Top 10 X-Files Episodes, Part II
Based on How Many Times I Said “Oh Fuck Off” While Watching
We return to our article in progress. We already talked about the movie-within-a-movie episode, the baseball alien episode, the Bermuda Triangle episode, the giving-the-aliens-the-flag episode, even the Brady Bunch episode. How much stupider can this show get?
#5. The Truth
In a return to the perennial refrain of this blog, everybody hates the original finale of The X-Files, but I don’t. Perhaps because I watched the show long after its original airdate, perhaps because I never expected an explanation for the obviously improvised and clearly metaphorical-at-best conspiracy, I managed to appreciate “The Truth” as the corny clip show-meets-trial episode that they are.
Many things occur in this episode which prompt one to say “Oh fuck off!” Multiple dead characters return as ghosts. Multiple dead characters return as improbably alive. Multiple obvious norms of courtroom conduct fall by the wayside. Mulder makes a silly speech. We learn the final fates of approximately no one.
We enjoy the greatest hits, though. We enjoy retrospecting on the journey, which must necessarily matter much more than the destination. We enjoy seeing familiar faces behaving comically and dramatically. We reflect on the power Mulder and Scully’s adventures held over us.
Why do we care? This show is silly and an imperfect, deeply human product. Essentially, we want to believe in The X-Files. But really The X-Files is inviting us to believe in ourselves.
Crucially, it is not, despite what every American now smoking 12 hours of TikTok daily thinks, inviting us to believe in horseshit conspiracies.
The real “The Truth” was the friends (Mulder and Scully and ghosts) we made along the way.
#4. Closure
A controversial and not particularly well-exposited piece of work, “Closure” invites one to say “oh fuck off” from the very beginning, because it’s yet another episode promising to reveal what really happened to Mulder’s sister.
“This time for real, I promise!” Yeah right, Chris Carter.
And the explanation is confusing. After years of thinking maybe she was alive and alien-pregnant, maybe she was alive and alien, maybe she was dead due to alien, now we learn she is conclusively dead of the lamest 90s TV answer of all: serial killer. But in her dying moments, fairies(??) spirited her soul away and she never suffered. Apparently that’s where all the serial-killed children go: fairyland(???).
Yet can I hate this episode entirely? No, I cannot, because Mulder travels briefly to fairyland and sees his sister and all the other murdered children in an afterlife of joy, unscarred by their horrifying final moments, preserved in innocence like sentimental formaldehyde. And seeing this finally releases Mulder from his obsession with finding his sister (not his obsession with the aliens, but then pobody’s nerfect). What a relief it is to let go of something it hurts you to hold, and yet how hard it is to actually open your hand.
Mulder probably should have gone to therapy as a teen immediately after his sister disappeared, but he didn’t have very good parents and he did already have Capital-T Tendencies. So he burnt himself out chasing mysteries for a decade, only to discover that sometimes people are yanked out of our lives for no reason and no sense. To see him finally let go is an enormous relief, even in a stupid context, and an unexpected overturning of television’s status quo fixation.
#3. Post-Modern Prometheus
This is the episode, the most intense dose of X-Files you could possibly watch and survive. Mulder and Scully journey to a weird small town plagued by mysterious pregnancies, its mysteries echoed in a cheapo comic produced by a local kid. Everything’s shot in black and white like an old-timey movie. The source of the strangeness is theoretically a two-faced mutant obsessed with Cher, but the longer you look the more it seems to come from everyone. Instead of punishing anyone, Mulder and Scully take everyone, mutant included, to a Cher concert.
You might say “oh fuck off” every five minutes to this episode, particularly when actual Jerry Springer shows up, but come on man: it’s out of love. The sight of Mulder demanding to speak with The Writer and iron out a happy ending for this fucked-up little two-face freak justifies the whole meta-snarl of the story.
Fate and free will, real life and story: can’t make sense of one without the other. Can’t make one make sense while honestly acknowledging the other. One week you might be an FBI agent charged with saving the whole world. Next week you’re a character in a Hammer horror movie, party-planning for the loneliest freak on Earth. Let the hits keep coming.
