Rip It & Run! Bad Guys...

I have just waded through Season 13 of “Supernatural” which has left me feeling somewhat – meh. Occasionally shows like this need to do some house-cleaning and put things back in order and this is definitely the season where they do all of that (I thought about posting a review, but the whole thing can simply be summed up with the following: “this is prep.; stay tuned for Season 14!”). The good bits are fourfold – Rowena; Bobby and Charlie are back; Mark Pellegrino; and “Scooby-natural”; the bad things were par for the course – the Winchesters emoting; Kevin Tran getting killed (again!); soporific angel politics; and the egregious error of failing to pick up a “Wayward Sisters” spin-off show (I would have watched the Hell out of that!). Along the way, I threw a DVD into the ‘player entitled “Frailty”, starring Bill Paxton (who also directed), Powers Boothe and Matthew McConaughey; the film isn’t really anything to write home about, but it – along with the ‘Whinge-chester’ farrago - got some cogwheels turning in my brain.

When we embark upon a new campaign of “Call of Cthulhu”, there’s an unspoken automatic expectation that the group of players are going to be the ‘Good Guys’. The assumption is that our team will be going up against the Dreamer in Rl’yeh, taking names and kicking butts, but why should that be the case? Are they fighting a Good Fight? In Lovecraft’s universe, things such as an ethical disposition are entirely superfluous – the Universe doesn’t care whose side you’re on, or even if you score points for your ‘team’; it’s entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The “Delta Green” source material for “‘Cthulhu” touches on this issue, but I don’t see why it can’t be brought wholesale into a mainstream version of the game.

Getting back to “Frailty”, the synopsis for this film is as follows: the American Midwest father of two young boys receives a holy vision/has a brain snap (your choice), and suddenly perceives that many people walking around the countryside are actually “demons” from “Hell”, working against God and His angels. A set of coincidences leads him to his ‘holy weapons’ – a length of steel pipe; an axe; and a pair of heavy-duty work-gloves – and he convinces his children to go with him to remove these monsters from God’s Creation. One child is fully on board with the plan; the other… not so much. And thereby hangs the tale. It’s an okay set-up as far as these things go, but it got me thinking: what if it was true?

Many “Call of Cthulhu” teams are established around the notion that the members of the group are seeking out evil within their communities and expunging it. They tend to band into organisations – ghost-hunters; private investigators; newspaper/TV reporting teams – which give them a rationale to be together and a means to be drawn in to their investigations. Alternatively, they become a loose confederacy of fellow-travellers, striving towards their goal while keeping their activities on the down-low. But what if their actions forced them out into the daylight and made it difficult to keep their fight completely sub rosa?

Sam and Dean are on an FBI hit-list; wherever they go, if they get noticed, they will get pursued (although the threat of this ever happening has faded absolutely into the background at this stage in their career!). The story outlined in “Frailty” is, in essence, the effort of one of the abused sons to throw off an active FBI pursuit that is closing-in uncomfortably on the ‘family business’ of demon-slaying. In both vehicles, the crusade against the Evil infecting the world requires that a whole bunch of misdirection and avoidance of the Powers That Be has to be undertaken in order for the Good Fight to keep going. Here is a way to lift your campaign from a simple string of escalating “Monster Of The Week” (MOTW) killings and to re-locate it into a narrative containing some Real World bite.

Let’s assume that your team is based in New York. It transpires that a cultist conspiracy has infiltrated City Hall and certain key figures within the government – the Mayor; the Chief of Police – have been replaced by leading cultists, or by shapeshifted/mind-controlling/body-swapping alien horrors and only your players’ characters know about it! Suddenly, your team’s focus shifts sideways – how do we confront the menace when the menace is an upright pillar of the community? You can’t just bowl into the Mayor’s press conference, toss the Powder of ibn-Ghazi in his face while he’s on the podium, gun him down with magic bullets while chanting in Senzar, decapitate his body with your holy blade and then calmly re-assure the members of the Press watching all this that he was “an evil entity who dripped down onto our planet as cosmic pus” and that things will all be fine from now on. No – we all know exactly what happens next and it doesn’t involve a photo of the party on the front page of the next day’s ‘paper receiving the keys to the city beneath a banner headline screaming “HEROES!”; it has more to do with white coats, electrodes and high-dosage injections of insulin.

