The very beginning of the film defines the scope of the mythology, which had only been hinted at in episodes like “Tunguska” during the first five seasons of the series. In essence, the presence of Purity on Earth goes back tens of thousands of years. In the end, of course, that is extended out to at least a million years; Purity, it is suggested, was there long enough to ensure that humanity would be primed for its purpose in the “present day”.
Of course, the implication is that there were two waves of “Purity”: the initial wave that was there to prepare humanity for its purpose and then the second wave, which didn’t arrive until 1947. That doesn’t quite make sense; why wait so long to return and use humanity as a breeding ground, when the development of the species was sufficient to that purpose 37000 years ago?
It makes far more sense for the “black oil” to have been introduced in its most powerful form and then buried where the later emergence of hominids wouldn’t come into contact with Purity unless something unusual happened. As it is, there are issues with how and why Purity would be contained underground; why wouldn’t it simply emerge and spread out through the world over time, thus striking out of nowhere wherever humans happen to be? The “black oil” is nothing more than a medium for a non-corporeal intelligence, after all, and that means it ought to do whatever the hell it wants.
The question may be one of energy. It takes energy to think, to move, to expand and reproduce. Merging with isolated oil reservoirs would probably be useful, but just as the conversion process itself requires the subsuming of a human host into something else (transformation of existing biological matter into a new matrix), an energy source may need to be present for small elements of Purity to move. There would, of course, be thermal or magnetic energy sources underground, but small segments of Purity may require something more. This is likely the reason why temperature is such a major factor with the spread of Purity.
Setting aside some of more technical issues surrounding Purity and how it is treated within the mythology, the rules are more or less set in this film. Heat gives Purity energy to do what it wants; lack of heat slows down that process tremendously. The most potent form of Purity (seeded within oil under the surface of the planet) contains the genetic instructions to take a living human host and use it to develop and then gestate a new physical form, which the non-corporeal intelligence that is Purity then can inhabit.
This film is the story of how this is discovered by certain individuals: namely, Mulder, Scully, and the Syndicate. Note that Cancer Man is not on the list. It is imperative to the integrity of the entire mythology that Cancer Man know and understand the true nature of Purity, at least in terms of its ultimate goal. He may not know where Purity comes from, but he has to know that it does more than just take control of humans who are exposed to it.
This is mandated by the final act of the film. Cancer Man is quite familiar with the “mothership”, since he’s obviously running a small facility right on top of it, and that means he must have actually looked at the human beings kept in cryogenic freeze. And that means he’s seen the “alien” forms that are close to emerging. (How the humans that are thousands of years old turned up in the bowels of the “mothership” is something to be addressed later in the review.)
Cancer Man’s knowledge and agenda are especially important in determining who knows what and who works for whom. As far back as the first season, it was clear that some members of the conspiracy were working exclusively for Cancer Man and acting towards interests above and beyond the interests of the Syndicate. Thus it can be quickly surmised that Bronschweig is not working for the Syndicate directly, but rather, reporting to Cancer Man.
So what was the “impossible scenario” that Bronschweig was referring to? The most obvious answer would be the infection of a human being in the modern era by the most potent form of Purity. The implication of the plot is that such an infection had not been seen during the course of the conspiracy thus far. The Blackwood County incident appears to be the first opportunity for Cancer Man to see the process take place in real time.
This confirms, to a certain extent, what must inevitably lie behind Mulder’s assignment to the X-Files. The Syndicate had been using Mulder and his investigation of the X-Files as a means of disinformation, something that Scully was meant to facilitate. Episodes like “Fallen Angel” proved that point rather well. Beyond simply allowing the case related to the X-Files to run through a filter that would downplay their credibility, this process suggested that the Syndicate was keeping an eye on nearly every law enforcement and media source to determine whether or not something needed to be debunked.
This, in turn, explains why the situation in Blackwood County is a problem. It’s something that needs to be controlled and contained before it can become something discussed enough to be detected by the Syndicate’s network. Cancer Man is apparently well aware of this fact, and he also ought to know the extent of the network that he must confound.
There also the context of the fifth season finale to consider. Cancer Man has just engineered his return, demonstrating to the Syndicate why he is valuable. Outmaneuvering Mulder and eliminating the X-Files served his purposes while giving the Syndicate a sense of progress. The incident in Blackwood County threatens that achievement. Unless he can prevent the situation from spiraling out of his control and thus weakening his newfound positioning, his recent plans will be for naught.
