Note: This article is adjacent to much
of my writing on The X-Files but not directly part of
the series. The idea, however, has been floating around my head for the last
few months and I figured it was worth printing. I have put up variations of it
in previous entries but this is a complete version of it.
It is no secret
to those who have read my columns over the past few years how much I truly
loathe all things Shondaland. It’s not just that I think her series are
essentially all about sex with the basic formulas of a series thrown in to a
formula around an archetype of a show. It’s that I’ve now come to conclusion
that she hasn’t had an original idea since she created Grey’s Anatomy – which,
to be clear, isn’t original at all: it’s basically a soap opera in a hospital.
But that’s actually superior to the fact that she and whoever works with her
have essentially been plagiarizing superior series for decades, changing
certain details about the races of the protagonists or details, and is
considered some kind of revolutionary.
I have written
on numerous occasions that she and Peter Nowalk stole outright the concept of
the brilliant FX series Damages and turned it into the inferior How
To Get Away With Murder. She only got away with it because practically no
one had seen Damages. I’m kind of amazed that three years in, no one has
caught on to the fact that, for all intents and purposes, Bridgerton is
essentially a Regency version of Gossip Girl, complete with the voice
over from a ‘surprise guest star.’ (Yes, I’m aware that the former series is
based on an original series of books; don’t pretend that the coincidences in
the format haven’t occurred to at least a few of you.) And after much
consideration, I’m relatively certain that Scandal is a non-supernatural
version of The X-Files.
The latter
decision is, I admit, something of a leap. We may very well be in D.C. but law
enforcement is not involved in any degree beyond something to be ‘handled’,
there are no aliens, vampires, or liver eating mutants and while there are
monsters in the show that have be dealt with from week to week, there aren’t
even any serial killers among them. But on closer inspection, there are many
formulaic elements of The X-Files that are blatantly obvious and many
that prove its derivative.
First, there is
the fact this show is about government conspiracies. I grant you Rhimes does a
very good job of hiding this fact by having Olivia Pope and her ‘gladiators’
seem essentially like superheroes, ordering the powerful as to how to get throw
crises, using technology that Mulder and Scully never could and walking
stridently among the corridors of power with a confidence the protagonists
rarely got a chance to show.
But when
Olivia’s first job is to hide the fact that the President has been having an
affair with an intern and then has to spend the entire season hiding the fact
that the President – her lover – helped get that woman pregnant, then deal with
the woman ending up in the Potomac as well as the revelation that a man in the
government was responsible for it, then the show is making it very clear this a
conspiracy of the week series. Rhimes cleverest move was to title the show Scandal
which adds the idea of sexuality and makes what is happen seem salacious
rather than far darker.
And because she
carries herself with confidence, because she wears designer suits and - most importantly – because she is played by
Kerry Washington, an African-American woman who is almost always engaged in talking
authoritative to old white men – the viewer is inclined to view Olivia Pope as
a heroine, who is speaking ‘truth to
power.’ In fact what she’s essentially doing is making sure that powerful white
men can stay in power and getting paid to do so. This flaw was noted years
after the fact and it’s a tribute to how much the world seemed to be in awe of
Rhimes that anyone who critiqued the idea was considered either racist, sexist
or a wet blanket.
Indeed Olivia
Pope is almost a throwback to kind of TV characters we’d been thrilling over
for the previous fifteen years. For all the cynicism that she displayed when it
comes to dealing with the powerful, she does because she has a belief in
America that is out of touch not merely with the reality of the time but of Peak
TV. It’s even more disturbing when you consider Olivia Pope is an
African-American woman who by design should be more cynical about how
America actually works. The cynicism that Mulder felt towards institutions like
the government was revolutionary in the 1990s. Olivia Pope’s attitude would
seem more fitting for The West Wing, not someone who has in fact engaged
in stealing the White House for the President before the series begins. The
flaws between these truths – that Olivia claims to believe in America when she
herself was responsible in maintaining the lies that held it up – was a circle
the show never managed to square.
This actually
gets to the main reason I feel the commonality between the X-Files and Scandal.
As fans of the former series are painfully aware, every couple of months
Mulder and Scully would learn certain ‘truths’ about the government
conspiracies involving aliens that on their own should have been enough to
change the world but at the end of a two-parter, all the toys would be put back
in the boxes and it was business as usual. The mythology, which Carter and his
writers kept trying to tie together but kept fraying the longer the series was
on the air, was more or less a pattern of one step forwards, two steps back. Whatever
revelations we got over the course of a season would be walked back, rewritten,
and walked back again until it was incomprehensible even to the stars of the
show. It wasn’t just that nothing made sense, it was that every time something
seemed to change for good, Carter would arrange things so that nothing actually
changed. The only reason The X-Files managed to last nine seasons
were the Monsters of the Week, and at a certain point they started to get derivative
themselves.
