"Triangle"

“I want you to do me a favor. It is not negotiable. Either you do it or I kill you. You understand?”
Originally Aired 11/22/98

I recently watched an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 which featured a movie about a caveman in a modern day world; no, it wasn’t Encino Man. A line used in that episode, which poked fun at a movie called Eegah, could easily sum up the events of “Triangle”; “we’re on a collision course with wackiness.” Much like Darin Morgan and Vince Gilligan have done before, this is Chris Carter playing with his characters in a humorous way with the use of time travel, as it takes place in both 1998 and 1939.

Season Four’s episode “Small Potatoes” had a sequence where David Duchovny was able to play someone else playing the character of Fox Mulder. “Triangle” is actually a reversal on that because David Duchovny is the only actor whose character is the same throughout, while his co-stars have counterparts in both 1998 and 1939. Even a man who evesdrops on Scully at the present day FBI building has a counterpart back in 1939, who actually outs her character to a band of German soldiers. I didn’t see versions of the Lone Gunmen back in 1939, which would have been funny, but a lack of Gunmen doesn’t mean it’s short on humor.

The highlight of “Triangle” is an entire 10 minute segment of the episode dedicated to Scully running around the offices at the FBI in search of information on Mulder’s whereabouts. She’s tipped off by the Lone Gunmen about the missing Mulder, then is denied help by Assistant Skinner, which meant she had to do the unthinkable and ask the uptight Agent Spender for help; well, she doesn’t exactly ask politely. Agent Scully is my favorite character on the series, in fact she’s among my top characters in all of television, and if I didn’t have a moment that I could pinpoint why I’ve chosen her, I do now. If this episode has any weakness, it’s that seeing the 1939 Scully running around isn’t nearly as engrossing as when she did it in 1998. In fact, several of the scenes on the ship are almost too darkened to tell what’s going on in them. That’s a minor complaint and doesn’t keep the episode from being a supremely entertaining hour. Maybe another minor nitpick is why Scully didn’t call her brother for help, though that could be answered by her phone’s poor reception. Even in 2013 our cell phone reception hasn’t changed!

While this is one of the few remaining episodes I haven’t seen prior to writing a review, I feel that’s actually for the best that this is my first time. Watching reruns of the standalone episodes was a good way to sample the series since many aren’t linked to the series-long conspiracy, so I was able to see self-contained stories with Mulder and Scully investigating monsters and maniacs. “Triangle” is one of the few that features Mulder and Scully at a different level of their partnership, so you’d need a knowledge of several seasons’ worth of episodes to truly appreciate all that this episode has to offer. I’m glad I’ve waited this long to see “Triangle” because I was grinning from ear to ear the entire length of it, even long after the episode had ended.

"Drive"

“Well, on behalf of the International Jewish Conspiracy, I just need to inform you that we’re... almost out of gas.”
Originally Aired 11/15/98

“The slower you go, the faster you die.” I really love that tag line for this episode since it perfectly sums up this fast-paced, forty-five minute thriller. Initially I thought it was a Speed knock-off since Mulder is forced to drive at a high-speed; in fact Mulder even makes reference that he “saw that movie.” Instead it focuses on Mulder and the man holding him hostage, Patrick Crump (played excellently by Bryan Cranston), who’s much like other villains on The X-Files. Its a trait of the episode’s writer, Vince Gilligan, to put his villains in situations where they’re only acting that way through some force they can’t control; Leonard Betts devoured cancer to survive, now Crump has to travel at a high speed to dull the painful noise in his head so it won’t explode. See, that even sounds strange on paper, but it’s the focus on the character of Crump that makes this story work.

I love the imagination involved in the creation of many X-Files cases because the staff of writers took ordinary objects and twisted them into scary situations. Morgan and Wong wondered what would happen if someone crawled out of an office air vent, which gave birth to Eugene Tooms in Season One’s “Squeeze.” Vince Gilligan’s inspiration behind “Drive” was actually someone spinning on a carnival ride that was taken hostage. He even based it on actual military projects, Project HAARP and Project ELF.

