Any shortlist
of the greatest showrunners of this century has to have Vince Gilligan on it.
It is not just because he created two of the greatest series of all time – Breaking
Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul - but because in an era where the series
finale matters more than it ever did, Gilligan and his writers managed to stick
the landing not once, but twice. Its not
just that for many viewers the series’ finales for both shows are clearly among
the best in history but because the entire final season for both shows led up
to it perfectly every step of the way. With the exception of David Simon, who
managed to perfectly close out not only The Wire but his follow-up HBO
series Treme and The Deuce I don’t know of any showrunner who has
that great a track record.
As I’ve
mentioned in an earlier entry Gilligan cut his teeth working for The X-Files
writing his first script in 1995, becoming a staff writer in Season 4 and staying
with the series until the final season. Only his colleague Frank Spotnitz, who
also joined the series in Season 2, stayed with the show for nearly as long and
anyone who looks at Gilligan’s writing over the course of the series knows that
he was not only the superior but far more consistent writer. Gilligan wrote or
collaborated on 30 different episodes and the majority of the episodes he wrote
were among the greatest in series’ history.
Like Darin
Morgan, Gilligan was the great comic genius of The X-Files but while
both were brilliant satiric writers, Gilligan’s scripts had a different kind of
humor than Morgan’s. Morgan’s satiric style was meta and had a much darker humor
to it: as much as one laughs at Clyde Bruckman and Jose Chung, there’s a
melancholy tone along with so many of the great jokes. Gilligan is essentially
a more optimistic writer not only then Morgan but overall. And Gilligan didn’t have
an outsiders look; he wanted to joke at it from within.
We see this in
some of the greatest comic episodes he wrote over the years; not just Small
Potatoes which looks at our great hero Mulder and shows that he himself is
something of a loser, but other superb gems over the years. Among his crowning
achievements were two masterpieces in Season 5: Bad Blood in which he radically
reinvents the format of the show to see how Mulder and Scully see each other
and Folie A Deux, which shows that Mulder and Scully are soulmates, because
they have a common insanity. Gilligan
also had a gift of creating some of the most human monsters-of-the-week of the
entire canon, some of which make you wonder about just so much of what Mulder
and Scully doing. In Bad Blood, Mulder and Scully discover what seems to be an
entire small town of vampires and learn through the wonderful sheriff (Luke
Wilson) that the vampires are average citizens who don’t want to be spotted. “We
pay our taxes,” Wilson’s character says at one point. Gilligan had a gift with
so many of his monsters to make their superhuman abilities actually make them
more ordinary. This led to the inevitable conclusion in Season 7’ masterpiece
Hungry which took place entirely from the perspective of the monster and went
out of its way to make Mulder looking like a man toying with his prey to the
point he almost seemed a villain.
When the series
began its decline in the seventh season Gilligan was the only writer on the
show still capable of turning out masterpieces on a regular basis. During
Season 7, he not only wrote the exceptional Hungry but the wonderful X-Cops
which found Mulder and Scully interacting with the Fox hit series. Filmed entirely on video and playing like an actual
episode of the series it was one of the comic highpoints of the entire show:
not only because it showed Mulder eager to have an X-File play out on live TV
but because it showed the bold and fearless Scully understandably terrified
that her eager partner was going to embarrass them on TV - and seemed incredibly reluctant to ever
appear on camera.
It remains unclear
if Season 7 was going to be the last one when it was being filmed but Gilligan
may have very well thought it would. Writing what many thought at the time
would be the penultimate episode of the series Gilligan also got to realize his
dream of making his directorial debut. And if it was going to be the final
monster of the week, Gilligan pulled out the stops.
Je Souhaite
deals with Mulder and Scully investigating a series of ‘crimes’ by the Stokes’s
brothers, played by those brilliant comic geniuses Kevin Weisman and Will Sasso.
(Weisman was a year out of becoming famous for his work on Alias; Sasso
had become one of the breakout sensations of the late night comedy MAD TV.)
Gilligan usually
treats most of the characters in his stories wit respect and love, even the
monsters, but with the Stokes brothers he goes out of his way to show them as
among the dumbest people possible. The gimmick of the episode is that Anson
discovered a genie in a rug and has become its master. He is granted three
wishes and its clear he is incapable of making good ones. His second wish is for
a giant boat but because he didn’t specify it was in the ocean, it’s parked
outside his house. There’s also the fact
his brother Leslie is in a wheelchair, thanks to an accident of stupidity years
earlier. The genie suggested to Anson what the right thing to do is – but neither
Anson nor Leslie seem able to see the logic.
