Tracking the Justice Democrats: Now That The Primaries Are Over, Let's See What The Justice Democrats Have Actually Accomplished

 

The next time one of your self-righteous socialist or progressive colleagues (but I repeat myself) launches into a diatribe about how AOC and the Squad are the future of America interrupt them and say you are typing the following question into your iPhone:

"How many seats have the Justice Democrats flipped that were Republican?"

My readers already know the answer but I'm going to tell verbatim what the algorithm tells me when I type it in:

Justice Democrats have not flipped any Republican-held seats in general congressional races.

To back it up there's are two quotes from the centrist Democrat site Third Way under the term Electoral Performance:

Justice Democrats have not flipped a single Republican-held seat blue over the last four cycles.

Candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats have lost 63 of the 72 non-incumbent races in which they have competed – an 88% loss rate.

(My private thanks to Third Way for making it clear that someone in the Democratic Party knows what they're doing.)

There's a joke in there about how Siri and Alexa know that socialism is still unpopular with the American electorate but the New York Times hasn't figured that out yet. Privately, however, I find it exhausting that in eight years no one who works in legacy media, whether it is CNN or Rolling Stone, seems capable of doing a one minute search on the internet to actually find out if what Bernie and the Squad are saying about their policies resonating with the masses  are true. Why hasn't anyone from Rachel Maddow to Sean Hannity confronted them with this? Why haven't George Will and Bret Stephens done their homework? It's one thing to worry about socialism taking over the Democratic party – I myself have concerns about it -  its another to keep saying it every two years as if it's doctrine.

I want to believe so badly that this election cycle will be the one where the media finally wakes up and realizes how little the average voter wants what Bernie and the Squad have been selling. Certainly the Democrats themselves should be capable of pointing out this simple reality to the left wing of their party: if nothing else Elizabeth Warren should be able to understand basic arithmetic. But seeing as that is increasingly unlikely to happen, it falls upon yon author (as well as the good people at Third Way, who I hope will be the North Star going forward for my party) to tell you  where the Justice Democrats actually  are at the end of the 2026 primaries.

This week marked the end of the last  primaries where the Justice Democrats were running new candidates. By their standards (which as you can see  are incredibly low) this has been a good cycle for them. Compared to the hyperbole that they and the media seem to greet  everything they do it’s as underwhelming as Supergirl's box office.

So here's the complete record of the new group of  Justice Democrats who ran this cycle in order of the dates of their respective primaries:

March 3rd

 

TEXAS

As I mentioned Frederick Haynes III won the nomination for Jasmine Crockett's  old district. Crockett held similar values to the Justice Democrats though she wasn't an official member.

ONE HOLD

 

NORTH CAROLINA

Nida Allam tried to run against Valerie Foushee in the fourth district  on an anti-ICE platform, was endorsed by Bernie Sandrs, gun control activists and the working families party. She lost.

ONE PRIMARY LOSS

 

 

ILLINOIS MARCH 17^TH

Two challengers, Junaid Ahmed and Kat Abughazaleh tried to win in the 8^th and 9^th district respectively.

Both received less than 26 percent of the vote.

 TWO PRIMARY  LOSSES

 

 

PENNSYLVANIA May 19^th

Chris Rabb ran in the 3rd. He's running unopposed in the general. No Republican opposition.

ONE PRIMARY WIN.

 

June 2nd

NEW JERSEY

Adam Hamawy is running to succeed Bonnie Watson Coleman in the 12^th district.

He won, albeit with just under 28 percent of the vote.

ONE PRIMARY WIN

 

CALIFORNIA

Three new candidates were running for in California along with Ro Khanna who won his primary: Mai Vang in the 7^th was challenging Doris Matsui, Saikat Chakrabarti in the 11^th (Nancy Pelosi's former district) and Angela Gonzales-Torres was challenging Jimmy Gomez in the 34^th district.

. Chakrabarti finished in a distant third, Vang finished first in her primary and Gonzales-Torres finished second. Under the rules of California politics both Vang and Gonzales-Torres advance to the general election. We'll deal with their prospects in the general below.

 ONE PRIMARY LOSS, TWO PENDING FOR GENERAL ELECTION

 

NEW YORK, June 23rd

Claire Valdez, another Democratic Socialist who was elected to the 37^th district in 2025 would attempt to run for New York 7^th to succeed Nydia Velasquez. She would be challenging Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Queens Councilwoman Julie Won. In the 13^th Darializa Avila Chevalier would be running to challenge Adriano Espaillat, who has represented the district since 2017 and is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Both candidates won, in large part thanks to the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. (I've written about why this happened in a previous article.)

TWO PRIMARY WINS

 

COLORADO, July 1^st

Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist. defeated Diana DeGette in the primary in the Colorado 1^st. She is heavily favored to win in the general.

 

 PRIMARY WIN

 

August 4th

MISSOURI

Cori Bush was challenging Wesley Bell for the seat he defeated her in the Democratic primary in 2024 in the Missouri 1^st.

Bell beat Bush in their rematch by a landslide. For those keeping track Bush has now run as a Justice Democrat all five cycles. She lost the first time she ran in a primary, won her primary and the general in 2020, was reelected in 2022 and was primaried by Bell in 2024.  She's the ultimate Justice Democrat candidate in every way that counts.

PRIMARY LOSS

 

MICHIGAN

Donovan McKinney

McKinney was challenging Shri Thanedar in the Michigan 13th. The main difference is that Thanedar renounced his membership in the DSA in October 2023, after they failed to condemn Hamas after the terrorist attacks in Israel.

McKinney managed a narrow victory beating Thanedar by just under 4 percent.

PRIMARY WIN

 

TENNESSEE August 6^th

Justin Pearson

Pearson was running to contend in the newly redrawn Tennessee 9^th. He managed to win in a landslide over his nearest competitor with 65 percent of the vote.

PRIMARY WIN

 

 

So to recap of the fourteen candidates the Justice Democrats recruited this cycle seven won their primaries (I'll get to one of them below) five lost and two are advancing to the general while holding one  old seat.

Only by the incredibly low bar that the Justice Democrats have set in four consecutive election cycles could their track record in 2026 be seen as a 'movement'. Particularly when you consider that in 2025 they announced that they were planning to have candidates to run in all fifty states and that they could only come up with fifteen to run in eleven. Add in that Allam and Bush had already tried before (in Bush's cases, multiple times) and it's hard to argue that people are lining up to run under their banner.

For the second consecutive election cycle the only districts they chose to run in were some of the most blue in the country. The exception was Pearson who had planned to run before a recent Supreme Court decision led to Tennessee redrawing its maps make the one deep blue district in the state now majority red. By that point Pearson had already announced his candidacy but it's clear that this wasn't the race he'd signed up for. To his credit he decided to keep going but this district is overwhelmingly favored to go to his Republican opponent.

And its not clear for the two other candidates who managed to advance to the general election whether they'll have a chance to win. Vang managed to finish ahead with 31.2 percent of the vote to Matsui's 29 percent. However its not clear where the 37 percent of the vote that when to her Republican challengers will go.

Gonzales-Torres is in a worse situation in the 34^th district, finishing second to Gomez. Gomez won far more decisively getting 46 percent of the vote to Gonzales-Torres 30.7 percent. In order for her to overcome that deficit she's going to have to make up a lot of ground and there are fewer voters to win.

