copyright © Jedo Dre 2011

…WHAT…THE….FUCK?!


There has been a problem with agent Scully and agent Mulder's relationship from the beginning. The continuous skepticism coming from Scully as part of that scripted relationship loses its credibility already in the beginning of the 1st season of X-Files. Occasionally these outbursts of skepticism make her look like she is actually deliberately trying to annoy and it makes you want to reach out right through the screen and smack her, yelling: "What the hell is wrong with you?!".


In this particular episode this problem comes to a pinnacle as the whole script takes on the face of agent Scully. After four seasons of both characters personally witnessing all kind of aliens we are supposed to believe that agent Scully, due to a single conversation with some stranger who both assaults and tries to flee from her, is suddenly convinced that everything in the past was a lie; that the never doubting agent Mulder might actually doubt himself; and that agent Scully believes that agent Mulder might actually shoot himself because of that.


The story in this episode, however short and blunt, is so far up itself that it threatens to open an all-consuming cosmic singularity.


If Gethsemane and its two follow up episodes were a movie, starting from scratch, it may have worked. In fact, with a little correction it would have been quite interesting, but you cannot just ignore a library of preceding events only to create a plot twist in the last episode of the season to keep the public interested. The fact that this attention grabbing plot twist is clearly the purpose of the episode just makes the poor strategy and writing appear worse - not just the writers having a bad day, but a conscious conniving conspiracy. And even though the next episode in the series will claim that some of the characters' behavior was a fabrication it will not relieve the problem. In fact Season 5 will continue to push the ridiculous character arch.

The X-Files Gethsemane