(Spoiler Alert)

Before I write anything else, I want to say that I am genuinely a fan of Robert Downey, Jr. as an actor. I think he’s great, and he’s been in a lot of great movies.

This isn’t meant as an insult to him or his acting ability, please don’t misconstrue it as such. 🙂

Getting to the point, I watched “Oppenheimer” today, and if I were given the “Oppen-tunity” (sorry, couldn’t resist) to re-cut the film, I would limit his presence to the scene where he invites Oppenheimer to come to his retreat or whatever for physics geniuses, the one where Albert Einstein is living, and maybe one or two quick scenes toward the end.

A quick thought on that:

When Robert Downey Jr’s character — a politician who (according to the film) was behind a McCarthy-era smear campaign against Oppenheimer some years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — watches Oppenheimer approach Einstein (who is childishly tossing rocks or something into a pond) we the viewers see the two cinematic representations of these two physics icons from a distance. As Einstein turns to greet Oppenheimer, the wind blows his hat from his head, and causes his — that is to say, the actor portraying Einstein’s — hair to blow upward, momentarily reminding us of any number of photographs we have all seen of Albert Einstein, with his notoriously unkempt white hair going every which way.

As I watched the film I felt I was (perhaps) being condescended to: I mean for example instead of a few quips about relativity or (God forbid) a little more explanation about why Einstein didn’t endorse quantum mechanics (other than a reference to the famous “God does not play dice” quote), all we the viewers are given to identify this actor as Albert Einstein is a quick shot of his hair (which was probably a wig) blowing in the wind.

But with regard to that scene, as well as the one at the end where the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein is revealed, I think that if I were given the Oppen-tunity to re-cut this film — not remake, not recast, not redirect, merely to re-cut — I would leave both those scenes in, and leave in most of Robert Downey Jr.’s parts in those scenes, but remove most of the rest of every other scene he is featured in.

Here’s why:

His character in the film provides a frame through which we the viewers can see J. Robert Oppenheimer, in that Oppenheimer is being interrogated and asked to justify many aspects of his professional and personal life, and (as we learn near the end) Robert Downey Jr.’s character was (according to the film) the reason Oppenheimer was being interrogated.

In that sense, his presence is necessary, and I wouldn’t remove him from the film entirely… just mostly.

And again, this isn’t meant as an insult to Robert Downey Jr., I am a fan of his work.

But what happens is that the center of focus of the film’s narrative arc is shifted from the sense of guilt we might imagine Oppenheimer feeling at being responsible for the deaths of a couple hundred thousand people to some vague, poorly executed pissing contest between Oppenheimer the political figure (as opposed to the physicist) and some McCarthyist politician who (according to the film) held a grudge against Oppenheimer, and because of that grudge tried to smear Oppenheimer in the political sphere in order to advance his own career.

The reason you lost interest in that last long, convoluted sentence is the same reason I honestly almost got up and left the theater midway through the post-Trinity test anticlimax of the film, one which lasts somewhere between half an hour and ten thousand years, as cliched “suspenseful” music builds and builds in the background, getting louder and louder until the characters (most of whom aren’t even physicists) have to scream in order to be heard over it.

That reason being, it’s flipping boring.

If I were given the Oppen-tunity to re-cut the film, all of this would be removed, because (in my opinion) it transforms what could have actually been a very good film about the moral implications of inventing the atomic bomb into a political pissing contest.

That said, visually (Albert Einstein’s hair included) “Oppenheimer” is a stunning film. It’s just way the hell too long.

There is a scene where Oppenheimer is making a speech to Los Alamos scientists and employees after the bombs they built were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and during the speech Oppenheimer imagines that a bomb has been dropped on this crowd, and he envisions a pretty woman in the crowd having layers of skin being peeled back off her face, in the way that an atomic bomb blast might (presumably) affect someone within the blast radius.

After this vision, he finishes his speech and goes outside, where he sees one of the scientists who helped build the bomb vomiting uncontrollably, presumably because of guilt related to his participation in research that led to the horrific deaths of a couple hundred thousand Japanese people.