An investigation of a local haunted house becomes fraught with difficulty when the ‘ghosts’ are cultist enforcers using the ruined building as a base of operations and the local cops are in on the scheme, as would be the case with a spooky mansion in, say, Dunwich, or Innsmouth. In such an instance, the stakes are raised: the investigators need to factor-in the idea that any sources of information that they access might be guarded by those with a vested interest in keeping nosey-parkers away and, if things go pear-shaped, the option of just dialling 911 is no longer available.

Take our ‘Invasion of City Hall’ concept above. Say that the invaders are the Insects from Shaggai, bent upon summoning Azathoth into the middle of New York. The Shan possess people by phasing into their heads and riding them around in order to do their evil deeds. Suppose one of our investigators discovers a certain type of lens, or photo-emulsion process that allows the viewer to see when a human being is possessed (all those wings and legs and neural whips don’t always fit neatly inside the victim’s cranium!). Now our players can target the evildoers, identifying them easily much as Sam and Dean do with a splash of Holy Water, or as Bill Paxton does in “Frailty” with an angel-provided written list of names. Suddenly our heroes have a long line of individuals to break down into an efficient MOTW timetable.

But identifying the enemy is just the first step and it’s arguably the easy part. What comes next is difficult and leaves the party open to punishment under the auspices of the Law, which doesn’t have ‘magic glasses’ to let them see the Truth and, even if they did, would probably not just say, “well, that’s okay then!”. When your team pits itself against an Enemy, they’ll suddenly discover that they have a three-way fight involving a de facto third front – the pesky Rule of Law and its enforcers.

What this all means is that your players will become outlaws. They will no longer have free access to the things that make life cool and dandy. They will have to curry favour with fixers, use connexions and employ cut-outs and dupes. They will most likely – initially, anyway – not have access to a base of operations. Some teams might enjoy this more desperate style of play; others might find it too gruelling – it depends on your players.

Of course, none of this is at all surprising really – most campaigns have a tinge of this sort of thing going on at some stage or another, moments when the characters skate a little too close to legal repercussions for comfort. However, dialling it up to 11 could be the thing that catches your players’ imaginations and brings them back for more!

Review: "X-Files - Season 11"

CARTER, Chris, “The X-Files – Complete Season 11”, Twentieth Century Fox, 2018.

After the non-event “event series” that was 2016’s “The X-Files - Season 10”, I was a little cautious about pushing my way into this new iteration. That previous run had some interesting things to say – some of them extremely heavy-handedly – along with some welcome returns to form here and there. Between that season and this however, there’s been a slump.

Season 10 shuffled about a bit, updating itself for a new reality, but seemed to be gaining some narrative traction by the end of its run. Here, there’s nothin’. The cliffhanger we were left with vanished into an ad-break somewhere and everything in the X-Universe had seemingly been re-set: Scully and Mulder had gone straight back to work with the FBI; Skinner and Cancer Man were conducting shady deals in a sinister back office; Scully was getting weepy about the whereabouts of her abandoned child, William; and Mulder seemed at a loss for something to do. The first episode manages to shoe-horn in a reference to Agent Einstein – Scully’s tacit replacement – but not Agent Miller who – I presume – got tired of waiting around. We were back in the basement office with the poster and the badly-abused pencils, ready to do… something…?

This was a huge issue with the original nine seasons of this program: whenever things reached a tipping point, the table got cleared and everyone went back to their corners, regardless of the nonsensical, but disregarded, ramifications of doing so. When Scully and Mulder stop pushing on with things, everything stops pushing back. In this instance, a global outbreak of mutant anthrax coupled with mass alien abductions, goes back into the bottle because Scully and Mulder get a little weary about it all. Apparently, it was all just a dream. Or something. That old chestnut.

So, back in the basement office, our intrepid X-Filers settle in to blandly experience what the next few episodes will bring. And that’s no joke: much of this series consists of our heroes’ bemusement at what rockets out of the blue to confront them. They smile wryly; they shake their heads in jaded disbelief; they shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes at one another. Then they struggle up out of their recliners, strap on their Sig-Sauers and get stuck in once more. This reaction is so prevalent and obviously rehearsed that it seems as if Duchovny and Anderson are no longer contractually required to act anymore. Scully just moons her way through the stories while Mulder always seems to be taking everything as though it’s a huge joke.

As to the material – and it’s a question as to whether or not this is the root cause of Duchovny and Anderson’s apparent apathy – it couldn’t get anymore postmodern or self-referential. Darin Morgan has been left to run roughshod over everything and it’s a case of a little going way too far. Almost every episode is laced with call-backs to past material and populated with Actors From Before Time, either reprising their roles, or playing with a new funny hat. It’s all a bit coy and knowing and, while I enjoyed it to begin with, I was definitely rolling my eyes by the finish, along with Scully and Mulder.

