It's A Zen Thing
The X-Files self-destructs in Part III of our ongoing series, "The Carter Conundrum."
      by pisher

Coincidences do happen. I get sick of repeating this sometimes, but they do. There are only so many ideas out there. This kind of thing happens to everyone in the entertainment biz, sooner or later. People gave Carter the benefit of the doubt (hopefully they gave it to Saunders as well). He was, as everyone knew, the great original of Dark TV, a "televisionary" as one writer memorably put it. And he knew it too. Because everybody kept saying it. And he had to keep right on proving it.

"This is who I am? An X-Files guest star?"

Anyway, once it became apparent that Millennium was never going to be a hit, Carter lost interest in it very quickly. His participation in the second season was non-existent, and his rare contributions to season three were collaborations -- and not very impressive ones at that. Frank Black was the first of Carter's brainchildren to know the sting of rejection by a distant and disappointed father figure. But with Morgan and Wong as his foster-dads, and Darin Morgan as the wacky uncle, one got the impression Frank really didn't care. This was who he was, not the first season guy. In the third season, we all got depressed.

Meanwhile, back at the Brand X Ranch -- things were beginning to get strange. I mean, even relatively speaking. And they kept getting stranger.

After a six-month summer hiatus (it's a miracle the fanfic archives didn't all crash), following Fox Mulder's apparent suicide, The X-Files' fifth-season premiere scored huge ratings. We had to know what happened. And after "Redux" I & II were done, we were still scratching our heads and asking, "What just happened?" So the aliens were a fraud. Or not. And Mulder had let Scully in on his faked suicide from the start -- damn, she was a better liar than we gave her credit for. No, actually Carter had told Gillian Anderson that Scully really believed Mulder was dead, so she cried convincingly in the fourth season finale. Oopsy.

And her cancer was cured. How? "I don't think we'll ever know", Mulder told Skinner. "We don't think we'll ever fall for that again", went a lot of viewers. The fifth season had a slight overall average increase in viewership, but averages are deceptive. For the first time since the show began airing, the ratings went steadily down, from around 27 million viewers for "Redux I" (around three million more than for "Redux II") to fewer than 19 million for "The End" -- which was the lead in to a heavily hyped summer movie. Many episodes did far worse than that -- still great ratings for Fox, but clearly people were tuning out. And the ratings would continue to sag, perhaps aided by the twin bogeymen of cable and the internet. But that was not a sufficient explanation for an established hit beginning to lose steam so quickly. Gauging audience reaction from ratings is a dodgy business, but one conclusion seemed unavoidable. The show had peaked. Nowhere to go but down.

And going down was something Carter had a genuine flair for, as swiftly became apparent. With more clout than ever, and fewer and fewer people who could talk to him honestly about his choices, Carter continued his quest to be the next Alfred Hitchcock, Oliver Stone, Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, or whoever else he was trying to be at the time. He couldn't seem to make his mind up.

"You're next, Chris": Duchovny on the set of The X-Files.

Actually, sometimes he seemed to be trying to be a cross between Darin Morgan and Vince Gilligan -- the huge success of "Small Potatoes" had not been lost on him. People liked seeing Mulder and Scully be funny. Well now, if you liked that, Carter told us, you'll just love seeing them waltz to the accompaniment of a Cher impersonator while a cross between Frankenstein's monster and the Elephant Man who had assisted in the forcible insemination of unconscious women dances happily in the foreground! In black and white, even! How about that, huh!? And maybe it didn't even happen! Some of us wanted to believe that very badly. Others liked it a lot. Takes all kinds.

At any rate, it didn't win Carter his Emmy. And the ratings did not begin to measure up to "Small Potatoes", particularly in repeats. Carter-boosters who said that you couldn't go by repeat ratings because "we all tape the episodes" failed to explain why some episodes did much better than others in repertory. Vince Gilligan's wicked and slanderous parody "Bad Blood", and the William Gibson penned VR epic "Killswitch" did boffo return business, and were actually re-aired several times that season. Almost everything else tanked miserably the second time around. We all wanted to see what came next. We didn't need to see it twice.

For many of us, the spirit of The X-Files died in that season, along with Scully's cloned daughter, and (we were told) her hopes of motherhood. (Sidebar: Were we beginning to see a theme here, of women being used for reproductive purposes against their will -- and liking it? At least in "Small Potatoes," the women were trying to become pregnant--and they were still mad as hell at sneaky little Eddie Van Blundht, who ended up in the pokey being beat up by inmates -- not at a Cher Concert. But I digress.)

Not everyone would agree that the Fifth season sucked, but you had to admit -- something had changed. It wasn't the upcoming move to L.A. that marked the end of something special. That just copperfastened it.

As I said earlier on, when the sixth season brought Mulder and Scully into the land of endless sunshine. All of the other founding fathers were gone from 1013, forever. Morgan and Wong's term of millennial servitude was concluded. Carter proceeded to tell reporters that he would now step in to get back the audience Morgan and Wong had lost. What audience he was referring to is not clear, since the ratings had actually gone slightly up. His remarks about his two former collaborators -- among the very few instances I have been able to find where he mentions them directly -- were not what one would call appreciative. Apparently he thought it was a mistake for them to introduce elements of the supernatural to the show. Even though his own script "Lamentations" had done exactly that in the first season.

And when a journalist mentioned to him that some people thought The X-Files borrowed a lot, he agreed that sometimes did happen -- giving as examples of derivative writing both "Ice" and "Little Green Men" -- which are both Morgan and Wong episodes. Nobody asked them for a reaction to this, so I don't know what their comment would have been. I know what my comment would have been. I think you do too.

R.W. Goodwin opted to stay in Canada -- and with him stayed Sheila Larkin and we lost Scully's family as an anchor for the character. Let's not dwell too long on season six, if you don't mind. Life is short. But let's note that a show that was losing its way long before then was now deprived not merely of the rain and fog of Vancouver, but was also deprived of the great majority of the people who worked on it over the previous five years, gave it a history, an identity, and what small sense of continuity it possessed. Carter was now the only link to the past. And he seemed to like it that way.

Certainly his competition for the fan's adoration was not impressive, Vince Gilligan excepted. Vince was the only consistent player that season, reviving and revamping Morgan and Wong's Lone Gunmen characters, and writing by and large the most interesting and popular episodes that season. But his most compelling writing for that year was the tale of a man who was tired of his seemingly immortal existence, and yearned to put an end to it all.

The one really stunning surprise was that David Duchovny could both write and direct remarkably well for a beginner. "The Unnatural" wasn't quite an X-Files episode, but it was so entertaining and high spirited that people were not inclined to complain. Carter had encouraged Duchovny's creative impulses -- he needed to, if he wanted to keep the notoriously boredom prone star from leaving -- but one must wonder what his reaction was to all the acclaim Duchovny got for his scripts.

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