This is the climax of the film. What comes after is the frame of the story attempting to become the story itself, and (spoiler alert) other than the final scene where the conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer is revealed, about 90 percent of all of this should be cut out, because it ruins the film.

And, to repeat, it shifts the moral question regarding guilt at having “become death, destroyer of worlds” to a political pissing contest between Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr’s character, whose name I don’t remember or care to look up.

The film could have been very good, and indeed is very good, in places. But there’s too much political bickering and too many shifts between time periods — and regarding that, the use of black and white for one time period is a tad esoteric, as the only reason I can guess it might have been used is to make this time period look like black and white television, i.e. to mimic news footage of McCarthy-era hearings?

I mean, black and white is often used to indicate that something happened in the past, right? In “Oppenheimer,” the black and white portions of the film take place in the middle of the overall timeline. To be clear, things that happen both before and after the black and white parts of the film are in color.

So it’s like, in terms of overall timeline:

Color —> black and white —> color again.

Why? I don’t know.

But like I said, the film is visually stunning, in places. In the first half of the film, the surround sound of the theater is also used to amazing effect, with the sounds of explosions happening unexpectedly from time to time.

But to give a completely honest assessment of the film, these unexpected explosions actually woke me up a time or two, when the film went much, much too far into the “political pissing contest” frame story of the film and abandoned both the interesting scientific discoveries briefly mentioned as well as the actual moral conflict of J. Robert Oppenheimer as a historical figure.

If I were allowed to re-cut the film and remove 90% of its extraneous bullshit, it would be an excellent film.

But honestly, I don’t think I could stay awake long enough to do that.

Apologies to Robert Downey, Jr., you are an excellent actor, in my opinion. 🙂

I’D RATHER BE A HAMMER THAN A NAIL

I guess I’ll file this one under “Movies/TV,” but it’s really more of a continuation of my last post, which is case it wasn’t clear, was anti-communist in its politics, just in case that wasn’t clear.

That may not have been clear, since in the post I compared how communist governments tend to run themselves to how corporations run themselves: in a top-down manner, with an authoritarian leader at the top – a “great leader” of some sort at the top of a communist regime, a CEO at the top of a corporation – and with workers at the bottom. 

Anyway, I was watching some movies today (it’s Sunday, October 23 as I type this) and the first one I will mention was a Korean movie with the English title “El Condor Pasa” that I ended up turning off a little more than halfway through, because to be frank it wasn’t very good. But as you may or may not know, there’s a Simon and Garfunkel song with the same title, and it features the lyric I used for a title here, so I figured that I would at least mention it. 

The title fits better with regard to the next movie I started watching just now, a Canadian documentary called “Letter From Masanjia” that I would like to briefly discuss, with regard to the last post, which may or may not seem controversial to some readers. 

I don’t think it’s controversial, and for the record I’m glad I live here in the USA, where I’m allowed to write about pretty much anything I want to, as long as I’m not threatening violence or anything like that.

Anyway, the letter that the documentary is about was written by a Chinese man named Sun Yi, who was in a forced labor camp in China. 

Sun Yi was put in the prison camp for his involvement in a religious group called Falun Gong, one that the Chinese communist party outlawed several years ago because of their alleged – emphasis on alleged – involvement in murders in China, as well as for creating political discord in China. 

According to Sun Yi, the real reason Falun Gong was outlawed in China is that their membership (according to him) reached somewhere between 70 and 100 million people, and was beginning to have more influence than the communist party, which only had around 60 million people. 

Sun Yi was sent to a the Masanjia Labor Camp near Shenyang, China because of his involvement with Falun Gong. While there, he was forced to make Halloween decorations that would be sold in English-speaking countries, a fact he deduced from the English writing on the boxes that the decorations went out in. 

Sun Yi wrote several letters in English and Chinese – more than 20, I think the documentary said – secretly in bed, a few words at a time, while guards weren’t looking. He slipped the letters into boxes when the finished products were sent out, and hoped for the best.

A woman in Portland, Oregon found one of his letters, and the story went viral. Sun Yi – who had since been released from the labor camp, and secretly bypassed China’s internet firewall to read Western news – saw her story. He’s in the documentary, filmed secretly over Skype. I haven’t finished it, so I am not sure if he gets arrested again for filming it.