And historically California has never been as friendly to the Justice Democrats as one might think. In the first two election cycles 8 Justice Democrats tried to run under that platform (other than  Ro Khanna who was an incumbent when he joined). Only three were able to advance to the general and all lost. The same happened this year for Saikat Chakrabarti, one of the original founders of the Justice Democrats, who could only come up with 17.6 percent in the primary and finished a distant third.

I have no doubt that the Justice Democrats will use their successful primary challenges of incumbents in New York, Colorado and Michigan as signs that they have 'put the establishment on notice' and the media will parrot it.

Several things. First the left is always putting the establishment on notice when they protest or go on social media. Equating a college campus march with a primary victory shows their lack of context. Second, they will as always ignore the numerous primary defeats – including in Missouri and North Carolina, where they couldn't successful primary an incumbent.

And lastly the Tea Party in its first cycle in 2020 managed to win 39 seats in the House and multiple primaries in the Senate. Two of them, Rand Paul and Mike Lee are still standing after sixteen years while Marco Rubio was a fixture until he became Secretary of State. That was a movement that America's still reckoning with. (I found out all of this with another Google search.)

Four election cycles after their founding by the end of the 2026 election cycle the Justice Democrats in the best case scenario will have fifteen members in the House of Representatives. That means they have three percent of one house of one branch of Congress. The Freedom Caucus alone has between 30 and 40 members and they are far closer to where their party is then the Justice Democrats have ever been – and no one can argue which group has power to set the agenda in the House no matter which party is in charge. That won't change this cycle even if the Democrats do regain control of Congress this cycle – and at least until the Democrats win the Presidency we're not going to know if they have the same kind of influence the Freedom Caucus has.

Far more than the far right, the far left wing of the Democratic Party has a more visceral contempt of the political establishment. That most likely explains why they feel a primary victory against a Democrat is the equivalent, if not better, then prevailing over a Republican in the general.  This argument has always been prevalent among the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party and its even more true for the Squad. Perhaps to them a defeat in the primary is less meaningful then losing in the general election; it would certainly explain their overall strategy over the past few election cycles even before this one.

But there is a difference and anyone who works in politics knows it.  Mainstream Democrats are aware of it and the Republicans definitely are. And it is infuriating to see every single media establishment essentially argue that a primary victory by Claire Valdez is ranked by them the same way Cait Conley's was in the same state. If Valdez wins in November it doesn't change the math for House Democrats at all; it just changes the name of a member. Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries know that Claire Valdez can take a cruise for four months and still win this fall. They're going to spend far more time and money helping Conley defeat Mike Lawler because that actually matters.

And it's not just New York; there are swing districts in nearly every state that the Justice Democrats chose to run candidates in. If the Justice Democrats had wanted to help the party they would have run in them. Instead they put their own brand ahead of the party they share their name with and half the time it still  resulted in failure for them. Worse they forced many state parties to spend time and money helping either beat back challenges to incumbents or lost to new members who have made it clear they show no loyalty to the Party many of them will be representing next fall. Yet the media still acts as if their accomplishment count for more then the many Democrats in those swing districts who the Party is counting on to do what the Justice Democrats keep demonstrating over and over they can't.

So for the next several months whenever you read an article or see a story on TV or social media arguing about how the left, radical or otherwise, is taking control of the Democratic Party/America simply do exactly what I have done but that the rest of the media, liberal, conservative or otherwise, has apparently not. A five minute internet search. It may surprise you; it may reassure you; it might even bother you. But remember that even if you think the algorithm is misleading you, figures don't lie. And I'll take statistics and voter counts over the vibe any day of the week.

 

 

Howard Gordon and Vince Gilligan on The X-Files to Now :How Vince Gilligan's Experience on The X-Files Helped Shape Plur1bus Or: How To Show What's Important When The World Ends

 

 

I said when I began this series that one of the most important things both Gordon and Gilligan learned from their work on The X-Files was what not to do with a serialized drama. And that's far more true of Gilligan then it is of Gordon, if for no other reason then he was there from Season Two to the end of the original run.

Unlike Gordon who wrote several episodes that were mythology-adjacent, if not directly related to the conspiracy Gilligan never wrote a single script that had to do with the mytharc. The closest he came was co-writing several episodes that had to do with Scully's relationship to the conspiracy, whether in regard to her being diagnosed with cancer (Memento Mori) or the aftereffects of the experiments on her (Christmas Carol, Emily). Other than that all of his episodes fit the traditional monster of the week format.

And the interesting part of Gilligan's tenure on The X-Files was that he basically was an optimistic writer as well as its resident humorist. Gilligan spent much of the show poking fun at the tropes of the series but never with the kind of meta that Darin Morgan did. With him he was gently poking fun at it. We get the clearest sense of this in his first comic episode, the classic Small Potatoes.

 Mulder and Scully are called to a small Virgina town where babies are being born with vestigial tails. The most recent mother Amanda Nelligan claims the father is from another planet, which naturally brings our agents there.

When Mulder questions Nelligan about how she got pregnant, Amanda tells her that the father just showed up on her door one day. It wasn't an alien; it was Luke Skywalker. With perfect comic timing Scully says: "Did he have his lightsaber?" "No" Amanda says. "How many times have you seen Star Wars?" Scully asks absolutely delighted. "368. I should break 400 by January."

(Was it possible that Gilligan's taking a gentle dig as the nerd culture that was forming online, including on The X-Files?")

Mulder wants to go home but then they find out all five babies have the same father. This leads them to a sperm bank and the janitor Eddie Van Blundht. "The H is silent" he will constantly remind us.

Fans of this episode – and everyone loves it – knows that Eddie has the ability to make faces and turn into anyone he wants. This is a direct reference to the Bounty Hunter we saw as early as Colony. But Gilligan cleverly indicates that he's not taking it seriously and neither is Mulder. When Scully asks him if Van Blundht is an alien, Mulder is dismissive: "Not unless aliens live in trailer parks." This is clearly a dig at Carter and how the mytharc is so portentous: we're not going to dignify the idea that someone who has to power to shape shift would do so only to impersonate Jedi Knights.

And so Gilligan spends much of his humorous monsters of the week episodes going out of his way to gently puncture everything that Carter and his colleagues hold sacred about the aliens. He will usually do so by doing everything in his power to make one, if not both of our beloved agents, look like stuffed shirts.

 The best example of this is Bad Blood where the episode opens with a young man being chased through the woods by a figure in dark, screaming for help. Then he trips and is staked by Mulder. Scully runs up looking horrified. Mulder gets her to look at the fangs, saying this man is a vampire. Scully pulls them out. "Oh, sh---" Smash cut to the titles before Mulder can complete the obscenity.

The episode then shows how Gilligan is going to play with the format in which our agents are being sued for $446 million for their role in the wrongful death of their killer. Skinner wants their report and Mulder asks Scully what she's going to say. So Mulder asks Scully to tell what she said and then Mulder tells Scully what he saw.

The episode then goes out of its way to show how Scully sees Mulder and Mulder sees Scully. Both versions show the narrator as the calm, rational human being and their partner is the person who is the burden to everything. Mulder (in Scully's version) is an overexuberant, hyper person, who loves his slideshows and points out trivia, all the while pushing his partner to do autopsies in the dead of night. Scully (in Mulder's version) is a whining harridan who hates being dragged around the country by their partner and keeps falling over herself in front of a buck-toothed sheriff. (In Mulder's version. In Scully, it's Luke Wilson.)

