'I've heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.'
'Think I'm bluffing?'
'Paper Clip' is...a jumble.
Perhaps I would not have written the following if the last line of the episode, quoted above, weren't embarrassingly bad:
It contains so much hamfisted dialogue I could barely keep watching, yet it's also the biggest leap forward so far for the show's 'mythology.' It does more plot work than any preceding episode, yet the psychology of our heroes as presented here is (again) completely incoherent. It's the most personal presentation of the 'mythology,' but it's also the first time (for me) when it seems like the momentum of the show is going to break it apart. I don't mind incoherent plots so much, or at least I aspire not to, but they still trip certain wires for me. Incoherent characters are much much much much worse. And there's some of that here too; the world carries them away.
The decision to turn 'the Conspiracy' into a literal back room full of literal old men in suits trades away a lot of 'adventurous expectancy' for not so much visceral intensity. Great to see Cancer Man take on such depth, though.
I never thought I would find a coal mine full of filing cabinets interesting but damn, that sequence is extraordinary...and then for some unknown goddamn reason a bunch of little aliens run by Scully and fly up into space in a massive UFO that surely everyone in West Virginia can see. We see the 'sins of the father' stuff skillfully intertwined with the real-world nightmare of Operation Paperclip, and nearly every metaphor the show's ever played with is beautifully crystallized in the revelation of the human-alien hybrid project -- yet what should be the emotional peak of maybe the entire show, the revelation that Mulder's father chose to let the Conspiracy kidnap his daughter, floats past in a short scene that contains, to my eyes (on a single viewing), two characters but zero fully-imagined human beings.
Duchovny and Anderson are so damn good here, but it feels like all the work behind 'Paper Clip' went into the deep story, and didn't actually translate to, y'know, the dialogue. For every moment of startling bone-deep horror like those (say it with me) terrifying filing cabinets, there's some bit of unrepeatable speechifying. Carrie Fisher gently derided George Lucas's script on Star Wars: 'We used to say, you can write this stuff, but you can't say it.' The X-Files feels like that to me, even at its peak, as it clearly is here.
It's so frustrating not to be able to count on the show to be excellent across the board, even in episodes like this, on which so much attention has obviously been lavished.
For all my carping, 'Paper Clip' does something exciting: it takes the paranoia of the Season Two conspiracist mytharc, the New Age spiritualism of late-S2 and especially 'Anasazi,' that post-'Duane Barry' emotional intensity of the Mulder/Scully pairing, and the black blood of the storyworld (parallels to real-world 'state crimes against democracy,' a term I'll come back to later), and explicitly connects them all to the primal scene for Mulder's character -- Samantha's disappearance.
But the climactic revelation scene in the greenhouse is so awkward, the conflict between an emotionally naked Mulder and an inexplicably bullheaded and stupid Scully so forced, that I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth that even Skinner's final bird-flipping can't wash away. Whatever you thought of the pseudo-native jarble of 'Anasazi' (and if you believe in the virgin birth of an extraterrestrial messiah or the reincarnation of souls, you might think twice before voicing complaints about Navajo soothsayers), that episode was up to something both complex and complicated; it kept the plot moving while exposing a new vein of story. And this is the episode with the 'white buffalo' voiceover and that clam of a closing line...
I'm talking in circles because 'Paper Clip' is a beloved 'top 5' episode of the show among fans and critics, yet as the credits rolled I found myself frustrated by its schematicism -- not to mention that fact that from here we're just going to jump back into a string of one-off episodes, and even if we're an hour away from the gorgeous 'Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose,' it seems impossible that we'd go from this ever-tightening serial drama to oddity-of-the-week stories. I know that these serial/episodic shifts aren't generated according to story logic, I know they're not the story's 'fault' but the medium's, just the way TV was in those days &c. &c., but it strains credulity all the same.
There are bigger things to worry about. Time to pack up my resentments and go home.