Thus, the solution: to divert attention away from the situation in Blackwood County by eliminating the evidence in a manner that completely and utterly whitewashes the media and law enforcement concerns. Without the evidence in hand, Cancer Man can easily claim that the incident in Blackwood County involved exposure to Purity on the same level as seen previously by the Syndicate. The effect on his personal mission is profound enough that he must eliminate the evidence in a manner that defies inspection. In this case, that means setting a bomb, diverting the law enforcement attention to a completely different building, and thus ensuring that hundreds of people will be killed, allowing the victims of Purity to be hidden within the mass of bodies.
Of course, Cancer Man couldn’t necessarily predict that Mulder and Scully would be assigned to the job, and he certainly wasn’t expecting Mulder to find the bomb. Michaud was supposed to be on site to ensure that the bomb wasn’t located; thus he had to kill himself to cover the gambit. These early scenes actually present the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how quickly Cancer Man reacts to a potential threat.
Even if his “domestic terrorism” gambit can be considered overkill, since a discrete burning of the infected in the middle of the desert would be a lot more reasonable under the circumstances, Cancer Man works swiftly to use the situation to apply more pressure on Mulder and Scully. This is where the episode “The End” becomes important to understanding context. Cancer Man had placed the agents in a situation where one misstep would result in reassignment at best and prison time at worst. The current situation gives him one more opportunity to seal the deal and place Mulder and Scully under his thumb.
In fact, the situation is so perfectly designed that it would be easy to think that Cancer Man intentionally staged events in the hopes of ensnaring Mulder and Scully. Unfortunately, there’s one thing missing from that scenario: a reason for Mulder to be in the building holding the FEMA medical offices. If he had been given a tip, it would have clearly been a setup. Instead, he’s operating off a hunch, which means it was more of a plot contrivance than an elaborate trap.
The only thing that Cancer Man needed was an excuse to place blame on Mulder and/or Scully, thus providing an excuse for splitting the agents up and driving them into a compromised personal situation. One can assume that Cancer Man would have used Michaud in some capacity to point the finger at Mulder had the plan gone off without a hitch.
The opening scenes also do much to establish, very quickly, the depth of the relationship between Mulder and Scully, so that the forced separation has meaning, even for new viewers. Those familiar with the fifth season, however, can see how Scully was already driven to a decision point long before OPR came along. In “All Souls”, Scully was brought to terms with her sense of loss and how much she has given up because of her association with Mulder. By “The End”, Scully has come to realize that her role as Mulder’s sole confidant has been something of a lie, and so her primary reason to stay with Mulder (the fact that she is the only person he trusts) seems invalid.
So when Scully tells Mulder that her reason to be assigned to the X-Files no longer applies, she’s effectively telling him that he no longer needs her. She no longer feels needed, and given her psychology, she needs to be in a situation where a man with strong personal vision has authority over her life (looking back to “Never Again”, among other episodes). If Mulder cannot implement his crusade, the drive behind their partnership (in every sense) is missing.
It’s this loss that pushes Mulder into a fit of depression and self-mockery. Without Scully, he really has no hope of going on. If Scully needed Mulder to be her authority and father figure (with all the uncomfortable connotations involved!), then Mulder needed Scully to challenge his own assumptions and make him more human. Without Scully, Mulder is no better or more credible than any of the Lone Gunmen, and he knows it.
The story cannot move forward if Dr. Lurtzweil doesn’t approach Mulder at just the right time. Once again, this seems like a plot contrivance. The question is whether or not there is a potential upside for Cancer Man to push Kurtzweil to speak with Mulder, and thus for Mulder to start looking into the truth regarding the Blackwood County incident. In fact, there is an upside, if one assumes that Cancer Man began his gambit in “The End” for the purposes of placing Mulder in a very specific and compromised position.
If Mulder is driven to investigate the bodies recovered in Dallas, then he will inevitably seal his fate with OPR and also give him an impetus to continue on his own, reinvested. And Cancer Man’s goal was not to stop Mulder’s forward progress. He needs Mulder to continue, because he wants Mulder to become the driving force behind a child to be conceived with Scully. This child, Cancer Man believes, will be the future human savior, able to resist Purity and prevent Colonization.
So Cancer Man wants Mulder to get evidence for what is happening, but he needs Mulder out of a position where he can be seen as a direct liability. There’s very little for Mulder to uncover within the context of the X-Files themselves, and Mulder is no longer effective as a source of disinformation.