The main thing I wanted to briefly write about is how a communist government – which, remember: the stated goal of communist “revolutions” is to liberate the working class from oppressive capitalists – is using forced labor to produce inexpensive goods that will be sold in capitalist markets. 

It’s strange, how this all works out: some American company (or a Chinese company that does business in the USA) is in the business of using communist party-sanctioned forced labor to produce goods that will be sold to capitalists overseas. 

In a country (the USA) which is far from perfect, but nonetheless does not (currently) feature forced labor as part of its political system.

I point this out to illustrate that the stated ideology of the communist party does not in any way match up with its actual treatment of workers. 

And to flip it around, “forced labor” is not something that American capitalists claim to endorse. Everyone reading the story about Sun Yi’s letter was outraged, yet very few (presumably) gave a second thought about it the next time they went to buy Halloween decorations, or Christmas decorations, or any number of inexpensive “Made In China” items that may have also been produced in a forced labor camp like the one Sun Yi was imprisoned in. 

At any rate, it’s a well-documented fact: labor conditions in communist China are among the worst in the world. And it’s not just cheap decorations. Apple has been criticized often for the conditions at its factories in China, which feature “suicide nets” to prevent overstressed workers from literally killing themselves from being overworked. 

Which think about Apple for a minute. Their current CEO is Tim Cook, and he’s the bigshot who has the final say-so and all, and he’s the guy who currently does the little presentations a few times a year, where Apple trots out a slightly modified version of the same small product line and acts like they’ve reinvented the wheel every time. 

To be sure, Apple makes quality products. Not denying that. But at the end of the day, it isn’t Tim Cook who built my iPhone, it’s some working-class Chinese person who didn’t get paid very much, who was overworked, and who lives under a “revolutionary” regime that was supposed to eliminate classism and elevate the worker to a higher level in society. 

So much for the revolution, I guess. 

But think about political figures in China briefly: the current President/General Secretary of the Communist Party is Xi Jinping. But he’s not the guy you see on the big banners, any time Chinese government buildings are shown. 

That guy is Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, the “great leader” behind the communist revolution that brought about China’s current political state. 

Strip away all the ideology, and just focus on the optics here: there’s an actual leader (Xi Jinping) who has control over everything in the country, basically, with a “legendary” type figure in the background of everything, a figure who is still viewed with reverence as being the one who started it all, everybody loves him, movies are made about him, he’s quoted often, etc. ad nauseam. 

Remember, just going on superficial optics, no ideology here: look at how Xi Jinping runs the country, with the ghost of Mao in the background, gently smiling, his “revolution” still going strong, inspiring Xi Jinping and his communist party to run China in a way that would make him proud…

And then look at Tim Cook and how he runs Apple: in the shadow of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, who “started it all,” everybody loves him, movies are made about him, he’s quoted often, etc. ad nauseam.

And yes, I absolutely am comparing the Xi Jinping – Mao Zedong dynamic to the Tim Cook – Steve Jobs dynamic, purely in terms of optics. I.e. how it appears superficially. 

If you’re following along here – even if you think I’m off my rocker – remember that “ideology” is not being considered in these comparisons. Because the “free market” capitalist ideology of Steve Jobs is diametrically opposed to the communist ideology of Mao Zedong…

But on the one hand, the legacy of Steve Jobs requires abhorrent labor conditions to continue, and Apple is supposedly against that…

And on the other hand, Mao’s legacy requires it to do business with capitalist entities like Apple and subject it’s supposedly “liberated” workforce to conditions that capitalist countries don’t allow. 

So, what you should understand is, it’s not actually controversial or even unusual for little ol’ me to “strip away ideology” and point out similarities between two supposedly opposite systems. 

Why not? Because leaders in both systems act in ways that oppose their stated ideology all the time.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

The Upside Down

There are spoilers for the Netflix show “Stranger Things” in this post.

Be warned: this post is my own wonky interpretation of the show, based entirely on my subjective viewing of the show.

I am not arguing that what I am about to write is what the show is “really about” or that this interpretation will even enhance your viewing of the show in any meaningful way.