Anson’s third wish
involves something that should bring money. The genie (Paula Sorge) makes
sardonic suggestions he might want to wish for intelligence or talent and Anson
thinks he should wish for a money machine. Finally he asks to turn invisible at
will. The genie rolls her eyes, tells him his wish is breathtaking in its
unoriginality, but grants it. Anson walks out on to the street turns invisible –
and is promptly flattened by a truck when he sets his eyes on a pretty girl.
The body turns
up at the morgue – and Scully’s eyes practically bug out as she first realizes
that its invisible and then seems genuinely in awe. (When she puts the body back in the freezer,
she says ‘Bye’ in a girlish fashion. By this point Mulder has come to realize
the Stokes brothers have found a genie and this genie has a long history. Using
the national archives he finds images of the genie with Mussolini and Richard
Nixon. (That would explain a lot.) Mulder goes to see Leslie, who is
still staggering – and has to hear the theme to I Dream of Jeannie to know what
a genie is.
Leslie then
gets the rug back and once again the genie suggests the obvious. Leslie considers
this. “Oh, a solid gold wheelchair.” His first wish is to ask for his brother
to come back from the dead. By this time Scully has called in a bunch of
scientists to see her discovery – and her face falls flat when she finds the
compartment empty.
It has now
become very clear that bring Anson back from the dead was a horrible idea, and Anson
makes it very clear. Leslie has just figured out to wish for ‘legs’ – just as
Anson lights a match to explode the gas in the trailer, blowing both him and
his brother up to kingdom come.
Mulder and
Scully now find themselves with the genie, who seems remarkably non-plussed to
see them. She’s been a genie for more than five hundred years and she is
appropriately cynical, saying that mankind has not changed for five hundred
years. “They always make the wrong wish,” she says. They are about to move on
when the genie tells Mulder that since he unrolled the rug he gets three
wishes.
Mulder wants to
do the right thing – he wants to make a selfless, completely
free-of-obligations wish. (Considering everything he’s gone through the past
seven years; you might think he’d want the conspiracy explained to him but that’s
never been Gilligan’s style anyway.) So he wishes for peace on earth. The genie
grants it. Immediately after it happens, Mulder’s face falls. He runs outside –
and finds that the streets are empty of people. “I should have known you’d do
this!” he shouts, running to the Bureau. Naturally his next wish is to reverse
the first wish and he begins to lecture the genie – right as Skinner reappears.
In the final
minutes Mulder is in the middle of writing out the details for what he believes
the perfect wish will be. Scully shows up in his office. “You don’t remember
disappearing for about an hour earlier today?” Mulder asks Scully. Scully doesn’t.
Mulder tells
Scully what’s he planning to do – make the kind of wish that will make the
world a perfect place. Scully tells him if you do that, what is the point of
our everyday existence? Now this seems to go against the nature of so much of
the series message, particularly the mythology, but Gilligan has a bigger point
that argues that at the end of the day The X-Files was never about
solving the big problems but the relationship we’d found with the characters we
love. Mulder listens turns off the computer and makes his final wish.
In the final scene
Mulder and Scully are about to watch Caddyshack. (“I can’t believe you’ve
never seen that,” he tells her.) He mentions to Scully that: “I don’t know if
you noticed, but I never made the world a happier place,” he tells her. “Well,
I’m happy,” Scully says. “That should count for something. What was your third
wish?” she asked. Mulder smiles.
In the final
scene we see the genie drinking a coffee and with the mark of the djinn gone.
There’s a smile on her face we haven’t seen the entire episode. Someone finally
made the right wish.
The episode is,
as one reviewer called it, “a note of perfect bliss” and had it been the final
monster of the week, it would have a great triumph for the series. Then of
course came Requiem – and the decision was made to keep the show going.
Gilligan’s role
in the final two seasons of the series was significantly smaller; during Season
8 The Lone Gunmen spinoff which had been a development hell for years
was finally greenlit by Fox and he took on the role of showrunner. He only
wrote one script for season 8 but it was a gem: ‘Roadrunners’, a brilliant
piece of body horror where a cult in a small desert town worship a slug as God
and have a habit of stoning people to death for the next host. Scully ends up
discovering the town, becomes a prisoner and becomes a host.
The show is one
of the great works of horror for the series and Gillian Anderson gives one of
her best performances of the final two seasons in it, playing someone desperately
lost and increasingly aware of how trapped she is.
