The X-Files 2x07: 3
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tori_reviewsThe X-Files 2x07: 3
I think this is about the same line I came down on last time, but this episode maybe isn’t actually that bad. It’s not good where it absolutely should have been something excellent; even more, it should have been special; and it does utterly fail to stick even its own landing; but taken on its own, it’s about 2/3 of a middle of the road kind of episode that falls apart at the end. It’s problem is that it should have been so much more than that.
This episode does do some to try and earn its placement. We get to see Mulder acting on his own, we don’t even see the supporting cast so he feels entirely on his own. He’s also noticeably able to rein himself in, relying on himself to be the voice of reason that whatever his usual beliefs, there could be rational explanations for what he’s seeing and hearing. There’s also quite enough evidence to say he’s not doing real well since Scully was taken (apparently he still isn’t sleeping much, to the point where he didn’t even bother to get a hotel room). And some of Mulder’s actions I don’t think he would have done if Scully had been around, but because he’s all lone wolf in this he ends up doing now.
And I’m not saying this should necessarily have been another mytharc plot, even one where he’s running around with a flashlight pointed at the sky yelling for them to give her back but we ultimately learn nothing. But *mytharc* or not, it should have been part of the *arc*; this should be “the one where Scully is gone.”
While it wouldn’t fix everything, a simple reedit of Mulder’s first scene would have both covered a plot hole and shown the emptiness and hopelessness of this time for him. Have him walk in, turn the calendar to August (when the last episode was set, and when he got the X-files back), then montage him going around getting things back in order and looking lonely, then pan across the calendar again and it’s November. Just like that, no more plot hole of why it took Mulder three months to move back to the basement (alternatively, insert a line that after three months they have to call off the hunt for Scully and just keep hoping some evidence turns up, so Mulder goes back to the basement finally).
Look, this episode is slow as molasses, they could have taken maybe an extra minute at the beginning to ground the story in what people actually care about.
But that is a band-aide to the problem; the plot would still have very little emotional grounding because as it is the one episode filling in a gap of months, there is no reason for it not to be a case that resonates with where our remaining hero is emotionally. It should be an episode about loneliness and isolation, about having lost one’s anchor in the world, about the desperate search for the truth and the almost more desperate fear of the answers. And vampires are not a bad choice for that, but that would have meant exploring their existence as vampires and probably at least confirming that that’s what they are which the show wouldn’t do (especially not at this stage).
But what it probably should have been is a case involving dead/missing young women (vampires involved or not) and how every one of them is a surrogate Scully that Mulder is desperate to rescue because he can’t do anything for the one he most needs to save. Sure, keep his sex-interest (I hate using the term love-interest when there’s so little effort put into establishing any connection) as different from Scully as possible to keep the projection issues from being too literal, but let us be in this moment in time with him. Maybe the acting job would have been beyond DD at this stage, but I can still wish.
When are we?
November 1994, sometime
Are we saying it’s aliens?
Something in the neighborhood of vampires There’s some secret formula for becoming a vampire and only vampires can kill other vampires, so there’s more than some genetic disorder going on, but they’re not real specific as to how it works.
How crazy does Mulder sound?
He mostly just comes across as a good profiler and at getting suspects to cooperate. The way he presents himself is more as if he’s clued into what the killers think they are rather than necessarily believing it himself. As an audience member I’m not even sure how much he believes it to be vampires at any point, and I know he can find a way to believe in most things. But, he’s definitely exhibiting some cop-on-the-edge tendencies (though considering Mulder’s been working alone for a while, even before Scully was taken, I’m not sure why it reads as weird that he’s an agent without a partner), so he still probably doesn’t seem entirely sane to the local cops.
Kill counts
Mulder’s record is sure going to show him responsible for Son’s death. He’ll probably get away with it since he had no way of knowing that a few seconds in the sun would kill a man, but no else knows he came back either, so it’ll still be on the record.
Can DD act?
Again, the script isn’t doing him any favors, and I suspect he was directed to seem as checked out as possible, but that would work a lot better if we saw layers beyond that, like him being checked out because feeling it is too much, and I don’t see that in the performance.
Mulder kisses
Mulder definitely kisses Kristen, I’m still not 100% sold on just how far beyond that it went. The implication is that they had sex, and one would have a hard time disproving that reading; but Mulder is sleeping (at least dosing) in a chair when she comes back to the bedroom and they have so little chemistry in the scenes leading up to it that I have a hard time thinking they actually opted to have sex. There’s not even a feeling of them desperately looking to feel a living connection, or just trying to forget the pain they’re in because of what they’ve been through, which I would have believed as a writing choice but it’s not in the acting at all (you’ll note that I’m not objecting that Mulder wouldn’t because of Scully, at this stage I don’t think we have to put that on him).