But anyways, here goes:

The world of “Stranger Things” is immersed in nostalgia. Everywhere, the viewer sees nostalgic images, hears nostalgic music, and is presented with scenes and plot devices that are themselves nostalgic, in that they mimic scenes from blockbuster movies like the original “Jurassic Park” (raptors = demidogs) or “The Exorcist” (when Will is possessed by The Mind Flayer) or many other such scenes.

To say that the show “Stranger Things” is immersed in nostalgia is an understatement.

But there is one recurring part of the show that is not nostalgic, that does not evoke warm, fuzzy feelings: “The Upside Down.”

The Upside Down is a parallel dimension where faceless monsters prowl around, looking for prey. The Upside Down is also inhabited (and possibly created) by a shadowy monster called The Mind Flayer who appears in visions over the sky of the town.

The Upside Down is just like Hawkins, Indiana (the show’s fictional middle class, midwestern setting), in that landmarks from Hawkins appear in The Upside Down, but they are all dilapidated, covered with dust, broken down and so on.

Here is my interpretation of what I have written about so far:

Hawkins, Indiana (as well as the California town in Season 4), as mentioned, is immersed in nostalgia.

When the various characters in the show enter The Upside Down, they are leaving this nostalgic bubble that they exist in.

Similarly, when viewers finish watching an episode of “Stranger Things,” they are leaving the nostalgic bubble that the show creates for them.

Before I continue, I want to make clear that I am a huge fan of the show. I am not trying to denigrate the show or its viewership by pointing this stuff out, I am just offering my wonky interpretation of the show.

Here it is, for real this time:

“The Mind Flayer,” the dark entity that kidnaps and later possesses Will Byers, is itself representative of the nostalgia that the show is immersed in.

And when characters from the show go into The Upside Down, they are leaving the nostalgic bubble and entering the world of the present day, in which all of the nostalgic elements of Hawkins, Indiana are long dead and gone.

(Madonna’s “This Used To Be My Playground” plays softly, inside your head.)

Nostalgia, in addition to giving us the warm and fuzzies, can also become an incredibly destructive force in our lives. When we as humans indulge in nostalgia, we deceive ourselves into thinking that “the good old days” – whenever they were for us as individuals – were actually better than the present day.

Here’s another spoiler for you: the good old days weren’t as idyllic as you remember them. Bad things happened then, too. People weren’t any more or less “good” back then, whenever “back then” was for you.

To be clear, hopefully: remembering “the good old days” can be a very positive thing, for a million different reasons.

But at the same time, it can very easily become a trap, in that it makes the present day seem like The Upside Down, where everything is old and used up and dilapidated.

If a person spends all their time immersed in nostalgia, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate the positive aspects of life in the present day.

And this perspective-skewing (and highly addictive) manifestation of nostalgic thinking is what The Mind Flayer represents.

Think about it: in Season 2, as Will and his friends go trick or treating in their matching Ghostbusters outfits, with all kinds of nostalgic images and sounds bombarding the viewer, Will goes into a trance and finds himself in The Upside Down.

All the nostalgic Halloween-themed stuff is gone, and Will is left alone with the massive Mind Flayer, who is towering above him in the sky, with its various limbs dug into the ground.

Later, Will sees The Mind Flayer again and is possessed by it. And the way in which he is possessed is key: The Mind Flayer becomes a cloud of dust (or something) and enters Will through his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.

Think about how we experience nostalgia: when we see something that reminds us of childhood, we feel warm and fuzzy. When we hear a song from years ago, memories can be triggered. When we taste or smell food we haven’t eaten in decades, our minds can involuntarily drift away to another time and place.

And no matter how great our lives are in the present day, when we awake from these momentary lapses into nostalgia, we as humans have the tendency to tell ourselves that “back then” was better than now, when that quite simply is not the case, in any meaningful sense.

Of course there are exceptions. For some people, the past may have been more pleasant.

But even then, too much nostalgia can make the present day seem worse than it is. What was can (and often does) blind us to what is.

And this negative aspect of nostalgia is what The Mind Flayer represents, in my interpretation.

In season 2, as mentioned, The Mind Flayer possesses Will Byers by turning into a cloud of dust (or smoke, or something like that) and going into his sense organs.

