Nothing Lasts Forever

The best episode of the recent revival season of The X-Files was an all-out comedy in the mold of classics like "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" and "Bad Blood" -- some of the most highly-regarded episodes of the series. But there's another very different episode that also routinely ends up on "best of" lists: the gory and profoundly disturbing "Home." That's not a personal favorite of mine, though I can understand why they'd want to try revisiting that well one more time. I imagine that's how we got "Nothing Lasts Forever."

Mulder and Scully investigate the gruesome and ritualistic murders of a pair of organ harvesters, and soon find themselves hot on the trail of.... vampires? A cult? Both! Sort of. A charismatic couple, an actress and an unethical doctor, have built a group of followers literally willing to die so that the two might prolong their lives and remain forever young. But the sister of one of these wayward followers is also in pursuit, with vengeance on her mind.

This episode seems to exist mainly just as a vehicle to gross out the audience with body part smoothies, graphic impalings, gruesome operations to stitch people together, and whatever else they can think of. There's a loosely woven plot around prolonged life apparently making you crazy, but it appears to subscribe to the notion that "crazy people don't make sense," and so neither does this plot need to.

There's a tiny sprinkling of meta commentary throughout, about aging in general, and the aging of our two heores in particular. It's definitely the episode's strongest element. We see Mulder struggling with vanity and embarrassment as he has to resort to progressive lens eyeglasses (not bifocals!) in order to read. Scully the doctor tries to tell him that it's a natural stage of life, to which Mulder gets a dig in on how she's not just leaving her appearance to nature either. This is just one of a few nice moments with the characters, though none are as effective and simple as the show's opening credits -- which still, after all these years, show our baby-faced, season 1 protagonists crashing through a door, circa 1993.

I'm not sure anything on television (certainly not network television) could be as shocking today as "Home" was in its time, so I feel like this episode was chasing something that could never be caught. Add that to the fact that I never thought much of that original episode, and I found this a rather lackluster installment of the show. I give "Nothing Lasts Forever" a C-. As I'm finally winding down the season, I'm ready for it to be done.