Well, it does raise some questions. If Mulder and Scully were the “threat from without” why did the syndicate leave them alive? Why not kill them during some innocuous Joe Monster episode and breathe a sigh of relief? And he gets kidnapped by some aliens in the end, no? Does he ever return or what?
At the risk of alienating (ha ha) Dalovin’Dj, I have a feeling that were I to start watching the series from scratch now, the conspiracy episodes would fly right by me. The plot seems a tad forced and unnecessarily convoluted. But maybe that’s a premature judgment based on insufficient information, I don’t know.
I’d have to say that this assessment is pretty accurate. I lost interest in the show around the time that the movie came out. I was never a huge fan of the conspiracy episodes. (Yeah, I’m in the Monster of the Week camp.) Plus, the Syndicate’s near-dictatorial power was kinda depressing. You knew that if Mulder and Scully ever got too close, it would be a trivial matter for them to have both agents murdered. The fact that the mytharc was a tangled mess with no master plan didn’t help. I understand that the mytharc became even more of a Gordian knot in later seasons.
Well, at first they said they didn’t want to make them Martyrs. Better to have every one in the Bureau think M&S were crazy, rather than kill them and make them martyrs - resulting in people thinking they were killed because they were onto something. It was later revealed that Mulder’s father was one of the original men in the syndicate deal, and he (along wiht others) had paid a sacrifice of one child each. this sacrifice was respected, and Mulder’s life was spared because of this many times.
To expand on the DJ’s point, a recurring theme throughout the series is Mulder’s quest to find his long lost sister.
I was always a fan of the conspiracy episodes, and kept close track of it until around season 5 or 6 when it spiraled into a complete narrative meltdown. It ended with the final episode, the writing for which was so terrible, I’m still pissed off about it today.
Yeah, the deal was that everyone in the syndicate had to give up one of their kids in return for the alien fetus which contained the (alien) genetic material needed for the production of the planned hybrids. The genetic material would also, they hoped, facilitate the top secret production of a vaccine - as stated above. The thing about the conspirators was that their goals were ultimately good ones. They wanted to save humanity. The grey, or should I say ‘Gray’ (ha ha), area arose from the fact that they would do anything to achieve their goals. They murdered, took over governments, tested new technologies and weapons on innocent people the world over, and in the end, had they not created a vaccine, and had not they been killed by the alien rebels, they would have helped them to conquer us when they come. In return they would get to be overlord types managing the human slaves/hosts.
The sacrifice of one child made the lives of their brothers and sisters that much more special. The syndicate did try to operate on a somewhat distorted honor system, the ‘code among the Syndicate members that put honor and the future above personal politics’. The future of the children of the members of the syndicate that were not chosen to be given to the aliens were often afforded every protection the syndicate could afford.
Yeah, he gets returned. And he knows when the aliens are going to attack, as well as how to kill the bounty hunters.
Geez. That sentence came out fucked up. Let’s try it again:
The futures and, by extension, the lives of the syndicate members children that were not chosen to be hostages were often provided every protection the syndicate could afford them. This was illustrated in the episode where we saw how Mulder met the Lone Gunmen. At the end, conspirators flood into a warehouse where Mulder ends up unconcious. The head agent (cool blacvk actor) says something like “nothing happens to this man”. We also hear the Cigarette man talking about how proud he is of what Mulder’s son had accomplished, while being disgusted by his own son (who was shot and killed by his own Dad - so much for affording protection).
Unlike the other children, Samantha was returned secretly to the April Air Base, where Cassandra and the Cigarette-Smoking Man raised her with CSM’s other son, Spender. At the base, the Syndicate did hybridization and cloning experiments on Samantha. The other Syndicate family members taken by the aliens were used as human collateral to ensure the Syndicate’s cooperation. Mulder’s father had hoped that Samantha would survive the colonization as a hybrid made by the Syndicate. He quit the Project long ago after the Syndicate decided against resisting the aliens in favor of saving themselves. Eventually, Samantha escaped in 1979. She ran away from the base and turned up at a hospital. Right before CSM and his men found her and were going to take her away, she vanished without a trace. What happened is that “walk-ins,” friendly spirits, saved Samantha from the horror she would have to go through at the base for the rest of her life by converting her body into pure energy and taking her to a better place, the “starlight”. She was cloned a bit before she disappeared.
Probably because it took years to unravel, seemed grossly convoluted, and seemed rife with contradictions as it was being told. Not to mention all the lies, half-truths, and disinformation the characters encountered.
Plus, all the mysticism involved with the whole thing probably tended to throw some people off.
And we have to remember…at least some of the explainations for the conspiracy’s actions are just on-screen rationalizations for very off-screen motives. (Why didn’t the Syndicate just kill Mulder and Scully? A: The same reason that 007 always gets chained to an execution machine that doesn’t work.)
An [=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=2863438]earlier discussion of the arc.
It did take years to unravel. You really had to catch all the mythology episodes to keep up, but if you did it all made sense. The contradictions and disinformation were my favorite parts. Head fakes galore made the whole thing alot of fun for me. Is it really aliens? Or is it bio-research on humans which uses the UFO culture as a screen? Mulder flip-floped a bunch of times on what he believed. Was he really onto something? Or was he simply the victim of misdirection and misinformation. ‘The Truth is Out There’, or so Mulder believed, but the truth, it turns out, depended on where you were standing. Were these syndicate men heros or scoundrels? Are the aliens real or a red herring? The show ‘24’ uses the head fake trick all the time. Just when you think you know what is going on something happens that turns everything on its ear. Fun stuff. While it can be a bit confusing, in the end the X-Files revealed a relatively coherent picture of what was going on. But by the time they had done this you didn’t know who to believe any more. Doubt, faith, the frustration of unanswered questions - these are human issues we all deal with. The arc not only revealed a cool alien story, but it also showed how many pitfalls and incorrect paths the search for truth can take you down. It was about trying to find the Straight Dope, and just like in philosophy, the more you learn the more you realize that you don’t really know anything.