After the possession is over, in Season 3, Will’s friends have girlfriends, and they don’t want to play Dungeons and Dragons with him any more.

There is a painfully emotional scene in Season 3 where Will dresses up in his Will The Wise dungeon master outfit, and tries to get Mike and Lucas to engage in his Dungeons and Dragons campaign, one which he spent a lot of time preparing for them.

But Mike and Lucas are more concerned about a recent fight with their girlfriends. They mock Will’s game, and Will leaves.

Mike follows Will outside, and asks him, did you really think we would never get girlfriends and just play games for the rest of our lives?

And Will – who was possessed by The Mind Flayer, representing negative, backward-looking aspects of nostalgia – answers “Yeah, I guess I did.”

Watch the show if you haven’t, it’s pretty awesome. It’s a nostalgic thrill ride that will press psychological buttons you forgot you had.

But don’t get so involved in it that everything outside of your TV starts looking like The Upside Down.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

SPOILER ALERT: THAT’S NOT NEO

Merry Christmas! Just wanted to say that to everyone, and also to share something I found interesting about the new Matrix movie:

You may or may not know this, but a few years ago, “redpilled” (a Matrix reference) was being used by online misogynists to indicate that they had figured out the “truth” about women.

9/11 truthers were “redpilled” when they decided to believe “inside job” theories, Flat Earthers might consider themselves “redpilled” when they start believing the Earth is flat, etc. And people who don’t believe those things are “bluepilled.”

This refers to a scene in the first Matrix movie, where Neo is told to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. If he takes the blue pill, nothing in his life will change, but if he takes the red pill, he will “wake up” from the simulated reality of the Matrix and see the real world for the first time. Of course, Neo takes the red pill in the first Matrix movie, and that’s where the internet got the “redpilled/bluepilled” thing.

Sorry for explaining what you probably already know, ha ha. But anyway, circa 2016 or so, online misogynists, pick up artists, etc. were using “redpilled” to indicate to each other that they “knew the truth” about women, this “truth” being bullshit like “all women are manipulative,” “Feminism castrates men,” etc.

At least one of the Wachowskis commented on that, I am pretty sure. And that community may have stopped using “redpilled” but who knows. I think the term has migrated back to non-misogynistic conspiracy theorists, but at one point it was being used by misogynists all the time. 

Anyway, getting to the point, early in the new Matrix movie, Keanu Reeves’ character is shown at least a few times as someone other than Keanu Reeves. A white haired bald man is shown as Keanu Reeves’ reflection at least once, when his character leaps off a roof in a flashback, it’s clearly not Keanu Reeves leaping off the roof, etc. 

This is explained away with convoluted nonsense in the film, as one might expect. And this “Keanu Reeves might not actually be Neo in this film” element is never explained or explored beyond showing a different person in the mirror a few times. 

I apologize if you haven’t watched it yet, but as you may have read or otherwise heard already, “rescuing Trinity” is the main plot point of the second half of the film. “Neo” wakes up again about halfway through and is told Trinity has been captured by the machines again, and is in one of those pod things.

I need to back up here: Carrie-Anne Moss appears in the first half of the film. But she isn’t “Trinity,” her name is “Tiffany” and she’s married to “Chad.”

“Chad” has been used on the internet a lot, to refer to some woman’s handsome boyfriend or husband. The same people who said “redpilled” to refer to becoming misogynist pickup artists would use “Chad” as an attempt at an insult, to the husbands, boyfriends, etc. of women they wanted to date. 

It’s often in the context of delusional “if she only knew the real me, she would dump Chad” fantasies.

And I apologize if I am spoiling anything, but in the new Matrix movie, Keanu Reeves’ character (ostensibly Neo, but with a different reflection at times) only knows Carrie-Anne Moss’s character because he has seen her in a coffee shop. 

Keanu Reeves’ character is basically stalking her character in the movie. But it’s presented as if he is “rescuing” her from a delusion where she loves her husband and children, a delusion where she doesn’t fully remember being Trinity. Keanu’s character also knows where she works, and he goes and visits her – uninvited – at her work in the movie. 