What's the most telling part of the narrative is that in reality Sheriff Hartwell and the entire town are vampires – but they're not the monsters.  Late in the episode Hartwell apologizes to Scully for putting them through all of this. "He makes us all look bad. He's not who we are any more. I mean, we pay taxes. We're good neighbors. Ol' Ronnie, he can't quite seem to grasp the concept of 'low profile'."

There's a deep irony here. Mulder and Scully have stumbled on to a town of monsters but they're not monsters in the sense that they've been hunting all this time. This is one of the best ways Gilligan pokes fun at the entire Monster of the Week format, something he'll do quite a bit more often. Perhaps the real problem with so many of the monsters we've met over the five seasons so far (and more to come!) is not that they're mutants or demons but that they don't have a community. Perhaps Eugene Tooms or Flukeman wouldn't be a threat if they had their own village somewhere. And its worth noting that though the vampires have both Mulder and Scully at their mercy when the episode ends they choose to 'pull up stakes' because while they could kill our heroes, it would just draw the wrong sort of attention to them.

But there was always a darkness to Gilligan's humor and in a sense that darkness was a foreshadowing of what would come in Plur1bus. In 'Je Souhaite' Gilligan's directorial debut Mulder finds himself the master of a genie and given three wishes.  He tries to be altruistic and wishes for world peace. And how does the genie grant it? By erasing everyone but him from the planet.

And in the Pilot of Plur1bus  Gilligan's aliens manage to invade Earth and create a world that is a perfect paradise with no violence, crime, pollution or deviancy. And how do they do that? They manage to eliminate all but thirteen people on Earth into a hive mind.

Gilligan's aliens are completely different from Carter's. The aliens do not invade on UFOs nor do they colonize through black oil or bees. They arrive on a transmission and they manage to create a compound which the best scientific minds on Earth synthesize. Then they manage, in ways Gilligan and his writers have yet to explain, to take over the minds of every single person on Earth so that they all become the same brain. And all they want to do is create a paradise for those who live. The cost is one's individuality, one's soul, everything that makes you a human being. And what's surprising is that in Season 1 there only appear to be two people left who don't want to go along with the program.

As with the vampires in Bad Blood the aliens in Plur1bus want to be good neighbors. They are willing to accommodate everything that the remaining thirteen people who have not been processed want. In the case of one such survivor that means allowing him to live out all of his fantasies, played in the level of James Bond in Las Vegas or being able to fly Air Force One.   In the later episodes Zosia, who is established as an inspiration for a major character in Carol's fiction, tries to befriend her by playing games, going through couples massages and eventually rebuilding the diner she once used when she was deciding to become a writer.

These are not the hulking bounty hunters we spent all of The X-Files watching but there is a similarity: in The X-Files the aliens can take the form of any person on Earth ; in Plur1bus they have the minds of every person on Earth. As a result they always refer to themselves as 'we' whenever they talk to Carol about anything. In one example of the humor of the show Carol demands to that Zosia use terms like 'I' and 'you' and Zosia visibly struggles with it.

We also know far more about the aliens in the first season of Plur1bus then we ever got to during The X-Files. At one point Zosia tells Carol that they come from a planet called 'Kepler 23' and that they plan to spread everything they've been taught across the known universe, in theory, through a great radio transmission. Human emotions affect them so strongly that it causes them physical pain and that extends to not wanting to cause emotional pain either. They are also incapable of either lying or refusing any request that their subjects. Carol becomes aware of this in the worst way possible when she drunkenly calls for a grenade and Zosia shows up on her door with it. She doesn't believe they'd give her a live grenade until she pulls the pin – and it detonates, severely injuring Zosia.

The aliens also seem incapable of hurting living things, whether they are animal or plant. As 'John Cena' tells us if an apple falls from a tree they can eat it, but they can't actually pick an apple. They are currently surviving of a kind of protein found in dead humans but as they are told within a decade they will all starve to death from lack of nutrition. In another irony the aliens have managed to solve most of humanity's problems but Earth has done nothing to solve their own.

The biggest difference between Carter's alien invasion and Gilligan's is a difference in style. As any fan of The X-Files knows the mytharc episode were increasingly dragged down by a lack of action and forward movement and burdened by every single character giving long ponderous speeches in purple prose that is often referred to as 'Carter-speak'.

Gilligan, by contrast, has always been a far more visual storyteller: many of his series are an example of show, not tell. Plur1bus is by far the biggest example of this writ large as so much of the first season focuses on Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) one of the few women left untouched by the hive and how she tries to resist in Albuquerque.

Like Scully Carol has a skeptical worldview but hers was always cynical to the point of unpleasantness. A best-selling romance novelist who seemed to hate everybody except her lover Helen she never liked people when things were normal.  Established early in Pluribus is that all of the aliens only seem to want to fulfill the fantasies of every human on Earth and Carol is the angriest person alive. Indeed her anger is so toxic that just being in its presence can be fatal to so many of those who are still alive – something that sickens Carol when she learns the consequences of one such outburst.

So much of the first season is done in long, visual sequences where action speaks louder than words. We see Zosia (Karolina Wydra) traveling from one section of South America to an airstrip in the opening teaser of the second episode. We see all of the aliens working to clean up the mess and Zosia traveling as the rest of the aliens silently work as one. A similar section takes place with Manousos, who we will learn maybe the only person left on Earth who shares Carol's worldview. We watch him in the opening sequence of the fourth episode in his darkened apartment, assessing his food supplies, rationing what he has and methodically working his way through a shortwave radio. Gilligan doesn't formally introduce us to him until the sixth episode when he starts his long trek to see Carol in New Mexico.

Carol spends much of the first season trying to learn the truth about the aliens, who are incredibly forthcoming. She learns very quickly that they will do anything to make her happy and that they don't want to hurt people. In fact they can't do it either physically or mentally. Indeed we eventually learn the process to finish conversion involves an invasive medical procedure and because that will cause harm, they refuse to do it unless the subject consents.

In the Season 1 finale we get the clearest picture yet as to how to aliens are planning to convince everyone else to 'join them. One of the remaining unchanged is a Peruvian girl named Kusimayu.  Two and a half months after the invasion she has agreed to the process. She lives in a small Quechuan village.  The mood is cheerful and hopeful and its clear 'they' are trying to make Kusimayu feel good about her choice. She says she's not scared and she feels happy to do this.  In the last moments before the process begins she's among the pets she keeps and is stroking a young goat. She asks if it will hurt and they assure her it won't.

They take out a large tube that has been kept in cold storage. (This could be an homage to The X-Files where we learned that the alien fetus – or the wellspring – was kept that same way for nearly thirty years as early as the season 1 finale.) They open the tube and she inhales. As in the pilot she begins to seize and passes out.

She opens her eyes and has the same beatific smile we've gotten used to over the course of the series. Immediately after doing so all of the members of her community begin to pack up clearly intending to leave the village forever. 'Kusimayu' opens the door to the coop and the animals begin to run free…with one exception. The goat that she was stroking just a few minutes ago runs after her. She walks away from it without even looking back.

Gilligan has illustrated without a word of dialogue what the cost is of being part of the hive and it's devastating. In a single moment you give up everything you ever cared about as a human being without thinking twice.

Later on Carol and Zosia slowly manage to become involved in large part because the aliens want her to write her next book. This is another humorous twist. By this point they have read every book on Earth and they want something new to read. That Carol has never thought her literature of great value prior to the invasion is wonderful because it turns out that, like the teller of the Arabian Nights, it might keep her human. And sure enough after the two of them have sex – which Carol initiates – she manages her first chapter of her new book.