Again, it’s a question of mechanism. Kurtzweil seems to have been involved in the early stages of the conspiracy, prior to the formation of the Syndicate itself. He could have been the man seen with Mulder and Cancer Man in 1953 in the third season episode “Apocrypha”, thus giving him a reason to know something about Purity. At the same time, he couldn’t have been too involved in the conspiracy or for long, or he would have been a security risk.
The Syndicate doesn’t consider Kurtzweil an issue, so he must have been out of the picture well before 1973. The fact that he has been involved in reproductive medicine strongly suggests a connection to the earliest experiments under Phase II of the Project. The period between 1947 and 1953 covers enough ground to suggest that Kurtzweil left the initial conspiracy shortly after learning about Purity and what it might do to humanity.
One thing is relatively certain, however: Kurtzweil did not know about the “mothership” or the true nature of Purity’s endgame. He knew that it was an advanced pathogen that would effectively end civilization, but he never quite speaks to the idea that Purity will produce spontaneous repopulation. That suggests, once again, that only Bill Mulder and Cancer Man knew the truth about Purity, and that everyone else was operating on second-hand information or working directly for Cancer Man.
At any rate, Kurtzweil could easily be pushed in Mulder’s direction without realizing that his old “friend” had been waiting for the right moment to use him. After all, Kurtzweil allows his excitement over learning new details about the conspiracy following his exit to overcome his better judgment. He’s the perfect tool for feeding on Mulder’s doubts regarding the incident in Dallas.
Mulder, rather predictably, goes running to Scully once the implications sink past the drunkenness. Her reaction is a bit interesting, because it can be interpreted in two very different ways. On the one hand, she could be thinking that a drunk Mulder would come running based on some half-baked conspiracy theory. On the other, her tone suggests that her suspicions run into more personal territory. (Granted, it’s hard to imagine Mulder not noticing Scully dressed in silky clothing and a push-up bra, but he’s very focused in that moment!)
Meanwhile, Cancer Man arrives in Blackwood County to inspect what is quite obviously the goal of his current activity. Why destroy the bodies of three of the firemen and Stevie, only to keep one alive and under observation for days on end? Cancer Man wants to see the process more forward, to understand how the gestational process would progress if bodies were not placed in a cryogenic environment quickly enough. His shock is not over the fact that Purity is gestating into a new form; it’s the details of the process that he finds hard to reconcile. And of course, he wants to test the vaccine to determine whether or not his work with the conspiracy has led to success or failure.
Scully is placed in a difficult position at this point of the film. She may be having a difficult time moving out of Mulder’s orbit, but she still feels a degree of responsibility towards him and it shows. In a certain sense, he uses that to lead her around without explanation. Scully’s frustration is completely justified, especially when he’s holding back on something that could clearly be dangerous. (Never mind that he leaves her to conduct an autopsy on a victim when he’s well aware that the authorities will be coming within hours!)
One can assume that the allegations of child pornography against Kurtzweil are meant to keep the pressure on the man, since his conspiracy psychosis seems to feed on the adversity generated by such investigations. Cancer Man probably used those allegations over time to control and debunk Kurtzweil’s claims, thus sidelining him enough to keep the Syndicate from eliminating a resource.
Kurtzweil’s allegations about FEMA presage the later revelation that the nanotech-controlled “super soldiers” are taking control of key government facilities as part of the overall conspiracy. Since the “super soldiers” were in place as early as 1991 (roughly the time that Diana Fowley was reassigned to international work, suggesting a connection), it’s entirely possible that the FEMA offices were among the first to include these “replacements”.
Continuity logic takes a hint shortly thereafter. It’s important to the plot for Scully to make the connection between the Dallas victim and the bones recovered in Blackwood County, but there’s no possible way that she could conduct the autopsy on the victim, take samples, hide from the authorities, submit the samples, receive the results, and then travel to Dallas. More to the point, there’s no way that Scully could look at bone samples through a microscope and recognize a specific protein code, especially since looking at the victim’s “bones” and the recovered bones reveals, on screen, a very different appearance.
The first act effectively ends with the revelation that the gestating organism is not, in fact, the expected “Colonist” form, but something a bit more violent. (“The Beginning”, the sixth season premiere, would reveal how the process was supposed to result in the base form for the perfectly adaptable shapeshifter form.) Bronschweig’s fate is indicative of Cancer Man’s original plan: contain and conceal.
It’s not entirely clear how Strughold came to know about the incident in Blackwood County, but one must inevitably conclude that Cancer Man was behind it. Even though Strughold is essentially running the meeting and determining the course, Cancer Man is the only other member of the Syndicate to answer questions regarding the course itself. All other Elders provide minimal contributions.
