‘The X-Files’ airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m.
ET on Fox
The Lost Art of Forehead Sweatis the bestX-Filesepisode so far this season.
Its a mess, no doubt, built on a self-destructing narrative.
Credit: Shane Harvey/FOX
I understand if you hate it.
I loved it, but it has problems.
More than anything: It isa lot.
Forehead Sweat breaks through the last Great Barrier of sanity.
They have a long conversation about the nature of everything.
Our hero declares, uneasy, that there is still an objective truth, an objective reality.
So this obvious location shooting feels like a wink from Morgan, who also directed this episode.
The tone is set by the prologue.
We see a guy tell a bartender that aliens have already invaded.
But the window is a mirror.
And when the guy looks in the mirror…he sees an alien!
Or maybe its not a mirror, and did I mention the bartender was an alien, too?
Cut to Fox Mulder, eight years old, a moment of epiphany: NowI get it!
The Lost Martian matters to Mulder.
But its not important because its important.
And now The Lost Martian has gone missing, like it never happened, canceled from history.
Mulder checks the internet, scans through his DVD boxed set, pages through his episode guidebooks.
This quest begins with a mystery man.
Reggie Something (Brian Huskey) meets Mulder in a parking lot.
Reggie tells Mulder a strange story about erased memories.
And he seems toknowMulder, well enough to tell him his favoriteTwilight Zoneepisode never existed.
He knows Scully, too.
I have such wonderful memories associated with it, says Scully.
Forehead Sweat has big ambitions.
Scully has her own theory about that.
Maybe youve just lost your taste for it, she says, especially after all this birther stuff.
Thats right: The Big Man in the White House got there because he peddled his own conspiracy theory.
Mulder = Trump: Discuss?
But why take things so seriously?
Morgan has a fascinating perspective on the shows resident paranoiac.
I was fighting the power and breaking conspiracies before you saw your first chemtrail, you punks!
Im Fox Freaking Mulder, you punks!
This is the Im the Goddamn Batman!
ofX-Files, except definitely funny and unquestionably sad.
His peacocking is egotistical(FOX FREAKINGMULDER)but also sounds like the chestbeating of a dying animal.
Credit to Duchovny, for really going for it.
Morgan is a brilliant writer.
HisX-Filescorpus constitutes a strange miniseries, the tones silly but incisive but heartfelt, self-parody-as-criticism-as-tragedy.
This is only his sixthX-Filesscript.
But he also carries one earlier story by credit.
And he playedtwomonsters of weeks past, fearsome Flukeman and shapeshifting Eddie Van Blundht.
And, if youll indulge overthinking, this episode has trace elements of autobiography.
Morgans actually onscreen for a moment, in a phony flashback.
We see Mulder transform into Eddie, an actual moment from Small Potatoes.
But this memory has beenForrest Gumpd, and ReggieshootsEddie.
Is this an act of self-immolation?
Reggie himself feels like a Darin Morgan analogue.
He claims hes always been a part of the team, that he actuallycreatedthe X-Files.
In another memoryfake?we see Scully arrive in the X-Files office for the first time.
Its the pilot episode, 1993, so Mulders there…but so is Reggie.
Move along, sugarboobs!
This is the X-Files!
This is a half-funny line that feels all-the-way true, given Andersons own complaints aboutthe shows all-male writing staff.
I admire the spirit, self-reflective, self-recriminating.
But as a director, Morgans choices are strange, even bland.
And so part of the gag was how Jose Chungs mostly looked like a regular eerie mythology episode.
This decadesX-Filescant match the original shows visual flair.
Robot single-shot episodecame almost 20 years after Chris Carter did his own long-take wonder, Triangle.
Robotpushed the form forward, achieving a new pinnacle of breathtaking realtime-thriller imagination.
Meanwhile, Carter opened this season with narratin Mulder on a never-ending drive somewhere important.
Morgans flat staging gives Forehead Sweat its own peculiar magic, though.
The strange men who keep appearing to chase Reggie arent remotely scary.
And in the climax of the episode, Reggie conjures up a false(?)
memory of the teams final case.
The scene is clearly syntheticsurf-rock soundtrack, rear-projection driving, convertible red as Mulders speedo once was.
But its exactly as synthetic as the rest of the episode.
The problems of 2018X-Filesare all over this episode.
Again with the presidential tweet-quoting, ho ho.
But something thats bothered me this season: Was Mulder ever actually a rebel?
(Will history recall Fox as a bold outlier, or the cultural tip of Rupert Murdochs spear?)
Forehead Sweat comes closer than the revival ever has.
Witness Stuart Margolin as Dr.
They, the man behind the curtain.
Except theres no curtain.
Hes in the phone book, if anyone still knew how to use a phone book.
They is technically a mad scientist who invented a ray of some kind to change peoples memories.
They is a YouTuber, just like Logan Paul.
A Voyager space probe brought home, like the one inStar Trek: The Motion Picture.
And the Martian Donald wore Elvis old cape.
(Theory: HewasElvis?)
This is myX-Filesseries finale.
I lovedThe X-Filesand remembered loving some episodes especially, like Carters own black-and-white The Post-Modern Prometheus.
In memory that episode was everything I admired about the show, everything I believed television could accomplish.
I remembered specifically how Cher had a cameo, as herself, in the wonderful and romantic final scene.
But I loved this episodes screwball spirit, the way it chewed up its own scenery.
I will ponder this episodes deeper meanings forever.
I already want to argue about its place in the canon.
Reggies carried away to the Spotnitz Sanitarium, tied up in the back of a crazyhouse ambulance.
Mitch Pileggis crusty Director Skinner walks into the parking lot as hes driven away.
Where the hell they taking Reggie?
he asks, the last man on Earth who remembers the man who wasnt there.
And that ending: Tears!
Mulder solves the episodes first and most important mystery.
The missingTwilight Zonewasnt aTwilight Zoneat all.
Mulder watches the episode, which come to think of it isnt good at all.
The tape collapses when Mulder ejects it from his VCR.
She cooks up her own private Proustian spongecake, a Goop-o shaped like a sasquatch foot.
But she cant bring herself to actually eat this fantasy fruit.
I want to remember how it was, she says.
I want to remember how it all was.
Its a happy line, a sad one, thought-provoking, ambiguous, conclusive.
And for how long?
Morgans camera rises up from the couch to the night sky.
We see the stars.
Well never see the stars up close, but they do exist.
And Mulder and Scully still exist, real as any fake memory.
Their truth is out there, where it never was and ever shall be.
The X-Filesairs Wednesdays at 8 p.m.
