Written & Directed by Darin Morgan
As I've mentioned before, Darin
Morgan was, with the exception of Vince Gilligan, the most astonishing talent
to come out of Ten-Thirteen. Were it not for his relatively small output, he
would properly be regarded as one of the geniuses to come out of television
anywhere. What is remarkable about his ability in his scripts for X-Files (and,
to a certain extent, for both scripts he wrote for Millennium) , was his
ability to look into the workings of a great TV series, and find a way to
completely subvert the characters and invert the idea of how TV works. In the 1990s, he was light-years ahead of the
curve; by the time of reboot of The X-Files had come up, entire series had been
developed which were basically meta-construct of familiar types. (The most
obvious examples were Psych, Community,
Supernatural and Leverage, and
those are just the most blatant versions.)
It would be easy to make the assumption that hiring Morgan to write an
episode would be more of a nod to the fans of the series rather than the idea
of having anything new to say.
But, as always, Morgan takes your
expectations of what we've come to expect from the series, and manages to complete
subvert them. Hell, the very title of the episode has the unwieldiness of all
the scripts Morgan wrote in Season 3. The same logic applies to much of the
casting. There in the opening are Stoner and Chick, still trying to find the
ultimate high (this time by sniffing paint) and running into supernatural
death. There's Alex Diakun, who made brief but indelible impressions in three
of the four scripts that Morgan wrote for the series original incarnation.
Scully goes looking for an animal shelter, and finds herself reminiscing about
Quee-Quee, the dog she got from Clyde Bruckman, and was ultimately eaten in
Quagmire, a story that Morgan was believed to have rewritten. And near the end,
Scully makes a joke that she's immortal, playing off a reference that Bruckman
made when she asked how she died, and he told her she didn't.
But Morgan has a more intriguing
story to tell than you would think by all the sly in-jokes I've already
mentioned. He takes the idea that Mulder is finally beginning to run out of patience
with the paranormal, and milks it for all the entertainment he can. Duchovny
gives the best performance of the reboot, playing a man who is not the
invincible icon of the 1990s, but a middle-aged man suffering from
frustrations, unable to find his way to work his own cell phone, and finally
running out of patience with the mediocre motels that he and Scully have been
forced to stay at all these years.
Morgan takes the tropes of the series and turns them on his head - the
big debate that Mulder and Scully would have about the nature of the beast that
they are tracking is told entirely by Mulder, acknowledging that by now
everybody can do them. He makes Scully a bit more than active than she's been,
getting her to admit how much fun these cases were, and how much she liked
Mulder when he was in his rabidly chipper mode.
But what makes this episode sing is
a scene that we've never seen in any incarnation of the X-Files - Mulder
finally has his conversation with a Monster-of-the-Week. The ten minute sequence
in which Guy Mann/The Were-Lizard tells about what happened when he was bitten
by a man - not the other way around - and found that he was turning into a
human whenever the sun comes up. And we find out that all the vagaries of human
life - the urge to get a job, to have dinner, to get a pet - would look like
from an outsider's perspective. It's one of the funniest sequence the X-Files
has ever done, no question, but its also hugely entertaining because Mulder,
even after everything he's seen finds it impossible to believe. It's a
reflection on the cynicism that has become exponential in the 21st century and
how much it seems to have truly affected even our most believing hero. And yet,
strangely, the episode also ends a note of optimism that was largely absent
from most of Morgan's work. Mulder runs out at the end to tell Guy that he
believed every he told him. Inexplicably, there's an element of warmth in it
that we never see. And the moment at the end where Guy finally transforms into
the Werebeast and goes off into the moonlight is the moment of validation that
Mulder has been looking for his entire career.
Of course, because this is a Darin
Morgan episode, Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster is also screamingly
funny. Morgan has no problem playing on just about every trope and joke that he
can milk out of the episode. Mulder is going to a psychiatrist to see a
patient, and the doctor diagnosing him as even crazier than a man who turns
into a were-lizard. The ultimate mockery of are obsession with cell phones, and
the fact that nobody understands them. The fact that Guy tells Mulder that he
screwed Scully in the back of the phone shop. And the fact that the serial
killer is ultimately so common at this point that when Scully finally catches
him, no one wants to hear his excuse.
Not to mention the little touches such as that Mulder has made his
ring-tone The X-Files theme. All put
under the Morgan-esque dialogue that we've come to love from his work.
When any series is rebooted, if
there's only one good episode in the entire run, one wonders why they bothered
to bring it back. But to get a Darin Morgan story for Ten-Thirteen nearly
twenty years after he penned his last one really is a good justification. Mulder and Scully Meet the Were Monster is an
X-Files episode that stands up with the best of any that the series produced
when it was at its peak. Will we get
another such story when the 2018 revival comes up? Even one would justify that
one, too.
My score: 5 stars.
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