What is also left out of this scene is a sense of overall context between Cancer Man and Well-Manicured Man, which has quite a bit of history. Initially, Cancer Man was content to run things behind the scenes through proxy. However, in the wake of his disastrous decision to flush out Mulder’s allies in “Anasazi” through “Paper Clip”, which spiraled out of control with Melissa Scully’s death, Well-Manicured Man began gaining influence. It came to a head after “Terma”, when Well-Manicured Man lost a loved one as a result of the ongoing conspiracy.
This process led to Cancer Man’s apparent assassination in “Redux II”, which was actually a long-term plan to allow Well-Manicured Man to take control while Cancer Man put his resources into place for a triumphant and effective return. That took place in “The End”, which essentially placed Well-Manicured Man in a weakened and vulnerable position.
Taking that into account, Cancer Man’s goals seem far more plain. Cancer Man needs another victim to test the vaccine and determine whether or not it would halt gestation. That means intentional use of the recovered Purity from Blackwood County on a selected target. At the same time, he also needs to know how powerful the vaccine might be in terms of the technology resident on the “mothership”. Now that the vaccine exists, the goal is to test it under the most advantageous circumstances, something which the Syndicate would not necessarily allow.
Cancer Man thus formulates a plan: tip off Mulder as to the truth through Kurtzweil, then give Strughold and the Syndicate limited information to ensure that they understand the scope of the threat and recognize Mulder as a potential complication. Use the fact that Mulder must be protected to ensure that Scully is selected as the target, ensure her infection with Purity, and then use Mulder as a means to conduct the test that needs to be conducted. This has the desired effect of reinvesting Mulder without the outlet of the X-Files, which was the inevitable next step after “The End”.
While this seems far more complex than it needs to be, it goes a long way towards explaining how information gets to certain people, who knows what, and why the plot unfolds as it does. More to the point, it is no less complex or convoluted than Cancer Man’s plots in “The Erlenmeyer Flask”, “Anasazi” through “Paper Clip”, “Gethsemane” through “Redux II”, or “The End”, just to name a few of the instances where Cancer Man used parsed information to manipulate others into action aligned with his purpose.
In light of this plan, it’s not hard to believe that Strughold has come to understand the truth about Purity at this juncture. The Elders seem equally surprised about the gestational aspects of infection. This is odd, since they seem to know about the “mothership” and the base that Cancer Man has been (apparently) running there for some time. Consider that Well-Manicured Man later demonstrates a rather encyclopedic knowledge of what is happening and where Scully has been taken. This means that something specific changes between the moment when he knows nothing, walking into the Syndicate meeting, and his eventual discussion with Mulder.
At the same time, Strughold mentions handing over “a body infected with the gestating organism” to the Colonists, which makes it sound as though he believes that the “mothership” is, in fact, run by Colonists. This brings up an interesting point. Someone prior to the Syndicate must have been collected and storing the infected within the containment pods, because the victims date back thousands of years. Yet the Colonists are nowhere to be found in the film. So who was conducting this “clean up” operation?
Mining the series for an answer, there is an elegant solution, though it once again requires elements that are only hinted at during the series itself. Throughout the series, especially after the sixth season finale, it is revealed that several Rebel-style spacecraft, identical to the craft recovered at Roswell, are buried underground. These Rebel UFOs date back thousands, if not millions, of years. Similarly, Purity is supposed to have arrived in its most potent form millions of years earlier.
This suggests a common reason for those buried vessels to be in the distant past. Since the development of Purity’s fully adaptive medium (effectively, the final form of the vaccine) doesn’t come into the picture until shortly before Colonization, and the war between the Colonists and the Rebels is a future event being waged across time through limited time travel (initiated with the 1947 Roswell incident), something must have happened to get the final form of Purity on the “mothership” and then into the distant past.
The idea is simple. The “mothership” is, in fact, the conspiracy’s final development facility for Purity, as run by the post-Syndicate “replacements” seem in the final seasons. That facility would most logically be located on Mars, given the hints in the series about activity there, and would have been used as a central storage facility for mass quantities of Purity. On the day of Colonization, those under the control of the conspiracy or created as part of “Phase II” would be infected through exposure at the “lighthouses” (mentioned in “The Red and the Black”).
