"And he that does one fault at first
And lies to hide it, makes it two."
-- Isaac Watts, Song xv.
"That would mean that for four years
we've been nothing more than pawns in a game.
That it was a lie from the beginning."
-- Dana Scully, "Redux"
I know exactly how you feel, Dana. I, too, feel as though I have been manipulated and lied to for four years. For if we are to believe what we saw in Redux, then the very fabric of The X-Files is made of gauze.
Close scrutiny of this episode will reveal that, well, nothing much has been revealed. We knew that the nefarious Project involved human subjects and DNA as far back as The Erlenmeyer Flask. We knew that Scully's abduction was orchestrated by the Consortium, and that they were responsible for her cancer. We knew that CSM was having his problems maintaining his status within the Consortium. So, what did we learn? Ostensibly, we've learned that the Department of Defense is supposedly behind this whole conspiracy, and that there's a mole within the FBI. I'm underwhelmed by the depth of these revelations.
Stylistically, Redux might better be called "Rehash." Much of the episode was simply a replaying of selected parts of Gethsemane. The line, "Keep going, FBI-woman," was straight out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). The voice-overs of Kritschgau explaining the evils of the military industrial complex to the visual accompaniment of Cold War film clips was straight from Oliver Stone's JFK, where Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) meets his mysterious informant ("Just call me X,") who happens to be a military man (Donald Sutherland). This whole episode gave me a feeling of deja vu. What it lacked in originality it made up for with ersatz narrative.
And oh yes. Let's talk about the narrative. Mulder's first speech sounded as though he were reading directly from The Paranoid's Manifesto. This ostentatious, aureate diatribe might be better suited to recruit new members into the X-Files division of the FBI. But as a means to explain motivation, it was overblown, pretentious and oh-so grandiloquent. The proposition that the search for the truth was something he shared with Scully was ludicrous. It is now, always has been and always will be his quest, his motivation, his raison d'etre. Scully looks for her truth in her science; Mulder looks for his in conspiracies and fantastic explanations.
The extensive use of narrative can most likely be attributed to the cramped production schedule for the series induced by the filming of Blackwood this past summer. (Sorry, I just can't bring myself to type The X-Files: Fight the Future featuring Jackie Chan and Steven Segall. ;) Certainly the actors and crew were exhausted after working so many months without a break. But extensive turned into excessive. Long stretches of monologue were superimposed over bland, repetitive, almost inert activity. Hey! That meant that there were no lines to learn and no reaction shots to practice. Just hit your marks and read the voice-overs later. It may have been a godsend to the actors, but it was so prevalent as to be distracting. And that brings me to my next complaint.
The acting in this episode was almost nonexistent. Gillian Anderson turned in a paint-by-the-numbers performance. She averted her eyes on cue, she got teary-eyed on cue, she gave the obligatory look of astonishment when Mulder told her about the lies and the traitor within the FBI, and she even bled from her nose on cue. Her scenes with Mulder felt forced, and her scenes with others were perfunctory at best.
David Duchovny's Mulder was just as somnambulant. There was no energy to his performance, no vitality, no animation. To say that DD expressed grim determination would be accurate, but that is about all he expressed.
Charles Cioffi was wasted as Section Chief Blevins. His stoic demeanor was underscored by the inflectionless recitation of his dialogue. His unnamed associate was Cioffi's dramatic peer. The finest performance in the episode was that of guest star John Finn as the problematic Kritschgau. He was convincing enough to make Mulder believe that the truth is a lie. Or that the lie is the truth. Or something like that. For some reason, Deep Throat's warning about hiding a lie between two truths keeps coming back to me.
Director Bob Godwin's pacing of the episode was languid. There was no fluidity to the episode, no pace, no feeling of excitement or tension. Mark Snow's usually redoubtable score was intrusive and downright blaring in too many parts. Only Heather MacDougall's editing of the multiple scene venues was up to par for what I have come to expect from The X-Files.
There were so many plot holes in Redux as to defy belief. Obviously, the DoD has some sort of management training program. They've given their highest security clearance to one of their killers. Ostelhoff not only is a killer with the highest security clearance around, but he's out in the field doing surveillance work. When he's killed in his own apartment, he doesn't even have the courtesy to bleed in there. Instead, he bleeds in Mulder's apartment. He was, however, good enough to have phone records of the calls he made to the Consortium's FBI mole, so that Mulder could momentarily overcome his fear of fire and recover this vital piece of evidence. He was shot in the face by Mulder's .45, which, of course, is easily mistaken for the wounds that would be inflicted by a sawed-off shotgun. Given this, it's easy to understand how the authorities would mistake the wounds from a .45 fired from across the room for a pointblank shotgun blast. I won't even bother to comment on how preposterous it was that Mulder could walk into the highest security building this side of the Pentagon and not be stopped by one security guard who was seeing someone access Level 4 that they had never seen before.
Finally, let us consider Kritschgau's story from Mulder's perspective. Someone from the Department of Defense tells you that his own organization, the DoD, is responsible for an elaborate hoax that's been your life's driving force. This is like having a peeping tom installing your shades. But instead of believing what he’s seen over the past four years, Mulder accepts Kritschgau's pronouncements as fact. Perhaps Mulder should check out this new web site:
Redux was a major disappointment. It was plodding and overbearing, it didn't reveal anything we didn't already know, and it was a technical disaster. It looked like it was thrown together to meet a deadline, and that's about all it met. It certainly didn't meet any of my expectations for a season opener. Sorry, Chris. I can't give you the benefit of the doubt any longer.
My Score: 1 out of 10