Friday, April 14, 2017

X-Files Episode Guide: Nothing Important Happened Today, Part 1

Written by Chris Carter & Frank Spotnitz
Directed by Kim Manners

Admittedly, the X-Files opening of its ninth season has a lot of strikes against it almost from the get-go. Apart from the most obvious one - Mulder's gone, and no one's even trying to come up with a plausible explanation as to why he's disappeared this time - Carter and company have put themselves in a really deep hole. They have to really introduce a couple of characters they haven't really vetted - Monica Reyes has had some promising moments in Season 8, but she seemed more of a flake than anything else. Having closed the last season with no real cliffhanger - they probably thought Season 8 might be the end - they have to try and create drama where none existed, something that they last tried back at the beginning of Season 6, and failed disastrously at. And now, having closed last season with a two-parter, they now decide to open with a two-parter, which has always led to a ridiculous amount of padding, most notably with Redux in Season 5.
The positives can be briefly recounted. There's none of the awful purple prose or stilted voice-overs we've come to associate with these season openers. And with the teaser finally starting with some genuine action, it briefly feels like the X-Files is going into the new territory. Unfortunately, the operative word is briefly.  The X-Files has always tried to open with some giant exposure at the beginning of every season, and if its failures were inevitable, they at least had the feel of effort with it. In Nothing Important Happened Today, the main drama seems to be around an internal investigation at the FBI around Deputy Director Kersh. Now Kersh has come off mostly as an obstructive prick, but until Existence, there was very little to prove that he might be on the side of the conspiracy. Now Doggett seems to be determined to bring him down, and while the diehard Mulder fans might rejoice at this, we know that its going to come to nothing. And sure enough, all of the evidence has been covered up, and AD Skinner, who had seemed to be firmly on the side of the angels in Season 8, now seems to have gone into full retreat. So what we're left with is basically an hour where Doggett is being accused of violating the Bureau's authority, and flouting his superiors. If we hadn't seen all of the series before now, this might be interesting.
Then there's the far bigger problem for the series - Mulder's gone. Cleaned out of his apartment, apparently without having to rent a moving van, buy a plane ticket or get a car. (You'd think he'd want to do something for his fish, but they'll soon be migrating to Scully's.) Now with Duchovny gone for good (so it seems), Carter and company would have to come up with a plausible explanation for why he would leave the woman he loved, and his newborn son. And amazingly, having had a summer to come up with an explanation, Carter and Spotnitz seem determined to ignore this giant elephant, and try to focus on a whole new conspiracy. It's bad enough that they decided to take a sledgehammer to the existing mythology throughout Season 8, but now they seem determined to do so by wrecking everything we've come to love about our heroes. And worse still, they've now decided to ignore what they went to a great deal of trouble to say wouldn't happen in the last weeks of the eighth season, and make William part of the mythos. And how do we know there something wrong with him? He appears to move a mobile with his mind. Scully, you're supposed to be a goddamned scientist; didn't you even bother to check whether or not there was some kind of breeze in the room?
And all of this, by the way, is being done with the introduction of new characters that seem even flakier then the ones we've already known. Annabeth Gish is a good actress, who seems to be stuck working with one hand tied behind her back. One of the few good points of the episode comes when we find out that this closet office in the basement represents Reyes' dream assignment. But even given that, the writers don't seem able to come with a clear focus for Reyes' yet. And the ways that they try to do so involve even more stumbling. They introduce another previously unknown character, AD Brad Follmer, who seems to have been involved with Monica at one point, and known is put here just to be an obstacle between her and Doggett. We dealt with the issue often enough in Season 1, and God knows it was mishandled with Diana Fowley, so why does Carter need to repeat this mistake again with someone we barely know?  And now, we introduce another mysterious character, who seems to an alien replacement/supersoldier, whose sole purpose seems to be killing EPA bureaucrats. Now I realize Lucy Lawless had just gotten away from Xena: Warrior Princess, but considering that we got introduced to at least a handful of these people in the last episodes of Season 8, is there really a need to introduce another mysterious character from Doggett's past, who now seems to be trying to kill him?
This is a lousy way to start off any season of The X-Files. The fact that the episode seems to be acknowledging all this with its own title would seem almost laughable in the face of the dour mess that we seem to be dealing with. At least given how messy Season 8 was, the presence of Robert Patrick managed to lend it a certain gravitas even when things tended towards the absurd. Nothing Important Happened Today seems to be determined to start Season 9 reminding the viewer just how worn out and tired the X-Files seems to be, and does nothing to assure the viewer, like it managed to as recently as last season, that the series might be worth sticking with.

My score: 1 star.

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