Closure, Part 2?: The Series Finale in the Age of the Reboot

Several years ago, when I was just starting to blog seriously about TV, I wrote an article about to need for closure when a series came to an end. At the time, I was talking about the necessity for a satisfying ending as a constant viewer. I had worried about the end of series such as Lost and 24 providing enough information for fans to let go. However, I didn't even have the slightest idea what was coming.

Over the past few years, more and more networks are trying to reboot or do new episodes for series that have been gone for years. I have had something of a mixed relationship with such ideas. I didn't quite approve of the graphic novel continuations of such series as Buffy, Angel, Charmed and Smallville, because it seemed an unnecessary adjunct to series that had, more or less, come to a suitable conclusion, and were eventually fouling the memories of good shows. But it was comic books, and I didn't think it mattered much as canon. Then came the fourth season of Arrested Development. That series had been killed way too soon, so I had no objections there. I didn't even mind that much when The X-Files was granted new life, first in comic book form, then on television. There was still a loyal fanbase out there, and there had been a movie before, so it didn't seem to matter that much.

But now it seems, we are being drowned in reboots of series that wrapped up in more than satisfactory ways years earlier. First, we got more adventures with Jack Bauer in Live Another Day, and now 24 is set to return on Monday, albeit with a new cast. Twin Peaks is due to return in May, this time on Showtime.  We've already had a Heroes reboot, a Gilmore Girls addendum, and God help us, Fuller House, which is coming back for a third season, even though no one liked the previous two. Still come is a fifth season of Prison Break and new episodes of Will & Grace. I could keep going, but I don't have the heart.

Now, things seem to be getting more and more out of control. I realize that the networks, desperate for bigger hits in the era of fragmented TV viewing, figure that bring back old successes might work. But so far, it hasn't. Live Another Day's ratings were weak even compared to 24's final season. X-Files ratings were barely above ten million (big numbers today, but nothing compared to what the series had in its peak) Heroes couldn't even manage decent numbers in comparison to its final season. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, and with limited space on TV schedules already being filled with film and comic book remakes, we keep getting more of them.  The fans clearly don't want them, and new viewers aren't interested, so why do we have to keep seeing them?

More to the point, I fear what this may mean for showrunners who want to try and end a series, and yet now have to consider the inevitable reboot and movie franchise a few years down the road. Will this affect their overall planning to bring a series to a definite end? One may have thought series finales for The Sopranos and Lost were ultimately divisive as to whether they work, but at least David Chase and Darlton made clear they were finished with the work they had been a part of. Some of the best episodes of series have been their last episode - Six Feet Under, The Shield, and Breaking Bad come to mind. 

Already one gets the feeling that such finales may be hedging their bets. The Good Wife's finale was such a bizarre hodgepodge that one wonders if the Kings hadn't already decided to work on The Good Fight a few months later. But its been proven you don't need to write a bad finale to make a spinoff  - Vince Gilligan has already demonstrated that with Better Call Saul (although, to be fair, this is a prequel) Will this kind of thinking forestall showrunners coming up with a conclusion that is fitting for everybody in case someone might offer them something down the road? It doesn't seem to include logic - Prison Break is restarting even though the series ended with its protagonist dead and buried.

I will admit that I crave some of these reboots as much as the next one - I want to see the new Gilmore Girls, the next Twin Peaks, and if the Bluths ever do a season 5, I'm in. But if the overall consequence is that we get series were nothing ever ends, I think we will have sacrificed something vital to a viewing experience. I may not have liked the way Dexter or Mad Men ended, but that's no excuse to revisit those worlds that their creators have wrapped up.  Some doors should stay closed.

I realize the world will little note nor long care about my opinion, and that not long after this review is published we'll probably get word that  ER: The Next Generation is a go. But in a world where there's so many options for sparkling new entertainment, do we really need to revisit old ones? Especially if they weren't that good when they finished the first time.

Homicide Episode Guide: From Cradle to Grace

Written by David Mills; story by Jorge Zamacona

Directed by Myles Connell

                           Given the enormous power of the last episode, one would think that the next episode would be a major disappointment. But while ‘From Cradle to Grave’ isn’t as brilliant as the last episode, it is also a very effective episode. This is due partially by the fact that  it has a flavor of the first season episodes habit of having more than one central story. Indeed, there are two extremely effective, very detailed cases served with a comic one.

                           The first one involves the murder of Monk Whetherly, a member of a biker gang known as the Deacons. From the beginning there is something very off about the gang’s attitude towards his death. They are upset that they have lost one of their own, but they seem to feel that it was inevitable (though they shy away from claiming responsibility) Meldrick Lewis working with Munch (he is  in the process of going through nearly every detective in search of a new partner) is stonewalled by one of the gangs leaders. He gets into a ‘whose -is-bigger”  (a fight that he seems to lose) with him bringing him into the station house.  Preacher (who is a prep school graduate and is certified as a bishop) gives a cryptic hint that Monk died because he loved his little girl.

                           Meldrick makes an attempt to understand bikers in general, their codes of honor. When he learns that Monk’s wife was  the source of an FBI enquiry, it makes sense: Monk died for his wife’s  sins, so his child could have a mother. Under their code, no Deacon will touch her but she still must go into hiding. This leads to a great moment at Monk’s funeral in which the detective, a trenchcoat among a sea of black leather, walks though the bikers to put a picture of Monk’s daughter on the casket while ‘Stand By You’ by  The Pretenders plays on the soundtrack. Another moment of quiet dignity and understatement by Clark Johnson  demonstrates his own value to the show.

                           While Meldrick’s case is unfolding, another high-profile investigation is surrounding Pembleton. In a case taken from   Simon’s book, a superior officer, Deputy Commissioner Harris, asks  Frank to investigate an alleged kidnapping of a Congressman. He doesn’t state it directly, but there are clearly big things in store for him.  Frank soon finds that he has  put his hand in a hornet nest. The Congressman never was kidnapped but he reported it as such in an attempt to  cover his own indiscretions and the fact that he is a homosexual. All of which would be all right if the congressman if had not filed a false police report, a misdemeanor.  The Deputy Commissioner seems to give Pembeton permission to bring an end to the investigation and  assures the man that this will not be pursued. Unfortunately, the media does get hold of the story and the  Commissioner deserts Frank leaving him to take the heat alone. For  once Gee cannot help him due to  Frank’s decision not to bring his lieutenant in on what was happening. Filled with indignation that he let himself be used in such a matter, he resigns from the department. Though it will turn out to be mostly for show, we’re not certain how this entire mess will turn out.

 (We find out in the next episode.)

                          

The situation with Pembleton leads to a remarkable scene in the fourth act. After the story breaks, Pembleton has to explain  to Giardello and Colonel Barnfather his actions, while Harris leaves him to twist in the wind.  Dramatc but not exceptional--- until you realize that all four actors are black. In a police drama, or for that matter almost any other show, when all of the actors are of the same race, they are usually talking about prejudice or discrimination. At the very least someone would mention it but Homicide  treats it as if it were nothing special (and in the Baltimore PD this probably does happen).

                            Making the drama of the two stories stand out is a mostly amusing case. Felton and Howard are called into investigate the murder of a homeless man only to find that the rookie officer on scene let the hospital attendants take the body away in an ambulance. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the paramedics return the body to the crime scene and attempt to reposition it, much to the exasperation of the detectives. (This, too, is described in Simon’s book) Never the most vigilant detective, and preoccupied with finally finding his kids, Felton commits an act of fraud by replacing his John Doe on the board  with  another John Doe that had been closed. Nothing is ever made of this (it’s fixed by the next episode) but you wonder if its ever been tried before. (Why the squad is till on the 1994 board in 1995 is another mystery never solved) This is forgotten in Felton’s reunion with his kids is about to occur

                           ‘From Cradle to Grave’ isn’t a perfect episode but it is definitely an example of old-school Homicide. We have great cases with the characters being true to form, we have  some humor and some real, poignancy This is the show in stride.

