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.