#2. Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose
When I’m watching this episode, I’m saying “Oh fuck off” out loud to the screen repeatedly because I’m literally crying. Mulder and Scully meet the sad old man psychic Clyde Bruckman, discuss the nature of fate and death with him, and then he kills himself.
There’s also a serial killer in there somewhere, but he’s forgettable. You remember Clyde Bruckman, a performance which would win Peter Boyle and the episode well-deserved Emmys.
A difficult strand of The X-Files, less digestible than getting justice for the dead, is the romantic beauty and terror of death. Eventually we all have to close up shop and head on out, and the only comfort is that we won’t be alone. Everyone else has gone before us.
It’s enough to make you say “Oh fuck off!” to life in general.
#1. Redux I & II
And at last we confront the ultimate “oh fuck off” double-feature. Midstream in the show, tired of their confusing mythos, the authors of The X-Files decided to reveal that the aliens were themselves made up by the US government to hide the excesses of the DOD and their Northrupp-Boetheon henchmen. This made both too much and too little sense, with the creative team eventually walking it back for no reason in later seasons.
I like to think of the “no aliens” version of the show as existing in an eternal quantum confrontation with the “yes aliens” version of the show, the same way we live simultaneously in a doomed version of the world and one which might still be saved. Both states are true at every given moment, depending on how you want to look at it, despite being mutually incompatible.
The most important thing about “Redux” is that it contains my favorite X-Files monologue of all time, the speech given by creepy g-man Kritschgau to explain the subconspiracy about faking the aliens. It really must be seen to be believed. The number of times it swerves comically from the regular baloney of X-Files into something painfully adjacent to truth makes me mutter “oh fuck off” to myself. The American people’s appetite for bogus revelation indeed.
Kritschgau ends his soliloquy with an admission of self-interest in Mulder’s mission: he must believe that Mulder will uncover the cure for Gulf War Syndrome, which is killing Kritschgau’s son.
Why did we have the Gulf War anyway? Seems like every single time I ask questions about why America is killing people in Southwest Asia, the answer turns out to be “bogus revelation”. If I had a nickel for every time, I’d change it for a quarter instead.
A person hungry for revelation is a person who, by definition, wants to believe, which is yet another funny contradiction in the rhetoric of The X-Files. Wanting to believe is a heroic aspect of Mulder’s character, we think, yet Kritschgau reminds us that wanting to believe often makes you a sucker.
Not too long ago, David Duchovny had Chris Carter on his podcast. Mostly they giggled amiably as two old friends do, but at one point Duchovny asked Carter to explain the difference between “believing” and “wanting to believe” in the X-Files context. Chris Carter did an admirably piss-poor job of differentiating the two, so allow a critic to take a shot.
Wanting to believe is a type of crueler optimism than mere faith. If Mulder, or any of us, believed with simple conviction in the aliens, all the questions would be answered. We’d be done. But Mulder constantly questions the veracity of his own fixation, even while it provides the only spiritual sustenance in his life. He can’t commit wholeheartedly to the bit because the bit remains eternally fraught, something he can’t share with other people or reconcile in his heart without evidence.
I’m fairly certain that everybody has something like this in their life, even if it’s not quite as dramatic as proving the existence of the aliens who stole their sister. You have a dream and your relationship with it is toxic. You have a question hanging over you, the answer to which will only hurt you. You want to believe, but the evidence is all pointing in the other direction. You would like The X-Files to be a good TV show to justify the amount of time you’ve invested in it and the amount of enjoyment you’ve derived from it, but everything suggests the show is dumb. You go back to normal at the end of each day, so you can wake up and do another variation in the morning, without the comfort of certainty.
What to do about it all? How to reconcile our unearned hopes with the US government-riven world?
Personally, I want to see The Writer. I demand a happy ending for all the fucked-up little freaks and everyone else too. We’ll spend our tax dollars on baseball and Cher concerts, not bombs and heartbreak. The truth is out there, just down the block from where the ghosts hang out.
