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"Interesting? As in preposterous and outrageous?"
Well. I don't even know where to start.
Here's what I got out of "Per Manum": Scully's hair is really floofy now. I like it that way. It is pretty. She looked very nice in all her ridiculously manufactured soapy angst, didn't she? I sure was glad in those flashbacks that they were not able to really give her that helmet head hair again so she even looked nice then. You know what Carter and Spotsy? I'm not thinking one bit about stupid goat bleating alien babies. I'm thinking about Scully's poofy floofy hair. And here they told us they were not going to write any comedies this season. That doctor trying to suck the snot out of a baby alien's nose was one of the funniest things I've seen on TV this year (and yes, I am even counting stuff on "Will and Grace"). And one of the saddest. "Bleeeeeaaaaaattt!"
I can't call it a waste of an hour though as much as I'd like to. Sure, the premise was juvenile, the plot incomprehensible and stupid, and the entire point of the hour was to continually tweak the audience and still not tell them ONE SINGLE WORTHWHILE THING. (Are those boys clever writers or what? We still don't know how she got pregnant, who the father is, what she's pregnant with, or what the hell is the matter with the calendars at 1013. They must be just in a drunken tizzy over the way they gave the audience absolutely nothing.) However, the actors - God Bless 'em - still showed up to work. They worked their asses off so we could be left with a big fat nothing. That is just so wrong.
Here we had Gillian "I don't need no freaking lines" Anderson (at this point I bet she actually prefers the parts where she doesn't need to recite ridiculous dialogue) giving us everything we need to know about Scully's state of mind from a few seconds looking in a mirror: There really is a baby in there. Am I showing? I'm glad black is slimming. Maybe I'm showing a little. It's a blessing. I'm so lonely. Oh God. Don't cry. Get a grip.
We don't even need Mark Snow's Scully's lonely angst theme to remind us. It was all there in her face. Just as it was in that first elevator scene with Scully at her transparent best. Well, frankly as it was the whole episode. Gillian was acting her heart out. Thank God for that. I loved how busted she looked when Doggett told her Parenti's office called. And my goodness but Robert Patrick was great in this episode. He actually made me feel bad that Scully was treating this guy so poorly. And I'm usually not like that at all. I just adored the look on his face as he was trying hard for her while hearing that stupid story about Haskell's wife giving birth to an alien. And then when she smacked him down for going through her file (she'd apparently forgotten how prominently featured she is in those files) he looked like a pup that just got swatted on the nose when he thought he'd been good.
Patrick was also so good in that scene in the diner where for some reason Skinner and Scully called him in just so she could purse her lips and give out one word answers while Skinner explained it all. Doggett is trying so hard to be a good guy here and his hurt at his treatment by his partner was well done. As was his hurt at the end when he wondered why she had not told him and we find out it is because Scully was afraid she could not continue her unorthodox search for Mulder by investigating subway systems, scrap yards, exterminator offices, slug cults, ghost kids, butt genies, and man bats if he new. That made sense.
I so enjoyed seeing Duchovny actually get to finally have lines beyond "SCULLEEEEEE" this season, but it just seemed to me like he was a little out of his X-Files groove. I missed Mulder's charm. I saw it in glimmers such as "The answer is yes" as he answers a Scully trying to cover her worries, but he seemed a bit more deadpan than usual to me. Especially given the things they were talking about.
As dumb as the flashbacks were, and as much as I despise this retroactive storytelling that makes ZERO sense in context to what we've seen in the past, it was nice to at least see Mulder and Scully together again. And see them interacting in such an intimate (well for them) manner. Even if it was a Mulder, who as we are told has been suffering from some big old brain death thingee, worried that Scully is keeping something medical from him. God forbid that. Oh and I love the way he kept the whole ova thing from her for three years. She wasn't sick that whole time and it was her body damn it. And agreeing to father her child without clueing her in that he's gonna die at any time from an alien virus - better hope he doesn't pass that on to the little Sculder. Yeah, let's worry this might come between you rather than forgetting to tell her about the impending tombstone purchase. Oh, look at me, I'm onto how stupid the writing was again. I don't blame Mulder for these things. I blame the writers. How utterly insulting this "gee what you didn't know was happening last year" path has been. For the audience and the poor actors who get their performances last season negated. Carter and Spotnitz should just be embarrassed that the only way they could tell their weak story this year was to shoe horn in retroactively stuff that makes no sense in the context of what we saw. I'm so glad we got to watch dreck like "Fight Club" and "First Person Shooter" while Mulder and Scully were scurrying around behind the scenes dying and trying to have a baby. If we have to tell a story by flashback then why not give us the scenes we want to see, like Scully asking Mulder to be the father of her baby? Or them realistically figuring out how a baby would fit into their uh, somewhat busy and dangerous lives? Did that require too much thought?
Kim Manners did his usual nice job with the camera work - I especially liked the way the camera circled around and around when Scully and Hendershot went to the army base. For a while I thought he was trying to make us dizzy so we'd forget how stupid it was for Scully to go to an army hospital given the luck she's had at military facilities in the past. Editor Chris Willingham made the flashback segues seamless. I especially liked the use of light in the first flashback in Scully's apartment - the warmth and golden glow of the scene with Mulder to the stark cold darkness of her standing alone and remembering. I found Adam Baldwin (who guest starred as Doggett's friend Knowle Rohrer) especially interesting from the supporting cast. Wondering whether he was really friend of foe was the one thing up in the air that didn't feel manipulative and ridiculous.
