Before he was the brainchild behind Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan got his big break writing for The X-Files. Credited as a Creative Consultant from season 3, his own monster-of-the-week episodes started appearing in Season 4, with his second script's sweet-talk-you-into-suicide villain 'Pusher' as popular as Tooms for one of the show's most notorious antagonists. That said, it is the later episodes penned by Gilligan that are the most fun to watch, because you can tell he had the most fun writing them. Having produced as many episodes as he helped write, Gilligan later had such a firm thumb on the pulsing tone of the show that he started to experiment with the investigative structure of The X-Files storytelling itself. Behold my spoiler-free trailer for Gilligan's S06E14 episode, Monday.
The more ineffable examples of Gilligan toying with the mood & mechanics of his genre come much later, with an apathetic genie at heart of his Season 7 directorial debut Je Souhaite (French for "I Wish"), building an identical replica of the The Brady Bunch set for the series' penultimate episode Sunshine Days. Or there's the final season's cheekily-titled Jump the Shark, in which Gilligan mourns the cancellation of his Lone Gunmen spin-off series, by killing off the Lone Gunmen.
It is a credit to Vince Gilligan's craft that even these later episodes, as tongue-in-cheek as they are, never push that playfulness through into proper parody. It is the hallmark of a man who know his series back-to-front & inside-out. Gilligan's reflective, refractive episodes start as early as Season 4, wherein he feels free to be explicitly experimental with the art of narrative. In Season 5's Bad Blood, Mulder & Scully consecutively talk each other through the same series of events, so they can get their stories straight after Mulder has apparently killed what is either a vampire, or an innocent child. The dialogue is so brilliantly forced because not only do they each remember things differently, but they're each trying to convince the other of their own version. He remembers her rolling her eyes at every he says. She remembers him leading them through a field of fool's errands to chase more wild geese. It's like Gilligan has the personified polar opposites of the series and then taken things a step further by reflecting them back through each other. The fact that it's so funny whilst also staying true to the quintessence of The X-Files is a credit to his pen. The true triumph of this episode comes not only in his taking science fiction seriously, or in exposing the fictions of science, but in exploring the science of fiction.
Interestingly, Vince Gilligan never wrote an X-Files script dealing with the overarching alien conspiracy mythology, the only exception being Season 4's Memento Mori, for which every regular writer was called in. Gilligan's gift came instead in probing the double-edge sword of the standalone episodes, in taking seriously the dissection of the cheesiness at the heart of that week's monster concept. He was so well able to play upon the perpetual suspension of belief we as a viewer invest into the supposed absurdity of the very idea of The X-Files: the simultaneous scientific skepticism teamed with the leap of faith that has the assumed audience whispering 'I WANT TO BELIEVE'
This dissecting the dialectical duality of Mulder & Scully via mechanics of the medium is handled even more subtly by Gillian Anderson in Gilligan's X-Cops homage in Season 7. Scully wants to get the COPS cameras out of her face, at once because she's embarrassed about their apparent werewolf hunt going public, and at the same time, that the camera's presence is impeding their ongoing search for the uneasy truth.You can so clearly see here that Anderson appreciates the paradox of Scully's character, that her skepticism is what ultimately legitimises Mulder's madness, because her science cannot deny what she has seen with her own eyes.
/mr_metaphor.
No comments:
Post a Comment