Read This Thought
Remember when humor on the X Files was restricted to Mulder's blase
one-liners and Scully's glances of disapproval?Back in those days, the wacky story lines, hokey opening credits and buckets
of slime were amusement enough. Then Darin Morgan donned the Flukey suit and sat down to pen 'Humbug'. That script still blows me away with its eclectic
melange of perspectives and voices, the curious glimpses into the universe
at large, the exploration of what it means to be a normal freak, or maybe
just freakily normal. 'Just because a man was once afflicted with excessive
hairiness, we've no reason to suspect him of aberrant behaviour.' Morgan,
chronically unemployed until he hit the X Files, went on to write 'Clyde
Bruckman's Final Repose'; War of the Coprophages', and 'Jose Chung's 'From
Outer Space', all brilliant for their dark humor and separate trains of
thought. 'Clyde Bruckman', for instance, was written while he was feeling
'suicidal'; and 'Jose Chung' has that wonderful last line: 'For although we
may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways on this planet,
we are all alone.' (In a twist, Jose Chung himself was killed off on
'Millennium'.)His early retirement from the pressures of show biz have been lamented not
only by us, but by the XF staff as well. 'Where in the hell is Darin
Morgan?' reads the headline on a magazine in 'Musings of a CSM'; and the
scruffy title character of 'D.P.O.' was lovingly named for him.Although he hasn't scribed an X File in years, Morgan did come out of hiding
to play the bane of Scully's existence Eddie Van Blundht in the fourth
season, with perennial loser aplomb befitting the person who single-handedly
invented the gallows humor genre that is X Files comedy. All subsequent
humorous episodes have owed their flavor to him - from 'Dreamland' to 'Bad
Blood', from moments like Scully stuffing a doll in a microwave to Mulder
afraid of a giant bug. Mulder gave us the genius of Scully's embarrassment
over starring in a fakey alien-autopsy video; the whole zen poser of
auto-erotic asphyxiation; Queequeg; Bambi; and the eternal question of what
it means to be alive on this planet.
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