My score: 4.5 stars

X-Files Episode Guide: Millennium

Written by Vince Gilligan & Frank Spotnitz

Directed by Thomas J. Wright

Before I rewatched this episode, I had decided mainly for reasons of my own, that I should try and watch 'Millennium', as I had basically ignored it when it was on the air the first time, and most of what I had heard about it had been fairly negative. So I made a commitment and watched all three seasons of the series.

Millennium is one of the odder series in TV history, an anomaly in programming that would come before or since. It is impossible to tell what mission statement Chris Carter had when he created the series, and what he was tying to say. Part of it has to do with the fact that for every season it was on the air, it had a different showrunner - Carter for Season 1, Glen Morgan and James Wong for Season 2, and Chip Johannsen for Season 3. And aside from the brilliantly solid work that Lance Henriksen put in for the series, the episodes have little in common. Season 1 takes a solid forensic approach to cases, usually involving serial killers, Season 2, involves cases more inclined to the paranormal, and Season 3 mainly deals with a combination of the two. All of them are focused on the end of the millennium and what may come, but the series could never quite come to a consensus as to what that meant or even what the Millennium Group had in mind. Even that vision differed from year: season 1, they were ex-FBI agents trying to help local law enforcement, Season 2, they were a Mason-like cult that resembled something more out of Dan Brown, and in Season 3, they were a group bent on sinister means that may have led to world domination. It's hard to figure out what was the mission here.

That said, while 'Millennium' was deeply flawed, it wasn't a bad series. When they were good,  episodes were capable of being as searing and mesmerizing as any TV series could be. Bad scripts could be pretentious, but the good ones could be fascinating. And as a rarity, it never seemed to know what it exactly was, but it kept experimenting, even up to its final episodes. One could understand why Carter and Ten-Thirteen thought that it deserved some kind of closure.

Unfortunately, this version of it just doesn't really work as a finale to those fans who had been watching the series loyally. For starters, while it is good to see Frank Black finally meeting up with Mulder and Scully, the picture that we get of him locked in an asylum, trying to discard any pretense that he cares what the Millennium Group was about doesn't jibe at all with what we saw him doing when he left with Jordan for parts unknown in the series finale. The idea that Frank would discard everything he has thought for just for a safe life was something that he rejected in the series; here he doesn't seem to want to fight at all. And even his great gift: the profiling skills he demonstrated over and over again throughout the series is revealed to be something of a fake: the reason that he can profile the necromancer so well is because they know each other.

But even if the character of Frank Black weren't muddled badly, this whole idea of what the Group seems determined to do doesn't fit in with any of the versions we got during the series. The closest version that it comes to is Morgan & Wong's version of the religious rites, but it still doesn't fit in well at all. And even if it did, the problem is that the idea of the apocalypse, a huge concept for a series to handle, and one that 'Millennium' never got a grip on, seems to amount to four corpses in a basement. This is what the group was pushing towards all this time? That's a bigger disappointment than most of what we got for the X-Files mythology.

So for those who were fans of Millennium the series, this episode can't come as anything but a disappoint. But as an episode of the X-Files, it doesn't do much better. The idea of necromancy is an intriguing one, and has some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, its never made clear how exactly Johnson is raising the dead. If its only working for the 'Four Horsemen', it doesn't explain at all what happened to the deputy. And it doesn't seem to explain why Johnson would go back to the morgue and save Scully from being eaten by the zombie deputy. The whole concept is so bizarre that Scully doesn't even try to explain how its happening. We know she's gotten a lot more open-minded, but this kind of thing cries out for some of her healthy skepticism. She doesn't even try, which is a theme for this episode. Even the idea of the millennium actually coming in 2001 seems more like a slur on the series that we didn't bother to correct.

But there are some people who will just ignore all this and decide to like the episode anyway, and we all know why. The kiss. Mulder and Scully finally kiss on the stroke of the new millennium, all supposedly so that Mulder can say to her "The world didn't end." The shippers must have been dancing in the streets after this episode, even though it was pure cheese. But just because this moment finally came after six seasons of Carter and company saying otherwise (though there denials got a lot fainter after the movie), doesn't mean we should give this episode more credit than it deserves.

A lot of the problem with Millennium may be the episodes writers. Considering that Carter and Spotnitz were still here, it doesn't make much sense for Vince Gilligan, who never wrote for the series to write the episode. Gilligan is usually great for anything, but this time his inexperience shows, and it really hurts the episode. There are some interesting reasons to watch this episode - Henriksen is good, and there's a brief appearance by future Oscar winner Octavia Spencer as a nurse - but those fans of 'Millennium' hoping for closure will definitely not find it here. Millennium was about a lot of things, but to try and sum up everything it stood for in a gunfight in a basement between Mulder, Scully and Frank Black along with four zombies will not fly. For those who were fans of both series, this can only play as a disappointment.

My score: 2 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: Hungry

Written by Vince Gilligan

Directed by Kim Manners

Ever since Pusher - maybe even in Soft Light, depending on how you view it - Vince Gilligan has always had a gift for seeing the humanity in even the most bloodthirsty of his monsters, often to the point that an argument could be made they're not even villains. This episode takes his concept and puts to the natural conclusion, show Mulder and Scully completely as antagonists, and the monster as the protagonist.

Rob Roberts comes across as relatively sympathetic, even after we see him commit his first murder in the teaser. He comes across as an average person with a problem that he genuinely wants to suppress. Because we don't see him remove his human appendages until the episode is half-over, the idea that he is basically normal being overwhelmed by society's standards seems almost bearable, and there is a lot of sympathy for him. It helps matters that Mulder comes across rather predator like himself - on the occasion we see him, he seems like he is toying with his prey. (Kinda makes you wonder how he comes across to the rest of his criminals). Duchovny gives a rare pointed performance, in which even his jests seem like he's trying to goad Rob.

There is also a certain amount of barbed commentary about how society's political correctness has now arranged things so that we don't view even the most brain-sucking mutant as just someone who needs help. Rob seems willing to try and suppress his desires with diet pills and self-help tapes, but the rest of the world seems more than willing to aid and abet by having its employees visit ridiculous empathetic shrinks who send their patients to 12 step self-help groups. Gilligan has a fair amount of fun with this as well, showing Rob attending an Overeaters Anonymous group, where he is the only slender participant, and have him manage to make the entire gathering salivating when he discusses in as subtle terms as possible, his fetish for eating brains. But it's clear that no matter how hard he tries, Rob can't suppress his cravings. There's more than a little fun here as well, as we see Rob's hallucination of brains frying on a grill, and seeing the brains in a man's bald head.

Chad Donella gives one of the more brilliant performances in the guest star pantheon. He has to walk a more measured line than just about anybody in the X-Files canon - we have to feels like he's a normal person who Mulder and Scully won't stop harassing, hut also inhuman enough that we can't ever forget what he is. It's one of the better jobs we see, and it doesn't hurt matters that most of his victims are pretty scummy - we don't really lose sympathy for him until he decides to go against what he's experienced and murder the friendly landlady. We see him try to handle his cravings, and continue to fail, until, against his will, he's become a serial killer. One could make the argument that this will be a layout for future series such as 'The Sopranos' or 'Dexter', but few would do as good as job as making us care for the character in such a brief period.

As good as Donella is, there are other good performances. Mark Pellegrino, a decade before he would begin playing angelic characters on sci-fi series such as Supernatural and Lost, plays such an ugly character on this series, that you're almost rooting for Rob to kill him. Also good is Judith Hoag as the therapist, who feels so much sympathy for Rob, it borders on the ridiculous - but near the climax when Rob finally reveals to her his true nature, her empathy seems genuine. Unfortunately, by the time Rob reveals who he is, he knows there's no way out - only thing left for him is for Mulder to kill him like the monster of the week he is. The final shot, coming after Rob's tragic last words, is one of the more amusing technical feats the series would do.