There are probably other instances of this sort of thing that I missed, but in short, Keanu Reeves’ character behaves like a “redpilled” misogynist stalker creep in the movie. And as you know, in the first movie, Neo takes the red pill and unwittingly started the whole “redpilled” internet thing. 

What I am saying is this: in the new Matrix movie, Keanu Reeves does not portray “Neo” at all, Keanu Reeves portrays someone else entirely, a “redpilled” stalker who has delusional fantasies about how he is a superhero and the woman he is stalking is secretly in love with him. 

The entire movie (including “Analyst” scenes with Neil Patrick Harris) is a fantasy concocted by Keanu Reeves’ character, a fantasy that internally justifies his stalking of Carrie-Anne Moss’s character in the film. 

“The Analyst” is not actually the entity running the Matrix, “The Analyst” is just an analyst, and when he attempts to break through all of Keanu’s character’s delusions, the character mentally transforms the analyst into a nemesis and incorporates him into the fantasy. Which of course, the fantasy ends with “The Analyst” being defeated and “Trinity” remembering who she is. 

Which would be just another dumb Hollywood ending, were it not for the fact that the “not Keanu” reflection stops appearing (and stops being mentioned) after Keanu’s character starts immersing himself in “Matrix” fantasies more fully.

At the end (SPOILER ALERT), Keanu Reeves’ character can’t fly because he isn’t actually Neo. At the end, he tries to fly, in order to escape police pursuit, but he can’t do it.

Trinity – the focal point of his fantasy, a wholly imaginary version of Tiffany – *can* fly, and she holds his hand and carries him through the sky, away from the police who are pursuing him.

Which Tiffany or Chad (or one of their children) may have called the police on Keanu Reeves’ character when he showed up uninvited at Tiffany’s workplace.

In short: Keanu Reeves’ character (I refuse to call him “Neo” because I don’t think he’s actually Neo) uses his fantasy version of Tiffany to escape from reality.

This angle may have been totally accidental, nonetheless, I find it interesting.

Anyways, just wanted to share that. Merry Christmas!

…and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy?

Prediction: within a month of this film (which looks badass) being released, there will be scads of blog posts and articles from people who watch this and then read the book, where they will discover that wherever the word “crusade” was used in this movie, the word “jihad” was used in the book.

The two words mean basically the same thing: “holy war.” It’s just that historically, holy wars associated with Christianity have been called “crusades” and holy wars associated with Islam have been called “jihad”.

I get why this change was made: to avoid association with terrorists who consider themselves jihadists.

But what’s gonna end up happening, I bet, is that there’s gonna be a lot more attention paid to the nomenclature used for holy wars in the Dune universe than there would have been if they’d just kept calling it “jihad.”

Which is probably good for marketing… no such thing as bad publicity and all.

Spoiler Alert (I Guess)

You know that song at the end of “Breaking Bad,” the one that plays while Walt’s lying on the ground at the end?

That’s by a group called Badfinger, and oddly enough, their real-world experience in the music industry was quite similar to what happened to Walt in the Breaking Bad backstory:

Walt was in some chemistry startup called “Gray Matter” with a couple of his friends from college (grad school?), a man and a woman, and it’s never really made clear what happened exactly, but Walt was romantically involved with the woman, who ended up hooking up with the other dude, and Walt accepted a buyout of I think $5k or something like that…

And then Gray Matter took off, and the other 2 became billionaires off of the company Walt helped found, while Walt struggled to make ends meet as a chemistry teacher.

I don’t know if this played into the song choice at the end… but Badfinger had a similar experience in the music industry. Long story short, they had hit records and made millions of dollars for record company crooks, meanwhile they were living on 7 pounds 10 a week (guessing that’s about $25-$30 American nowadays; not much money at all) and having to borrow shoes for gigs.

By the way, I watched that documentary after seeing the episode of Peep Show where Sophie Breaks up with Jeff, and Jeff comes over to get his stuff, and Sophie and Mark see Jeff crying in Sophie’s room, listening to the Badfinger song “Without You” as performed by Harry Nilsson.

This is the song, I couldn’t find a clip of Jeff crying:

…which is a shame, because it’s an hilarious scene. Which might sound strange if you aren’t familiar with Peep Show.