Does Chris Carter hate love?
I’ve had this category sitting around the whole show and haven’t felt the need to use it, and I didn’t think this would be the episode I finally did. Up until now any time the characters would deny a romantic connection going on, it felt in character rather than hitting the audience. But the line “Not a lover...a friend,” feels very pointed. Not that Kristen knows anything about it, or that Mulder confirms or denies either way. It wouldn’t have been so hard to twist the line yet again with something like “...maybe more than a friend,” which could be read as his ‘partner’ or his ‘everything’ depending on your leanings.
While I come down on a similar feeling of this episode’s quality, but I seem to have a slightly different feeling about whether the supporting cast should have been in it this time around. The above review thought that was kind of the right move to show Mulder’s isolation, while past me wanted to check in with how everyone was part of this story. I am however, never sure about where we land on sex-interest of the episode.
2x07: 3 (2016 thoughts)
(Previous status: I have weird memories that found about three moments in the episode familiar even though I know I’ve never really seen it before.)
The most interesting thing about this episode is that it’s apparently set in November, the last two were back to back so both in early-to-mid-August, which means in canon it’s taken Mulder a while to get back to actually working on the X-files. Which could make some sense as Skinner probably couldn’t just make it happen overnight, but that much of a delay is somewhat at odds with the fact that no one ever actually packed up the basement office in the first place; and wouldn’t Scully information already be in a files somewhere, even if got moved to the X-files now?
I don’t quite know where to put the blame for this being such a bland story. I definitely don’t think we can blame DD’s acting for most of it; again, a much higher caliber actor could have brought more to the role here, but it’s not the main problem. And yet the script isn’t terrible either, a long way from great, and definitely needed some more work, but it isn’t terrible. It just feels kind of...gutless; like they have this one chance to tell a story with very different rules for how the characters play, and they waste it on this.
Yes, some things in this episode probably wouldn’t have happened if Scully was around as it does have moments where her absence in clearly a factor, with Mulder insisting he works alone and actually deciding not to believe the supernatural explanation right away since he doesn’t have the outside voice to check him now. And it’s doubtful Mulder would have...did he actually sleep with Kristen or did they just make out? As he’s just sleeping in a chair with his clothes still on when she comes back later’ so while it seemed implied at first, I’m now less sure; anyway, if he slept with her I doubt it would have happened with Scully around, although if they just made out that might have still happened. But most of the time the story doesn’t feel that deeply affected by her being missing, and probably presumed by a lot of people to be dead. It they weren’t going to make it a search for Scully episode (which I kind of understand) I still want a scene where Mulder and Skinner talk about whether there’s going to be a partner working on the X-files and Mulder pointing out that his last partner was a mole and besides they *will* find Scully, and Skinner looking conflicted because he knows the odds at this point but he does want to believe it too. I want a scene where he checks in with the Lone Gunmen who are keeping an eye on unofficial channels for any leads but they still don’t have anything for him. I would have taken explaining that the reason Mulder’s only really getting to the X-files now is that he’s been out chasing every half-formed lead he can for the last few months and maybe now he is actually starting to give up and get back to normal case work.
Instead we’re not really allowed to feel the emotion he must be going through, be it desperation or grief or belief. But like I said, I don’t really put that on DD though that would be the easy answer. I can’t help think it’s ultimately a problem with the ill-defined nature of Mulder and Scully’s relationship, which is a problem at very high levels, or very base ones depending on how you want to define it. That we’re not really allowed to focus to closely on how her loss affects him, and when Kristen says Mulder lost a friend no one says ‘more than that.’ I’m not saying they’re lovers, but she’s his partner and just about his only friend in the world, that’s more than a friend. And yet the next episode doesn’t have the same problem as I recall, the relationship may remain undefined, but it’s allowed to show its depth at whatever it may be.
Look, the plot of this episode is ridiculous and stupid, but if I thought that was the worst of its issues I’d focus on that. This episode should have been something special, it should have been intensely character focused and a real view into what is months of in-show time between Scully’s abduction and return. If she’d been gone for more episodes maybe there would have been room for one that was just kind of a normal if not very smart case surrounded by more detail of what was happening with the remaining characters. Not that I want her to be gone longer, but as they ended up with just this one chance, it should have been something meaningful instead of a placeholder episode until she did get back.
Also I would like to note that for the second episode in a row, Mulder may well have killed somebody and gets away with it.