As hinted in the episode “Synchrony”, time travel (and thus, FTL travel) would be possible by using a coolant that could also be used for cryogenics. The design of the “mothership”, as later revealed in the film, seems designed for fluid transfer rather than humanoid utility. The large interior also suggests a massive containment field in the center, which could have been used to keep Purity in stasis during transit. Since the Rebels would be trying to prevent the spread of Purity to achieve their own goals, they would be within range of the “mothership” as it approached Earth.
This leads to an outcome that brings the story full circle. The “mothership” is sabotaged (presumably by William and his allies), which then sends the damaged vessel containing the most potent form of Purity into an uncontrolled transit into the distant past, where the vessel crashes in Antarctica and Purity is dispersed, eventually working its way underground. The Rebels are pulled into the “wake” of the transit and are tossed back into time as well, though not necessarily as far.
At least one Rebel, one of the “pilots”, would likely survive. Since the Rebels want the conspiracy to emerge from 1947 through 2012, to ensure their own existence, the surviving Rebel “bounty hunter” would have every reason to locate the “mothership” and ensure that any infected victims over time would be cryogenically contained to prevent the spread of Purity. With the emergence of modern technology and the rise of the Syndicate, this would become the Rebel “hunter” that eventually works with Cancer Man in episodes like “Herrenvolk”.
Strughold’s desire to eliminate Mulder also suggests that he is unaware of what Cancer Man has been doing over the years. Cancer Man, after all, needs Mulder to survive, and he has manufactured Mulder’s mystique as a possible martyr for the purpose of keeping the others in sway. (Logically, Mulder is no more dangerous in terms of his quest than Kurtzweil or the Lone Gunmen, so the typical excuse doesn’t quite work.)
Whatever the case, Strughold’s own words make it clear that Cancer Man succeeds to large measure. Strughold indicates that someone must be infected with the most potent form of Purity and then sent to the “mothership” (though not in so many words), thus allowing Cancer Man to conduct manipulation of that event outside of Syndicate view. Strughold himself identifies Scully as the perfect candidate, under the impression that Mulder will back off and get in line once Scully is killed, since Scully is currently what Mulder “holds most valuable”.
That was probably a concession to the new audience, since the details of Mulder’s life (drunk exposition notwithstanding) were still a mystery. New audience members wouldn’t know about Samantha and how central she had become to his life and his work. They would only know about Scully, who was clearly his emotional linchpin in this film. But since the film is in continuity, this represents an important step in the relationship between Mulder and Scully, because she is now effectively on the same level of importance as Samantha by this point in the timeline.
It’s ironic, then, that Scully has such obvious doubts about her place in Mulder’s world. She’s to the point where she’s not even sure why she’s supporting him in this latest mad quest, and it doesn’t help that he’s not telling her anything. Her frustration grows by leaps and bounds once they are running around Texas with little sense of direction, and it all comes to a boil (after the best piece of music for the film).
The timely appearance of the train and the unmarked tanker trucks, coming on the heels of the discussions by the Syndicate, is anything but coincidental. How hard would it be to track the agents’ movements, after all, when no one else should be around? The train is meant to lead them to the location of the delivery system experiment, where Scully is clearly meant to become infected.
Speaking of the delivery system: this is perhaps the best example of how clueless the Syndicate must be. For one thing, it’s not a logical system for delivering a virus to achieve mass infection, even if one buys into the theory that the bees themselves can be controlled once carrying the virus (suggested strongly by “Herrenvolk” and “Zero Sum”). It’s far more logical to assume that the virus will be spread by controlling the movements of the human population, using the control chip technology, gathering them in a specific place, and then infecting them with the virus that also allows the non-corporeal Purity to take control.
Instead, in some odd attempt to create the most convoluted system in the world (and indeed, why wouldn’t Cancer Man let this happen, to ensure their efforts are harmless?), they use Purity to fertilize the corn, the bees interact with the corn crops, the virus gets into the bees (why not feed people the corn?), and then the bees infect the population. It makes no sense at all, especially since it doesn’t explain how the bees carry the most potent form of Purity so damn quickly!
Whatever the case, someone on site must be expecting Mulder and Scully. More to the point, they must know that infecting Mulder would be pointless, since he’s already immune to Purity, thanks to his experience in “Tunguska”. Keeping in mind that such a facility would probably have some level of surveillance, it would be easy enough to know when and where Mulder and Scully step into the domes. And once they are far enough inside, the goal would be to get Scully infected and take her into custody before Mulder can stop it from happening.
