"Is any of this coming back to you, Agent Mulder?"
ACTUAL DOCUMENTED ACCOUNT: Mulder wakes up missing two days of memory, aside from the occasional childhood flashback.
REVIEW: On the one hand, we have a very cool mystery on our hands when Mulder wakes up, Hangover-style, with two days missing, his shirt soaked in blood, and two rounds missing from his gun. On the other, the mystery that most interests us is the one playing out in his vivid flashbacks - just what happened to his sister - provides nothing we, the audience, didn't already know. Maybe Mulder didn't know about his mother's affair, though he at least suspected, just as the memories seem to confirm his father chose his sister to be abducted, but Mulder can't be sure because that was all stuff was already spinning around in his head. WE can't even call them confirmations, though they're likely meant to be. Now Mulder is "caught up" like we are. Okay.
So we're left with the more intriguing idea of Mulder following the clues back through his last two days, and finding out he may well be a double-murderer. Frame-up? The truth is altogether different. A murder-suicide, followed by another suicide in the police precinct itself, all of them committed by alien abductees undergoing a rather extreme regression therapy (it involves voluntary trepanning?!). Between the hole in his head and hallucinogens in his bloodstream (make sure you ask to see you psychiatrist's license, Rhode Island residents!), Mulder has seizures and almost shoots Scully. At least, that's what they try to make us believe.
Of interest is the fact that all the recipients of the mad doctor's treatment each exhibit obsessive-compulsive behavior - the woman paints the same house over and over, the cop cuts his face out of pictures - but not Mulder. Or doesn't he? It's easily explained since he hasn't been treated for the same amount of time, but I'd hazard a guess that Mulder's search for the truth at any cost IS his obsession. So we hardly notice. A Mulder episode, but Scully is very good in this too, most especially in her anger towards the doctor whose practices she knows to be unethical. Ironically, Mulder shrugging off her pleas that he check into a hospital mirror his own concerning her cancer.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - A good mystery, but we don't learn anything new, do we? Perhaps it's just a recap episode as we head into the season finale.
REVIEW: On the one hand, we have a very cool mystery on our hands when Mulder wakes up, Hangover-style, with two days missing, his shirt soaked in blood, and two rounds missing from his gun. On the other, the mystery that most interests us is the one playing out in his vivid flashbacks - just what happened to his sister - provides nothing we, the audience, didn't already know. Maybe Mulder didn't know about his mother's affair, though he at least suspected, just as the memories seem to confirm his father chose his sister to be abducted, but Mulder can't be sure because that was all stuff was already spinning around in his head. WE can't even call them confirmations, though they're likely meant to be. Now Mulder is "caught up" like we are. Okay.
So we're left with the more intriguing idea of Mulder following the clues back through his last two days, and finding out he may well be a double-murderer. Frame-up? The truth is altogether different. A murder-suicide, followed by another suicide in the police precinct itself, all of them committed by alien abductees undergoing a rather extreme regression therapy (it involves voluntary trepanning?!). Between the hole in his head and hallucinogens in his bloodstream (make sure you ask to see you psychiatrist's license, Rhode Island residents!), Mulder has seizures and almost shoots Scully. At least, that's what they try to make us believe.
Of interest is the fact that all the recipients of the mad doctor's treatment each exhibit obsessive-compulsive behavior - the woman paints the same house over and over, the cop cuts his face out of pictures - but not Mulder. Or doesn't he? It's easily explained since he hasn't been treated for the same amount of time, but I'd hazard a guess that Mulder's search for the truth at any cost IS his obsession. So we hardly notice. A Mulder episode, but Scully is very good in this too, most especially in her anger towards the doctor whose practices she knows to be unethical. Ironically, Mulder shrugging off her pleas that he check into a hospital mirror his own concerning her cancer.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - A good mystery, but we don't learn anything new, do we? Perhaps it's just a recap episode as we head into the season finale.
Comments
In a bit of an interesting What If scenario, what if the writers choice this type of ending for Mulder and Scully? As in Mulder either voluntarily or unvoluntarily is checked into a mental opsital, seemingly for the rest of his life, while Scully succumbs to her cancer. This would easily set up and explain the need fot the replacement agents used later on towards the show's last seasons.
Now would that type of ending, with Mulder deemed certifilably nuts and Scully as a terminal cancer patient be seen as ironic, considering the weird nature of the cases they investigated, but then find their own lives ending in a totally natural and real world believable ending, or no?
Just food for thought, and a highly unlikely and fitting ending for those two I'm sure. But in the real world? Totally believable.
Instead, Mulder disappears and Scully's abduction cancer is cured. (I think, memory is hazy, but we'll find out.) Not ironic, but certainly in keeping with the rules of the X-Files universe.
OR check in tomorrow for yet another way it all ends, because Gethsemane could very well have been used as a "dark ending" to the program instead of its halfway point.