Written and Directed by David Duchovny
I would like to be reasonable and
fair to Duchovny's second effort in writing and direction, mainly because of
how entertaining The Unnatural was. There, Duchovny took a critical piece of
the X-Files mythology and turned it into a fable. Here, if one were
particularly charitable, you could say that Duchovny was now trying to
mythologize the Hollywood version of what the X-Files
has become. But charity only takes you so far, and most of what you see in this
episode is as ghastly and horrendous as the film version of the series was.
What makes Hollywood
A.D. so particularly tragic is that you can see that there's a really
intriguing mystery surrounded by the offal that is the comedy that Duchovny
thought he was trying to write. Considering that the episode starts with a
teaser so horrendous and grotesque, I was actually praying for some
Carter-speak by the time it was over, that's actually rather remarkable. I know
Duchovny was trying to satirize the X-Files series as a film, but really what
emerges is so generally awful, it makes the Da Vinci Code seem subtle by
comparison.
The episode rapidly manages to
regain its footing as the story emerges. There's actually an intriguing idea
behind the story - a cardinal's church is the target of what appears to be a
terrorist bombing, and the man behind it turns out to be a missing 1960s counter culture figure who
clearly has gotten involved in religious forgeries. The ideas are so
interesting, you can almost forget the presence of a movie writer Wayne
Federman, who for some reason, AD Skinner has decided to have accompany Mulder
and Scully on this investigation.
The story picks up even more when
Federman leaves after the first act. Mulder and Scully now find themselves
investigating a fake gospel and a bizarre piece of an artifact that they
believe to be 'the Lazarus Bowl', a
piece of pottery capable of raising the dead. The story about the mythos is
actually pretty intriguing, and well-conceived enough that you might think that
Dan Brown used this section to inspire a goodly amount of his bestsellers. The
episode than takes on a more interesting turn when, as Mulder and Scully
prepare to arrest the Cardinal for the murder of Micah Hoffman, who should show
up but Hoffman himself. Skinner gets more angry at his agents than perhaps is
warranted (particularly given some of the shit they've put him through over the
last seven years) and puts them on suspension for four weeks. It then becomes
even more interesting when it turns out the revolutionary actually went through
a period of conversion. None of this should be plausible at all, but Harris
Yulin and Paul Lieber are so good in their scenes that it actually seems rather
emotionally powerful, and even intriguing.
Unfortunately, having set up such
an intriguing mystery in the first half of the episode, Duchovny then complete
burns the whole thing up by deciding to literally go Hollywood .
Bad enough that he decides to make Ed Wood part of the investigative process
somehow, but the scenes in Hollywood
are exercises in pure self-indulgence. The late Garry Shandling and Duchovny's then wife Tea Leoni end up playing
Mulder and Scully in the movie purely for the purpose of having them around as
in-jokes. There have been more ridiculous casting throughout the last couple of
seasons in Hollywood , but few that
were more self-indulgent. The scenes having Mulder, Scully and Skinner in a
split-screen bubble baths seem more ridiculous than any real attempt at comedy.
And the screening of the movie is such a fairly horrible idea, it makes the
opening sequence positively subtle by comparison. The subsequent deaths of the
Cardinal and Hoffman are delivered off-screen, and have even less meaning because
of the last twenty minutes. And Duchovny clearly has no idea how to end things
well - given the opportunity to have Mulder and Scully celebrate using a Bureau
credit card for the night, he has a group of fictional zombies appear on a
movie set and dance. What the hell!
Duchovny's earlier script was
slightly self-indulgent as well - it actually had the nerve to show a scene
from Colony in the middle of an episode on aliens. But we could forgive it the
plaudits because for the most part it was subtle and gentle in its humor. Here
we have an episode that has a more intriguing idea, in some ways, than The
Unnatural, and Duchovny completely flushes it as if he's trying to merge as many
unfunny jokes and references as he can. There's no reason to have Cardinal
O'Fallon's character in the movie as the Cigarette-Smoking Pontiff - Duchovny
just wants to have the joke there. And none of the lines that would play for
any laughs in the movie would work unless you've seen the entire series to this
point. If Duchovny was trying to make fun of Hollywood
for some reason (which is particularly bizarre, considering at this point in
his career, he wanted to leave the X-Files to do movies) than he could've done
so in any number of subtle ways. As it is, he seems to be acting like so many
other writers on the series, determined to play with all the lights before the
show is closed. There've been other
episodes this season that have been lacking effort before, but few that have
shown the presence of so much overkill.
My score: 1.25 stars.
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