It's difficult to register the sincerity of any one of the Hive mind but there seems to be genuine delight as Zosia reads the first draft and sees the changes she's made by turning Raban into a woman and discusses how this would be possible through canon. That the world might be saved via a cheap fantasy novel is a very Gilligan touch and it’s a far more direct idea then 'the truth'. Which makes you wonder if what Zosia and the rest of the hive is thinking involves thought or is just an act.  Do they realize that if Carol joins them that they would never read another story from Wycaro?

But  by design that fits the kind of writing Gilligan has done, not just in The X-Files but all of his series afterward. He has always been interested in character rather than story, even when he his shows have some of the greatest plots and continuity in 21^st century TV.  Pluribus is a show about the angriest woman left in a world that many of the human's left now consider a paradise but that she argues isn't because all of what makes us a human – our individuality – has been taken away from them. For all her contempt for the world when it was normal, she understands it is the flaws in humanity that makes us who were are, even if that it is our rage and ways of causing pain.

This is seen more clearly in the second half of the first season which focuses more on Manousos (Carlos Manuel-Vespa). Manousos is just as resistant to the aliens as Carol but for a different reason: he believes that they are thieves who are taking what is not theirs anymore. He knows from the start that this is a lie when the alien who is taking the form of his mother talks to him warmly. "You're not my mother," he says. "My mother was a heartless bitch."  Again Gilligan's writers argue that by taking away the bad characteristics of those we love, we are robbing them of their humanity. He equates all of the things they are willing to do to help him as he makes an increasingly perilous crossing to find Carol, and at every level refusing the help of the aliens.

One almost sees a sense of Mulder-like stubbornness in Manousos as he seems more determined to die on his way to see Carol then to take any help from the aliens. But unlike Mulder, who rushed headlong into danger thinking the truth would protect him, Manousos knows all too well what he's getting into every step of the way.  The seventh episode of the show focuses on his long journey from Paraguay to the tip of Columbia, syphoning gas from cars, focusing on learning English from a series of cassettes, hunting and fishing as he goes. When he reaches a point he can travel no further by car and the aliens try to warn him away (compassionately) he takes out his gas can and then sets his cars on fire. Manousos is clearly a man of faith – we see him sleep in a church and with a religious icon hanging from the mirror – but it's not a blinding one, it just has simple moral principles.

Taking this further, at one point in his journey, he suffers horrible injuries and is hospitalized. When he escapes from the hospital he demands to know the cost of the medical care they have given, as well as for an ambulance he is going to take. The aliens immediately give him the bill – and in a Gilligan twist, an itemized receipt.

 Throughout his journey he says the same three sentences in English over and over. "My name is Manousos. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world." What makes you who you are is a recurring theme throughout Gilligan's work starting with what he did on The X-Files and how Manousos simply and eloquently phrases it is one of the simplest and most profound things ever written in 21^st century TV. 

By the time Manousos arrives (twelve days before Kusimayu commits to the process on the timeline we see) Carol has clearly started to rethink her priorities. She tells Zosia that she intends to hear him out and send him on his way. In typical the two people who most want to save the world not only don't meet in person until the end of Season 1 but spend much of their initial discussion disagreeing where to initially meet because Carol, like all white women, is afraid of being raped by strangers have their entire conversation, arguably the one that might save the human race, take place over Siri in google translate. Their priorities are different. She wants to see if there's a way to reverse the process believing their basic humanity is intact. He thinks that the transformation has taken away their souls – something that the opening of the season finale implies – and the best thing is to exterminate them.

If one wanted to draw parallels to The X-Files one could see this as a meeting between this show's Mulder and Scully, only it is simultaneously hostile and absurdist. By the end of their first encounter Carol is so annoyed by Manousos she tells him "We'll save the world tomorrow," gets royally drunk and when she wakes up puts a chair blocking her door.

When Zosia tells Manousos everything about their relationship Carol is horrified particularly when Zosia tells Carol: "We love him the same as we love you." For Carol this is the most grotesque violation yet. When Zosia starts seizing – in large part because Manousos is choosing to experiment with radio waves – her reaction is to take her rifle and threaten him with it.

In the final twenty minutes Manousos asks very bluntly: "Do you want to save the world or get the girl?" It seems for a while as if Carol has chosen the latter.  In this he is not unlike Mulder seeking the truth at any cost. For a while it seems like Carol has chosen the alternative as we see a montage of the two traveling the world as a couple and Carol looking happy – genuinely happy for the first time in the entire series. Looking at this we are reminded of both Gilligan's final episodes of the series 'Je Souhaite' and 'Sunshine Days'. In both he made essentially the same argument: it's less important to find some existential truth then the friends and loved ones you meet along the way. In Je Souhaite the real truth Mulder finds is watching 'Caddyshack' with Scully in the final scene and in the latter Scully argues that proof of the paranormal is less important then that of human connection. One could see him making the same argument here in his scenes with Carol and Zosia at a ski chalet by an open fire.

But ironically it is Carol's inability to just be happy that saves her humanity as she asks the questions she needs to about how they've improved the process. And because Zosia is unable to lie she tells her exactly what we saw in the opening scenes: that very soon they'll have a way to do this without an invasive procedure. Carol tells them they can't do this if Zosia loves you. Zosia says they have to do this because they – and she uses I – love you. This is a parallel to so many of the experiments Scully went through during the various biological experiments done during her abductions, which also involved a lack of consent.

Immediately afterwards Carol comes home and she's back to her old, bitter self. We'll have to see in later seasons (when Gilligan and his crew finally come up with them) if these parallels between Gilligan's first show and Plur1bus continue. But I should add that at the end of the first season one of Carol's last lines is "We save the world." This is a line that no one on The X-Files ever said during its entire run – and in typical Gilligan fashion its delivered by her in such a way that it sounds more like an annoyance than something that she really wants to do.

Decision 2026: What's Behind Door Number Three? How An Increasing Number of Deep Red States Are Offering Another Choice To Exhausted Voters

 

 

I want my readers to imagine the following scenario.

You are the citizen of one of the many states in the Union where a significant portion of the population (many of whom frequent sites like this one) will tell you with a straight face one of two conflicting stories. Either that 'no one lives there' or 'these states have a disproportionate amount of power'. Both of these arguments, often used in the same paragraph by the same author, show both the de facto bigotry of urban America versus rural America as well as the judgment that the electoral college counts for the entire voting population.

You've lived your entire life in one of these states – Montana, Idaho, either one of the Dakotas, Kansas or Nebraska. All of these states have been Republican during  that period at a national and local level.  In some of those states until fairly recent Democrats did have a base there but as the party has increasingly embraced a platform that while inclusive in the general sense of the term doesn't fit the populace of your particular state, the party has become so moribund that many local elected offices Republican candidates basically run unopposed.

You might not be a Democrat. Perhaps you’re an independent or just a dissatisfied Republican who for years if not decades has seen your state increasingly be left behind economically as the one-party rule gives neither party any real reason to take the concerns of its populace seriously. Perhaps you might not agree with the social justice part of the Democratic platform, perhaps you do. In either case you're desperate for some kind of change in leadership.

