Far from it, though reservations and appreciation certainly go hand in hand.įrankly, it wouldn’t be a Carter mythology episode without a near-equal share of frustration and elation.
#X files season 11 series#
This may make it sound like I’m about to launch into a harsh critique of what looks very likely to be the series finale. After “My Struggle IV” aired, I joked to some fellow X-Philes that Carter might as well be crooning his own intransigent tune, Barbara Beaumont style, while simultaneously cannibalizing his audience’s goodwill. This is also a defiantly personal work of art that sticks doggedly-and, I would argue, admirably-to its philosophical guns, even when it flies in the face of fashion. There’s a degree to which Barbara is an onscreen avatar for The X-Files itself: A show forever set in its narrative and thematic formulas a series sustained by a rabid audience that is enthralled even when it turns hostile (a reaction, any reaction, is all a branded, multi-platform franchise such as this requires) and a portrait of two characters who physically age (and acknowledge that fact) while remaining emotionally repressed and stunted. (Juliet’s deific savagery is a precursor to and subconscious inspiration for Mulder’s own enemy-annihilating actions in the episode that follows.) Juliet, from the teaser sequence, is trying to rescue her brainwashed sister Olivia (Micaela Aguilera) from among the group’s ranks, and is, per Mulder, “literally using the church to exact vengeance” since she stabs her targets with pointed iron rods stolen from her Bronx parish’s gates.
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Both of them are surrounded by, and sometimes literally sutured to, a group of adoringly dead-eyed acolytes. Barbara Beaumont (the spectacularly unhinged Fiona Vroom, who previously appeared as the younger Cassandra Spender, the Cigarette Smoking Man’s wife, in “My Struggle III”) is an 80-something child actor/television star who now runs an eternal youth blood cult with her geneticist lover Dr. It’s a callback to guest star Haley Joel Osment’s not-so-lunatic-as-it-seems rant about the same topics in episode 6 of this season, “Kitten.” But it also acts as a reminder of the larger apocalyptic threat that has shadowed most of this year’s installments, and which must, per dramatic dictate, come to a head.Īs often occurs in the series, the case in “Nothing Lasts Forever” comments on where Mulder and Scully and the world they inhabit are currently at.
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Amid the sanguine, pre-opening credits hubbub-a pair of cannibalistic physicians harvest (and taste-sample) human organs, only to be interrupted by an avenging angel vigilante named Juliet Bocanegra (Carlena Britch)-there’s a fleeting audio clip on a car radio of Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale), the paranoid host of an Alex Jones-esque media pageant who was last seen in Season 10's "My Struggle II," bellowing about mind-altering gases and chem trails. I had a notion during the teaser sequence of “Nothing Lasts Forever” (episode 9 of The X-Files’ 11th season, written by Karen Nielsen and directed by James Wong) that it would be best recapped alongside “My Struggle IV” (the season, and possibly series finale, written and directed by XF creator Chris Carter).