X-Files Episode Guide: Never Again

Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong

Directed by Rob Bowman

Morgan and Wong's last teleplay for the series is, in keeping with all of their Season 4 scripts, a deviation from the norm we've come to expect from them. If it also happens to be the most atypical, well, part of their problem was not their fault.

Many of the episodes of Season 4 were aired out of the order of their shooting. Most of the time the results barely affected the storyline, but this one had huge consequences. Never Again was originally shot to air before Leonard Betts, and there's a definite consequence. Gillian Anderson would tell writers that she would've performed Scully completely differently than the way she does had she known that her character had cancer. Her utter rudeness to Mulder in the first act, her genuine frustration, and her general drift that makes her follow her more animal impulses now seems a little more affected by what she is processing.

But no matter when this episode aired, one can be sure that there would've been problems. For one things, there's the fact, that strictly speaking this isn't an X-File at all. Aside from the shock in the teaser (which is the biggest scare of the episode), everything that happens to Ed is a direct relation to ergot poisoning from the dye that is being used into the tattoo. The auditory and other hallucinations all follow from that premises. Which is good, because there really isn't much energy to the X-File. Apart from the tattoo having the voice of Jodie Foster, there's very little that is remarkable about the hallucination. It's shocking the first time she talks, a little less so the second, and by the time, she's ordering Ed to burn Scully in the furnace---- and by this time, he knows its a hallucination, so there really is no excuse--- it's all but laughable, a sloppiness in the writing that we, frankly, have come to expect more of.

But what's really on display is Morgan & Wong trying to test the limits of the format. Just as in Home, when they used the images of the grotesque as a test for the viewers, and as in Musings, when the back-story of the Smoking Man was realism urged to a perfect joke, in the episode they seem to be looking in the direction of the state of the Mulder-Scully relationship itself. Which would be fine, except 1) Mulder's barely in this episode, and 2) they seem to run out of interesting things to say about halfway in. It doesn't help matters that Mulder spends much of the episode being brusque and abrasive to everybody. There's been a pattern throughout the season of Mulder being callous in pursuit of a goal, but he's never pointed that callousness at Scully until now.  Then, it was trying to show how Mulder will blind himself in pursuit of a truth; here, it just seems written for him to seem like a prick.  If this were Glen's brother, we could see this as a sort of satire, but it's hard to tell what he is trying to show us by doing so.

One could also see this as a commentary on the fan's level of frustration (enacted through Scully) with the Sisyphus like mess the mytharc seems to be taken, and how repetitive it seems to be.  Again, one could see Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan being able to turn it into a good joke. Here, however, it just seems rather forced and insensitive. One could understand why Scully would be contemplative, if she really were struggling with the possibilities of her health. But there's being contemplative, and then there's just navel gazing. She's spent the better part of four years in the basement, so for her to be considering why she doesn't have a desk or why she following such pointless assignments, seems almost laughable, and it seems to be falling under the arch of fanspeak, something that Morgan and Wong have been staying away from until now. It would be meaningful, also, if this were a break in the pattern, and there was some self-realization on both their part. But Mulder will just dismiss the idea of her ever having a desk for the remainder of his time in the series (it'll actually be made a point of in the final seasons), and Scully, despite years of frustration, will never raise the subject again. In which case, why raise the point at all?

Still, despite all that, there's something  daring about this episode. To raise this kind of point, along with all the other aberrant behavior going on (Mulder taking his only vacation during the series... to Graceland, of all places) is rather bold of Morgan & Wong, and to have the emotional denouement occur with no actual resolution was something that few series would've dared to do at the time, especially when they were about to embark on arguably the darkest storyline they would ever attempt. Perhaps its not the best episode for Morgan and Wong to leave us with, but it shows, just as they did when the series was in its infancy (and to an extent, the kind of leadership they would demonstrate when they took over Millennium later this year) that they were never afraid to go big or to fall flat on their face. To go out with neither a bang nor with a whimper, but just an awkward silence... well, even if you don't like Never Again, you have to admit it's a ballsy play.

My score: 3 stars.