Now as any fan
of Scandal at the time knew, this show seemed to be the opposite. Every
episode we got revelations that seemed to be game changing, the cliffhangers
never carried on for more than an episode, and the overarching plots would pay
off at the end of the season at the most. But…did they?
Take the second
season. We learn early on that a conspiracy of five people close to President
Fitzgerald worked together in secret in order to make sure he won the election
by fraud. The Chief of Staff’s husband managed to work that out and coordinated
with a prosecuting attorney and gathered the evidence to expose that
conspiracy. Except…that conspiracy was never exposed. The Chief of Staff’s
husband chose not to betray him, the President murdered a Supreme Court Justice
who was about to blow the whistle on the conspiracy and the nation moved on. At
the end of the season, the President learned the truth – and the conspiracy was
covered up by the prosecutor.
Now there was a
lot more going on within that season to be sure – an assassination attempt on
the President, the pregnancy of the first lady and a plot to figure out a mole
within the CIA. But the revelations we got were essentially the equivalent of The
X-Files: sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing.
The reason it is
far more excusable in the case of The X-Files was because it was a 1990s
TV series and it was revolutionary in what it tried to do. There was no road
map for that kind of show in 1993 and while it might have failed in those
respects, at the very least, other series learned from the mistakes it made. By
the time we get to 2012 and are fully in the midst of Peak TV, almost every
classic series of the era has been not only able to handle revelations but
actually follow through: from The Sopranos and The Shield to Breaking
Bad and Game of Thrones. Network TV, it’s worth noting, had also
learned how to handle it better: 24 for all its cliffhangers would be
able to do something involving revelations from season to season, Lost, for
all the flaws in the ending, was willing to commit to game changes not only
every season but within them and The Good Wife would be able to handle
it with an aplomb that few other series could. Scandal managed to hide
this fact with all its revelations coming so fast that the audience had no time
to think – because if it had, they’d have caught in quicker that ‘revelations’
are not the same as change.
This was true
with other major commonality – B613 the
Syndicate of Scandal. In a sense Rowan Pope is little more than this
show’s variation on William B. Davis’s Cigarette Smoking Man, the apparent
puppet-master in power behind everything, being shouted at by figures in
authority but implacable in his certainty and contempt for authority, always
left standing as the world crumbles. And just in case the parallel wasn’t already
obvious, Rowan is Olivia’s father – and by the time of the revival, it was
canon that the Smoking Man was Mulder’s.
But the difference
is when it comes to both the Smoking man and the Syndicate, the stakes are so
much bigger. I don’t think it was ever clear even to Carter what the plans were
but the key phrase was a colonization in order to prepare the world for alien
invasion and take over. I will grant you that B613 was responsible for a lot of
deaths and bloodshed as well as trying to control the world…but at the end of
the day, the Syndicate was trying to at least save some people. Even Smoking
Man gave a damn about his family.
All Rowan Pope
did for six seasons was manipulate the entire American power structure, control
the wings of American government and kill hundreds of people… so that he could
look down on all of them and sneer. In case we missed the point that’s more or
less what he bragged to a Senate subcommittee that he’d been doing all this in
the series finale.
If you remember
the series finale of The X-Files, it had a similar ended: the show’s
central character was put on trial and used the truth as his defense. Now the
defense was trying to use the mythology, and in that case Mulder might have
been better off to plead insanity. But at least there you got the sense that
everything that the heroes had gone through was for something. Even the fact
that Mulder was sentenced to death and that his fight had been labeled a
failure at least had a certain nobility to it.
The exposure of everything
at the end of Scandal is empty. It’s taken seven seasons for Olivia Pope
to finally realize what was clear to any viewer by at most season 2: she and
her colleagues were not the heroes of the stories, but the villains. And nobody
wanted to do it, to be sure; they were all trying to find a way to squirm out
of it right until the end. And their excuses were essentially the same ones
that had permeated the entire series: that the public could never know the
truth about the secrets they kept. That is the exact opposite of ‘The Truth is
Out There’.
All of this, of
course, is worse when you consider that Olivia Pope and her father were both
African-Americans. I’m sure that Rhimes wanted to use both of those characters
as some kind of subversive message to the idea of all these powerful white
people hiding in terror to these two very different African-Americans. But even
that showed an incredible lack of imagination on Rhimes’ part because both of
them were, for all intents and purposes, two sides of the same coin. These
African-American had power over the most powerful people in the world – and neither
of them did a single thing with it.
The X-Files had been revived
for two successive seasons in the second half of Scandal and I can’t
help but think that both Mulder and Scully would be immensely let down with
both Olivia Pope and B613.