Hungry is one of the more brilliant pieces of work in the X-Files canon, even if it is, for Gilligan at least, just another day at the office. It gets Season 7 off to such a good start after a couple of good but overblown mythology episodes. Had the rest of the episodes of this year had this one's level of style and creativity, the series would be in excellent shape, especially for one that had been on the air this long. Unfortunately for us, and the writers, such would not be the case.

My score: 5 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: The Sixth Extinction: Amor Fait

Written by David Duchovny & Chris Carter

Directed by Michael Watkins

If there's ever been something resembling a tradition to the three-parters that open the X-Files seasons, it's that the first episode sets up a cliffhanger, the second is mostly padding, and the third gives us resolution - or at least a return to what we consider the norm. But Season 7 seems determined to throw the series into what appears to something madder than a box of snakes.  For one thing, the padding that we get seems a lot stronger than what should be the resolution, and that's bizarre because most of the padding involves something not even a series based on the paranormal wants to quantify. Is it a dream? A hallucination? A metaphor? Normally we could blame most of the mess on Carter, but since Duchovny took a bigger part in creating the mess, we have to consider that most of it was his doing - and probably his success.

What takes up most of the episode isn't made clear more than half the show's running time. It has Mulder being led out of his hospital bed, by the CSM, who now seems to be claiming Mulder's parentage once and for all. Never mind what he told both Mulder and his actual son back when the Syndicate went up in flames ; now, he's saying its true, and for the remainder of the series, its gospel. I still prefer to think of it as something of a hallucination on the part of Mulder, but let's let that go. After all, it's actually the least important part of what's going on.

Mulder goes from his hospital bed to what Cancer Man calls some kind of Witness Protections. He's led to a house in the suburbs, he's shown that Deep Throat is still alive, he finds connubial and marital bliss with Diana (boo!), he's shown that his sister is living in this same neighborhood. And at that point, the mask slips, and we see that all of this is Mulder's dreaming while lying on a far less comfortable hospital bed, about to have his brain condition surgically removed from his head. Clearly, this is meant to be an homage to the final section of The Last Temptation of Christ, and for those of us who missed the subtleties, the fact that Mulder is held in a cross-like formation with what amounts to a crown of thorns pretty much spells it out for us.

This really shouldn't work - historically, hallucination like episodes don't exactly have the bets history on the X-Files - but it does, much better than you'd figure. For the first time, we are shown what Mulder has sacrificed for his quest, and what some part of him has really wanted all this time, and maybe even could've had. There are parts that don't work - Ten-Thirteen really can't do old-age makeup that well - but showing Mulder going through his life in fast-forward with CSM being the only constant, never aging, is really one of the better set-pieces the series has done. And showing Mulder on his deathbed, while Smoking Man looks outside at a world laid waste to by an alien invasion, is really a small masterpiece. (Figures that the only apocalypse we ever see in the entire series isn't even real).

As always, our heroes are divided throughout the episode, but in an exception to the norm, the sections with Scully are far more pedestrian, though they have some interesting elements. Mulder is taken from his hospital bed (apparently with the full complicity of his mother) and Scully spends the entire episode trying to find out what happened to her partner. Kristchgau shows up for two scenes, mainly to berate Scully, and tell her that her partner is now biologically alien. Skinner, after being so big in the opener, is regulated to being threatened. And what should be a major confrontation - Scully versus Fowley, just seems an anticlimax because neither seems to give away anything. It's telling that the best sequences of the bunch are the ones that she has with Albert Hosteen, trying to help her find a way to find her partner, and its clear at the end, that it's just another hallucination.

For all the talk about how vital it is for Mulder's brain chemistry is to saving the alien apocalypse, its maddening that the series never seems to tell us in words of one sentence what exactly this operation is supposed to do. For much of Season 7, it appears to be a failure - whatever happened to CSM is clearly causing his lingering illness. And while it appears to have finally cured Mulder, we are eventually given a whole storyline in Season 8 that says that he was still dying from it. It can't have been to big a thing - Mulder certainly is walking by the end of the episode - but it's enormously frustrating, and another clue that the writers were, by this point at least, making it up as they went along.

And all of the carnage that seems to come in the last few minutes doesn't make much sense either. Why would Krycek kill off Kritschgau? What did any of that prove? How did Albert appear Scully? And after everything we've seen involving Diana Fowley, she doesn't even get the benefit of being killed on-screen. But somehow, we are willing to get past all of this because of the emotion in the final scene. As Scully, who never trusted Fowley for a second, has the soul to weep for her death, and finally confess to Mulder that she no longer knows what to believe any more. And the moment when Mulder and Scully admit to each other that throughout this ordeal they were each other's touchstone's is as pure a declaration of love as we will get for the series. Even as they move closer to finally consummating their relationship, it is by far the most moving moment.

Amor Fati is not perfect. There's far too much metaphor going around in this episode, and that's without counting the young boy who is obviously Mulder building a spaceship in the sand over and over. It leaves too many gaps for what should be a series trying to close them. But the imagery is so well done, and the moments of emotion so pure that it resonates as a way a lot of Carter-speak wouldn't at this point. As Duchovny begins his final full year (for this incarnation of the series, at least), its a reevaluation of what the X-Files mission statement should be. You can argue about the timing, but not about the power.

My score: 3.75 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: The Sixth Extinction

Written by Chris Carter

Directed by Kim Manners

Strangely enough, after nearly four seasons of the mythology episodes taking on such a house style that there was little originality to them, as the series entering (what many thought) was its final phase, Carter and company seemed determined to take the mythos in a different direction. Some elements would remain the same - yet again, we have another episode starting with Scully delivering a Carter-speak voiceover - but at least, after years of giving us tell instead of show, the writers seemed to realize that they were going to give us a bigger picture. If it seemed even more over the top than could be considered credible, at this point, any loyal X-phile would've taken what they could get.

So as Sixth Extinction begins with Scully standing over a UFO with some kind of alien writings on it, the effects department seems determined to make this seem even more remarkable than it should. We get what appear to be equal parts of the ten plagues - locusts, boiling sea, the waters turning into blood - and the New Testament , which ultimately climaxed with a murdered man rising from the dead. As if we're not  being given enough on that end, Scully finds herself encountering the rogue Dr. Barnes from the previous episode, who helps translate the writing on the craft as including the human genetic map, passages from the Bible and the Koran, and numerous other things that just don't seem to belong on an alien spaceship. No wonder Dr. Barnes seems to go mad from the discovery. I'd feel sorry for the man, but you know, he is a double murderer, who kind of deserved what he got. To top the whole thing off, Scully sees a mysterious African bushman repeatedly, whose sole purpose seems to be to warn her that 'some truths are not for you. I have to hand it to Gillian Anderson, for managing to keep her performance all together throughout this episode. Only her rigorous personality - measured with the skepticism that is finally starting to erode - could manage to handle all this without going over the top.

Considering that she seems to be doing all of this for Mulder, there's a certain irony in that the entire episode of the ship doesn't seem to offer a single, pertinent solution to what is happening to him. As the increasingly frenetic brain activity has essentially rendered Mulder catatonic, it falls upon Skinner to be the one to essentially try to save him. One also has to give Carter credit; after nearly a year of giving Mitch Pileggi essentially nothing to work with, he finally seems willing to give the character room to do something more than growl authoritatively. One wonders why Mulder would have him turned to Michael Kritschgau of all people in order to save his life, especially considering that he's one of the few people in the mytharc who had no belief in aliens at all, but considering that he manages to do more to help him than any of the doctors in this episode, it does seem like Mulder hasn't fried his entire brain yet.

The episode is a definite improvement over where we seemed to leave things in Biogenesis, but where it starts to break down is by having the character shifts that we see seem a little too unbelievable at times.  Scully's is completely buyable. Considering what she has been through in Africa, the moment when she finally tells Skinner that what is causing Mulder's illness is extraterrestrial in origin seems powerful, because it seems so irrelevant given the state of Mulder's health. What is far less believable is watching Barnes, who we knew from the previous episode thought his colleagues beliefs were laughable, accept it so completely. Its only remotely plausible because it helps drive him mad. Kritschgau's is even harder to stomach - he spent his entire career, believing that alien life was propaganda, and now after a couple of hours with Mulder, he seems all too willing to dump everything that he once worked for.