The purpose of the helicopters was not simply to chase down Mulder and Scully. It was to determine whether or not Scully had been infected and thus fell down in the middle of a corn field, which would take hours to comb through. And since the goal is to place Scully in a cold environment as soon as possible following infection, leaving her in the middle of a corn field in the middle of Texas summer would not be a good idea.
Noting that Scully is not infected yet, the agents are allowed to escape, and they are presumably tracked back to Washington. This is the most troublesome part of the story, because it requires that the deadly bee remain carefully hidden until the most inconvenient moment for a Mulder/Scully love connection. Even taking into account, once again, the possibility that the bees could be controlled and thus kept from infecting Scully until she was no longer in a government building, it just feels like a major plot contrivance.
Meanwhile, things continue to complicate and unravel. Kurtzweil is revealed as a man with incredibly limited information, clearly being used by someone else to get to Mulder. Scully presents new “evidence” to OPR with no proof, and things go about as badly as one would expect. In the end, Mulder finds enough reason to believe Kurtzweil and keep pressing, but Scully is given the final reason to leave the FBI and find a new (old?) direction in life.
This prompts Mulder to make a confession regarding how important Scully really is in his world. For those watching the series since the beginning, this is the culmination of several such confessions, none of which went so far towards actual professions of love or desire. For the newly initiated, this is just confirmation of what the story has been implying all along. (For those preferring a non-romantic love between the agents, it’s a death-knell.)
In typical Scully fashion, once she is infected, she manages to give Mulder a laundry list of her symptoms, which would be rather convenient, if the conspiracy wasn’t waiting in the wings to intercept the 911 call and take Scully into custody. Another questionable plot point quickly follows. Shooting Mulder in the head and leaving him alive certainly sounds like the kind of extreme methods often used by Cancer Man, but wouldn’t he be fairly screwed if Mulder had been killed in the process?
The appearance by the Lone Gunmen is mostly a bone thrown to the hardcore fans, since no attempt is made to give their presence context, beyond their friendship to Mulder. The scene gives Skinner a chance to display his loyalties more completely, which is a nice touch, but it’s mostly an excuse to get Mulder out of the hospital and hunting for Scully, via Kurtzweil, which leads to the massive exposition dump that marks the end of the second act.
This particular scene is troublesome because it flatly contradicts what is revealed during the Syndicate meeting. Quite obviously, Well-Manicured Man (and most of the other Elders) didn’t know nearly as much about the “scope and grandeur” of the Project as he does in this scene. More to the point, he has been convinced that Mulder is the one person that can change things, and that giving Mulder the vaccine and the coordinates of the “mothership” is the right thing to do.
So what changed? Within the context of the film, nothing changes, and this shift makes little sense. But within the context of the series as a whole, this is the culmination of the process that took place over the past three seasons. Cancer Man was all but eliminated in favor of Well-Manicured Man, and that was deftly reversed in “The End”. The Syndicate meeting, as noted above, demonstrated that Well-Manicured Man is now at the bottom of the pecking order.
Much as Cancer Man effectively leveraged Bill Mulder out of the Syndicate in 1973, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Well-Manicured Man was given this information (and the death sentence that came with it) by Cancer Man himself. After all, Well-Manicured Man tells Mulder a story that touches on the truth but still contains much of the fiction that Cancer Man fostered over the past few decades.
The original cut of the film (trimmed to save material for mythology episodes in the sixth season) included an explanation regarding Bill Mulder and his children. On the one hand, Chris Carter was right to pull that section out; Samantha is tangential to the plot of the film. On the other hand, it provides an explanation for why Well-Manicured Man would allow himself to be placed in this lethal situation.
Bill Mulder was pushed out of the Syndicate, but in exchange, one of his children was left out of the testing program. Bill chose Samantha as the one to be abducted in the hopes that Fox would be better equipped to expose the Project and take measures to stop it. (Presumably, based on the episode “Demons”, Cancer Man also had some influence in this decision.) Similarly, Well-Manicured Man wants nothing more than to protect his family from the viral holocaust to come.
So the explanation is rather plain. After the meeting with the Syndicate, Cancer Man (or, more likely, a proxy) ensures that the “truth” and the information about Scully is delivered to his rival, along with an assignment to eliminate Kurtzweil and Mulder. Since Well-Manicured Man has always objected to such methods, this is an obvious sign that he has fallen completely from favor. Whatever the case, it must be clear to Well-Manicured Man that he will be dead, and that the only way to save his family is to help Mulder. (He says as much, after all.)