As with Season 10 (which wasn’t going to be called that, but now…) there are a mix of different types of standard X-Files stories book-ended by “Mythology Episodes” hammer-handedly entitled “My Struggle” – yes, we get it Chris ‘Pile-Driver’ Carter; now please stop. Most of these are actually X-Files pastiche, cheerfully cannibalising the stories and tropes of earlier seasons and – outrageously! – even providing us with a clip show episode, proving that the Carter/Morgan machine is not above stooping to the trade tricks of 60s and 70s TV. Let’s unpack:

The introductory episode – “My Struggle III” – is a monotonous voice-over while footage of toothpaste oozing from a tube is played backwards – metaphorically, that is. All the chaos left hanging at the end of last season is undone and tidied away, the product of a brain seizure in Scully’s head, while Mulder roars off into the distance in order to murder the Smoking Man, himself being pursued by the hired assassin of another secret cabal of wrongdoers: ‘turns out that Cancer Man’s anthrax assault upon humanity is taking a backseat to another group’s Apocalypse plan. Anyway, there’s a lot of talk; it transpires that Cancer Man is actually William’s dad; Monica Reyes is working for him; the Moon landings were faked; and Mulder’s brother is still alive and he spills the beans about William’s whereabouts. Or something like that – it’s a bit hazy.

Leaving the soporific mythology behind, we turn to “This”. During a sleepover at Mulder’s place, the duo is attacked by Russian-accented thugs who attempt to take them prisoner. During the mayhem, Langly of The Lone Gunmen communicates with Mulder via his telephone and seems to be still alive somehow: ‘turns out that he had his brain electronically duplicated and put to work in a huge inter-Governmental agency think-tank (as you do). His artificial consciousness worked out that the world in which he ‘lives’ is synthetic and is designed to seduce him into Working For The Man, so ‘he’ busts out to contact Scully and Mulder and ask for help – which they do. There’s a lot – a lot – of talk about how modern alphabet agencies – FBI, CIA, NSA – are working hand-in-glove with their equivalents from other countries, thus explaining the glut of Russians, and there are some hired thugs in Ramones drag throwing monkey-wrenches into the works. Keeping the insomnia cures firmly in place, this is a multi-layered and dense premise that fuzzily lurches along while everyone talks about overseas agencies trampling all over America with impunity. The ending is weird also.

There are a bunch of X-Files episodes which are told from the point of view of the villains, usually a duo of malefactors who try to outsmart Scully and Mulder before they get caught. “How The Ghosts Stole Christmas” springs to mind, as does “Lazarus”. The next episode “Plus One” follows in this vein, detailing the ongoing games of ‘Hangman’ played by a pair of twins – she’s in a mental facility; he works as a custodian in the local prison. Both of them have invisible, intangible ‘other selves’, capable of acting out their collective dark impulses and relaying information telepathically from one set of siblings to the other. They identify targets, guess their names by playing the game and then psychically kill them once they’ve learned their identity (interestingly, all of the twins are played by the same actress – it’s a bravura performance in a season that’s short on thespian skills). Scully and Mulder become involved and mutter in the background about ‘fetches’ and ‘doppelgangers’ while the twins slowly weave their evil around them. Our heroes are saved by a commonality peculiar to the spelling of their names and we hear a lot about the mechanics of auto-erotic asphyxiation as a hark-back to “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (eye-rolling). It’s the third episode and only the first which has any kind of zip.

Then this happens – “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”. Not only does Darin Morgan go full Jose Chung on the proceedings but he does it by re-animating “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” in almost every particular. I guess, why write something new when you can just dust off an old episode and change the names, right? There’s a bunch of batting around of the idea of Trump’s fake news shtick and how it manifests itself through the Mandela Effect, wrapped up in all of the actors from Morgan’s best episodes of yore and all of the bait-and-switch narrative techniques which we’ve come to expect. But then it turns into a clip-show! A tired old network device used to pad out a season run that’s short on ideas by re-playing excerpts from previous stories (as in “How The Ghosts Stole Christmas”, again). Have they no shame? Apparently not.

“Ghouli” is where Scully and Mulder wrestle with the creepypasta effect. Rather than court litigation by manifesting the Slender Man, the Filers of X engage with the eponymous tentacled-and-toothy internet-generated monstrosity which messes with people’s minds, rousing them from hypnagogic states to wreak mayhem. It transpires that the creature is William, manifesting alien powers to do… something. He gets shot in the head; Scully has a meltdown; he comes back to life; Scully’s spirits revive; he disappears into the woodwork once more, sans foster parents. In real life some people ditch their guardians and their annoying girlfriends with far less hassle than this kid…!