I think this is about the same line I came down on last time, but this episode maybe isn’t actually that bad. It’s not good where it absolutely should have been something excellent; even more, it should have been special; and it does utterly fail to stick even its own landing; but taken on its own, it’s about 2/3 of a middle of the road kind of episode that falls apart at the end. It’s problem is that it should have been so much more than that.
This episode does do some to try and earn its placement. We get to see Mulder acting on his own, we don’t even see the supporting cast so he feels entirely on his own. He’s also noticeably able to rein himself in, relying on himself to be the voice of reason that whatever his usual beliefs, there could be rational explanations for what he’s seeing and hearing. There’s also quite enough evidence to say he’s not doing real well since Scully was taken (apparently he still isn’t sleeping much, to the point where he didn’t even bother to get a hotel room). And some of Mulder’s actions I don’t think he would have done if Scully had been around, but because he’s all lone wolf in this he ends up doing now.
And I’m not saying this should necessarily have been another mytharc plot, even one where he’s running around with a flashlight pointed at the sky yelling for them to give her back but we ultimately learn nothing. But *mytharc* or not, it should have been part of the *arc*; this should be “the one where Scully is gone.”
While it wouldn’t fix everything, a simple reedit of Mulder’s first scene would have both covered a plot hole and shown the emptiness and hopelessness of this time for him. Have him walk in, turn the calendar to August (when the last episode was set, and when he got the X-files back), then montage him going around getting things back in order and looking lonely, then pan across the calendar again and it’s November. Just like that, no more plot hole of why it took Mulder three months to move back to the basement (alternatively, insert a line that after three months they have to call off the hunt for Scully and just keep hoping some evidence turns up, so Mulder goes back to the basement finally).
Look, this episode is slow as molasses, they could have taken maybe an extra minute at the beginning to ground the story in what people actually care about.
But that is a band-aide to the problem; the plot would still have very little emotional grounding because as it is the one episode filling in a gap of months, there is no reason for it not to be a case that resonates with where our remaining hero is emotionally. It should be an episode about loneliness and isolation, about having lost one’s anchor in the world, about the desperate search for the truth and the almost more desperate fear of the answers. And vampires are not a bad choice for that, but that would have meant exploring their existence as vampires and probably at least confirming that that’s what they are which the show wouldn’t do (especially not at this stage).
But what it probably should have been is a case involving dead/missing young women (vampires involved or not) and how every one of them is a surrogate Scully that Mulder is desperate to rescue because he can’t do anything for the one he most needs to save. Sure, keep his sex-interest (I hate using the term love-interest when there’s so little effort put into establishing any connection) as different from Scully as possible to keep the projection issues from being too literal, but let us be in this moment in time with him. Maybe the acting job would have been beyond DD at this stage, but I can still wish.
When are we?
November 1994, sometime
Are we saying it’s aliens?
Something in the neighborhood of vampires There’s some secret formula for becoming a vampire and only vampires can kill other vampires, so there’s more than some genetic disorder going on, but they’re not real specific as to how it works.
How crazy does Mulder sound?
He mostly just comes across as a good profiler and at getting suspects to cooperate. The way he presents himself is more as if he’s clued into what the killers think they are rather than necessarily believing it himself. As an audience member I’m not even sure how much he believes it to be vampires at any point, and I know he can find a way to believe in most things. But, he’s definitely exhibiting some cop-on-the-edge tendencies (though considering Mulder’s been working alone for a while, even before Scully was taken, I’m not sure why it reads as weird that he’s an agent without a partner), so he still probably doesn’t seem entirely sane to the local cops.
Kill counts
Mulder’s record is sure going to show him responsible for Son’s death. He’ll probably get away with it since he had no way of knowing that a few seconds in the sun would kill a man, but no else knows he came back either, so it’ll still be on the record.
Can DD act?
Again, the script isn’t doing him any favors, and I suspect he was directed to seem as checked out as possible, but that would work a lot better if we saw layers beyond that, like him being checked out because feeling it is too much, and I don’t see that in the performance.
Mulder kisses
Mulder definitely kisses Kristen, I’m still not 100% sold on just how far beyond that it went. The implication is that they had sex, and one would have a hard time disproving that reading; but Mulder is sleeping (at least dosing) in a chair when she comes back to the bedroom and they have so little chemistry in the scenes leading up to it that I have a hard time thinking they actually opted to have sex. There’s not even a feeling of them desperately looking to feel a living connection, or just trying to forget the pain they’re in because of what they’ve been through, which I would have believed as a writing choice but it’s not in the acting at all (you’ll note that I’m not objecting that Mulder wouldn’t because of Scully, at this stage I don’t think we have to put that on him).