Thus Well-Manicured Man tells Mulder what he believes the truth to be, and then gives him the means to save Scully, all exactly as Cancer Man planned once it was clear that the Syndicate would need to handle the situation in Blackwood County. All that remains is for Cancer Man to be on hand, to ensure that his own actions demonstrate his lack of culpability, when Mulder introduces the vaccine into the systems of the “mothership”.
The third and final act of the film is the culmination of all the machinations in the second act, yet it has some serious plot contrivance issues. For the most part, these problems are related to the desire to make the third act as action-oriented as possible. The “mothership” is enormous on such a scale that Mulder should die several times during his exploration alone. Cancer Man may have reason to believe that Mulder will survive, since William is practically foretold and hasn’t been born yet, but one is left with the feeling that Mulder is placed in jeopardy to generate tension that otherwise could (and should) have been generated with a more “exploration friendly” situation.
After all, the concept is that the conspiracy has been running around this thing for decades. In all that time, why wouldn’t they construct some kind of scaffolding system to allow for safe passage in and around the vessel? Even if that wasn’t practical (given the desire to show off the effects), ropes or ladders wouldn’t get in the way. (Though, to be fair, the idea is to show off how “alien” the “mothership” design is, so showing how long the conspiracy has been on site would detract from that purpose.)
Speaking of the design of the “mothership”: it is a massive design, and even with the extent of CGI at the time, the sheer brilliance of the set itself adds immeasurably to the atmosphere of the third act. All that said, the structure of the story doesn’t allow for much chance to see it. Mulder has to find Scully’s apparent location quickly, get there in a cut, and move on with the plot. It’s too bad, because this is the kind of thing that Carter was clearly talking about when he said the real UFOs and “aliens” wouldn’t come until the film.
All that said, the third act is mostly flashy hand-waving at a plot. Cancer Man rallies the troops to go stop Mulder, but since Mulder encounters exactly no resistance from Cancer Man and his people, it makes little sense. One could argue that Cancer Man wouldn’t be putting on the act if he were surrounded by his own people, so he’s trying to place the Syndicate lackeys in danger by running them down into the ship, but it’s validation of a silly plot point.
While slimy naked Scully is seldom a big thing, it seems a bit odd that Mulder would bash the cryogenic pod containing Scully at head level. That only begins the litany of issues with Scully’s rescue and the agents’ escape from the “mothership”. For one thing, the vaccine works a bit too quickly, and it defies a certain level of logic. Based on the timeline for the “mothership”, one could assume that the inter-connected network of pods was constructed without filtering systems. But if the conspiracy can monitor the system for contaminates, wouldn’t that suggest that there was a reason to suspect they were present, thus logically requiring a way to deal with them?
As Cancer Man keeps the (presumed) Syndicate personnel running in circles, Mulder tries to get a wet and freezing Scully to safety. This is one of the worst plot holes of the film. Neither Mulder nor Scully should be able to survive in the extreme temperatures of the Antarctic winter (which somehow has sunlight) with just one set of clothes between them (though items appear out of nowhere, like boots). The two freezing agents, one barely alive, somehow manage to climb out of the “mothership” and escape frenzied aliens that stop chasing them at the most opportune time. And quite frankly, neither of them should have survived the process of getting tossed off the side of the “mothership”!
The main issue, of course, is how they survive exposure in the Antarctic, mated with no means of getting off the continent, long enough to make it back to an OPR hearing in reasonable time. Two possibilities come to mind. The first is relatively simple. If Cancer Man had contrived to get Mulder to Antarctica to save Scully and introduce the vaccine to the “mothership”, then he would have contrived to ensure that Mulder and Scully could be rescued. In fact, Cancer Man would know that Scully would be without clothes. (For that matter, what stopped him from rescuing them himself, taking them to a place with medical care, and ensuring that they hear some vague rescue story from the personnel there?)
The other option, somewhat less attractive, is that the spiritual forces that have been fostering Mulder and Scully on the series and will eventually aid them in bringing William to the world recognized the situation and took measures to correct it. This could be in the form of rescue personnel or something similar, a stray message to such personnel, etc. But it is less satisfying, overall, when compared to the idea that Cancer Man himself ensured their survival.
Another question is posed by the ending: what happens to the “mothership”? The vessel’s flight was apparently triggered by the presence of something that would weaken Purity, and perhaps it was meant to get into orbit as some kind of “reset”. But this presents a possible means of explaining the weakened version of Purity encountered and recovered at Tunguska. If the hyperspace drive of the “mothership” was still intact enough to provide a means of escape, yet damaged enough to fail again, it would provide a rather satisfying explanation for what struck Tunguska 90 years earlier.