Where this episode is better is the way that the characters seem to be finally breaking through. Anderson, big surprise, is remarkable in every element of her performance. Mimi Rogers finally allows Fowley a little room for growth, when she shows that she doesn't care for the conspiracy either, but only for Mulder. And even though Duchovny doesn't have a lot to work with, the fact is he seems to have made his choice as to whose confession to believe -  in the sea of voices that are deluging him, he can still find Scully's anywhere. It's a bit that will be played out a little too much, in the conclusion of the episode.

Of course, because this is a mythology episode, there's very little going on that will be held to, even at this late date. You'd think if everybody thought the series was going to end this season, they'd want to wrap things up here, but Scully, as always, loses any proof that she might have that this alien ship exists. The illness, even as it pertains to Mulder will be handled - or not handled, the writers never worked that out satisfactorily. Even the ship will be simply washed away by the tides, only to come back yet again when its least expected (or wanted, by that point). We're prepared to give Sixth Extinction a little more rope, because we are, at least, seeing character growth, something the series has been very begrudging in giving. This is definitely a step in the right direction. It's just a little disappointing its starting to come now.

My score:3.25 stars.

Homeland Season 6 Review

It's been awhile since we've returned to the world of Carrie Matheson, the protagonist at the center of Showtime's Homeland, both in calendar time (its been nearly a year and half since Season 5) and in the world of the series. In many ways, the evolution of Carrie is remarkable, having gone from the ultimate in superspies when the series began in Season 1 to now being totally disillusioned with the government's reaction to the war on terror. Her public persona is busy running a law firm in New York City which gives legal aid to Muslims arrested by our government. This has caused her to get involved with an African-American Muslim broadcasting on the Internet, who it seems has been set up by the FBI (Nurse Jackie's Dominic Fumusa). Her more secretive approach has become being involved as an intelligence adviser to the President-elect (Elizabeth Marvel, not that far removed from the character she played on House of Cards in Season 3 and 4) about approaches that run counter to US policy. (Some may say that the series producers got their parallel's wrong this season. However, this isn't the first time Howard Gordon has had this problem. Eight years ago, in Season 7 of 24, he created a female president played by Cherry Jones. He really has too much faith in the electoral appeal of Hilary Clinton).

At this point, the President Elect needs all the help she can get.  The pundits within the CIA, led as always by Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham) and Saul, Carrie's mentor  (Mandy Patinkin) who consider the president soft on terror, and want to test her in ways that seem to border on treason.  Carrie knows how to work around them, but she may not be able to be as well done without the government's resources at her beck and call.

But by far the most stunning difference between last season and this one involves a character that the viewer honestly thought would be dead by now. Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) was involved in a sarin gas attack last year, and was so close to death's door, it seemed likely Carrie was going to give him the final push.(Even Gordon thought he was going to write the final scene for him last year.)  I hoped otherwise, but given what his current condition is, one can almost death would be kinder. In a state of medical misery and incredible hostility to the world, Quinn refuses to take his meds or even take care of himself. Carrie seems to be the only one willing to take care of him (given what happened and their prior relationship, its understandable) but it has become very clear in the minutes of last nights episode, that Peter may not want to live. Of all the characters, Quinn has had the most strain through his arc on the series: wanting to leave the agency throughout Seasons 3 and 4,  then becoming a ruthless killer throughout last year. To finally be in a position where he no longer wants to be in the world may be his final version of penance. One can only say that his work has enabled Friend to higher up on the echelon of the Emmy nominations.

Homeland has become a stronger series the further it has gotten from the era of Brody, becoming more timely with each new location. Both of its previous seasons were stronger, dealing with a threat on foreign soil. Returning to domestic ground and more political matters is somewhat newer territory for the series. But its always up to Claire Danes and the rest of the cast to bring us great drama, and unlike the previous seasons, by keeping the focus narrower, they make the drama more real. Its still off to a great start.

My score: 4 stars.

Homicide Episode guide: Every Mother's Son

Written by Eugene Lee; story by James Yoshimura and Tom Fontana

Directed by Kenneth Fink

                           Some episodes of television are impossible to enjoy. That is because the subject and writing are so serious and tragic that to take any pleasure in it seems wrong. This is the kind of TV that leaves you emotionally raw and drained.  This, in my mind, is what ‘Must-See TV’ should really be.

Many dramas  go their entire run without any such episodes.  Others like ‘ER’, ‘NYPD Blue, and ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ manage maybe one a season. Homicide  averaged two or three a year.  This season, we have already seen   the detectives go through a wrenching journey in ‘Crosetti’, now in ‘Every Mothers Son,’  we get one that is less personal but no less powerful.

                           As we saw in the Adena Watson investigation, the death of a child is an experience where the tragedy seems to overcome even the detectives investigating the crime.   More of the agony came because of the brutality of the death. This one is affecting because of the coldness of the killer.  A fourteen year old named Darryl Nawls is shot point blank in the head when another kid walks up to  him in a bowling alley, takes out a gun and shoots him three times in the head. A gang hit, one would assume, except Darryl wasn’t in a gang.

                           Part of the power of the Watson case was that we never knew who did it. In this shooting we know who did it before the guest star credits have rolled. Ronnie Sayers, also fourteen. Does he run with a gang? We never find out. When Bayliss and Pembleton track him down, he doesn’t seem one. He does however have the coldness of someone who has been on the street for a while. When the detectives finally pin him down, he reveals that he thought the victim was another kid--- the shooting was a mistake. But even more chilling is his reaction to this. He believes that because he shot the wrong person, he’s going to walk away from this. When his mother tries to help him, he cops to the charge in order to get her out of the  room.  Even when he is taken to processing, he still doesn’t seem to understand the magnitude of what he has put himself in for. Sean Nelson (who a few months later would explode on to the screen in  ‘Fresh’) plays Ronnie as someone who is more or less totally indifferent to the concept of death or responsibility How much of this is a front is hard to tell, but his calmness to everything that is happening to him is frightening.

                           Now all of this is powerful in its own right, but its only half the story. The power of this episode comes from the reactions of the two mothers who are caught up in this tragedy, Mary Nawls and Patrice Sayers.

As the writers make very clear, both have lost a child to this crime--- Darryl is dead, Ronnie is probably going away for life. But what makes this painful is how much these women have in common. Both are single parents with no husbands to be found. Both have another child at home. And both of them are absolutely appalled at what is happening to the children of Baltimore.  Mary Nawls says that  she’s been to three funerals of Darryl’s friends--- something which a lot of mothers in the ghetto must go through. There seems to be no release from any of this. All of this is made clear in one of the most stunning  scenes that the show would ever  do--- where both women, not knowing who the other, share their grief in a witness room in the Baltimore police station. It should seem heavy handed but it comes off naturally and unforced. The episode also has an incredibly poignant coda  when Patrice comes to Mary’s place of business and tries to offer her sympathy. The two younger children play together, and there seems the tiniest glimmer of light--- which is immediately shot down when Mary asks what will happen if those two get older and learn that one’s brother killed the other. There is no real hope and this makes everything even more poignant.

                           Now given the grimness and senselessness of the tragedy one would have to be made of stone not to feel something. But Pembleton does a good job of seeming  relatively calm and impartial as always---- until he goes into the coffee room before taking the boy to processing. Howard asks his counsel on a case,  whereupon Pembleton delivers one of the most memorable monologues in the shows history:

                           “Every day I get out of bed and drag myself to the next cup of coffee. I take a sip and the caffeine kicks in…. I’m ready to rock. The time is coming when I wake up and decide I’m not getting out of bed. I’m not getting up for coffee or food or sex. If it comes to me, fine; if it won’t, fine. No more expectations. The longer I live the less I know. You’re suspicious of your suspicions? I’m jealous, Kay. You still have the heart to have doubts. I’m going to lock up a fourteen year old kid for what could be the rest of his natural life.  I gotta do this; this is my job. This is the deal, this is the law, this is my day. I have no doubts or suspicions anymore. Heart has nothing to do with it anymore. Its all in the caffeine.”