Does Chris Carter hate love?
I’ve had this category sitting around the whole show and haven’t felt the need to use it, and I didn’t think this would be the episode I finally did. Up until now any time the characters would deny a romantic connection going on, it felt in character rather than hitting the audience. But the line “Not a lover...a friend,” feels very pointed. Not that Kristen knows anything about it, or that Mulder confirms or denies either way. It wouldn’t have been so hard to twist the line yet again with something like “...maybe more than a friend,” which could be read as his ‘partner’ or his ‘everything’ depending on your leanings.
While I come down on a similar feeling of this episode’s quality, but I seem to have a slightly different feeling about whether the supporting cast should have been in it this time around. The above review thought that was kind of the right move to show Mulder’s isolation, while past me wanted to check in with how everyone was part of this story. I am however, never sure about where we land on sex-interest of the episode.
2x07: 3 (2016 thoughts)
(Previous status: I have weird memories that found about three moments in the episode familiar even though I know I’ve never really seen it before.)
The most interesting thing about this episode is that it’s apparently set in November, the last two were back to back so both in early-to-mid-August, which means in canon it’s taken Mulder a while to get back to actually working on the X-files. Which could make some sense as Skinner probably couldn’t just make it happen overnight, but that much of a delay is somewhat at odds with the fact that no one ever actually packed up the basement office in the first place; and wouldn’t Scully information already be in a files somewhere, even if got moved to the X-files now?
I don’t quite know where to put the blame for this being such a bland story. I definitely don’t think we can blame DD’s acting for most of it; again, a much higher caliber actor could have brought more to the role here, but it’s not the main problem. And yet the script isn’t terrible either, a long way from great, and definitely needed some more work, but it isn’t terrible. It just feels kind of...gutless; like they have this one chance to tell a story with very different rules for how the characters play, and they waste it on this.
Yes, some things in this episode probably wouldn’t have happened if Scully was around as it does have moments where her absence in clearly a factor, with Mulder insisting he works alone and actually deciding not to believe the supernatural explanation right away since he doesn’t have the outside voice to check him now. And it’s doubtful Mulder would have...did he actually sleep with Kristen or did they just make out? As he’s just sleeping in a chair with his clothes still on when she comes back later’ so while it seemed implied at first, I’m now less sure; anyway, if he slept with her I doubt it would have happened with Scully around, although if they just made out that might have still happened. But most of the time the story doesn’t feel that deeply affected by her being missing, and probably presumed by a lot of people to be dead. It they weren’t going to make it a search for Scully episode (which I kind of understand) I still want a scene where Mulder and Skinner talk about whether there’s going to be a partner working on the X-files and Mulder pointing out that his last partner was a mole and besides they *will* find Scully, and Skinner looking conflicted because he knows the odds at this point but he does want to believe it too. I want a scene where he checks in with the Lone Gunmen who are keeping an eye on unofficial channels for any leads but they still don’t have anything for him. I would have taken explaining that the reason Mulder’s only really getting to the X-files now is that he’s been out chasing every half-formed lead he can for the last few months and maybe now he is actually starting to give up and get back to normal case work.
Instead we’re not really allowed to feel the emotion he must be going through, be it desperation or grief or belief. But like I said, I don’t really put that on DD though that would be the easy answer. I can’t help think it’s ultimately a problem with the ill-defined nature of Mulder and Scully’s relationship, which is a problem at very high levels, or very base ones depending on how you want to define it. That we’re not really allowed to focus to closely on how her loss affects him, and when Kristen says Mulder lost a friend no one says ‘more than that.’ I’m not saying they’re lovers, but she’s his partner and just about his only friend in the world, that’s more than a friend. And yet the next episode doesn’t have the same problem as I recall, the relationship may remain undefined, but it’s allowed to show its depth at whatever it may be.
Look, the plot of this episode is ridiculous and stupid, but if I thought that was the worst of its issues I’d focus on that. This episode should have been something special, it should have been intensely character focused and a real view into what is months of in-show time between Scully’s abduction and return. If she’d been gone for more episodes maybe there would have been room for one that was just kind of a normal if not very smart case surrounded by more detail of what was happening with the remaining characters. Not that I want her to be gone longer, but as they ended up with just this one chance, it should have been something meaningful instead of a placeholder episode until she did get back.
Also I would like to note that for the second episode in a row, Mulder may well have killed somebody and gets away with it.