In the end, the Syndicate does its usual job of covering their tracks. The Texas cornfields are destroyed, the recovered Purity is removed to a new location, and Mulder and Scully find their report sanitized. But Scully still has the bee that carried the virus, and so there’s a tenuous logic for pushing the FBI to re-open an investigative unit devoted to cases that can’t be programmed, categorized, or easily referenced. (Why the bee should be considered compelling enough evidence is hard to fathom, but it’s better logic than that employed for the Antarctic scenes!)
The interesting twist is that Mulder and Scully don’t really achieve a victory. Cancer Man managed to take the situation and evolve his plan, begun in “The End”, to accommodate the crisis. Mulder and Scully are reinvested, closer than they’ve been in quite some time, and that plays into Cancer Man’s desire to mold Mulder’s next moves. The final scene reveals that the X-Files have been re-opened, but as “The Beginning” would quickly demonstrate, that doesn’t mean Mulder and Scully are back in the saddle.
Ironically, given the original intentions for the film, the ending works better as a platform for a second film with Mulder and Scully working on the next X-Files case than a lead-in to the sixth season. With minor modifications, this could have concluded the series’ mythology in large measure, avoiding the need to assign deeper context through the later introduction of plot elements that didn’t mesh well with the original mythology arc. (This subject, of course, will be addressed in reviews for the mythology episodes of the final seasons.)
Instead of being the climax of the series, launching Duchovny and Anderson into the spotlight afforded by a ready-made film franchise, “Fight the Future” became an afterthought. Because the series needed to continue without the assumption that the film had been seen, the plot elements are extraneous. Whatever is revealed in the film is covered in the sixth season mythology episodes in more detail. In fact, though the film made a profit, largely due to enthusiastic foreign response, a second “X-Files” film has been a constant exercise in delay.
All that said, the structure of the fifth season demonstrates that the film, to a certain extent, is nothing more than a two-hour mythology epic elevated to feature film status. Isolating the story within a relatively self-contained film takes away from the fact that it is the logical extension of what came before. Take each act of the film, break them into separate episodes, replace “The Beginning” with the final act as the sixth season premiere, and the result would be one of the best cliffhanger arcs ever.
Just as an exercise, imagine ending the fifth season with the hallway scene and Mulder’s apparent murder. Sure, it would seem like another instance where Mulder is dead, but that would’ve left “Gethsemane” in the dust. The issue would have been money for effects, which would have forced the story to scale back slightly, but the result would have been a more logical progression of events and the avoidance of retreads in “The Beginning”.
Overall, the question is whether or not the film succeeded in what it tried to accomplish. The answer is a qualified “yes”. The film introduced the series and the characters to a much wider audience; the number of fans who cite the film as their first experience with “X-Files” is a testimony to that fact. It also marks the end of the series’ mythology as it was first conceived; none of the extensions to the mythology arc following the film seemed nearly as well-considered.
The writing, as noted, is a matter of feast or famine. “Fight the Future” has some of the best character work for Mulder and Scully, because it is the logical extension of the best moments between them over the course of the first five seasons. But the Syndicate and the conspiracy scenes aren’t given enough context to make sense, and the third act is riddled with plot holes the size of the “mothership”.
Afforded the opportunity to shine on a wider canvas, Duchovny and Anderson deliver iconic performances as Mulder and Scully. If the characters were somewhat less complicated to allow for fresh audience members, then the actors gave the performances the context necessary for the more experienced fans. One can watch the film simply for those two performances.
With more money and time to spend on the production, the film looks like the idealized form of the series. While the plot doesn’t always allow for huge effects shots, there are some beautiful moments, enhanced by color and light textures that look like nothing else on film. Some shots are oddly underwhelming (the first shot of Cancer Man comes to mind), but those are rare moments.
In terms of content, this film has something for everyone. The ‘shippers within fandom essentially got what they wanted, within reason: confirmation that Mulder and Scully had thought about taking their relationship to the next level. Mythology fans were given most of the major answers and enough room to maneuver to keep several theories alive and well.
The biggest problem is the fact that the series couldn’t fully integrate the film into the continuity because the writers couldn’t assume that the television viewers had seen the film. Thus it seems extraneous, given that the series went on for four more seasons and dealt with all the issues raised in the film in some other (often redundant and inferior) fashion. The result is a good film for X-Philes that is, unfortunately, all too easy to overlook.