It seems this episode has aged incredibly well, or perhaps its been given much more attention in hindsight because of its connection to Breaking Bad. I’ve actually waited longer than the entire time Breaking Bad was on the air to watch this again, now that I have a new found respect for Cranston’s range of acting. Prior to watching this episode and Breaking Bad, I was only familiar with Cranston in comedic roles on Malcolm in the Middle and Seinfeld. Crump’s moments in the car with Mulder are what set this episode apart from other government experiments gone wrong, such as “F. Emasculata.” We weren’t able to feel sorry for those victims of a conspiracy on the same level that we do with Crump.

Gillian Anderson also gets to have fun in this episode as the giant flash lights from past seasons make their return. She’s even in the field searching for the source of Crump’s predicament in a haz-suit while another head explodes; I’m betting that scene was the inspiration for JJ Abrams’ Fringe. Scully’s scenes echo past seasons that were spent in darkened labs and exploring by flashlight, while Mulder’s car ride with Crump across the Western states showed off the new L.A. setting for the series. Besides the location change, another development for Season 6 was the removal of Mulder and Scully from the X-Files. It happened once before but Mulder seemed to end up investigating X-Files cases anyway, so I like how this time it wasn’t a case that was brought to him, instead they stumbled on it by watching television at exactly the right time. Another change this season was a new supervisor for Mulder and Scully, Assistant Director Kersh, and from the start he’s not putting up with any of Mulder’s antics. “Drive” is The X-Files at it’s peak, continuing the brillance from Season 5, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing.

"The Beginning"

"You can kill a man, but you can't kill what he stands for. Not unless you first break his spirit."
Originally Aired 11/8/98

Over five seasons the X-Files has introduced several characters for Mulder and Scully to interact with, whether they were friends, foes, or family. I’ve realized that while Mulder and Scully are the main characters, there are few secondary characters, and the majority fall into a third catergory; they’re nothing more than a gimmick to advance the plot. Its similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s gimmick, the MacGuffin.

A loose definition that I found online for this term, the MacGuffin, is “nothing.” Hitchcock described it as a plot device on which to hang the tension in a film, the key element of a suspense story. “Because Hitchcock lured the audience to such a high degree of sympathy for the characters through cinematic means, the reason behind their plight became irrelevant for the viewer. Something bad is happening to them and it doesn’t matter what.” In this two-part story, actually three-part when you include the feature film, Gibson Praise becomes the MacGuffin of this tale. I wracked my brain over the summer trying to explain what purpose Gibson served to the mythology and ultimately, it really is that he’s just another “X-File” in a long list of them. Each episode needed to have one of those cases for which Mulder and Scully to investigate, whether it was a standalone or mythology episode. For example, “Nisei” began with Mulder investigating a video of an alien autopsy, then by the next episode he was on a speeding train that was armed with a bomb. We ceased to wonder what led him there, only if he'd make it out alive. Later in that same season, they investigated a man who had the power to heal, but he turned out to be another MacGuffin just so we could learn about bees and a history between Mulder’s mother and the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Those people like Jeremiah Smith aren’t really supposed to be fleshed out characters with a backstory, unlike the recent introduction of Agent Jeffrey Spender, who actually is one of the few in that elite category of the “secondary character.” This time in “The End” and “The Beginning”, its Gibson that acts as the MacGuffin so that Mulder and Scully will be separated from The X-Files and the Cigarette-Smoking Man can further his shadowy agenda.

That agenda of the Cigarette-Smoking Man seems less shadowy now that he's returned, rather it appears to be a dense fog. In past episodes his monologues and clandestine conversations were menacing and he was a man to be feared, however now he just sounds like an old man who likes to hear himself speak. Perhaps he isn’t as threatening in “The Beginning” because the episode moved too briskly to be suspenseful. It seems to bite off more than it can chew, with so many events to tie together from the end of the last season and the end of the movie- there’s no mention of the Well-Manicured Man and Krycek; Jeffrey Spender is barely given much time other than to show he’s now an X-Files agent along with Diana Fowley; Gibson Praise is featured slightly more, with all of his lines only serving to act as a summary of the episode; while the last thirty seconds of the episode erase the frightening movie aliens and show that they’re nothing more than the terrible two-year old version of the famous grey aliens we know and love.