The problem is that, for all intents and purposes, you have no real choices at the ballot box. If there is a Democratic party in your state, it is likely so atrophied over the course of so long that signing on is nevertheless an exercise in futility. It has always been difficult to recruit Democrats to run in these states during the 21^st century and the results have played out time and again. In North Dakota in 2024, for example, Kevin Cramer won reelection with 66.5 percent of the vote while the Democratic candidate Katrina Christinasen got just 33.5 percent. And that was actually an improvement compared to how she did two years earlier when she ran against John Hoeven when she only got 25 percent of the vote.

And these are not regions of the country that the left wing of the Democrats are rushing out to run in. When the Justice Democrats made their inaugural bid in 2018 they made an effort. They tried to run candidates in Kansas, Nebraska, Utah and even the delegate at-large primary in Montana. James Thompson in the Kansas 4^th and Kara Eastman in the Nebraska 9^th were the only ones who won their primaries and both lost in the general. After that election, with the sole exception of Eastman making another failed attempt in 2020, whenever the Justice Democrats have gone west they've usually gone straight to California or Colorado and pretend the rest of that region isn't there. It rejected them, so they feel just as justified in rejecting it.

So once again you are left with a bad choice or a doomed one.

Or…you could try what some deep red states are now trying. It's not a great option but it's an option.

When Dan Osborn announced that he was running to defeat Pete Ricketts in Nebraska as an Independent there was a Democratic primary. It was won, overwhelmingly, by Cindy Burbank. However on July 21^st she filed her paperwork with the Nebraska secretary of state to officially drop out of the race so she would not take votes away from Osborn. As I wrote in an earlier article Osborn has a decent chance of defeating Ricketts for the nomination even though there is a Democratic primary. She withdrew just one day after Osborn's signatures to be on the fall ballot were verified.

Nebraska Republicans were infuriated by this as many believed Burbank's run had been entirely for show, a manipulation of the ballot process done in order to ensure no Democrat will be under the ballot. Indeed the Secretary of State of Nebraska had done so in March arguing Burbank was not a 'good faith candidate'. She sued in order to get back on the ballot and was successful in her attempt, partly because a deadline to raise that objection was missed.

These kinds of maneuvers, frankly, are far more common in many Republican run legislatures and while this decision might seem as morally suspicious those in charge acknowledge that legally there is nothing they can do.

So Osborn has a decent, albeit still uphill, chance to win election in November. What I was mostly unaware of is that in the last several weeks in many other deep red states a similar movement is taking place.

In the Montana Senate Race incumbent Steve Daines chose to retire last earlier this year. U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme chose to run and on Tuesday won the Republican nomination. The Democratic primary was more crowded but Alani Bankhead won the nomination there.

However there's a third candidate on the ballot Seth Bodnar the former President of the University of Montana who resigned in January and officially announced he would run as an independent. During his run Jon Tester a Democrat who was defeated in the 2024 election revealed a text message in which he made it clear the Democratic party was 'poison' to his campaign.

Bankhead at the moment is refusing to withdraw from her campaign to clear the field for Bodnar. The few polls that are available show that Bodnar in a one on one race would have a better chance than Bankhead. What's not in dispute is that Alme will easily win if both stay in the race and the deadline is next Monday for one of them too.

In recent days other states have shown a similar trend. In Idaho Republican Jim Risch is running for reelection for the third time. Running against him is Todd Achilles who has an interesting history. Achilles was registered as a Republican before February of 2024 but changed his representation to Democrat so that he would qualify to replace one for a seat in the Idaho House of Representatives. Six months after that he changed his representation to unaffiliated, arguing that issues such at the national debt and foreign policy was a reason he left both parties. He resigned in July of 2025 to run for the Senate as an independent. In May David Roth won the Democratic primary and earlier this week, chose to withdraw in favor of Achilles.

In South Dakota Mike Rounds is running for reelection for his third term. After winning the Democratic primary earlier this year Julian Beaudion announced he was also withdraw from the race clearing the way for Brian Bengs, also an independent to run against Rounds in the fall.

Interestingly earlier this year it seemed another more prominent Independent run was going to take place right next to Dan Osborn. Roger Hamilton, a prominent megachurch leader in Kansas, spent much of the first half of this year considering a run as an independent. This might have been an easier path in a state that hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since the Great Depression. However he chose the safer route and decided to run in the Democratic primary and having won on Tuesday faces a very uphill run against Roger Marshall.

Many prominent Republicans, both in these states and nationwide, have claimed that the majority of these runs are little more than stalking horses for the Democrats rather then truly one of a third party. I'm inclined to think two things can be true. Yes the Democrats would love to rid the Senate of Republicans such as Deb Fischer and Mike Rounds by any means necessary. And while they might quibble at a term one of their own used like toxic they're not naïve as to their chances in Nebraska or South Dakota for the foreseeable future. Fewer Republicans will make it easier for them to have a majority in the Senate next year.

That being said having endured so much of Biden's term where most acolytes of AOC considered Joe Manchin a DINO I can only imagine them running screaming from the room if they ever had to be part of the same party where candidates like these were members. A brief look at Todd Achilles statements on politics would confirm this.  He has criticized Republicans on supporting the Iran War, has criticized cuts to Medicaid and has been a major critic of DOGE, particularly in regard to the VA. But he also believes in reducing the National Debt and is opposed to 'corporate socialism' and supports the administrations approach on the consolidation of the meat-packing industry. He has voted to cut Idaho's income tax and the grocery sales tax while a member of the statehouse And considering his support for the military and veterans (he deployed twice to the Persian Gulf in the 1990s) its impossible for me to imagine the stridently anti-military wing of the Democrats allowing him even near him.

With the exception of Osborn all of these candidates are facing immense challenges. (This will be true for Bodnar even if Bankhead does withdraw.) In addition to be heavily Republican states all of these candidates will start their races with a severe disadvantage when it comes to money. With no major party to send them funds it will be difficult to match their  Republican rivals when it comes to TV, campaign events or social media. All of these states are very big and very rural so travel is going to be a bigger deal then it would in a state like Ohio or even in the South.   And even though they are very much independents it will be hard for many not to see this as a fig leaf to help the Democrats win.  So its hard to imagine any prominent politician of note campaigning for someone like Bengs or Achilles even if they had not made it very clear that they didn't want their endorsements as part of their campaign.

The road for these men will be hard and lonely and it is very much uphill. Of the four independents I listed Osborn has the best chance with the Ricketts' odds of victory currently ranked at 72 percent at political sites. Kurt Alme's chance of election are ranked at 84 percent. And at the moment both Jim Risch and Brian Bengs have a 94 percent chance of winning reelection. Jamie Davis, running in Louisiana, has just as much a chance winning on a far left platform as Achilles and Bengs do as Independents. Adam Hamilton has just as good a chance winning has a better chance winning in Kansas as those two men.

Myself I have few illusions any of the three independents I listed have much of a chance in November.  I see Bodnar, Achilles and Bengs more as test cases than having even a longshot at winning. What I want to see is how well they will do in comparison to Evan McMullin's run against Mike Lee in 2022. McMullin ended up losing to Lee by 10.4 percent in 2022 but it was by far the best performance by a non-Republican in Utah since 1976. If any of these candidates can lose by a similar margin or overperform they will have confirmed the precedent McMullin set four years ago and that Osborn confirmed two years later: that one can do well in a deep red state if one rejects the traditional label of a political party.

As someone who has longed for a third party as the solution to much of America's problems I believe this trend could only benefit democracy in America, not just in states such as Idaho or Utah but nationally. It would be a long term project, I have no illusions of that, but for the health of our American political system I share the beliefs held by men such as Achilles and all of those who are running as independents this cycle.

