"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.