                           This distress is not the only sign that Pembleton is disturbed by this. The day  Ronnie Sayers is held for bail, Pembleton influenced by a sleepless night, gives him his card and tells him to “keep his ass to the wall. Don’t ask for anything.” He knows what prisoners will do to this boy. He knows that his life is over.

                           Frank’s reflection and anguish is probably due to the fact that he and Mary are considering having a baby.  And the thought of bringing a child into a world where these horrible, pointless tragedies take place frightens him. Frank, like all the  detectives is cynical, but he needs to believe even in the darkness  there is a possibility for something. But he knows there is a little chance. As he says after Sayers goes to jail, “One  time, I’d like t hear about a murder that makes sense.” Not gonna happen.

                           There are some light moments in this episode. Most  of it coming from Munch and Lewis’ problems with The Waterfront, combined with the unlikely role that George Washington played in the buildings history.  But for the most part, ‘Every Mothers Son’ is one of the most wrenching hours the show produced. You come away from it feeling drained and overwhelmed--- like you do with the best television

Fans Rating 9^th

^{My score: 5 stars.}

X-Files Episode Guide: Biogenesis

Written by Chris Carter & Frank Spotnitz

Directed by Rob Bowman

Considering that Two Fathers/One Son finally seemed to wrap up the alien conspiracy earlier this year, and also considering that many people thought that this was the end of the penultimate season of the series, one wonders why exactly Carter thought that it was a good idea to start what appears to be yet another mythology at this point. It's true that in Biogenesis there are some new elements that we frankly haven't seen before - a scientific basis for Scully to finally hang her hat on what she has been witnessing for the last six years, and Mulder finally facing a threat not from death, but from what appears to be the fragmenting of his own consciousness - but the sad truth of the matter is that there are so many elements of this episode that seem to be nothing more than old hat that we're beginning to wonder whether the real threat to this series isn't alien invasion, but rather its own lack of invention.

Hell, at this point even Carter seems to running out of ideas when it comes to the mythos. He has Scully say directly to Mulder that he's basically won - the Syndicate is dead, the experiments that they have been doing are closed, what more can Mulder (or the series) hope to achieve? (Well, there is the apparent alien invasion that is coming to take over this planet by two warring alien races, but why should we worry about this? God knows the series itself isn't going to care about it anymore.). Even Mulder doesn't seem to have a real answer anymore - his response involving his sister is so perfunctory, we get the feeling this is merely the writers doing lip service to an old story point. And while there are definitely a lot of intriguing ideas in Biogenesis, most of them are so buried under old tropes that one wonders what the point was of having them raised at all.

Let's be honest. The idea that life on this planet originated on somewhere other than earth is an intriguing one, and frankly one that we're a little surprised that X-Files has never dealt with it before. And the way that it seems to be explored is done generally pretty well. This isn't a battle between old men in rooms, but rather between scientists who have radically different views of how the universe developed. The ways that Mekmallen and Sandoz seem to finally prove that Mulder might actually be right about his beliefs is genuinely interesting. One wishes that when the writers returned from this next year, they wouldn't have been so inclined to throw it under the mythology bus. And after years of seeing Scully be so closed off whenever even the hint of alien life was raised to her for six years, its frankly revelatory to see Scully finally begin to accept that her partner has been right about this.

It's just that there's so much surrounding this that is familiar, and not in a good way. There's the traditional Carter-speak soliloquy at the beginning of the episode, and just to make sure we get the point, there's another one at the beginning of the final act. Krycek is back again, and he seems to be holding Skinner in check, and killing people who threaten the conspiracy - though really, shooting scientists seems to be completely opposed to his usual level of work. The Smoking Man's survived his colleagues, but since all he seems to do in his scene is just listen to another committee on the end of the world, there wasn't even much point in having him here. And Diana Fowley is back, who seems to be there only to literally start to screwing Mulder over when  he can't defend himself. It's nice to see Albert Hosteen back, but since he only seems to be here for another Navajo healing ritual - this time with him at the center - he's little more than just another wasted character.

There are some good moments here - Duchovny gets to stretch a little more than usual as we see him finally starting to suffer dramatically for his quest - but since the series will never truly give a real reason why or how this happened to him,  as well as just take these elements away from him by the time Season 7 has truly begun, again we wonder what the point is. Anderson, more than usual has to carry the episode, and she's more than up to the task. One of the few good things about the final seasons will be watching as Scully finally starts to come around to Mulder's way of thinking, and really, one would hope that after coming across what appears to be an alien ship that has religious writing covering it that she'd pretty much have to at this point.

Biogenesis isn't really that bad, even by the standards of X-Files season finales go. There are some new ideas in play that almost make you forget that this is a mythology episode. But the key word here is 'almost'. And in a season that has shown some truly wondrous elements when it came to exploring our heroes points of view, its kind of disappointing that the series chooses to end such a good season with such dismaying familiarity.

My score: 2.75 stars

X-Files Episode Guide: Field Trip

Teleplay by John Shiban & Vince Gilligan ; story by Frank Spotnitz

Directed by Kim Manners

When I initially saw the tease for this episode, which in May of 1999 seemed to be yet another one of the mythology,  I thought that this might finally be the episode where we started to get answers for the series. (You'd think I'd have known better by now). But what I didn't realize at the time, and in fact appreciate more even now, was that the trailer was in fact part of the point. Field Trip is really an episode that takes all of the perspective-shifting ones we've seen throughout Season 6, and brings it to its most logical conclusion.

 Indeed, for part of the episode, it seems like Gilligan is trying to rip off himself. The idea of telling a story from the perspectives of Mulder and Scully is one that was done to spectacular comic effect last year with Bad Blood.  He even has Mulder hint at it a bit in the first act, perhaps also giving Mulder a chance to finally vent a little about how frustrated he must feel at what has become the formula for the X-Files. And given the nature of the teaser, we feel we might be getting the same thing, albeit in a far grimmer fashion. But as Field Trip unfolds, we see that Gilligan, is going to be a lot more serious with the way he does thing this time. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; serious Gilligan can be just as good as the comic one)

Mulder and Scully go out to Brown Mountain to investigate the fate of Wallace and Angela Schiff, each with their own theories in mind. Mulder goes out to a rock formation and finds the Schiffs there, somehow both alive. Even more remarkably, they seem to be willing to follow his original theory as to what happened to them - that they were abducted and experimented on by aliens. But even as he hears his theories validated, we see that Mulder has finally started to absorb (pun not intended) Scully's voice of reason, so that he seems unwilling to believe what he's hearing. That kind of thinking has him go right into the white lights of the aliens (a pattern that we will see repeated when we get to the conclusion of Season 7) When he arrives back in his apartment and brings Scully to tell them what he has found, the childlike joy on his face when he reveals that he has retrieved a grey is one of the most remarkable things we've seen Duchovny do this year. But when Scully finally tells him exactly what he's wanted to hear after six years of partnering, he finds that he can not accept it, and forces himself to realize the veracity of the situation.

Similarly, Scully finds Mulder's body in the same field that the Schiff's are found in, and finds that everybody is parroting her original conclusion of what happened to them. But as she deals with something that is infinitely more devastating than what happened to Mulder, she keeps trying to bring out her inner Mulder; finally yelling at the Lone Gunmen for accepting what she can not. (One wonders if the writers would use this particular scenario when they would have to deal with Season 8). It's one of the more astonishing sequences in the year, and when it ends with Mulder ending up in his apartment after what appears to be his wake, we are really astounded.

