The Sixth Season Debunked
Kind of like remembering the 60's, if you think you understand the X Files
mythology then you probably haven't been watching the show closely enough.
This world of illusion is so complicated and often at variance with itself
that even as it red-herringed and full-disclosured its way through another
breath-holding shipper-tormenting season we were left with more conundrum
than elucidation. The show's propensity for altering events (did Scully get
the crucifix for Christmas or her birthday? What did Mulder actually witness
when his sister was snatched?) and for cancelling itself out (green blood
ceasing to be toxic; the invisible 'Fallen Angel'/'Fearful Symmetry' aliens)
adds to its confusion.Sometimes that garbled sense of rival colonizers, parking garage tussles,
genetic cataloguing, interred saucers, Texan apiaries, Krycek, aliens and
oiliens starts to meld into some kind of coherence, only to crumble as
Carter admits that he's just been making it up as he goes along. One has to
appreciate that spontaneity; after all, we love the X Files for its raw
dazzle and surprise, its foreshadowed horrors and morbid truths; yet our
earthbound senses cling to more equalizing standards of reality.Seeking consistency, we adhere to perceived invariables, like the office,
their apartments, and Mulder and Scully themselves. Around these constants,
day shifts into night, scars and tattoos come and go, 'Drive' and 'Triangle'
both occur on November 16th, the Red-Haired Man doesn't have red hair, and
Mulder lives on the fourth floor of a three-story building (and the DOD was
apparently spying on him from the fifth), and he suddenly has a bedroom
where before there wasn't even a door, except, for no apparent reason, in
3rd season 'Grotesque'. And how come Mulder wasn't seasick on the Queen
Anne? He sure was barfy on the Norwegian Sea. The structure of this
storytelling reflects all the ambiguities of the worlds it reveals.Day interchanges with night so commonly on the X Files that after awhile I
began to be charmed by it. To name a few eps in which this takes place -
'Nisei', 'Anasazi', 'Triangle', 'WOTC', 'Talitha Cumi', 'Alpha', and, very
blatantly, in the Movie. (Scully has a hearing at 11am, afterwards she shows
up at Mulder's apartment, bright sunshine outside, they horse around in the
hall for a few minutes, then the ambulance comes and suddenly it's pitch
dark outside.)So...we had a fictional psychic surgeon, carnivorous magic mushrooms, bogus
raindancers, landfill tulpas, a body-jumping Wanshang Dhole, sea monsters in
the sewers, grab-assing over tofu ice cream, and a devil who just wanted a
normal life. We were dragged through dreams and fictions, ghost tricks,
hallucinations, and wrinkles in time, and then expected to forget it ever
happened. It's the illusion that is television, that is Mulder's mind, that
is Christmas Eve in a haunted house. Death comes for you, then takes
another. Even our genesis is in question when we watch this show."Mulder, none of that really happened out there tonight - that was all in
our heads, right?"The sixth season emphasized this discrepant world, it was the season that
didn't happen. As Scully said in 'Dreamland II', "It's all about random
moments in time, about a series of variables approaching an event
horizon..." It's about Scully holding ghosts at gunpoint, and Mulder
shooting Skinner just on the Mulderleap that they're still shrooming. It's
about Scully holding Mulder as he bleeds to death, and about Mulder
abducting an alien. Scully even hallucinated a major Mulderditch: "Mulder!
Why the hell did you leave North Carolina without telling me?" (Field Trip)In the same ambiguous vein, the Consortium got zapped, but did it really?
Big cheeses such as Strughold and the CSM are still kicking. Even the
Well-Manicured Man is rumored to be alive. A few key informants still exist.
And what of Gibson Praise?Regardless of who survived, a world event was going down at El Rico Air
Force Base, and our usually punctual agents were late, late as the white
rabbit, they were down at the Potomac Yards smashing up a Bureau car. Scully
flipped a cool U-ey. Her little feet reached the pedals a number of times
this season. Mulder flipped a J-turn in 'Agua Mala', and he drag-raced with
the devil in 'Terms of Endearment'. He must have been wishing for cruise
control that long night driving west in Walter R. Duncan's '68 Caprice
Stationwagon.Mulder's financial state, which he had hinted at in 'Never Again' finally
came to light this year. He owed $4,386 at the end of 'Drive' (billed to
Scully), which may have explained why he was worried about bouncing a check
in 'Monday'; why he was cited for poor tipping in 'The Unnatural' and why he
complained about his 'obscenely' overdue XXX bill and the fact that his date
with Scully was costing him ten bucks an hour. Good thing Gogolak didn't
make good on his promise to usurp his paychecks.It was nice to see the odd sprinkling of things that pass for tradition on
the X Files: SREs and Mulder getting his door kicked in; Scully falling
asleep on the job; Mulder losing his cellphone; Scully barging into
emergency rooms yelling and taking over; Mulder getting into a fight in a
hospital parking garage, Mulder pulling a gun on the Smoking Man. Scully
forewent the usual Left Temple Graze in favor of two different gunshot
wounds to the abdomen and a Toomsish attempt at having her heart ripped out.
Mulder drowned, time-warped, body-jumped, drove, and was shot every day for
weeks. He picked locks, shot hoops, and threw pencils at the ceiling. He
caved under background-checkin' ennui and ripped the sleeves off his
sweatshirt again. He paraphrased a line from 'Jaws' in 'The Beginning' about
her needing an alien to come up and bite her in the ass... He got his
kitchen retiled and a peephole put in his door. We discovered some new
things about Mulder - he talks to people on the internet, he likes salsa, he
used to have a dog. We learned not to call Scully 'Red' or 'Danes' or
'Baby', but that Mulder can get away with calling her 'homegirl' or
'honeybunch'. The apartment location confusion caused by The Movie was
cleared up (Scully's file in 'Tithonus' says she's still in Annapolis) but
great license was taken with the layout of Mulder's flat in 'Milagro',
requiring us to once again suspend belief in order for the story to be told.The X Files is a story seen from the alternating angles of two different
minds, the essential recipe being diverse experiences of the same thing,
delightfully parodied in 'Bad Blood'. This twin-consciousness is couched in
inconclusive endings and nebulous moments when the screen gets dark. That's
when you begin to see that the shifting floor plan of Mulder's apartment
ceases to matter in the larger context of storytelling.Deciding what is real on the X Files is a matter of individual prerogative,
much as Mulder and Scully separately decide what they'll each accept as fact
in a given case. There have been times when the X Files has directly mocked
us for how real we let this world become, as when the cockroach walks over
the camera lens in 'Coprophages'. Moments like this also implicate us more
directly. After six years we've fallen very deeply down the rabbit hole,
and, as Mulder has noted, 'up is down and black is white'. By this point
even that X Files spoof on Sesame Street makes me giddy. But Duchovny
validated my existence as an X Phile when he wrote 'that which fascinates us
is by definition true'. We have spent these six years re-examining the world
in which we live, learning to accept the way boundaries and explanations
shift, and the way mysteries unfold.