Ever since Mitch Pileggi got his name in the credit sequence of this show, it’s become a requirement that he gets an episode each season which focuses peculiarly on Skinner and his personal peccadilloes; “Kitten” is that episode. I was eagerly anticipating this one as it stars Haley Joel Osment of “Sixth Sense” fame. Sadly, it turns out that, no matter how fantastic an actor you are, if they give you dreck there’s just not a lot you can do with it. The premise is that Skinner disappears without explanation (as he does in practically all of the episodes which focus on him, because of reasons and because it’s apparently more manly to vanish than ask someone else for help when anonymous correspondents send you a human ear through the mail). Scully convinces Mulder to help find him (Mulder’s having a pout about Skinner at this point, probably because Pileggi is aging more gracefully than Duchovny; however, there could be something else at work, buried somewhere and heavily soft-pedalled in the preceding overly-wrought narrative mess). They discover him in the town of ‘Mud Lick’ where Skinner’s old Viet Nam buddy - code-name: ‘Kitten’ - has run amuck: we flash back to the conflict and see Kitten get gassed by some experimental military ordnance that makes people see monsters. The townsfolk of Mud Lick are having memory lapses and are losing teeth – no-one seems compelled to ask why – and no-one has seen Kitten for awhile. Skinner goes to Kitten’s hovel, meets his son Davey (or is it?) and promptly falls down a hole onto a punji stick. Enter Scully and Mulder who follow in Skinner’s footsteps, run afoul of Davey, narrowly avoid a Viet Nam death trap which kills its perpetrator, and rescue their boss – but not before Mulder also falls into the hole and onto a punji stick (is it a metaphor for something?). Along the way there’s some talk about nightmare-inducing chemicals being put in aeroplane jet-streams but Haley Joel started playing this really cool song on his record player at that point and I zoned out…

Finally, we get an episode that isn’t as dense as a brick and overloaded with knowing looks and stagey winks. “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” starts with Scully and Mulder dining out at a sushi restaurant which is completely run without human staff – robots prepare the food and all transactions take place via the internet and mobile telephone. I have to admit that I found it a bit disheartening to discover that our dynamic duo are the sort of people who go out on a date together and spend all their time on their ‘phones but that’s the set-up here and it’s necessary for what happens next. After inadvertently ordering the inedible blob-fish, Mulder refuses to tip the ‘staff’ and the automated world goes on a rampage in order to extort a gratuity from the pair, the alternative being their deaths. The rest of the episode is a Buster Keaton-esque farce involving home security systems, Roombas, drones and Übers, all Hell-bent on destruction with a minimal amount of dialogue from any of the parties involved. After the heavy verbiage of the preceding episodes, this was a great palate-cleanser.

(Incidentally, the title of the episode is Base-64 code for the word “Followers” and the tagline for the episode is “VGhlIFRydXRoIGlzIE91dCBUaGVyZQ==” which informs us that the Truth – and this episode – are both out there.)

Throughout its run on television, “The X-Files” has made a point of delving into content that can only be called distressing. They broke new ground with the episode entitled “Home” which was one of the first prime-time TV show episodes to be hit with an ‘R’ rating (and which threw many network programmers into a loop because they then couldn’t show this instalment in the usual time slot). Thus, in trying to hit all the marks of What Has Gone Before, we get served with this televisual nasty entitled “Familiar”. It’s an apt title as there’s little here that we haven’t seen before in seasons past: small town witchcraft; infidelity among the town leaders threatening to be exposed by the illegal activity; suggestions of lycanthropy; strange figures in the woods. The story involves the awful death of a small child – ostensibly by animal predation (coy-wolves - coyote-wolf cross-breeds - this time) – and Scully and Mulder come to check it out. There’s a lot of chat about Occam’s Razor, John Wayne Gacy, the divide between high- and social justice when it comes to paedophilia, the nature of Hell and its guardians, all of which serve to obfuscate an otherwise straightforward narrative. A highlight of the episode is the creepy Mr. Chuckleteeth – a kid’s show creation come to life – scampering evilly through the strangely recognisable Vancouver woodland: that mask is enough to give anyone nightmares. This tale has a bleak, bleak premise, but fundamentally, it’s business as usual for the X-Filings.