Scully and Mulder then manage to put together what seems to have happened to them based on a digestive enzyme that was discovered on the corpses of the Schiffs  - that they are trapped in a cave with a giant fungal organism that is holding them dormant as it digests them. Given the traditional way these formulas work (and let's face it, in its lesser days, the X-Files would be just as likely to use them as anybody), one would expect our heroes having to embrace the other's point of view in order to survive. The writers don't do anything nearly as pat her, and it's honestly hard to tell whose more shocked - our protagonists or the viewers - when during what appears to be the closing scene with Skinner that Mulder realizes that they're still underground, that this is just another part of the hallucination. Mulder and Scully are saved purely by the fact that for once the FBI had smarter people on its staff than it usually does, that analyzed the situation, and realized they were in danger. The last seconds of the episode show our barely alive heroes finding the strength to reach for each other, but for all their valiant efforts, their salvation didn't come from each other.

How much of this episodes brilliance is due to the part of Gilligan, and how much the more traditional work of Shiban and Spotnitz is hard to say. The end result, however, is one of the more astonishing works in Season 6. There's also some interesting side notes by the guest cast; its interesting to see the mostly comic actors Robyn Lively and David Denman playing mostly against type as the doomed Schiffs, and brilliant character actor Jim Beaver doing solid work as the coroner. But mostly this is one of the more brilliant episodes because it deals with the ultimate unreliable narrator; we've had to deal with so many on this series that's almost astounding that such a good story could be told of one where our heroes can't even trust themselves. Not bad for an episode that seemed to be promising us answers in its coming attractions. One wonders how much the  writers had to do with that.

My score: 5 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: Three of a Kind

20. Three of a Kind

Written by Vince Gilligan & John Shiban

Directed by Bryan Spicer

While admittedly many of the episodes of The X-Files cried out for sequels, one would be hard-pressed to argue that last season's Unusual Suspects did. Considering that the primary reason for it was to give a hiatus to Duchovny and Anderson to work on Fight The Future, and the main story was fundamentally self-contained, really there wasn't much need for it, save for the popularity of the Lone Gunmen. And really, if you were going to revisit the Gunmen's private world, the story of Suzanne Modeski wasn't one that exactly cried out for closure, especially coming as it did after an episode that pushed Mulder and Scully to the sidelines.

That said,  Three of a Kind still has some good moments that at times almost make it worth the time and energy. Just as in Unusual Suspect, one of the best things about Three of a Kind is the performance of Bruce Harwood. The teaser and voiceover are one of the simpler ones the series would ever do - no purple prose, no complicated images, just a simple yearning for faith and a normal life that Byers knows he will never have. It is also telling that over a decade after losing Suzanne, Byers is still the one with the most hope of the three Gunmen - hope that he'll finally see Suzanne again, which is why it's so painful that when he finally finds her in the arms of another man, we can feel his pain, even if he's forced to denial over what has happened to the woman he loved.  It's a brilliant stretching of acting muscles that the Gunmen rarely get to do in any of their cameos.

There's also some good guest work from Signy Coleman as Suzanne. It's somewhat shocking to see this woman who basically inspired the Gunmen to begin their quest to expose the truth seemingly back under the sway of the shadow government. But this time Coleman gets a chance to stretch a little as we see some genuine emotion from her as she realizes that the man she trusted to get her away has been playing both ends to save his own life. For the first time, there is a genuine look of longing from her, and we realize the heartbreak Byers must go through as he learns that the woman he's spent ten years looking for never stopped looking for her, and that, at the end of the episode, he must let her go again, this time forever. Its a level of pathos that you wouldn't expect from a comedy.

Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of the episode is scattershot. Considering that Unusual Suspects was basically another conspiracy episode with comic elements, you would thing that Gilligan the co-author of this episode would've tried to keep it mostly serious. Sadly, he and Shiban mostly play the episode for laughs, and it does a lot of damage to the story. Gillian Anderson has a couple of good moments in the episode, particularly in the delightful scene where she just laughs and laughs around a much of men in black. It's telling that the only way that she can really loosen up is when she's under the influence of a drug. But the scene that precedes it, where she basically acts like a fool in front of a victim she was trying to autopsy is one of the most painfully unfunny ones in the series. The fact that Langley would even believe for a minute that Scully was just grossed out by a dead body shows he doesn't know her at all.

The other guest performances are something of a mixed bag as well. John Billingsley work as Timmy the Geek is one of the more unnerving portrayals as he goes against his typical need performances to play one of the more intriguing villains. He also has one of the better lines in the episode when he tells the Gunmen point blank what the best part of killing the three of them will be. But the work of Charles Rocket as Suzanne's fiancée/ betrayer is really rather terrible; given what we see of him, we never find out what the hell Suzanne ever saw in him. And frankly, Michael McKean's cameo as Morris Fletcher strikes me as just another case of the writers having a joke for the sake of a joke; it doesn't add anything to the episode at all, and it takes the attention of Anderson's best scene..

Ultimately, Three of A Kind is a rather bizarre entry in what has been a fairly good sixth season.  There are some good laughs in it, and it does have a few good shadow moments. But considering everything that's happening in the series, did we really need another Lone Gunmen episode? There is some genuine poignancy in the moments when Suzanne leaves John for the last time, but it's immediately screwed up when Frohike and Langley try to cheer him up. It guts the entertainment with a bad joke, which is the episode in a nutshell: the good moments are submarined by a writer who doesn't have enough confidence in his main character to give it what it needs

My score: 2.75 stars

X-Files Episode Guide: The Unnatural

Written & Directed by David Duchovny

Once again, we find ourselves in the broken down hallway of the apartment of Arthur Dales, with a long, rambling, sort-of mythological tales told in flashback that doesn't really fit anywhere in the mythos. Why is last season's episode Travelers so loathed (even though, as previously noted, it was one of the better episodes of Season 5) and this episode one of the more beloved in the X-Files canon? There are a lot of reasons for that, but the most prominent one is that The Unnatural is far more fun.

The episode is, for one thing, perfectly timed. Considering that Milagro was essentially an episode that analyzed Mulder and Scully from the point of view of its creator, this episode tries to take a lot at a story from the X-Files, and turn an entire episode of the conspiracy into one of pure joy. Duchovny has written quite a few episodes that have dissected the mythology of the series a bit, but in his first truly original script for the series, he wisely takes away all of the conspiracy and double-talk, and writes in a far simpler style. What we are supposed to take from the tale of Josh Exley, an alien who finds himself enraptured, not by an of the more pertinent things of what we call normal life, but by something that he himself considers "useless" - baseball - and it truly transforms, not just figuratively but literally. Mulder may not be interested in the world of baseball (or so he tells Dales, we know enough about his character for the last six season to know that he's a rabid Yankee fan), but in a way that's the point. This is not a story of the mythology, but a pure fable. A story of a baseball legend who just happened to be an alien. In essence, it gets to the core of humanity. Josh (at least partially modeled on the great Negro League star Josh Gibson) goes from being an alien to being human because of love. And in the final minutes of the flashback, it becomes a literal truth, as he finds himself bleeding human blood, laughing at it, even as he dies.

There should be elements of this story that don't work, there's a certain level of shifting between the real world and the flashback (Poorboy somehow being a link between the world of 1999 and 1947; a black and white TV showing moments of Colony) that should come across as pretentious. But as Dales tells us, this is an example of trusting the tale, not the teller, and we find ourselves carried along with the sweet, charming story about the friendship between Officer Dales and Exley and a story about baseball being one of those things that transcends even the complications of humanity. It's a real energetic episode, and one that is matched by the performances. Jesse L. Martin, in one of his earlier, more playful roles, well manages to cease the nature of Exley, both in his scenes as a ballplayer and the way he talks about his 'family' in metaphor. Frederic Lane plays another Arthur Dales, this time with far more pleasure than he did in Travelers. This time his character is overwhelmed, not by a massive Communist conspiracy, but by the truth behind a man he comes to consider a friend. Even Brian Thompson, who hasn't had anything really imaginative to do with the Alien Bounty Hunter character in three seasons, finally manages to get a little extra energy and emotion into his character.