You… aren’t familiar with Peep Show? 😐

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MORE X-FILES NONSENSE

I dunno why, but the song “Bleeding Love” popped into my head yesterday, so I found the chords on the internet and figured out the vocal melody.

And I thought it would be cool if I played it while video-ing my TV as I was watching Season 8, Episode 2 of “The X-Files,” an episode I had never seen before.

And the part of the vocal melody that corresponds to “you cut me open and I/keep bleeding, I keep keep bleeding love” ended up coming at just the right time.

I didn’t plan it that way, it just came out that way.

THE DOGGETT AND PONY SHOW

Alright, so I’ve been watching/re-watching “The X-Files” on Hulu off and on for the past few months.

“Watching/re-watching” because I think I had seen roughly half of the episodes already… maybe more like a third of them.

In case you don’t know, “The X-Files” consists of basically 2 types of episodes. One type of episode is “Monster Of The Week”. In these episodes, Mulder and Scully investigate some weird creature, or ghost, or alien, or whatever, and the story is resolved (more or less) in that self-contained episode. “Self-contained” because in the next episode, they would be going after some other monster, and the previous episode’s monster (or whatever) wouldn’t be mentioned.

Some of the more memorable “monsters of the week” came back from time to time, but most of them were one-offs.

That’s one type of X-Files episode. The other type are called “mytharc” episodes.

“Mytharc” is a term the show’s staff actually used (if Google is to be believed, “TRUST NO ONE” 🙂 ), and the word is a combination of “mythology” and “story arc.”

Which means, these episodes aren’t self-contained, they’re one long story. The X-Files mytharc was about the government covering up alien abductions, Mulder and Scully’s backstories, and so on.

As an aside, several years ago I got bored and decided to watch all the mytharc episodes up to I think season 5… because that’s all the seasons the local video rental place (since closed) had to rent.

I remember reading back then that many hardcore X-Files fans preferred “monster of the week” episodes. Regarding that, I can say with 100% certainty that if you only watch the mytharc episodes, you miss out on a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of what makes the X-Files a great show.

Actually my personal favorite X-Files episode – “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”; the episode where Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek make appearances as Men In Black – isn’t considered a mytharc episode, at least it wasn’t the last time I checked.

I am digressing like hell here, but if you’ve tried to get into The X-Files and couldn’t, watch that episode. Season 3, episode 20… it is (in my opinion) the quintessential X-Files episode. I didn’t really get the humor in the series until I saw that episode, and anyways it’s a good episode. 🙂

But getting back to the point, there are recurring characters in mytharc episodes, and one of them is the strong-jawed fellow you see in the picture.

alien_bounty_hunter

Well, it’s the same actor at least… there are several of these guys in the show. They are shape-shifting alien bounty hunters (the picture below is what they look like by default, I guess), and the only way to kill them is to stab (or shoot) them in the back of the neck. The dagger thing in the second pic is their weapon of choice, and they use it to kill various aliens disguised as humans, as well as probably a few humans, I honestly don’t remember. But anyways, when you stab (or shoot) one of these guys in the back of the neck, green stuff starts bubbling out, and they melt into a pile of green goop, basically.

x-files2

Early in the series, when these guys (or other aliens like them) get killed, the green goop is accompanied by a toxic gas that kills humans.
But later…

I am currently watching Season 8 for the first time. And in episode 2, Scully kills one of these guys by shooting him in the back of the neck. In the scene, she is down on the floor after a struggle, and she fires a single shot that pierces his neck, he falls to the floor a few feet away from her, and he turns into a pile of green goop, as expected.

But… there’s no poison gas. And my question to any other X-Files fans who may be on my friends list is… where’s the poison gas?

I have looked online for an explanation of this, but all I can find regarding season 8 are general reviews that talk about how bad it is. “Doggett and pony show” and whatnot. But nobody explained why Scully didn’t even bother to hold her breath when the toxic green goop started bubbling out of the alien’s neck when she shot him.

Maybe I missed something in an earlier episode that explained that (I did fall asleep watching some episodes, and sometimes I was half-watching, half-doing other stuff)… or maybe it was just lazy screenwriting.

Does anybody know?