And as a short term measure it might also help offer succor and hope to a section of America that has been faced with the options that have done much to hurt both that region and the country as a whole for so long. Many in our political system tend to call elections "choosing between the lesser of two evils." A third choice can only help improve them nationally and it seems these states are offering that.

Decision 2026 Addendum:The Left Wing's Track Record in Senate Primaries This Cycle. What We Should Take Away Is Different From What They Will

 

There's been a lot written and said over the last about just how seriously we should take the far left in American politics, whether they are labeled progressive, socialist, DSA or even outright communist.

I've had a lot of time to reflect on this subject and this sums up my opinion:

The far left will be successful in the American political system as soon as they understand how America or politics works. And in the ten years since Bernie's primary run, I see no evidence that they've made any substantive progress in either.

I'm given multiple examples of why I believe this before and this week I intend to buttress it with the results of the Democratic primaries this year that more or less confirms my overall opinion. Later this week I'll deal with a final summation of how they did in the Congressional primaries this cycle and today I'm dealing with how they did in the Senate.

One of the reasons that I'm convinced the American left has yet to understand how politics works is that they have different definitions for what success looks like. In terms of the Senate this can be illustrated by how they define the term 'turnout'. Because it's pretty clear that the establishment wing of the Democrats, as represented by Chuck Schumer, and the progressive wing, which for these purposes I will refer to as Sanders-Warren, have completely contradictory definitions.

To the establishment wing and indeed most political figures, successful turnout is a two-fold affair. First there is turnout in the primary in which you do everything to acquire more votes then your opponents. In many cases that usually means going to the left to win over the primary voters. Once you've won the primary, you must then pivot the general election which means going to the center in order to win undecided, independents and possibly dissatisfied Republicans. You must build a coalition in order to amass more votes than your Republican opponent does and they are building their coalition the same way.

For the Sanders-Warren wing, however, successful turnout means winning the primary only. As far as they and their followers are concerned, winning the nomination is the end of negotiations with any undecided voters or anyone else who isn't completely on board with the metrics they set in the primary. To even consider mitigating your positions to win over the undecided is a betrayal worse then losing the election. And if there are Democrats who are uncomfortable with the position the candidate took in the primary they have two choices: shut up and get on board or vote for the Republican candidate. Put a simpler way: the establishment wants its candidates to go where the voters are, and the progressive wants the voters to go where the candidate is.

This is a formula that can only work in a deep blue House district or in the case of the Sanders-Warren wing, states where the Republican party is so moribund that that no candidate from that party could win a statewide race. For Warren and such newcomers as Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, this approach is one they can live with. The fact that there are very few other states that are either small enough and/or Democratic enough for this approach to work has done nothing to diminish their certainty that is the only approach the Democratic establishment must take.

For people who have so many degrees and claim such high intelligence, the only reason they believe this approach is workable is because they have stayed in their left-wing bubble as much as the far right stays in theirs. It falls apart the moment you think about it and they clearly don't. And as I've noted throughout the leadup to the 2026 election the DNC with Schumer's blessing has spent its time and energy recruiting senatorial candidates who can and have won elections in Republican states. These included Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Roy Cooper in North Carolina. All have proven track records at winning at statewide races in Republican states which made them strong possibilities to do so in the midterms. As of this writing all three are in a strong position to win in November.

The Sanders-Warren wing made a different approach. Over the fall they picked several candidates to run in the Democratic primaries in states of either various shades of red, swing states, or in one case where a vulnerable Republican was running for reelection.  Eventually they settled on six candidates and yesterday the last of those primaries took place.

So with that in mind let's look at their track record in chronological order of the dates of the primaries:

 

Texas: Jasmine Crockett

Jasmine Crockett began her run for the Democratic Primary in December of 2025, challenging James Talarico. Crockett had been negotiating for a while to come up with a dream slate that could possibly win across the board at every level and eventually went forward.

February she ran an ad in the Super Bowl which might very well have used AI and earned criticism. On March 3^rd she lost to James Talarico by more than six percent in the primary. Though multiple networks called it  by midnight she didn't concede until the following morning.

Crockett dismissed the term progressive, calling her positions 'common sense'. The people in Texas thought otherwise.

 

Iowa: Zach Wahls

 Zach Wahls declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Senat in June of 2025.

Wahls was very much an activist while his opponent Josh Turek called himself a 'common-sense moderate' and prairie populist. The biggest difference going into the primary was that Warren was privately backing Wahls in large part because he said if elected to the Senate he would not vote for Chuck Schumer as Senate Leader while Turek said he would. Turek was backed by moderates such as Maggie Hassan and Catherine Cortez Masto.

Josh Turek would beat Wahls by nearly 25 percent of the vote.

 

Maine: Graham Platner

I've written so much about this and so much else has been said about this that there's no point relitigating it here. Suffice to say Platner won the nomination but eventually was forced to withdraw a few weeks later. I think it's safe to call this a defeat for the Sanders-Warren wing.

 

South Carolina: Annie Andrews

The Democratic Party had tried six years earlier to defeat Lindsay Graham with the very progressive Jamie Harrison, an African American who'd never held elected office in his life. He raised $57 million dollars in the third quarter of 2020, the largest quarterly total raised by a Senate candidate. And he lost in a landslide by nearly ten points to Graham.

In a demonstration that the Democrats learned absolutely nothing they chose to run Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who in 2022 had lost in a landslide to Nancy Mace. Harrison endorsed her and for all intents she ran unopposed.

On July 11^th Lindsay Graham died. A primary is scheduled is scheduled for next Tuesday. While this chaos may end up benefiting Andrews – the race has moved from Likely Republican to Lean Republican – it is still an uphill climb for Andrews in a state that last elected a Democrat to statewide office in 1998 when Fritz Hollings won reelection for the last time.

 

Louisiana: Jamie Davis

For all the enthusiasm that Jamie Davis might be able to argue for he faces an even bigger battle than Andrews.  He managed to win the Democratic primary but will be facing Julia Letlow in the general.  In both her primary win and runoff win Letlow got more votes in the Republican primary then Davis did in his Democratic primary win. And while a Democrat has won the Senate in the 21^st century when Mary Landrieu did in 2008 Landrieu was in the incumbent running for her third term. No Democrat has come close to winning a Senate seat since then.

Davis at best has been given a ten percent chance of winning a seat ranked as Safe Republican.

 

Michigan: Abdul Al-Sayid

I'll be writing about the race in Michigan in its own article in the next week or so but it is worth noting several things about this race.

First for all of the polls that emerged immediately in the final week of the race – many of them leaked from Al-Sayid's campaign – the primary was much closer then the polls said. And second Michigan has an open primary structure, which means you don't have to be registered Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary.

Mike Rogers was running unopposed in the GOP primary. So we can't rule out the possibility that many registered Republicans might have crossed party lines to vote for Al-Sayid so that the candidate who all polls shows would lose in the general election to Rogers's ended up being the Democratic nominee.

The Republicans were salivating for a match-up between Al-Sayid and Rogers, a man who narrowly lost to Elissa Slotkin just two years ago. And they ended up getting it.

Al-Sayid managed to win in what was by far the closest Democratic primary this cycle beating Haley Stevens by barely one percentage point.

 

Conclusion

 

 

The left wing will take away from this cycle what they want to take away. They will do everything to put the Platner debacle, which was entirely their mess, behind them and focus on the nominees they got as 'signs' of their inevitable movement.