About the only think that's really flawed about this episode is how it takes the character of the 'other' Arthur Dales out of the series lexicon. This was a necessity given the illness of Darren McGavin, but the result of having Dales now being played by another person, takes a lot of the energy out of the character. (It also doesn't make a heckuva a lot of sense plotwise, since Mulder knows that the real Dales is in Florida having visited him in Agua Mala.) While M. Emmet Walsh gives his usual solid performance, one can't help but wonder if there wasn't another way to work around this. Had Walsh had to tell it as one of Arthur's old tales, thus adding a further remove from the story, it probably would've worked a lot better. As it, Dales never appears again in the series, and that's something of a real loss for the show.

Though the flashback is truly one of the more wondrous bits of storytelling, Duchovny also is good enough to bookend it with Mulder and Scully at play. The opening act where our heroes come as close to flirting as they've done in quite some time is really very charming, but even more delightful is the end where Mulder teaches Scully how to hit a baseball. The final shot where the flying balls become shooting stars is one of the more brilliant pieces of cinematography the show has done.

The Unnatural is triumph for Duchovny on all fronts: it is without question the best script he would ever write for the series, and it is superbly acted and directed as well. Clearly Duchovny took as his model for this script, not Carter, whom he scripted out his previous stories, but Vince Gilligan, who demonstrated in Dreamland how to turn the mythology on its head. One wishes Duchovny could've kept this level of balance for his remaining stories, but unfortunately that was not to be the case.

MY Score: 5 stars.

Homicide Episode Guide: Nothing Personal

Written by Bonnie Mark; story by Tom Fontana

Directed by Tim Van Patten

                           Of all the programs scheduling changes, the most confusing was shifting ‘Nothing Personal’ from ninth  in scheduling to eighteenth. This would lead to one of the biggest lapses in continuity considering  that it was set before the major events that would occur in season 3 (the shooting of the detectives; the promotion of Russert to Captain; the opening of The Waterfront) In no publication or internet site have I ever seen a reason why. Perhaps the NBC executives didn’t think that it was sensational or exciting enough. It is comparatively low-key But there are some segments which make it arresting.

                           Set six weeks after Crosetti’s suicide, Giardello has finally managed  to get around to distributing  all of his open cases. Gee seems down at this, and can not even watch  Crosetti’s name being erased from the board. Lewis is more than a little depressed  by this (he asked Gee  to take all of the workload on himself) But the one who feels the most pain is Kay Howard.  Her clearance rate, which up until now has been 100% is challenged by the murder of Erica Chilton, a six month old investigation with no real leads and no suspects.  She then spends most of the episode determined to solve this case. It is unclear whether Howard wants to solve this case because she  needs to solve every case or whether she feels threatened about being the only female detective on the squad. But her reasons appear irrelevant as she has no real hope of solving the case.

                           Adding to her disturbed state of mind is Felton’s deteriorated state. Though he seems OK in the teaser, the other detectives all correctly note that the detective is falling apart. When an attempt at reconciliation with his wife fails, he continues his descent into drink. However, for the first time,  it causes him to fail on the job when he misplaces letters that may have been sent from the killer.  (As it will turn out, this evidence would have no relation to catching the murderer) He eventually hits rock bottom by ending up at Russerts house looking not for sex but for compassion. Things will improve from here on, but only in a relative sense.

                           The detectives aren’t the only ones who are dealing with bad news. Gee is understandably upset when he has to distribute Crosettis case, but he seems to improve when he goes to lunch with one of Megan Russert’s friends. They have a certain simpatico but she decides not to pursue a relationship with him. Now we never get a clear reason as to why she rejects him but Gee concludes that it because this woman (also black, but with light skin) doesn’t want to be seen with a dark- skinned man. This clearly has happened to Gee  in the past but for some reason he takes this as a huge affront, and becomes infuriated. None of the detectives have the nerve to approach him but Bolander, the only man on the squad who can relate with Gee’ problems manages to get him to confide in him. Gee is more upset than we realized. As he puts it to Bolander, “I hate myself. I don’t have any friends to speak of. All I have is this job and it disgusts me.” He believes that this kind of life is what made Crosetti kill himself.  This is a very deep level of pain and though this issue isn’t dealt with directly for the rest of the season, it doesn’t go away. He will feel versions of this pain when it comes to dealing with his children and his career.  It’s never going to ease.

                           This episode also demonstrates, indirectly, the value of Stanley Bolander to the squad. None of the other detectives have the concern or the nerve to talk to Gee like a man rather than as a shift commander. Furthermore, he manages to give Howard advice in getting over the Chilton case. “A good detective may not know when to  give up. But a good detective knows when its time to move on.” This gentle push helps Howard get the nerve to leave the case alone--- for now.

                           This episode is so focused that for once some of the comedy about The Waterfront seems a little out of place. In the grimness of the episode, we almost overlook the fact that the purchase of the bar has finally come through. Though the sequence at the bank is amusing, the rest of the business about their problems not being quite over seems a little added on..

                           ‘Nothing Personal’ isn’t a great episode but it does stand out to show how well Fontana and associates had managed  to write well for all the characters and not just Pembleton as some have considered.. Yaphet Kotto does some great work, as do Melissa Leo and Daniel Baldwin. This is a tale of raw nerves  but it also shows how people deal with  their own problems.

My score: 4 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: Milagro

Teleplay by Chris Carter ; story by John Shiban & Frank Spotnitz

Directed by Kim Manners

This was another episode I really wasn't looking forward to rewatching. I originally thought that the amount of gore in the episode was repugnant, especially by the standards of 1990s broadcast television, combined with the often turgid levels of the voiceovers throughout made this one of the worst episodes that The X-Files would do in its first seven seasons. However, many of the writers of the series, particularly Carter and Spotnitz considered it one of the more significant episodes they would do ever. And more than a few reviewers of the episode consider it one of the series more profound episodes. So, I figured I had to, at least figuratively, open my heart to it. And much like when I reexamined The Field Where I Died in the middle of Season 4, it seems that I had vastly underestimated it, and given my profession, that's a little unforgivable.

If we were to view Milagro as a straight X-Files episode, then of course it would end up  near the bottom of the pile.  The central investigation deliberately goes in circles, seems to have no motives or reasoning, and ends unsatisfactorily. But what I didn't really understand is that the case is really not supposed to be about the murders involving psychic surgery. It has to do with writing, and in  a sense writing about the X-Files. The central story is really about Philip Padgett, a man who wants to write a story about Mulder and Scully, and so in order to do so must immerse so totally in the world that he becomes a character. In a certain sense, Milagro is also about Chris Carter, and what's it like when your creation basically begins to control you. It may not be subtle that the episode begins with Padgett ripping out his own heart to come up with inspiration for a story about our heroes, but that's part of the point.

This episode wouldn't have doable had it not been part of the continuing theme of Season 6 - investigating Mulder and Scully's lives more closely. We've had Mulder swap his life with another man, we've had them analyzed by the X-Files they're examining, we've had them re-imagined in a domestic setting, we've had their lives repeated over and over again. So the idea of having our heroes become the characters of a writers fits in very nicely with this. What probably unsettled so many viewers -- probably this one as well - was that unlike Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan,  Carter plays is entirely straight and earnestly, examining Scully as a woman who has sacrificed so much of her career that she finds herself now considering the workings of her own psyche. The fact that she is being studied by a writer who is so clearly stalking her - he follows her into a church out of the hope she might come there, he moves into Mulder's apartment building just so he would have a chance to see her more often - that the scene where he and Scully seems to be on the verge of seduction shouldn't work at all. But it does, mainly because Carter seems to be making a statement about whether writers should be able to control their characters or vice versa.

None of this would be possible without the brilliant performance of John Hawkes as Padgett. One of the great character actors of our time, he does something that shouldn't be possible - more than a few actually. For starters, the prose that makes up Padgett's novel is very purple, bordering on pretentious. (It should be, after all, it's Carter speak.) But given his ability to deliver and the plaintive earnestness that involves most of it, it actually manages to sound like a pretty good novel.. And his prepossession even when Scully finally comes into his apartment, and realizes just how deep his obsession with her is rather remarkable: he maintains a level of equanimity throughout that we've come to see only in the behavior of some of the most intense serial killers on this show. (Of course, he is one, after a fashion, but its hard to realize that.)  The scene that he shares with the killer that he's created is also very haunting - we know from the scene that he's literally talking to himself, but he finally seems to realize whether or not he is letting his art control him. He is told this by Scully, and she openly complains about, but he realizes at the episode's conclusion that the best possible ending for his work may not be the most humane, as he finally realizes that the monster that he has created is actually himself.

