Sunday February 13th 2000 was a
significant night in the history of two very different TV shows. I happen to
remember that night very vividly because of it.
Earlier that year it had been announced that Homicide,
which had been cancelled the previous May, was going to wrap up every story
it had with a two-hour TV movie that February. I'd been eagerly anticipating
that since January. However I quickly learned it was about to come into
conflict with my other major TV obsession The X-Files.
The show was in its seventh season, and it was
widely believed by critics and viewers this was going to be the final one. A
large part of that reason was because it had been announced that February –
then a critical sweeps month – the show was going to reveal once and for all,
what happened to Samantha, Mulder's sister whose abduction was still the
foundation for why Mulder had opened the X-Files all those years ago. A
two-parter had been announced – and the second part was going to air at 9pm on
February 13th.
At the risk of boring those readers over thirty,
I need to remind the rest of us what television was like in 2000. It's not just
that there was no streaming, it's that DVDs had only recently been invented and
only very slowly were TV shows starting to release their shows on DVD. Netflix
was still several years down the road, so you had to go to your nearest
blockbuster to rent them and even then, it was still only recent TV shows.
Syndication existed for television but by now the only way you could find certain
series was on cable and there was no guarantee your service would carry the
network. FX had been carrying The X-Files since 1997 but Time Warner, my
cable service, wouldn't start carrying it until 2001. And with no guarantee
that a network would even rerun certain episodes in the summertime, back then
you either had to be there when a show aired or be one of those people who
could program a VCR – which I couldn't do. And no one had heard of DVRs or even
TiVo in 2000.
I was lucky that my house had two TVs both hooked
up to VCRs. And at that point in my viewing career I was a big believer
in recording every episode possible of series I loved, even if they were in
syndication because that was the only way in the 1990s to have a record of them
at all. Full disclosure: I'd already recorded almost every episode of Homicide,
either on NBC or cable and later on would do the same thing with almost
every episode of The X-Files in the years to come. I would do the same
with the overwhelming majority of TV shows I loved even after the DVD
revolution and streaming arrived. (This was a good decision for a few shows
over the years, but more about that in a different article.)
All of which meant which show was going to watch
that Sunday live. It wasn't a hard question. I recorded and watched Homicide:
The Movie and the following day I would end up watching the episode that I
later learned was called 'Closure'.
It's been 25 years since that fateful night and I
have never regretted that decision. And the more I think about it, there's a
bitter irony in how Chris Carter chose to title that episode that I've never
gotten over. In hindsight this may have been the point in my watching The
X-Files when I mentally gave up on the idea the show was ever going to
resolve any aspect of its storyline. I'd been clinging desperately through five
and a half seasons no matter how much the mytharc frayed and how confusing it
got, to the idea that there was a grand plan to everything and that Carter knew
would give us the answers. I have the excuse of being relatively young when I
watched the show (I was only a teenager during its original run) and had
perhaps a certain innocence about how I viewed TV that viewers who were older
at the time just don't. The show had after all begun because Mulder wanted to
find out what happened to Samantha and while the conspiracy had wobbled in many
places, the show was very clear that Samantha was vital to it. I really
believed at the very least Carter wasn't going to bumble that.
According to both Wanting to Believe and Monster
of the Week are willing to acknowledge that Closure is a flawed episode
that only works if you're willing to discard all of the plot threads that have
been going on about Samantha for seven seasons and be willing to emotionally
connect with it. Now I will concede this was something I was more than willing
to go along with for other, more controversial mythology shows over the years
with Lost being the most obvious example. But the critical difference is
with all of those shows, they were the series finale and I was more willing to
be forgiving for that. It's a bigger deal when the show decides that it's going
to wrap up its biggest mystery halfway through what we all think is its final
season – and then decides to keep the clock running, first for two more
seasons, then another movie and two more revival seasons.
Monster tries
to argue that Samantha's abduction hasn't really mattered as much to the
series since Scully was taken back in
Season 2. They're on firmer ground on that merit: the stories that focused on
what happened to Scully in the aftermath of her abduction were always more
dramatically compelling then the stories we got involving the clones of
Samantha Mulder that were parallel to it. And it didn't help matters that
Carter and the other writers kept zigging and zagging on what Samantha's
ultimate fate was from season to season. As Shearman puts it eloquently in his
review of 'Closure' :
"Abducted by aliens, murdered by serial
killers or living in the suburbs somewhere, they've all been served up as
truth, then invalidated, then served up as truth again. And it's a mark of what
happens to any series which relies on big mysteries for its appeal gets
extended beyond its natural life, that whatever conclusions it draws can only
be an anticlimax."
Shearman then gives examples of previous
mythology series such as Twin Peak and the British Life on Mars (the
revival of the former was still unheard of in 2009). Contemporary viewers can
use whatever fantasy-sci-fi series they want as their model – the remake of Battlestar
Galactica, Lost (I don't agree with that) Westworld, Game of Thrones,
Supernatural. It may happen with Stranger Things – time will tell.
