appreciated that they let her and Mulder come across as old and tired and battered by their experiences. I too have had a pretty crappy 13 years since the show went off the air, so we're on the same wavelength. But Scully's fatigue is matched by her determination to keep making a difference in the world, and so she's going on, doing the job in front of her. And Mulder, my god, was it really their intention to make him seem so lost, so non-functional? If so, a bold choice, well-played. It probably wasn't intentional, because it was mostly gone by the next episode, but while it lasted, it was horrifyingly familiar, because I have seen people I care about cross that line before, where they lose their awareness of their own issues and the crazy becomes real.
As for the second episode, William was my least favorite plot development ever and I was really hoping the reboot would forget all about him, but I guess that was never a realistic hope. Oh well.
And now onward. Rumor has it that episode 3 is pretty good?
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