I'm still not prepared to rank this as one of the best episodes of the series, or even the best of the sixth season. It is still a little too gory for even a viewer used to the bloodiness of pay cable to enjoy, and frankly the bloodiness borders on being superfluous more than once. (What was the point of seeing Padgett at the end, with his heart ripped out). And even though you know this episode is way too self-conscious on purpose, that doesn't make it seem any less ridiculous at some point. But it features one of Gillian Anderson's best performances, and its definitely far more watchable than it seemed the first time around. And as someone who has more than once had to struggle on making his characters do what I want them to do, I can certainly appreciate the struggles of Padgett - and Carter - a lot more than I did the first time around.

My score: 4 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: Trevor

17. Trevor

Written by Jim Guttridge & Ken Hawryliw

Directed by Rob Bowman

Considering that this is the fourth script written by a first time - or rather pair of writers - that we've had this season, this is one is a lot better than we've dealt with this year. Helps matters that Hawryiliw - try that one on your Scrabble board- has been working in the X-Files prop department since the series early days. And that's a bit fitting, since Trevor bears a great deal of resemblance to a first season script. It plays a lot better than most of them, but ultimately a few other problems prevent this episode from being anything other than average.

Admittedly, the teaser and the first act lead one to believe that this might be a bit better than some of the so called scary X-Files we've had this season. The opener is one of the more engaging that we've had, and when Mulder and Scully get involved, there's a bit more playfulness than we've come to expect from our protagonists. The opening exchange about David Copperfield is one of the best ones the series would ever do, and where Scully is the one to suggest spontaneous human combustion is one of the more wonderful responses, as well as the idea as illustrating how much Scully has grown over the past few years. The idea that Pinker Rawls is somehow managing to pass through solid objects is fairly creative, as concepts, and the effects people manage to make it work very well in the first bit of the episode, culminating with Rawls surviving being riddled with bullets. Mulder's theorizing is better than usual, and his solutions are more practical than they usually are for this particular theory, which is a radical change from a lot episodes, where our heroes survive mainly on dumb luck.

Unfortunately, this episode drops dramatically when it comes to trying to give recognizable traits to most of the characters. Rawls plays most of the episode as this horrible human being, the kind of person who won't think twice about killing anybody who gets in his way, and John Diehl does a good job when he makes the character seem as brutal as everyone says. But in the final act, when the story turns to what Rawls has been searching for this entire episode, turns out to be his not a score from a robbery but rather his seven-year old son. The transition for him hearing that his child led to him getting out of prison was an act of God is a change of character that is completely unbelievable, as are his attempts to act as a father to a child he's just met. The scenes near the end where he finally meets Trevor don't work at all, and the last  scene where he seemingly turns away from his killing frenzy after looking at his son's face, is a twist that doesn't play.

But even less likeable is the way his ex-girlfriend June is portrayed. It's clear the writers to an extent were trying to set June up as someone who, in her own way, was as twisted as her boyfriend - this is a woman who left her son with her sister as if he were a piece of luggage, then used the money from the robbery to try and set up a new life for herself.  But the way her new boyfriend reacts upon learning the depths of the lies she's told, just doesn't play - considering what we know about Pinker Rawls, he comes off as something of a prick. And the way she utterly denies her son isn't much better, so it doesn't explain why, in the climax of the episode, she takes her car and runs Pinker through. It's hard to say whether we was supposed to come off as a battered woman or a vengeful fury, whichever way the writers planned it just doesn't work. Catherine Dent is a great actress (a few years after this she would finally get the range that she deserved on FX's grounding breaking cop drama 'The Shield') but the script just doesn't give her enough to make the ambiguity that the role supposedly has to pay off.

Make no mistake, Trevor is a much better episode than Alpha, and honestly its something of a shame that this would be the only episode that Guttridge and Hawryliw would ever write for the series. They clearly have a gift for the mystery part of the series better than so many other writers wouldn't. But the lack of consistency with the dimensions of the characters make it a lesser entry in the sixth season. It might have served better in an earlier season, but we've come to expect better by now.

My score: 2.5 stars.

X-Files Episode Guide: Alpha

Written by Jeffrey Bell

Directed by Peter Markle

Okay, what the hell was that?

Jeffrey Bell didn't exactly fill viewers with confidence with The Rain King, and now in script number two, he demonstrates that his only apparent skill is to rip off other X-Files episodes, and not particularly good ones either. The Season 1 episode Shapes was one of the poorer scripts the series put together, but at least one could make the argument that it was an early attempt by a series that was still trying things out. Alpha doesn't even bother to try anything particularly original, and what it does try to do just doesn't make any real sense, even by the convoluted standards of this series.

Mulder and Scully are put on the hunt of what appears to be a killer dog based on something out of Chinese mythology. It employs a crypto-zoologist who claims to have tracked this dog throughout China and captured, and the doctor-- Detweiler goes to incredible lengths to explain that this is a peaceful dog, even as the body count gets higher. Mulder then calls in an expert named Karin Berquist - a canine behaviorists with who he has corresponded on line - read internet sex chats - who is equally sure that the dog is peaceful, and whom Scully can tell in under two minutes clearly has designs on Mulder, who doesn't return the affection. Both the zoologist and the canine behaviorist want to keep the dog alive, though for completely different reasons.

So, let's start with the obvious flaws. The dogs special effects don't work. And even if you thought they did, there's the fact that they get very repetitive very quickly. The first time we see glowing red eyes is a little scary, but the law of diminishing returns would dictate they get less frightening the more often we see them, and I counted half a dozen times by the time the episode was over. Then there's the fact that the dog seems to have the mighty morphing powers that the Alien Bounty Hunter has (now there's an aspect of the conspiracy that I would've loved to see) to change into a human and other dogs. Seriously.

None of this, of course, gets away from the fact that this is little more than a werewolf story. But at least the werewolf story of Shapes was without pretension. This one, oh boy. The episode goes to great length to map out that the werewolf is Detweiler - it's pretty obvious by the end of the second act. But we never get a clear idea as to HOW Detweiler became the animal was pursuing. Assuming that Mulder's theory was correct, and the dog did bite Detweiler, it doesn't explain why this dog would go rabid so quickly. It would seem to be killing people that threatened it, but if that's the case, why did it attack the stewards that just teased in the opening? They were too stupid to be any kind of threat. And the rest is dressed over so rapidly that one wonders if Bell put any thought into it at all.

Then there's the fact that Karin Berquist is not a particularly appealing woman, either in appearance, which is forgivable or in motivation, which is not. It is clear that Berquist drew Mulder to this case in order to see him, but aside from the 'I WANT TO BELIEVE' poster in her office, its very hard to guess what about would appeal to Mulder. Duchovny does his level best to try and seem like he admires Karin, but the script, as it does with just about everybody else, gives him next to nothing to work with. It isn't clear why Bell even went so far as to give her lupus, other than to try give her a reason to sacrifice herself at the end of the episode. But there's nothing particularly noble about it, it's just Bell, trying to cut the Gordian Knot of a character he had nothing to work with.. The final sequence where Scully tries to convince Mulder that Karin paid him "the ultimate compliment" is even lamer than anything else, because it makes even less since.

Alpha is such a lifeless story that one wonders why the writers even bothered to put on the calendar. Everything about it comes across shabbily (most of Mulder's one-liners are even lamer than usual), it gives Scully next to nothing to do for most of the episode, and it has more holes in than a Dunkin' Donut franchise. The only reason this story has any significance at all is because it seems to have a reason to have Mulder to get a copy of his poster back. Seriously, couldn't he have just ordered it online? It would have been a lot more painless.

My score: 1.25 stars.