And I can't really argue with it. Why then does what happened with Samantha
Mulder still stick in my craw twenty-five years later in a way that so many of
these other series I've been able to move on from?
I think it bothers me for the same reason that
the mythology essentially erased Emily from Scully's story after Season 5. As I
mentioned in my article on that two parter,
the show had always been more successful in the mythology when it made
not about aliens or government conspiracies but how it affected our two heroes
personally. Emily was a human representative of everything the conspiracy had
taken from Scully – and after she died the show never dealt with her again. I
found that offensive.
Monster acknowledges
that in many ways its only the hope of finding out what happened to Samantha
that redeems Mulder in many ways. As they say at one point:
"Without Samantha's abduction motivating
Mulder, the show would be much less powerful. The mythology episodes would come
to feel more and more poorly motivated and eventually you'd start to wonder how
Mulder could believe in any of this bullshit. (Author's Note: This is, for the record, exactly
what happened to the show when they removed Samantha from it.) Thinking that
he might find Samantha at the end of everything is occasionally the only thing
that makes him a sympathetic character. His paranoia has destroyed so many
innocent lives – including, arguably, his own – that we need to believe he's on
the right track, need to understand he's chasing a massive, global conspiracy…"
That is something they write for a Season 4
episode. The fact that both authors then turn around and try to argue Closure
works for the reason I listed above three
years later is one of the few points in
their book that I truly think they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They seem to be unaware of the contradiction in their writing for one of the
very few times in their book.
And considering that the one common thread
through the mythology since Season 2 has been that Samantha is vital the
conspiracy in some way – and that as recently as One Son the Smoking Man
himself said that she was alive and well and Mulder would see her again –
strikes me as a clear sign that the writers really didn't care how much they
were contradicting themselves by the time they got to Season 7. And what makes
all the more frustrating is that the episode that leads into it is not only one
of the few masterpieces of a deeply sluggish and flawed season but had the
potential to be an ever greater one were it not for what came the next week.
Sein Und Zeit is one of the few unvarnished
masterpieces of the season. The show's cold open sets up the disappearance of
Amber Lynn LaPierre, with her parents putting her to bed but not before having
a vision of her dead. The father finds himself watching television, the mother
is writing a note that she has no memory of. Then the father sees a pool of
blood under the door and knocks it down. His daughter is gone.
The story is quickly set up to be a parallel of
the disappearance and murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, then just three years in the
past. It is one of the most darkly cynical stories the show has ever done. The
parents are immediately held suspect and a TV attorney comes to 'assist them'
Just before Mulder demands to be put on the case Skinner tells him the other
agents have started a pool, betting she'll be found dead. Mulder demands to be
put on so he will ask all the right questions – and from the start, he asks all
the wrong ones.
What makes Sein Und Zeit work so well is that, if
the teasers hadn't given away that during the next two-parters we would learn
the fate of Samantha, it could stand well on its own. Indeed its not until
Mulder uses the work 'abducted' in a press conference that Scully actually
brings it up and Mulder shoots it down. "My sister was abducted by aliens.
Did I say anything about aliens?"
Mulder counters. Indeed The X-Files has made it clear in quite a
few other monster-of-the-week's that have nothing to do with the mythology that
not every Mulder says or does is about his sister. Indeed after Scully calls
him on this, he points out a ransom note that has a reference to Santa Claus
from 1987. He makes a connection between the LaPierre's and a woman named Kathy
Lee Tencate who was convicted of killing her young son after a ransom note with
the same reference was there. She claimed her innocence of the crime for years
and only agreed to do so in order to be eligible for parole – another note of
the darkness of this story. Syre enough later that night Tencate sees a vision
of her child and she tells the LaPierre's that Amber Lynn disappeared because
of a supernatural force and that they will find her.
None of this makes the FBI happy. Skinner is
certain the LaPierre's are guilty and that Mulder just handed them 'the Twinkie
Defense'. Then in the midst of this Scully calls Fox and tells him that his
mother is dead.
Teena called her son before the case and said she
wanted to talk to him. It's worth noting Teena Mulder in her few appearances on
the show seems to have spent her entire life in denial about her husband's
involves in her daughter's death – and her own relationship with the Cancer
Man. (This season seems to confirm that Smoking Man is Fox's father as canon
but it won't officially verify it until Season 9.) Before she died she left a
message on Fox's answering machine and we see her burning her daughter's picture.
It's an apparent suicide but the son doesn't buy it for a minute and neither
does the viewer. It's only after Mulder emotionally blackmails Scully into
doing the autopsy on Teena that he learns the truth.
Mulder is convinced that this is the answer to
his questions though it's here things begin to slip. He's convinced his mother
wrote a note like this herself one day.
