The X-Files season finale – the fate of the world in Scully’s hands

Warning: This contains spoilers… of the numerous unanswered questions brought up in the season finale

With Monday night’s My Struggle, Part II, the X-Files revival miniseries is done. The episode teaser begins the same as My Struggle, Part I, except the narrator this time is Scully. As she tosses a series of photos depicting her X-Files history into a pile on a surgical table, she explains her evolution from skeptic and appointed X-File debunker to a believer who, while still a rational scientist, cannot ignore the facts – including the fact that she has alien DNA. After the opening credits, things start moving fast. Mulder is missing. The Truth Squad’s Tad O’Malley has sounded the alarm that virtually every American has alien DNA inside them. Hospitals are beginning to fill with military folk suffering from anthrax. When we finally see Mulder, he is badly cut and bruised from a fight, driving fast and ignoring calls from Scully and Skinner.

Agent Einstein scoffs at O’Malley’s claims and Scully’s fear that alien DNA was introduced into Americans via smallpox vaccinations and has somehow been activated to turn off everyone’s immune systems. Nonetheless, she accompanies Scully to the hospital to test the older red-headed doctor’s hypothesis. Scully meets with an unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger Agent Reyes, who has been working for the Cigarette Smoking Man for a decade. She fills Scully in on a nefarious plan to depopulate the planet via disease. CSM, the self-proclaimed “most powerful man in the world,” spared Scully from the coming pogrom by implanting her with alien DNA when she was abducted in the original series.  She is one of “the chosen elite.”

Scully returns to the hospital, where sick people crowd exam rooms and hallway floors. Even the doctors are getting too sick to work. She brings Einstein up to speed: her theory was wrong, but close. Something called the Spartan Virus was injected into people along with their smallpox vaccination. The virus has been triggered and everyone will die from diseases they’ve been inoculated against – flu, measles – or from exposure to common germs. Only the people with alien DNA will survive. The agents develop a cure – a vaccine using Scully’s alien-infused blood.

Meanwhile, an increasingly ill Mulder confronts CSM, who offers the agent life-saving alien DNA. Mulder refuses to consort with his nemesis, a tyrant who has orchestrated the murder of pretty much the whole world. Agent Miller, who has been searching for Mulder this whole time, finds him at CSM’s house and brings him back to DC. Scully, cure in hand, hops in a car and rushes through gridlock and chaos to help Mulder. When she gets to him, he is sicker than she expected; the vaccine alone will not work. She says he needs stem cells from their child, who presumably inherited alien DNA from Scully. But where is William? They don’t know. Suddenly, a spotlight from the sky shines a pool of light over Scully, Miller and the car where Mulder is fading fast. It’s a spaceship. Or maybe one of those Alien Replica Vehicles from the first revival episode. My Struggle Part II – and the revival miniseries as a whole – ends with a spaceship point-of-view shot of the agents that zooms in to an extreme close up of Scully’s right eye.

Cliffhanger, much?

Random Thoughts

The only reason Scully morphs into an alien in the cold open is so they’d have something shocking for Fox to “leak” during the Super Bowl.

They were kinda lying when they swapped “The Truth is Out There” for “This is the End” at the close of the opening credits. I guess it was the end Season 10, but it hardly cleared anything up.

Or did they mean the end of the world? Either way; it wasn’t.

Is it me or did Cancer Man’s facial reconstruction make him look just like the Phantom of the Opera?

So the plan is to save the planet by killing almost everyone, but leaving folks like the cabal alive? Is that because they are such great environmentalists they’ll immediately stop using fossil fuels and air conditioners and plastics? I can’t really see CSM growing his own tobacco and rolling his own smokes.

And if the aliens predicted in the 1940s that we’d destroy the planet with our factories, deforestation, pollution, etc., shouldn’t the cabal maybe have used their considerable resources for the past 75 years to create green businesses? They could still have been evil and secretly in charge of everything. It’d just all be solar-powered.

The power goes out and Scully earnestly says, “as if we’re not already in the dark.” Oh, Chris Carter. You created the X-Files, so I guess I have to forgive you for dialogue like that.

What the Hell?

Last week, I discussed my discomfort with the writers using a terrorist suicide bombing by young Muslim men as their plot set-up. They just needed a guy on the brink of death. There are a thousand ways they could have achieved that without perpetuating a stereotype in an election year where Islamophobia is central to a number of candidates’ campaign platforms.

I didn’t mention it at the time, but I was also rather disappointed that in Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster, the writer included a transgender character, but he made her a crack whore. Really, guys? ONE transgender character in the whole revival series and she’s a flippin’ crack whore? I’m not saying you had to make her an Olympic Decathlon winner, but it would have been just as realistic for them to encounter one of those.

And now this week. Vaccinations are at the root of the demise of humankind? Holy shit, Chris Carter. Did you have Jenny McCarthy ghost write this one? No one’s gonna be like “oh, he’s trying to say that thinking vaccinating your kids is really dangerous is as outlandish as an X-File.” It’s just going to feed an already pervasive fear that puts children – and society as a whole – in jeopardy. Did you know there was a recent outbreak of whooping cough in California? Frakking whooping cough! You’re obviously banking on there being more episodes of The X-Files happening. Or that third movie you kept talking about. Please just think about what you’re writing. It’s not edgy to play into dangerous theories or prejudices; it’s plain irresponsible.