Not true. Bond manages a daring escape based on some gadget or some broad helping himout. Mulder and Scully were not killed because it would draw more heat to the Syndicate by making martyrs out of them. As well as the fact that Mulder had special protections because of his father’s role in the Syndicate. No Q gadgets or hot double spys ever saved Mulder from a brutally slow execution machine.
There is no reasoning behind why Bond didn’t die - the people who wanted him dead tried to kill him. They were simply incompetenet. The people in the Syndicate did not want Mulder dead. It wasn’t incompetence, it was a calculated decision. I’m sure the execution machines of the Syndicate would work just fine. My favorite syndicate kill was when CSM just put a bullet in an alien that was a survivor of a crash. Dr. Evil’s son would be proud. They just got a gun and shot him . . .
I really, really liked the walk-ins as a means of explaining the fate of Mulder’s sister. For as long as I had followed the series, I wasn’t sure if they would come up with something that was really satisfying, that wouldn’t leave me saying, “So … that’s IT?” after seasons of his desperate searching.
I think the series should have ended with the birth of Mulder and Scully’s baby. Then you could imply that the child will be the salvation of humanity and leave it at that. One last movie to answer any other questions, and you’ve got yourself a nice little series wrapped up with a big bow on top.
What I really want to believe is that they will make the great X-Files movie that I know is possible. What I fear is that they will blow it instead, and send the whole franchise into a downaward spiral that would make ‘ST: Nemesis’ look like a good movie. David Duchovney has said he would really like to do an X-Files flick every 3 years or so indefinitely. He thinks that it would be a great artistic experiment to follow Mulder & Scully into old age. That could be cool. Not sure that it will happen though. There’s word Fox might be offloading some of their older properties to some of the distribs. One company called Arclight and another Gecchi are apparenlty in talks to take both “X Files” and “Millenium” away. The studio doesn’t plan to follow through on their promises for films of both, but have given the go ahead to another studio to do so. For a nice sum I’m sure. Whether some third party studio can give the proper love to the franchise remains to be seen.
No, the reason the Bond villains never killed Bond was because it would end the movie in under 45 minutes. The reason the Syndicate didn’t “want” Mulder and Scully dead was because if they did kill them, they’d have won, and the series would have ended. Leaving them alive isn’t part of a grand, byzantine strategy. It’s a simple storyteller’s trick—you don’t just have Snidley Whiplash win by murdering all the heroes in the first act, and run wild for the rest of the play! It’d be like giving the characters a “Win” button.
Mulder and Scully’s continued survival has no more justification behind it than the reason the Transporters fail on the Starship Enterprise when they’re needed the most…it’s just a way of keeping the story going. A plot device. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. It doesn’t make it a bad story. But that doesn’t automatically make it a brilliant, impeccable story, either.
The real charm of the X-Files came from the way the ‘conspiracy’ and ‘MOTW’ episodes were interwoven - which made the whole thing ‘unexpected’ - you never knew what you were going to get.
The series also produced some stand-out ‘oddity’ episodes such as
How the Ghosts Stole Christmas
Clyde Bruckman’s FInal Repose
Jose Chungs from Outer Space
War of the Coprophages
Bad Blood
and there is one I’ve forgotten the name of, but it tells the story through the eyes of a teenager and Mulder/Scully appear as the ‘nasty G-Men’ rather than their usual selves.
It was that ability to ‘not take things too seriously’ - along with seriously-great-chemistry between Mulder and Scully - which made the series watchable for me.
Once one or the other actor started dropping out the series just went all-to-hell tho - many X-Philes simply ended their interest in Series 6 in fact!!
Not true. They explained quite clearly the reasoning for not just killing Mulder outright. And the series went on a couple of seasons without Mulder and very little Scully. Fox and Dana were not necessary to keep the X-Files show going (although some might argue that they should have been). There was a feeling, particularly in the later seasons (when the success of the show got the actors demanding more money), that they just might kill one of them. Hell, as a matter of fact, they still might kill one (or both) of them in the movies.
I understand the common storytelling quandry that you are talking about. But Chris Carter was always talking about how the show was the X-files, not the Mulder Files. The story can and will continue whether those actors want to do it or not. I think they bypassed this whole problem and could have (and must have talked about during the writing meetings) killed anyone at anytime. Right now the show ‘24’ is also facing the Immortality Trap. The show is badass because you know that they could kill anyone on the show at any time - xxcept Jack Bauer - the man on the poster. Kieffer Sutherland has said that, as much as he would hate not doing the show, the only way for ‘24’ to maintain its street cred is to eventually kill Jack. Then ‘24’ would be a CTU show and not a Jack Bauer show. We’ll see how it works out. My point is that the X-Files managed to keep the stakes high, and unlike Bond movies, I really thought (think) one or both of them may eventually get iced. Sure, the writers faced the trap you spoke about, but they also managed to disarm and move past it incredibly well IMO.
It really was cooler than it sounds. I shed a tear when she got beamed . . .