"Don't you see Scully? It never happened.
All these visions I've had have been to help me cope, to help me deal with my
loss. But I've been looking for mu sister in the wrong place. That was what my
mother was trying to tell me. That was what she was trying to warn me about.
That's why they killed her."
This monologue works because Duchovny – who for
the first half of the season has really looked like he was doing the bare
minimum – plays it as a man in frantic
denial and near mania. He's always done his best work when episodes involving
Samantha were involved but here he plays it as someone who needs all of this be
true. So when Scully tells him that Teena did kill herself, that she was
dying of a horrible terminal illness, he finally breaks down and cries. We've
never seen Mulder in this much despair before.
The next day Skinner gently tells Mulder and
Scully to come to California. Mrs. LaPierre says she's seen a vision of her
daughter, saying one number over. 74.
Mulder leaves with no response and it seems like
he's lost all hope. He's now convinced Amber's dead and that he has gotten to
close to the case. He actually insists Skinner take him off both the case and a
leave of absence.
It's only when they are driving to the airport
that Scully sees a sign for Highway 74 and Santa's North Pole Village. They
find a room of old film, some of it going back to the 1960s. Eventually they
chase down a man named Ed Truelove and the final image of the episode is a mass
grave holding what we will later learn to be 24 children's bodies.
This image – and the opening teaser of Closure
which shows the grim business of disinterring the corpses of Truelove's work –
are some of the most unsettling images The X-Files ever did. The problem
is that the conclusion to the episode basically chooses to cast everything
involving the previous episode aside. Truelove, we quickly learn did not kill
Amber Lynn, which makes us wonder why we bothered with this whole case to begin
with. There's also something very perverse about having the worst serial killer in the show's history
being dismissed as a footnote to move to something spiritual. That the
LaPierre's will never truly have closure for what happened and will no doubt
have to live this with for the rest of their lives is bad enough; that the
finale basically seems to have used this just to put it back on Mulder is
actually worse.
And that's far from the most obscene thing
about 'Closure', which essentially wants to discard everything the mythology
has told you about Samantha and her relationship to the conspiracy since the
Pilot basically for a kind of emotional wholeness. Mulder's regression
therapy which made him believe Samantha was taken by aliens? False memories
implanted by years of seeing sci-fi movies. The Smoking Man told Mulder in
their last conversation that Samantha was alive and that he'd see her again.
Now he tells Scully that as early as 1973 he believed she was dead. And its
worth noting his answer is all about him:
CSM: "There was so much to protect before.
But it's all gone now.
Scully: "So you just let Mulder believe that
she was alive for all these years?"
CSM: "Out of kindness, Agent Scully. Allow
him his ignorance. It's what gives him hope."
So the idea that just leaving even a clone of
Samantha somewhere any time between 1973 and when Mulder joined the Bureau
might have prevented all of this from happened never occurred to anyone in the
Syndicate?
Of course he's lying to an extent. We later learn
that Samantha was living with Jeffrey Spender, the CSM's real son and the two
of them grew up together. (Funny that Jeffrey never mentioned that to Mulder
considering that they left their hands in the cement there. ) And she was
subject to experiments and tests throughout her childhood where I guess they
got the genetic material for all the clones of her we've seen over seven
seasons. Some of which they raised to adulthood, some of which were children in
Canada. Why did they choose Samantha as apparently the center of the conspiracy
for decades? Well, the Syndicate's burned to a crisp so I guess it doesn't
matter.
But of course that's not important because we
finally learn the fate of Samantha. She got to a hospital in 1979, where an ER
nurse signed her in and the conspiracy tracked her down. The nurse had a vision
of her dead, then CSM showed up and Samantha vanished into starlight.
This is the kind of convoluted theory that Scully
would have no trouble poking holes in a hundred times over but there is no
point that her usual skepticism is in play. The line throughout the show that
Scully echoes is that Mulder needs closure but you really think that's she's
speaking for the writers right now directly to the fan base. "Mulder needs
to just let this go, so we're just going to throw all of our previous
continuity out the window."
And yet somehow many reviewers – Shearman in
particular – seem willing to accept it. He acknowledged the plotting makes no
sense and yet says it has such power because:
"That a series which is all about action,
and all about spinning out revelations so they can be as epic as possible, can
end Mulder's mission so gently in a dying fall. Whether the Walk-ins rescuing
children from certain death is just wish fulfillment of not, it doesn't matter
– this is a story in which Mulder doesn't catch up with his sister, or finds
her grave, or bring the people who abducted her to justice, it's a story in
which he finds peace, and lets go. It's about moving on and
acceptance."