Reality shows otherwise. In two of the states with a competitive primary the centrist candidate trounced the left wing candidate by a considerable margin. In Michigan the left wing candidate did win but by so thin a margin it shows just how divided the Democrats are in that state.

Al-Sayid now faces the more difficult task then Stevens was because if he wants to win in the general he has to move towards the center which involves many of the establishment Democrats he's spent the last year torching.  If he does this, he will almost certainly risk a backlash from those left-wing voters who chose him in the primary and who think that if Democrats are troubled by him, they can vote for the Republican.

Andrews and Davis managed to win in their states because in them the Democratic party is so moribund that there really is that much competition. Being the most progressive candidate in that state has no real value because both South Carolina and Louisiana are among the reddest states in America.

If the Democrats take the majority back this November, as is looking increasingly likely, it will because they've nominated centrist candidates like James Talarico and Josh Turek to run in red states. Al-Sayid and Troy Jackson – whose platform is as progressive as the disgraced Platner – might actually end up hindering the parties chances. 

Al Sayid is running as a far left candidate in a swing state, one that went for Trump just two years ago and that Biden barely won in 2020. Jackson has a similar platform and is running against a centrist Republican.  Both are running campaigns that will have immense burdens on them and combined with their left-wing platforms it is not impossible the Democrats may have to spend more time and money bolstering these campaigns then they would want.

As we enter the fall campaign the Sanders-Warren wing has picked its candidates for the stretch run and the establishment wing has picked theirs. Now will come the 'unity' part of the general election where both sides try to work together and win back the majority this November.

The difference is when all the votes are cast both sides will remember who was responsible for the Democrats getting – or not getting – the majority. And since the left wing has a selective memory at best, the establishment needs to keep its long memory.

 

 

Howard Gordon & Vince Gilligan on The X-Files: How Howard Gordon Did More To Shape Walter Skinner Than Almost Any Other Writer

 

 

While he never became a series regular until the final seasons Walter Skinner was the most important recurring character in X-Files history and one of the very few characters to survive until the end of the show. Played with remarkable restraint by Mitch Pileggi he was a fixture in the show for most of its run though given the way the show worked while he was loyal to his fellow agents its was often hard to know how much to trust him.

It wasn't until Season Three, when after a full season of prevaricating he chose to explicitly back Mulder and Scully against the shadowy forces represented by the Smoking Man that it became clear he was an ally. As Robert Shearman put in Wanting to Believe:

At the end of Apocrypha Mulder went as far as to thank Skinner for his support, something that would have been unthinkable at the start of Season 3 where the Assistant Director was still being played as a potential assassin to Scully….There is an acceptance now that Skinner must be regarded as a stable element in the series. It closes some storytelling ideas, but it opens up others.

As I mentioned in an earlier series Glen Morgan and James Wong created the character of Skinner in the first season episode 'Tooms'. By chance or happenstance the next writer to do an episode where Skinner was featured was Gordon for Season 2's Sleepless. Skinner's role in practically insignificant – he appears in the opening sequence when Mulder reports to him about a story he was told by what will be his latest informant – but it turned out to be a harbinger of sorts. For the two and a half seasons Gordon remained on the show he would be credited with writing more episodes that featured Skinner than anyone but Chris Carter, and often in collaboration with him. And he also was the first writer to pen an episode that was centered almost entirely on Skinner.

I think Monster of the Week explains the peculiar nature of The X-Files not only at the time but in hindsight:

If you were going to air the show today, Skinner would absolutely be a regular and CSM, X and possibly even Krycek would be regulars as well. The show would be more heavily serialized; there would be little bits of pieces of the alien story line threaded through every episode and the Monster of the Week episodes would keep getting interrupted  by the supporting players. But this odd little show did none of those things, and it all works because at its heart it's a simple little series that chooses to expand only when it really wants to.

(On a side note, you could argue that Seasons 10 and 11 were disappointments because it tried far too hard to put too much of these elements into what was a 1990s show and it was a failure. One hopes that Coogler's revival will try to remember what made the original work…but I'll save comments on that for a different series of articles.)

'Avatar', which aired late in Season Three, was The X-Files first real attempt to dive into the supporting cast's background. The experiment was successful and for the rest of the series the show would experiment more with that format, with episodes focused on CSM, The Lone Gunmen and even a former X-Files investigator.

Like many things with the show, it came about by accident. David Duchovny, who was already demonstrating the prima donna behavior that would become as much part of the series history as his performance, wanted a lighter work week late in Season Three. (He received a story credit for the idea.) To his credit Duchovny had also been pushing for a while more Skinner to have a bigger role in the series and it wasn't like Pileggi was complaining at the chance to be more in the spotlight. So Gordon took the reins for the first Skinner-centric episode. Fittingly with so many episodes Gordon himself would write; it's an odd mix of the supernatural and the conspiracy.

Unlike so many other episodes of The X-Files 'Avatar' focuses as much on domestic matters as it does the conspiracy. It opens with a divorce settlement where Sharon Skinner (Jennifer Hetrick) and Walter are having a final meeting but Walter leaves without signing the final papers. This is shocking because until now we never even knew he was married – and critically, neither did Mulder and Scully.

The implication, while Gordon never directly states it, is that the combination of running The X-Files, backing Mulder and Scully and fighting a shadow battle against the powers that be, have taken a toll on his marriage so great that his wife can no longer take it. Skinner has been known for being incredibly restrained in his professional life and it's now clear his wife has found this burden to much to bear. Skinner then goes to a bar and meets a random woman. They have sex – and Skinner wakes up with her dead next to him and he genuinely has no idea what happened. When the police are called in, he's unable to give direct answers to any question, is shocked to find out the woman was an escort – and is unable to state with certainty what happened afterwards.

Mulder and Scully end up being called in and while they are justifiably willing to defend their boss its clearly their stunned when they learn not only about his wife but that he's in the midst of divorce proceedings. At one point Scully actually puts her thoughts into words: "The truth is, we don't really know anything about him." Neither believe he's guilty of murder but they don't know best how to help him as a board of inquiry ends up meeting to mark the possibility of dismissal.

As the two agents investigate Mulder and Scully have conflicting theories. Mulder's initial belief is that there might be something supernatural going on, backed up by the fact that there is some phosphorescent substance on the corpse's lips that Scully can't identify and Skinner's statement that he saw an old woman at the murder. At a later point in the episode Skinner reminds Mulder of his time in Vietnam (which he memorably told his junior agent in One Breath) and that in order to get through he made the use of hard drugs. During that period he saw that same women in a red raincoat (the reference is clearly to the classic film Don't Look Now) that's been a source of protection.

However as the episode progresses there's actually a more grounded theory: the Syndicate is working to remove Skinner from the Bureau as a way to put Mulder and Scully in check. This is a perfectly believable theory backed up by what we've seen play out in Season Three. Just a few episodes ago Luis Cardinal, one of the Syndicates triggermen, attempted to kill Skinner and he spent the rest of the episode recovering. As Mulder points out, if they were to try to do so again so rapidly this would draw the wrong kind of attention and they're trying a subtle point. This is backed up by the fact that when Skinner is being interviewed we actually see CSM watching from a window even though William B. Davis has no dialogue. (There were apparently scenes between the two men that were edited for the purposes of time.)

