|
|
The X-Files
Trust No 1
air date: 01-06-02The New Year can be a time of great opportunity. Some might use it to make a fresh start. Even though The X-Files has an even more confusing than usual conspiracy thread running, from the commercials we could hope that Carter and Spotnitz were planning to tie it into the old one and maybe, just maybe, shed light on the whole thing.
What gave us this hope was the appearance of Terry O'Quinn (sorry, now it's Terrance Quinn), he who had lent life to Millennium as a recurring baddie, and appeared in Fight The Future.
If he was showing up, and if he was playing his film character, the unreasonable belief sprouted in my heart that it all has something to do with alien clones…which would have something to do aliens wanting Scully's baby…which has something to do with super-soldiers…which has something to do with Man-Thing's origin. Okay, so that was one step too far.
Instead of wrapping things up, this episode tries to ham-handedly center around the one character we know we can never see again: Mulder. And even then the thought arose, "Clooney made an unannounced cameo on er once…maybe Duchovny will be here…"
What fools we mortals be.
The episode begins with Scully's voice over a montage of images from the episode to come. She reads a letter to her son William in which all the pent-up unspoken passion and romance of the previous seasons spills over into a pool of ridiculousness. But then, the actual heat of the Mulder/Scully relationship seems retconned; it exists because now the writers say it does.
Someone has contacted the FBI, dangling the bait that they possess the names of the super-soldiers. The catch is, they will only give the information to Mulder.
Immediately this sends Doggett into a tizzy, haranguing Scully to let Mulder know. She says she won't even though all she wants is to be in Mulder's strong arms again; Doggett urges her to go ahead because he wants her to be with her true love, too. Except that a couple of episodes ago it was intimated that Doggett has a crush on Scully, though in a later episode he seemed to be intimate with Reyes who has been intimate with Fulmer. It's worse than Friends.
Of course when you say you cannot bring the father of your child into mortal danger, you have to back that statement up by contacting him and telling him to come into mortal danger.
It's not the only out of character moment. Think about it. Would a man with an e-mail address of Trustno1 freely engage in internet exchanges with a woman whose address has been provided by Microsoft? Thankfully, Scully takes the extra security precaution of only checking her e-mail at an internet café and later inviting a woman she encounters there to spend the night.
Once the new deep throat has been contacted in a very labyrinthine manner, Doggett completely changes his mind. Though he vocalizes almost every objection the viewer has to have with the logic of this episode, he fails to mention that he's the one who brought it all up in the first place.
As for Reyes, she looks concerned. A lot.
Of course it's all a trap. The source ends up being a super-soldier himself, chasing Mulder's stunt double off a train and through a quarry, only to be undone by a fatal flaw. It seems that if you're a super-soldier, you can neither take One A Day vitamins or play with Magnadoodle.
There were many more elements insulting to the viewer's intelligence, but others can (and will) point them out to you. In the end, we got cheated worse than last year when episodes would qualify as having Mulder in them when he would only appear in a minute-long flashback.
Stop toying with us and just kill him. At least that would be something new. Oh, wait. They sort of did that last year, too.
