![]() Yet, and like the show’s fans, she’s also grown nostalgic: She misses Mulder’s hot air. Scully is a beautiful, intelligent woman, who’s used to being underestimated by jack-offs in a men’s profession and wearing her tragedy and turmoil as scars of survivor’s honor. Morgan and Anderson have momentarily redefined her, entirely discarding the iconic earnestness that the season has already been gradually backgrounding, while foregrounding the character’s sexual confidence. Scully’s presence in “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” is even more surprising than Mulder’s. The sexual subtext existing between the protagonists is ripe and delirious, suggesting the intense erotic pleasure that can arise from knowing someone for years without ever entirely tiring of their theatrics. Under Morgan’s direction, this friction becomes transcendent: Mulder and Scully have never been this romantically alive together. In “My Struggle,” Carter laboriously attempted to rekindle the classic Mulder/Scully tension by dissolving their romantic union. It pivots on a traditional joke of the screwball comedy: The man hasn’t changed, but wants to change because he thinks the woman wants him to, though she’s come to realize that she loves who he really is, making his exertions poignantly ridiculous. Mulder has a monologue here in which he begins to rediscover his monster-believing self, while also voicing Scully’s inevitably logical naysaying, that constitutes an instantly classic moment for The X-Files. ![]() ![]() The possibly irrelevant innocence of Fox Mulder’s (David Duchovny) need to believe in the paranormal, a recurring theme of this season, is particularly under Morgan’s microscope, though he imbues that concern with an elegantly flippant screwball tone. In a Morgan script, it often feels as if Carter’s tight sense of control of the project at large has been temporarily loosened, as if Dad’s away and his intelligent, slightly cuckoo son has been given the keys to the kingdom.Įasily the strongest episode of the new season thus far, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” finds Morgan parodying not only The X-Files and its fans, but even the potential futility of Carter’s attempt to update it to 2016. The script casually pivots on a multiplicity of perspectives that recalls Rashomon, while informing Carter’s iconic bubble-headed aliens, the “grays,” with an element of slapstick absurdity that renders them recognizably fallible, which is to say scarier than usual. ![]() Take season three’s “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” which is often justifiably listed as one of the best episodes of the entire series. Morgan is the most distinctive voice to arise from the original The X-Files, as his scripts mixed pathos, slangy erudite banter, and meta gamesmanship into a tapestry that often suggested alternative worlds for the series, standing both within The X-Files and apart from it. Now, this week brings “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” a monster-of-the-week standalone wedded to the comic stylings of another X-Files legend, writer Darin Morgan, who also directed the episode. “My Struggle” is an affectionate update of a conspiratorial alien “mythology” episode, as written and directed by creator Chris Carter, and “Founders Mutation” is a fusion of mythology and monster-of-the-week formula, as written and directed by veteran series writer James Wong. So far, this season of The X-Files has suggested a kind of Whitman’s Sampler box, containing a variety of modern covers of the sorts of episodes that were once traditional to the series in its heyday. ![]()
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