In the case of
Olivia, Mulder would just feel a certain sad resignation as how much worse
things had gotten since he gone on the run: he’d spent his entire career trying
to expose government conspiracies; now this woman is making a fortune covering
them up and being proud of it. Scully would be infinitely angrier, considering
the struggles she’d had to go through to reach her position at the FBI, how
much she’d sacrificed in the name of science and the truth and how much she’d
lost. Both of them would look at this woman – who walks through doors in a suit
that they couldn’t get through with a badge, makes sure the powerful stay in
power and keep them from doing their jobs, has a team who will walk into fire
for her and a lot of people who worship her – and feel a justifiable outrage.
In the case of
B613, I think Mulder might be amused if he found out what was going on because
by comparison to what he and Scully had spent their careers chasing what Rowan
and his team were doing were, to quote another episode, small potatoes. They’d
work tirelessly to bring him down, of course, but if they heard his
explanations as to why he did it, they’d both roll their eyes. They might even
wonder if the Smoking Man had given this man all this power just to serve as a
distraction from what he and his colleagues had been doing – stuff that actually
matters.
Mulder and
Scully had many beliefs but they were universal – truth, justice, holding the
powerful accountable. They worked for the government but they knew all too well
that the system was corrupt and filled with evil people and that they had to be
brought into the light. I have to think that the scandals involving the
Fitzgerald Grant administration, as big as they might seem to everybody in the
cast, would never have amounted to a hill of beans for them because when you’re
trying to stop aliens from taking over the world, the workings of the White
House are very small indeed. Even the biggest deals – the stolen elections, the
assassination of world leaders, who eventually becomes President – are the kinds
of things that Mulder and Scully might be interested in, but they knew first
hand that they were irrelevant to the real battles, mainly because they knew
that none of these publicly powerful figures really had any power.
And Scandal knew
that too. The show was supposed to be revelatory as to what was going on behind
the scenes in Washington when all it really cared about what was going on in the
bedrooms of these powerful people. Not a single powerful person in DC – neither
Fitzgerald Grant as President, Mellie Grant who wanted to be President, not
Cyrus Beene who spent seven years wanted to be in power, not either of the
Popes who had power of these people – wanted the power to do anything with it.
Not anything good or bad, anything. They wanted power just for the sake
of having it.
I’m reminded of the
first time Mulder confronted the Smoking Man in his apartment in ‘One Breath’. He’s
in an apartment, crushing butts into an ashtray when Mulder sticks a gun in his
face. CSM barely blinks. “Look at me. No family. A little power. I’m in the
game because I believe what I’m doing is right…If the world knew what I knew, it
would all fall apart.” To be clear, this
is the series greatest villain and he’s a huge liar but there is more sincerity
in his cause than we see any single character utter in the entire seven seasons
of Scandal. At his core he believes in his cause as much as Mulder and Scully
believe in theirs. There’s something almost admirable in that.
That is the
final reason that Scandal is not merely derivative but vastly inferior
to The X-Files. For all the confusion of the conspiracy, for all of the
ridiculousness of the storylines, for all of the unspeakable voiceovers and
purple prose, you could never walk away from the show without the certainty
that there was some purpose behind the characters actions. That was one of the
catchphrase we saw in the Pilot after all: ‘I Want to Believe’. All of the
action the characters in Scandal was endless, pointless manipulations
for bunch of people who had all the power, were willing to take people’s life off
the board to keep it but didn’t really believe in anything or anybody. Mulder
and Scully were also willing to believe in each other and would die for each
other. There was far more sex in any single episode of Scandal than the
entire series of X-Files but no one had that level of devotion and they
certainly were willing to throw it away for a little more power.
There are
multiple endings for The X-Files (the original; the second movie; and
the revival) but all are infinitely more rewarding than any idea we got from Scandal.
In Scandal, the only truly good person has been murdered by the
villain, who has been forced to resign from office but will not be formally
punished. B613 is in the public circle but it’s been exposed and destroyed so
many times there’s no evidence anything will change. Olivia Pope is considered
a national heroine decades later but that’s cold comfort for a country forced
to face what we’ve just learned.
All of the major
endings of The X-Files essentially have a variation on the same theme:
Mulder and Scully are together, and they will always have each other. The
circumstances vary in direness but the government conspiracy is still out there
and the alien invasion may still happen, and there is no evidence they can stop
it. But there’s still something infinitely more optimistic because its
humanistic. The world may be crumbling and everything is hopeless, but our
heroes still have each other and are still going to fight. All of these
endings, regardless of the quality of the source, are still more comforting and
optimistic than Scandal’s. The last, that takes place in D.C, has a similar
level of comfort (though I won’t reveal the circumstances as I may get to it in
a later article) that is lacking in Scandal. Mulder and Scully may have
lost everything but they still have each other and they’re still fighting and
as long as the two of them are out there searching for the truth there’s hope
for the world. Their D.C. isn’t in the same universe as the one that Olivia Pope
lives in and it might be far more frightening but it’s still one that has infinitely
more hope for the future.
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