This is where I should add that Shearman, by and
large, disliked the mythology episodes almost from their beginning in
Colony/End Game and this pretty much remains true all the way to the end of the
series. The episodes that he gives mostly positive reviews to are more about
how they reach him from the perspective of stories or how they shift the
narrative: you get the feeling he never liked the mythology at all. No one's
going to argue he doesn't have a point to that, and there's a certain logic to
preferring emotional resolution to plot.
And make no mistakes there are many things about
the episode that work extremely well. For one there's Anthony Heald in one of
the best guest performances in the series history. Usually typecast as
obnoxious figures here he gets to play the largely sympathetic role of Harold
Piller, a psychic who is the biggest connection the previous episode. He's a
police psychic who believes that the children were transported through
spiritual intervention. Mulder picks up on this from something Tencate told him
and he ends up following Piller.
It is Piller who leads Mulder to April Base where
he finds his sisters home and Samantha's diary. Through this we learn that
Harold also lost his son and he has been gifted his powers as a part of this.
He believes that if they find out what happened to Samantha, they'll find out
what happened to his son.
There are also many other superb moments, such as
Mulder reading Samantha's diary and tearing up as he reads entries to it. The
individual images of the ghosts of the children are beautiful and the scenes of
the ghostly figures played to the music of My Weakness by Moby leads to some of
the most haunting images in the show's history. I can't deny their power on all
these levels.
But at the end of the day when Mulder comes back
saying 'End of the road' I'm more inclined to be sympathetic with Pillar than
Mulder. Now I'm all for emotional closure instead of plot points. Hell I now
understand why the finale of Lost works better as emotional closure
rather than physical. (That's not the only connection which I'll make later.)
But in a series that is all about skepticism over the supernatural, we are
being asked to believe the fate of Samantha because of something that Mulder
alone saw and which he has made this final connection absent any evidence to
the contrary. Any other time Scully would be picking holes in this but I
guess she's as overcome by Mulder looking to the heavens saying: "I'm
fine. I'm free." (I guess the character who weaponized the phrase 'I'm
fine' doesn't want to throw it back at Mulder considering how many times he was
willing to swallow it when she clearly wasn't.)
I'm now inclined to think this episode happened
because it became clear at some point in 2000 that The X-Files was going
to keep going whether anyone wanted to or not. Carter's original plan for the
series, as Frank Spotnitz would later reveal, was going to be to the end the
show with Mulder finding out what happened to Samantha. The show kept growing
beyond his original plans for the vision but I suspect that was the final plan.
Duchovny's contract was up at the end of Season 7
and he'd made it clear he didn't want to come back. Anderson was signed to go
through Season 8. And while the show was no long as big a hit as it had once
been it was still drawing between 12 and fifteen million viewers a week.
Spotnitz and Carter were still uncertain if the
show was going to come back in Season 8 or not but they had to at least be
realists and know it might. Spotnitz seems to have told Carter that they had an
obligation to wrap it up before they lost Duchovny. Hence the two parter
happened.
I now want you to theorize this. What if Closure had
been the series finale for The X-Files? Would so many critics and
some viewers being willing to give it the grace it gets in a way that the actual
series finale didn't? (As I've said The Truth was terrible and we don't
bother to hide that fact.) I suspect had this been the final statement, it
would be considered as polarizing as the series finales of other mythology
based shows such as Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones and yes, Lost.
Indeed unlike the series finale of that last show Closure basically does want to tell you: "She was
dead the whole time."
The thing is, that's really the show's pattern in
the second half of its original run when it comes to closing arcs of major
characters: kill them off. They did it with the Syndicate during Season 6 and
never went back to any part of the alien rebels or that mythology. They killed
off the Bounty Hunter at the start of Season 8 and basically ended anything
resembling the colonists. Krycek was killed off ignominiously in the Season 8
finale (to be fair, he'd used up his dramatic usefulness years ago). The Lone
Gunmen were gassed to death in one of the last episodes in the series – I guess
as punishment for not watching their spinoff? It's one thing to kill off series
regulars; it's another to have their deaths basically stand in for a huge part
of the mythology you don't want to deal with any more. Samantha Mulder was
killed off in advance of her brother's departure from The X-Files. It's
pretty hard to find emotional closure from that – especially after another
feature film and two revival series.
This wasn't my final break from the series during
its original run. That came, as you might expect, during Season Eight. But I
think that this may have been the point when I gave up on the idea the show
could ever end successfully. At the time I still thought Season Seven would be
the last one but I'm pretty sure going into those final weeks I knew that there
was never going to be closure for me on the mythology, not plot-wise and not
emotion wise.
That's another reason I'm glad I watched Homicide:
The Movie live twenty five years ago. Unlike the self-titled episode the
film gave him closure both physically and emotionally on a show I'd loved for
five years. In time my readers of my articles on Homicide will know that
it did leave a couple of loose ends but it was willing to end things on a high
note. That's something I'm not sure The X-Files ever learned and in the
case of Samantha Mulder, they definitely left me cold.
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