Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – The End But Not Really

Five years before the finale of season five of The X-Files, a movie about a rich man and a bunch of mad scientists bringing dinosaurs back to life landed in movie theaters. While the special effects, the story, even the score were memorable, it was the memeable cast that everyone thinks of when Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park adaptation comes to mind – and this was years before we knew what a meme was. Sam Neill scaring the hell out of that snotty kid by regaling him with a story about raptors. Laura Dern making commentary about dinosaurs eating men, leaving women to inherit the earth. Bob Peck’s shorts. Jeff Goldblum’s life finds a way. Samual L. Jackson’s cigarettes. All so memorable you, friendly reader, know exactly what I’m talking about.

Why am I discussing the most popular movie of 1993 on an X-Files blog, you ask? Well, the answer lies with actor Martin Ferrero who played the blood sucking lawyer in Jurassic Park. He also starred in the season five finale of The X-Files as the government agent trying to assassinate Gibson Praise, a young chess prodigy who can also read minds, among other things. 

This episode also serves as the first appearance of Mimi Rogers as Diana Fowley who would become a recurring character in season six. I didn’t know much of her at the time this episode aired, but I did remember Rogers from an episode of Tales From the Crypt that aired in 1992 that also starred Kathy Ireland. The 1990s were like that. An actor would appear in something memorable and then you catch them later in something else and have an ah-ha moment. This episode, it happened twice.

Back to the episode at hand, The End was always meant to segue the television series into a movie series. And it sort of does since Fight the Future was released that summer, but the series was so popular for Fox that they ordered two more seasons making the total seven at that point. Duchovny’s contract famously ended after season seven and contract renewal disputes and a desire to move on to other projects caused him to only appear in a very limited capacity after that. But at the end of season five, with the film already completed since they filmed it the previous summer, this season ender felt a lot less final than it was originally intended. It also did not fake kill off one of the leads like previous season finales of the show which was a very welcome change to this fan.

This episode also served as the last to be filmed in Vancouver during the show’s original run. It moved to Los Angelos in season six so that David Duchovny could be closer to his wife at the time, Tea Leoni. As a goodbye to Vancouver, producers allowed the city’s citizens to come to GM Place – later renamed Rogers Arena – for the filming of the chess match scene in this episode. Rumor has it that more than twelve thousand people showed up and that Duchovny and Anderson answered questions between takes.

After Gibson Praise senses that the shooter is aiming for him, he moves slightly causing the bullet to instead catch his opponent, a Russian grandmaster, in the chest. Meanwhile, Alex Krycek finds the Cigarette Smoking Man at his remote cabin in Canada and he is reunited with members of the Syndicate including recurring characters The First Elder and the Well-Manicured Man who want the Cigarette Smoking Man to help with the Gibson Praise situation.

Skinner reveals to Agent Mulder that Jeffrey Spender is leading the investigation into the shooting at the chess match. Mulder bursts into a meeting about the case and says that the shooter was aiming at Gibson and not the Russian. Unbeknownst to Mulder, his old flame and colleague, Diana Fowley, is in attendance. She and Scully work together just fine as they test what Gibson Praise is capable of, but when Scully visits the Lone Gunmen with the data collected from Praise, they inform her that Fowley used to be Mulder’s lover. It is obvious from Scully’s reaction to her that the character is intended to come between Mulder and Scully who have grown close over the years.

Mulder and Scully take what they know about Gibson to Skinner and want the boy’s help to unlock any unsolved X-files. Mulder believes his increased brain activity would solve almost all of them and that Gibson has genes that are dormant in most humans. The catch is that Mulder wants the shooter released as well because the shooter has more information on Gibson that Mulder thinks could help him understand the boy. Agent Spender is against this. The shooter, however, receives an empty cigarette packet which is essentially a death threat from the Syndicate. He ends up killed by a prison guard.

The Men in Black, working for the Syndicate, capture Gibson from FBI protection. When Mulder finds out the shooter is dead and the Morley cigarette package was found in his cell, Mulder accuses Agent Spender with working with the Cigarette Smoking Man after having seen Spender talking with him in the parking lot. Later, the Cigarette Smoking Man goes to Mulder’s basement office, takes the file on his sister Samantha, and sets the room on fire. On his way out of the building, he informs Spender that he is the agent’s father, much to Spender’s dismay. When Mulder and Scully see that the X-Files have been completely destroyed, he realizes that this was the plan all along.

 As far as season finales go, this one is one of the better ones. It leaves loose ends open enough where you’re curious where the story is headed but doesn’t leave on any one character supposedly dying. The X-files themselves are dead and that’s enough for casual viewers and constant fans to feel bad about. The way the episode is filmed really is like a chess match. The main players make big moves, but it is the Cigarette Smoking Man who gets the checkmate by using his own son as a pawn. Most of us already suspected this, but many believe that this was the episode that painted the Cigarette Smoking Man as the main villain of the show and not just the recognizable face of the Syndicate.

Gibson Praise would return to the show four more times, always bringing with him a sense of wonder and intelligence beyond his years. Actor Jeff Gulka brought him to life after he had an uncredited bit role working with Chris Carter on one episode of Millenium in 1997.  While he isn’t really recognizable as an adult, he did have small roles on Once Upon a Time and Stargate SG-1 and still dabbles in acting as late as 2024 according to IMDB.

As this series segues into the movie about an alien race plot to end the human race and take over the Earth, Millennium – Chris Carter’s other Fox series – ended it’s second season with an apocalypse of sorts. A contagion released by the Millennium cult spreads, killing Frank’s wife in the process even after they evacuated to a remote cabin to stay safe. The parallels of the two shows heading toward the end of the world, something that was on everyone’s mind as Y2k approached, can’t be ignored. The X-Files would later have a similar viral epidemic in 2017 during it’s revival run, but the second season proved it to be a red herring of a cliffhanger. Even post Y2K, the end of the world seems to be something Chris Carter likes to have in his shows.

My next review will be of the movie, and I can’t wait to write about it. Until next week, Fight the Future.