Vienen: Off the Top of My Head (SPOILERS) (April 29, 2001) Caution: spoiler for next week's ep (based on the trailer) is in the "Etc." section. VIENEN (8ABX16): In a nutshell: The black oil is back! The black oil is back! But wave goodbye to Mulder's Special Agent status. :( What I liked: - The lighting and camera work for the interior oil rig shots were very nicely done. - Loved the look that Scully gave Mulder in Kersh's office. Think he was in trouble? - Have I mentioned in the past that I adore Mulder? I loved when he picked up the phone in the basement office, then handed it to Doggett. OK, he was being a bit of a hard ass, but I do so love that about him. - Mulder had some great lines, too: "Kersh catch you peeing in his cornflakes?" "What church?" (In response to Doggett saying that Mulder could find a conspiracy at a church picnic.) - Doggett did some good pushing back on Mulder on that oil rig. Nice job by RP. He definitely seems to have better chemistry with his male co-workers than with GA. - Skinner, version 2: Woo hoo! Skinner took the blame for Scully! *This* is the Skinner I want to see all the time. - Yay! Mulder to the rescue! :-D - Good FX with the burning oil rig (except for one shot of Mulder and Doggett as they were falling toward the water, which looked cheesy, but I think I can forgive them for that one ). - I must say that the end of the ep was better than I expected it to be. The spoilers I'd read indicated that Mulder resigned from the FBI before Doggett could. From what I knew of the storyline from the spoilers, I just couldn't see Mulder walking away that easily. So this ending, with Kersh giving Mulder the heave-ho (albeit off-camera), made more sense to me -- BUT see the companion entry under "What I didn't like." What I didn't like: - Skinner, version 1: He believes in the existence of the oil but won't even try to get the rig evacuated? - How could Doggett mock Mulder about the black oil when he'd read the files? Oh, sorry, he apparently only read "Piper Maru" and "Apocrypha." He must not have gotten to the files for "Tunguska" and "Terma." :-PPP Even if Doggett doesn't believe that the black oil is connected to extraterrestrials and that it can control people, can he deny that the black oil exists? And that it involves some kind of virus? - So Scully had a corpse on her table. A corpse that had been immune to the black oil virus. Why wasn't anyone talking about being able to make a FREAKIN' VACCINE?! Hello? Was this the same Scully that we saw at the end of the movie, who wanted to find a vaccine to save people? -- "If I didn't know better, I'd say this was a Mulder stunt." Gee, *that* comment wasn't too obvious, was it? And a second before Kersh said that, I was thinking, "Why the hell isn't Kersh asking where Mulder is?" - Can I just point out that I'm one of those people that doesn't handle change very well? Yes, I know that the reality is that DD may very well not be on the show next year, and therefore there has to be a good reason, from a storytelling perspective, for Mulder to not be hanging around the Hoover Building in S9. However, I'm not happy with Mulder going out with such a whimper. It reminds me of Krycek pushing CSM down those stairs -- "Oh, viewers? Forget about that character that's personified evil for the past seven years. You won't be seeing him anymore." This time it's, "Oh, viewers? The Character Previously Known the Absent Center, Who was Abducted, Tortured, Dead for Three Months, and Miraculously Resurrected, and Therefore Should be the Source of a Lot of Conversation But Isn't, has been fired from his job as Special Agent. You know, that job to which he devoted a large portion of his life? But don't worry, it doesn't really bother him much. See him waving goodbye?" (To be continued in "What's got me puzzled.") What's got me puzzled: - OK, I give up. How did Diego know that the ships were coming? - Why didn't Mulder put up a fight when Kersh canned him? Is he that ready to walk away from the FBI? Wouldn't Mulder be *more* invested now, since he knows that something funky was going on with the black oil out on that rig? Is he giving up altogether, and is he just going to play basketball until the aliens come? Or does he have a plan? I appreciated that the writers tried to give us something with Mulder's speech about Doggett having Kersh's ear. But couldn't Doggett have Kersh's ear with Mulder still in the FBI? I keep saying to myself, "But Bonnie, how could you have been happy with the outcome of this ep? They had to get Mulder out of there somehow." I guess what bugs me is that Mulder's departure seems so pointless. His being fired was for the convenience of the writers and the Doggett universe, not for the integrity of the character. Yes, yes, I know -- that's reality again. But in my ideal world , there would have been a damn good reason (from Mulder's perspective) for Mulder to leave the FBI. He would have seen an *advantage* to his leaving. His departure could have maintained his importance as a character, yet the way "Vienen" ended left me feeling like he was impotent. - And why was Kersh making Mulder take the fall, anyway? And what exactly was he taking a fall for? Was he simply canned for insubordination? Or because of the loss of the oil rig? A combination of both? Was it one of those cases of "if it looks bad, it's bad for the FBI"? Why doesn't anyone (aside from Scully and Skinner) take Mulder a little more seriously? That all goes back to the "he was DEAD for three months and he's alive now -- doesn't anyone think that that's kinda important?" Etc.: - Did anybody else know that Diego was a dead man as soon as Doggett promised to get him out of there? - I guess Mulder's miraculous recovery including him getting over his fear of fire, since he charged right into that burning radio room. - I wonder how expensive that location shooting was? - Next week's ep: just in case you didn't know, "David Duchovny stars!" again next week. Think anyone at FOX is preparing bags of gold to throw at his feet to get him to come back for a few eps next year? And as far as the ep itself... didn't that creature look a little like Lenny's brother from "Humbug"?