So, if a man spends his life studying the mytharc like Frank Spotnitz tells us he does, well shouldn't that man remember things like the fact that Mulder and Scully had the barren conversation before a judge in "Emily" an episode he co-wrote? Wouldn't he perhaps recall that Mulder did not rush those ova right over to a specialist, but instead cooked the suckers in his pants pocket for hours in an episode he was nominated for an Emmy for? Do you think he could possibly make the time line match up just a little in the third episode in a row he worked on? Scully is 14 weeks pregnant? At this point more like 14 months according to episodes he wrote. I am really curious what math he uses to shrink from May until February into 14 weeks. Or even from May until the 11-23-00 date on that tape. And this is just the continuity stuff. The plot itself makes me wonder if Carter and Spotnitz are capable of doing anything that will end this thing with any sense of class at all.
So Duffy Haskell is in on it. OK. Why lock him out of the room in the teaser then? Scully's doctor is in on it to, eh? Yeah it makes so much sense that people as paranoid as Mulder and Scully wouldn't have had these guys checked out. This is now the second time in a row Scully has managed to pick a doctor for something major that is evil. What are the odds? Is her optometrist in on it too? Note to Scully: stay far away from that laser eye surgery. So why hasn't Scully just run her own DNA test? She is a scientist. This is the woman who performed a Southern Blot on herself before. It would be pretty easy to settle this once and for all. For that matter she could run one on Miss Hendershot's baby too and clear every stupid little mystery in this episode up in a jiffy all the while wearing her cool lab glasses that I'm sure would compliment her nice hair. And if the ova was not viable all those years ago why the heck did they still have it around? Did Mulder just say "oh well, I'll keep it in my freezer as a memento?" Why didn't Scully question the fact that Hendershot knew she was pregnant when it is such a huge secret? Why in the world in a place where you are trying to hide things like Zeus Genetics is there A) no security and B) a bunch of botched babies in an unlocked deformo room that any expectant mother can just accidentally waltz into if they took a wrong turn trying to find the bathroom? Oh, that's right, for a plot convenience. What was the whole point of this silly thing anyway? If they wanted Hendershot why not just take her, what's with the luring Scully into it? Why the whole setup? There was no reason that I could see to expose any of this to Scully unless the conspiracy just really wanted to freak her out for the hell of it because they had nothing better to do and it seemed like fun.
Did I mention Scully's hair looked nice? And that 1013 is lucky to have the actors that they do?
-Retread Alert: Duffy Haskell was played by Jay Acovone. He was also the detective in "Demons" that had Mulder in that lovely orange jumpsuit.
-Speaking of Jay, for some reason when Duffy first met Scully he spent almost the entire conversation staring at her chest. That was special. Too bad she wasn't wearing one of those unbuttoned shirts she's so fond of so he could have really got an eyeful.
-Things I wondered as my mind wandered during utterly ridiculous parts of this episode: I wonder if Scully now thinks she was taken by aliens instead of men since she's now all over that alien thing like white on rice.
-No good can come from things with Zeus in the name. Especially in Germantown - home of alien clone breeding in "Colony/EndGame". So Zeus Genetics brings back memories of Zeus Storage and for that matter the Zeus Faber.
-Since Doggett was asking questions about Scully's little X-Files secrets maybe he should have also asked what she did with that cool tattoo.
-I wonder what Apple had to pay for that obvious product placement in Zeus Genetics. Apple, we're the computing power behind terrorizing pregnant women. Makes me want one.
-Date Stamp: We know this one took place after 11-23-00, the date on the video tape.
-Bad liar Scully was back with a vengeance, wasn't she? I think my favorite was when she pretended to be Miss Hendershot's friend: "I'm worried about her."
-He may be a stuck in the mud skeptic, but at least Doggett has got in the spirit of the X-Files office. He's got his Montana Man Bat headline tacked behind his desk on the wall.
-Frank's Fashion Spot: Um. The hair.
-Scariest moment of the episode: When I spotted that turtle shaped stool in Scully's apartment. I'm going to pretend now that was a gift from a friend that she feels like she has to have out.
-Did you get the feeling Mulder was happy he could do something he was a pro at to help out Scully? Win/win.
-Blink and you'll miss him, but Mark Snow was one of the doctors at the Army hospital. He was the one that led Miss Hendershot off.
-Speaking of Miss Hendershot, they probably could have shaved two minutes off this episode just by shortening that name. What a constant mouthful.
-It almost seems silly to quibble over time stamps when these guys are months off at this point, but it did seem odd to me that they got to the hospital at 5:01AM and said labor would take 4-12 hours to induce but by the time they were escaping it was night again.
-Manly Man Meter: OK points for that big old pick up truck. Points for standing up and accusing Scully of her secrets and lies. Points for squealing his tires when he was cranky. Points for just being such a damn good guy. However, and I almost hate to point this out, but I have to. Blame the makeup people, but when Doggett went to meet his pal Knowle you could really see the eyeliner under his eyes. It made it look like he'd just come from a drag competition and not quite got it all off. You can see why I can't give a perfect score for that, can't you? 8.
-That last flashback was the icing on the, uh, well it sure as heck wasn't cake. Maybe the icing on the day old dried up rye toast. We learn that everything we learned about the baby experiment was for naught. We find that Mulder and Scully are still so fond, so very very fond of each other's foreheads, and we also see Scully swoop into kiss Mulder and wuss out at the last second and smooch his neck instead. Oh well, you take what you can get.
Autumn
"It was my last chance."