In trying to hit all the markers for a ‘classic’ X-Files experience, the guys wander into a pure body-horror moment a la Cronenberg. In this story – “Nothing Lasts Forever” - an actress from the 60s has cheated death by means of a radical surgical therapy, devised by a doctor untrammelled by notions of ‘ethics’, or ‘standard procedure’. Surrounding herself with youthful followers, she and they devour harvested organs from unwilling donors and then she has herself periodically sewn onto one of the cultists in order to drain all of the nourishment from them, causing the aging process to reverse (or something like that – there’s some techno-babble involved). Into their cosy world vaults a Marvel-esque avenger, sister of one of the cultists, who sets about dismantling the whole evil mechanism, impaling its operatives with the fencing spikes from outside of the church which she attends in her secret identity (definitely a Netflix-y level Marvel character, like a Jessica Jones or Daredevil, rather than a Black Widow or Captain America). Amid an icky mash-note to 60s and 70s television, Scully and Mulder wander in and (literally) expose the rotten heart of the situation, ending the sickness while finding time to contemplate their own aging and to consider Roads Not Taken. Oh, and Scully takes a four-storey dive down a lift shaft onto a pile of garbage without getting a scratch. ‘Could happen.

“My Struggle IV” closes the door on the season and, in comparison with everything that’s gone before, it stands up pretty well (surprisingly, for a “Mythology Episode”). The first episode set up the situation and “Ghouli” pushed it along a little: this is where it all comes together. We’ve learnt that Cancer Man is really William’s father (not Mulder) and that William and Scully have been sharing visions about the future (i.e., everything that happened in the last episode of Season 10); we know that William can affect people’s perceptions and look like other people, or even alien horrors; we also know that a bullet to the noggin won’t slow him down. Mulder goes in pursuit of him while Scully stays put and runs interference against Kersh before hitting the road with Skinner to back her partner up. Of all the goons and shadowy puppet-masters chasing them, Mulder kills almost everyone; William kills everyone else (spectacularly); Skinner kills Reyes; Cancer Man kills Skinner and Mulder kills Cancer Man. William slinks off into the night and Scully reveals that she’s pregnant with Mulder’s actual child. After all the dialogue-heavy musing of the previous instalments, it’s a relief to have nothing but action to round things off.

*****

What’s left to say? This feels like an exercise in reminding us why we spent so much time with this program in the past, but it doesn’t really say anything new. There is a lot of waffle about the new state of the conspirasphere and some interesting thoughts on the new, post-9/11 ‘X-iness’, but little to captivate. It feels as though Scully and Mulder have become bemused spectators of the world that they once used to actively inhabit. Once, we were concerned about these two; now they’re just bloodless.

I’m not averse to density of writing but I have indicated such density as an issue marring several of these stories. Oftentimes in these narratives, I felt as though I was being lectured at, and my first instinct in such situations is to avoid the grinding of axes. If there is a point to your stuff, show me; don’t tell me: it’s a visual medium after all. Throughout this season there’s a heavy-handed attempt at skewering Trump and its ilk – I have no issue at all with that – but it all feels as though the need to ‘info-dump’ has taken away the lightness of touch which was a hallmark of the best “X-Files” moments. Too, there’s a heavy sense that this show is resting on its laurels, what with flashbacks to past shows, the dragging-in of actors from ages past (which I’ve since read was a deliberate choice) and the creation of stories which parody, or are a pastiche of, episodes that have already screened. I can understand the desire to ‘get the band back together’ (and these short, 10-episode compendia are a cool way to do that) but if there’s nothing new to say, why bother? It just feels like it’s staking out territory and taking a cheap shot against the programs that came later, like “Supernatural” – ‘stand aside kiddies: let me show you how we grown-ups deal with things! No school like the old school!’

Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the look of these programs – making a show like this must be second nature for the Canada-based companies involved in such productions. However, the ham-fisted writing calls all of this into question too: if the stories are just re-tellings of old material with a Po-Mo spin, is all of the production just geared towards parody also? When you blur one line, all the others start to get fuzzy as well. In fact, I’ve taken a second look at the six episodes that comprise Season 10 and it actually stacks up a lot better than this one, which is kind of telling.

Perhaps this is all just a case of everyone being too much inside their comfort zones: certainly Anderson and Duchovny are simply ‘phoning it in and the creators are all re-hashing their best tunes and putting them out again with a solid dose of over-production – much like a late-era Pink Floyd album. There’s substance here amid all of the flash but it’s buried deep under a candy shell of dubiously-combined flavours. Sad to say, I’m only one step away from saying that this is for completists only.

Two Tentacled Horrors.