When The
Lone Gunmen died a quick death Gilligan returned for Season 9. Gilligan
wrote two solo scripts and one shared credit. The shared credit ‘Jump The Shark’
revisited The Lone Gunmen after their series ended and is considered one of the
worst episodes in the series. However John Doe, an episode where John Doggett
(Robert Patrick) wakes up with amnesia in a town in Mexico is one of the classics
of the final seasons, a brilliantly dark scripted series where Doggett has to
realize his identity – by learning that his young son is dead. Patrick gives
one of his best performances in the series.
By the time
that episode aired it was known the series was cancelled. Gilligan was once
again allowed to write and direct what was definitely going to be the last
monster of the week episode. Sunshine Days was not quite at the level of Je Souhaite
but it had a level of brilliant meta commentary, great humor and once again
gave a clear message as to what The X-Files had really been about.
Doggett and Reyes
are called into investigating a strange death of a young man who died in what the
neighborhood called ‘The Brady Bunch house’. These two young men (one of them
played by David Faustino) are flown through the air in telekinesis and killed.
The owner of
the house is known as an Oliver Martin (Michael Emerson cast very against type from
the kind of character he has played basically his entire career on TV.)Reyes does
some research – on a Brady Bunch website – and finds out this is the name of ‘Cousin
Oliver’, the character who was written on The Brady Bunch in the final
season.
Gilligan has
never done anything quite so meta in his career. This is the story of a man
fixated on a popular TV show, so lonely he derives comfort from its presence
around him.(He constantly recreates the family in the house.) He’s taken on the
identity of a forgotten late edition to the cast when it was nearing
cancellation. (Again Reyes is the one to figure it out, which is meta.) And the
dilemma he faces is whether he can find a way to live without it, because a
constant exposure to the fantasy is killing him.
Oliver as a
child possessed a kind of psychokinesis that enables his thoughts to become
reality. Scully learns about this and mentions that they need to find proof. “I’ve
investigated 200 cases” she tells Doggett and Reyes – the exact number of
episodes.
What’s
particularly remarkable about Gilligan’s work on The X-Files – particularly
for the man who created Walter White – is that at his core he was a humanist
who sees there are always more important things to care about then government
conspiracies. This stands in contrast to the series finale where Mulder chooses
to sacrifice his happiness with Scully to uncover the same truth he’s been chasing
all his life. By contrast Gilligan argues all of this is bunk.
Scully finally
gets the proof she’s been searching for all her life. She’s planning to get a Nobel
Prize. Witnessing it Skinner says joyously: “With this, The X-Files can go on
forever!” And then as Oliver begins to decline physically because of his use of
the power, they face a darker question.
Doggett
realizes the truth. He talks to the doctor who first observed Oliver (John
Aylward) who tells him that he spent weeks with him but the longer he stayed
the more his power diminished. The doctor realizes why. “For the first time in
his life, he was happy.” Doggett realizes that the way keep Martin alive is for
the doctor to keep being his surrogate father. In the final scene he agrees to
do so – on the condition he never uses his power again.
Scully walks
away from this not dismayed but happy. One of the final scenes shows that
Doggett is started to enjoy these cases and that Scully has finally learned her
lesson
Gilligan also
takes a shot at the mythology in this storyline. Oliver has the ability to make
objects float, he’s the kid who can change the world – in other words, this is exactly
everything we’ve been dealing with Baby William all season. Gilligan’s solution
is to show that love matters to keep a child safe – William, by contrast, was
injected with a bit of metal (that didn’t even work, according to the revival.)
Sunshine Days
is nowhere near the level of Je Souhaite or indeed Gilligan’s best work (he did
set the bar very high) But in both of those scripts Gilligan demonstrated that the
best way to end a series like The X-Files was not with a huge
information dump or revelations about a conspiracy but to remind us that it was
about the journey you took and the people you met along the way. (This is close
to the ending Gilligan would give us for Better Call Saul, if not Breaking
Bad.)
When the series
was revived in 2016 and again in 2018 Gilligan wasn’t among the former writers
to return to The X-Files. (To be fair, he was very busy at the time.)
But I honestly don’t think he needed to come back to the show, though it would
have been nice if he had. Gilligan had made his point about what The X-Files
was really about in what might have been the penultimate episode and the
actual penultimate episode. And honestly given how the revival played out, there’s
a good chance given the final episodes that Gilligan’s message, if not the execution,
finally registered with Carter and his colleagues. What more did he need to
say?
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