The X-Files: The Truth Has Abandoned Us

When did we get here, or has The X-Files always been like this? Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) show up at a crime scene a reasonably proximal distance from Washington, D.C., refute all jurisdictional complaints care of whoever happens to have gotten to the scene first, make clear what their reputation entails when Scully notices something on the body missed by the original investigators (while Mulder lists a series of supernatural or conspiratorial anecdotes), more people die, the agents discover what’s going on but not without preventing the perpetrator from suffering a violent or painful death, everyone who would have died without Mulder and Scully there ends up dying with them there, the agents share a moment of introspection about aging and the paths their lives have taken, about what “it” all circuitously means in this, the Trump Era, and they leave, on to the next case they’ll barely crack to no evident effect. As The X-Files lumbers into what could be its final episode, the X-Files themselves seem more and more a relic of a government (a world) that no longer exists—or worse: that no longer matters. Mulder and Scully’s life’s work has become a budgeting anomaly, too inexpensive to raise a red flag within the bureaucratic bowels of the FBI, but too inconsequential to do much of substance anymore.

This week, like much of their conversation in “Plus One,” Mulder and Scully confront the fragility of their corporeal realities, this time prompted by Mulder needing to use “transition lenses” because he can’t read his phone screen anymore. Of course, these universal human fears correspond well to the agents’ latest case, which has partly to do with black market organ harvesting and partly to do with a teenage girl, Juliet (Carlena Britch), who becomes a vigilante for God in order to take down the cult behind the organ harvesting, which also happens to count her sister as one of its members. It’s an odd hybridization of Monster of the Week plotlines writer Karen Nielsen assembles, alloying all the disparate pieces and themes under the banner of exploring “faith,” at least to the extent that Scully has it via her Christian upbringing, and Mulder isn’t sure what he has, though he does offer an explanation about how maybe life is the culmination of one’s choices, and faith is trusting that we’ve made the right choices? Scully seems to accept this nonsense, because The X-Files has pretty much given up on explaining how someone who’s seen everything Scully’s seen, who has experienced so much of the pointless tragedy Scully has, would still ally with an organized religion as dogmatically inflexible as Catholicism. And because Mulder wants to believe, even if he’s not sure what he’s supposed to be believing anymore, now that he’s done believing in the so-called “truth.”

In fact, with so much happening in this episode, Mulder and Scully are barely in it. Instead, Nielsen lays out whole episodes unto themselves, each necessarily underdeveloped because there’s only so much one can do in 45 minutes. The cult surrounding the underground organ harvest bows to ’60s sitcom actress Barbara Beaumont (Fiona Vroom), who, despite being a septuagenarian, looks exactly as she did on TV decades ago thanks to the cannibalistic “treatment” devised by her mad scientist husband, Dr. Luvenis (Jere Burns). The cult itself isn’t grounded with much of an explanation besides how those who belong to the cult, including Juliet’s sister, serve as living vessels for continuous blood transfusion or act as foot soldiers, finding victims for Barbara’s eventual consumption. According to some quick expository detective-ing on Mulder and Scully’s part, Barbara Beaumont left the public eye some 40 years earlier, hiding out on the top floor of a Bronx building she owns, using a system of tunnels and elevators and dumbwaiters to pay the building’s super and otherwise get what she needs. How does she recruit? Why would any person actually join this cult? How could they go 40-plus years basically keeping a group of young people living in such conditions, involved with murder regularly, without any law enforcement whatsoever showing up at her door? Rather than background or world-building, “Nothing Last Forever” provides some seriously stomach-churning prosthetic effects, making for the most upsettingly violent and grotesque The X-Files episode since the last one.