The problem with Avatar is the final act. Gordon never decides which interpretation of events – the paranormal or the conspiracy – is responsible for what's happening to Skinner. Both are valid in their own right but they have contradictory aspects and Gordon wraps up the episode with no clear answer, certainly not from Skinner.  That's a flaw but not one that undermines the episode with any real force because Gordon knows that this episode is about the character of Skinner and every time he focuses on this it shines.

Mitch Pileggi is blindingly good in a way he hasn't really been allowed to. It's clear that he's done everything to compartmentalize his job and his personal life. We know Skinner's very much a rationalist and he has a hard time accepting most of what his agents are telling him in their reports of the monsters and the alien conspiracy. Combined with the battles he must face as part of the authority of the Bureau we know this has to be a struggle.

We get this with the scenes that involve him and Sharon, which show a bruising intensity. Halfway through the episode Sharon is involved in an accident and ends up in a hospital bed. During that episode Walter tells his wife (who is comatose) that he has no intention of signing the papers and just how much she has always meant to him. It's a powerful scene for many reasons, not the least of which Walter can only tell his wife what he really thinks when she's unconscious – and its all the more painful because in later seasons it will be implied the marriage has ended.

In another series after everything was positively resolved Skinner would have expressed his gratitude and he would have become more of an ally almost immediately afterwards. That is not the case at the end of Avatar. Skinner's attitude at the end of the episode is painfully familiar – he doesn't want to explain the events that happened and while he's polite to Mulder and Scully its with a cold professionalism we're associated with him. Duchovny and Anderson don't say anything but you can see from their expressions both agents are surprised and a little hurt – they put their lives on the line for their boss and he doesn't seem willing to return the favor.

 I admit the first time I saw this episode as a seventeen year old I felt much like the agents. Now I think it was a bold move by Gordon and one of the better long-term choices of The X-Files. Skinner's allegiance to his fellow agents over the course of the series was one of the better arc the show ever did, and it would have been cheat to do it in the first episode that was centered on Skinner.

This would become clearer in the second Skinner centric episode: 'Zero Sum'. A collaboration between Gordon and Carter, it was the last script of any type he'd ever write for The X-Files. I talked about this episode in a previous article involving Gordon and his use of informants but in order to talk about why Skinner is so important to it, we have to go back a little.

The set up for the episode comes in the classic Memento Mori. In this Emmy winning episode Scully is officially diagnosed with cancer and Mulder spends it trying to find out how she got it.  As a result he comes to Skinner and tells him to set up a meeting with CSM.  He has no doubt he's behind it – but Mulder makes it clear this time he's ready to deal.

Skinner flatly refuses.

Skinner: Find another way. You deal with that man – you offer him anything – and he'll own you forever.

Mulder: He knows what they did to Agent Scully! He may very well know how to save her!

Skinner: If he knows, you can know, too. But you can't ask the truth of a man who trades in lies. I won't let you.

Mulder: We are talking about Agent Scully's life.

Skinner: Find another way.

However in his next scene Skinner and Smoking Man meet in Mulder's office. The exchanges like all of them are classic. CSM remarks on the office.

Skinner: At least he doesn't take the elevator up to work.

CSM smiles. "You think I'm the devil?" Then oh so casually he asks about Scully's health.

CSM: Is it terminal? The cancer?

Skinner barely contains his revulsion about if there's something that can be done. CSM smirks.

CSM: You think a lot more of me then you let on?"

Skinner: What'll it take?"

CSM: "For Agent Scully's life? What will you offer?

Skinner asks again: "What'll it take?"

CSM leaves him dangling.

At the end of the episode Mulder calls to thank Skinner for talking him down. He doesn't know CSM is in the office with Skinner.

"There's always another way," Skinner says neutrally.

CSM responds: "Yes I believe there is. If you're willing to pay the price.

Zero Sum is about that pound of flesh Cancer Man is extracting from Skinner.

The opening five minutes after the teaser are a visual tour de force as we see Skinner doing everything possible to stop a case that is meant for Mulder's attention from appearing on his record, cleaning up a crime scene and destroying all evidence of an action by the Syndicate. In his conversation with a detective its clear he's trying to do everything possible to make sure that there's no record of Bureau involvement.

What he doesn't know is that he's being shadowed by one of the Syndicate's button men (identified by the show as the Grey-Haired Man)

When he gets back home, however, Mulder has met him and tells him he got the information on the case from the detective's partner. The detective who sent Mulder the information – and who they just found executed.

Skinner can barely contain his shock with Mulder and later that night confronts the Smoking Man. He knows exactly what has happened and who did it. CSM is unfazed by his accusations. "This only happened because you left your job unfinished…You failed to neutralize a potentially compromising situation."

Pileggi is superb in this episode because we can see the two sides of his dilemma. On the one hand at some level he wants Mulder to find the guilty party even if it turns out to be him because that would bring immense relief. On the other, there's still a part of him that desperately wants to believe the devil he's made the deal with will come through. This is true even as he realizes, in typical fashion, the Syndicate has stolen his weapon from his desk drawer and no doubt used it to kill the detective in question. Davis also gives a superb performance, as he dangles the bait that he can save Scully if he chooses. The viewer, like Skinner, knows that this is a man who he deals in lies but even the possibility of hope – and the reminder that Scully is in the hospital having tests run – is something that Skinner finds himself clinging to.

In theory this episode has to do with a trial run involving the Syndicate's plan for colonization, utilizing the infamous bees that will carry smallpox and so forth. But Gordon is less interested in the machinations of the men in shadowy rooms then the human consequences of it and how much of it Skinner is bearing. This is clear at the end of the episode when he returns home to find his gun returned to his desk drawer – and Mulder in his home, having followed the path to him.

Skinner implores Mulder in a brilliant monologue: "There was a reason I did what I did. One I think you're in a unique position to understand. I advised you against a certain course of action some time ago – concerning Agent Scully. I didn't follow my own advice."

We learn not long after that while the gun has been returned to Skinner's desk, they've filed off the serial number. They have the murder weapon but there's no way that the Syndicate can be brought to justice.

At the end of the episode Skinner confronts CSM, arguing they never had a deal. Yet again the Smoking Man is smug.

CSM: Yours isn't the first gun I've had pointed at my face, Mr. Skinner. I'm not afraid to die. But if you kill me, you'll also kill Agent Scully.

Skinner: You have no intention of saving her. You never did.

CSM: "Are you certain? I saved her life once before – when I had her returned to Agent Mulder. I may save her again. But you'll never know if you pull the trigger.

You can see the internal struggle going on behind Skinner's eyes as he tries to decide which lie to believe. And in the end all he can do is fire three shots to the other side of the Smoking Man's head.  Tellingly he doesn't stay to see just how much he's rattled his foe.

In hindsight one of the biggest weaknesses of The X-Files was how little detail it gave most of the supporting characters during the show's run. This was the nature of how Carter and his writers did the series, just as there was no road map for the mythology almost every character we ever met had to be ambiguous enough so it could come as a 'shock' when they inevitably had hidden motives.

Gordon's two Skinner-centric episodes demonstrate by far just how much was sacrificed by that decision. If Carter's writers, like Gordon, had illustrated that there were explanations for why the characters did what they  the show's universe could have expanded slightly and it might have been creatively richer. And particularly in later seasons when the mythology's house of cards became more and more unstable it might have helped the series find more energy. I'm not saying we should have had episodes focused on every one of Mulder's informants necessarily. But maybe the best way to have the conspiracy make sense was to what Gordon did with Skinner and show that the backstory of certain people was far more interesting then bees containing black oil.