(pictured, at right: how I felt watching it)
Sometimes, this second paragraph of a review is where I summarize the plot. I can't even attempt to do that here. Something something Smoking Man something something William something something our answers are still in The X-Files. It was absolute nonsense. I suppose, in fairness, my memory of the details of the ongoing X-Files mythology story line range from murky to non-existent. I haven't watched any of those episodes since the show's original run, my memory isn't what it used to be, and I recall those episodes not making a whole lot of sense even at the time.
But it would also be fair to say that the episode should have provided us a "previously on" at the beginning that primed us with all the information we'd need to catch back up. Instead, we got a fever dream of images jumbled up like a music video, not even sufficiently reminding us what was going on in the show's revival season, much less what was happening two decades ago. Part of this seemed to be a desire not to refresh too much of what had last happened to Mulder in Scully because they were about to play out literally the most derided plot twist in the history of television: "it was all a dream." Mulder and Scully didn't find Bobby Ewing in the shower, but they did inform us that basically everything we saw in the last season finale all happened inside Scully's vision. (You might think that because that episode was terrible too, undoing it would be a positive thing. Instead, it doubled down on the "why am I wasting my time watching this?" of it all.)
The dialogue throughout the episode was embarrassing, both for the actors and for any fan of The X-Files who might have been forced to explain to a non-fan what it was about a show that stupid on its face that ever drew them in in the first place. It was like watching a contestant on the $100,000 Pyramid work a category of Things They Might Say on The X-Files. "Is this what you've been planning all along?" "The conspiracy goes much deeper than you realize." "Alien colonization." "The truth." Blah blah blah. It was cliche, felt made up as it went along, and didn't really serve to tell any kind of comprehensible story. Mulder's inner monologues were especially terrible, the sort of material that one imagines had David Duchovny calling his agents to find out if his contract might have any outs in it.
Adding to the feeling of this being bad X-Files fan fiction were the revelations in the plot itself. The Cigarette Smoking Man fakes the moon landings, we learn, even though this is a throwaway detail that has nothing to do with anything. Scully and Mulder's son isn't really Scully and Mulder's son, a twist that fails on any level you can imagine. Are we meant to believe that Scully knew this all along, thus eroding every ounce of trust we put in her and the relationship between her and Mulder? Are we meant to believe that she didn't know, in which case she's showing a shocking lack of curiosity about having been abducted by CSM that one time? I don't know. I really don't care either.
At this point, I only plan to be coming back under the assumption that the bulk of this season, like last one, will be made up of stand-alone episodes not written by Chris Carter (who I assume does his writing in red crayon, on the walls of his padded cell). If for a moment I had any notion that's not the case, that we're getting even one more mythology episode before the season finale, I would -- with all seriousness -- be done with The X-Files. This was every bit as bad (and more) as what finally got my friends and I to stop watching The Walking Dead -- a powerful display of how a once-great show has devolved into a self-indulgent parody of itself.
Several paragraphs later, I may be about out of ways to say it: this was terrible. "My Struggle III" is an absolute grade F. The only real struggle is to justify why you're an X-Files fan after watching it.
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