Why write one line when you can write five? Why build a world when you can fill every inch of screen with synth strings and darkness? I can't bear to summarize this, sorry.
I watched this weeks ago, I've watched True Detective since then, and I can't bear to talk about this episode either. I could barely pay attention as it was happening and I remember nothing of it now, except the ludicrous 'Hong Kong' sets and the unjustifiable time dilations and Skinner's jaw clenching as he's shot and the unutterably shabby dialogue and how basically The X-Files is, at times, far more interesting than good, which makes these posts hard to write.
Better. Krycek returns to the US and the Syndicate gets busy covering its tracks.
Best teaser in ages -- young Cigarette-Smoking Man and Bill Mulder visit the survivor of the submarine salvage mission. Best final shot in ages -- Krycek is betrayed by the CSM and left in a North Dakota missile silo with a UFO.
Inbetween, the usual stuff at a higher than normal level of intensity, and this is not an un-intense show, though after watching True Detective it feels like rainbow-coloured escapist fantasy rather than the subversive mindfuck I've been depicting in these posts so far.
I don't suppose Mitch Pileggi is a bad actor (his performance is well liked by fans, I think?), but thus far I've seen nothing to suggest that Skinner is much more an overworked jaw muscle. His line readings are so over the top and his face/body work so limited that I assume the role of Skinner grew to match the actor's private charisma rather than his onscreen performance. I see there's a Skinner-centric story coming up. That will tell.
I find it hard to believe in the character anyway, despite Pileggi's confessional speech to Mulder in the X-Files office about, I think, Vietnam(?). In 'Apocrypha' he tells Scully to back off from investigating, y'know, Them -- the bad guys -- out of concern for her safety, but the scene feels to me like nothing more than setup for Scully's closing line (something like 'that's exactly what They want me to do'). It's a common feature of so many middling dramas to confuse complicated action for complex motives; it's hard to dismiss The X-Files as 'middling' given its extraordinary ambition, but the writers were obviously far better at head trips than heartbreak, and this episode's Skinner scenes are sorely lacking in 'mere' human interest. That's not Pileggi's fault. There just isn't much character there, and I bet there wasn't much on the page.
Of course, if you're staging a myth rather than a drama, maybe 'character' isn't so important. Which doesn't excuse but maybe halfway explains the show's sometimes wooden dialogue and mismeasured acting, I suppose, but then so how did they win all those Emmys...?
I'm with Chris Knowles: the cost of the increasingly intimate conspiracist storytelling (putting Mulder's dad at the center of a half-century plot to colonize the earth, say) is the loss of the Syndicate's menace. The sight of John Neville (as the 'Well-Manicured Man') invariably warms my heart, but he's just an old man sipping brandy in a back room...that kind of thudding literalism robs the show of some of its polymetaphorical power. Through Season Two, the Conspiracy could be anything; Cancer Man was one representation but its 'true nature' was formless, unknowable, irreducibly complex. The Syndicate is less interesting than the abstract Conspiracy, to me, because I find a roomful of old men the exact opposite of scary -- i.e., knowable. They tumble from myth into fact.
My complaint about the Syndicate ties in with the previous, about Skinner's characterization: The X-Files is by nature a highly abstract show, transmitted via a medium whose specificity, domesticity, and 'realism' are central to its power. TV differs crucially from film in that it comes into your home and infuses your living room (or bedroom!), the place where you and your friends and family feel safest, with story. With few (essential) exceptions, primetime TV has been a venue for reassurance: closeups of adult human beings showing understandable feelings in something like 'realistic' order. Shows like The Twilight Zone, Fernwood 2-Nite, and Twin Peaks challenged the norms of primetime TV in their own ways; The X-Files represents another kind of challenge -- few shows have struck a more cynical, antagonistic attitude toward our government and our late-millennium way of life -- but because (unlike Twin Peaks, say) it can't quite throw off the conventional late-capitalist 'officemates become friends' pressure exerted by its medium and venue, its surreal/mythic approach is compromised, and it's susceptible to the bland language of TV 'criticism,' that glorified did-I-like-it-or-did-it-'fail' schtick you know from the (digital) papers, not to mention (ahem) (some of) my posts...
At its best, The X-Files somehow balances its nervewracking critique of lazily rationalist (not actually at all 'rational' but anyway hostile to e.g. Mulder's vision of 'extreme possibility') postwar American culture with a moving story of wounded seekers finding something like completeness in one another, struggling to become a Counterforce. The Lone Gunmen are part of this; Skinner too, Max Fenig, Duane Barry, the various misfits in Darin Morgan's scripts, the dying old folks in 'Excelsis Dei,' the abused kids in 'Die Hand die Verletzt,' Scully's mess of a sister, and of course Scully and Mulder finding that love is itself a visionary experience...
At times during these first three seasons, I've seen the writers lay out the terms of a bitter cultural indictment with empathetic tenderness worthy of Joss Whedon. But with the revelation of the Syndicate's identities, that balance has subtly shifted as Season Three has progressed; the gestures of conspiracist entertainment sometimes seem to stand in, as they do here, for visionary account. Maybe it's not as big a deal as I'm making it out to be, maybe I'm still watching in the psychic shadow of True Detective and just need a couple more episodes to get back into the epistemological/aesthetic swing of things. But I just couldn't connect to these two episodes at all.