Darin Freaking Morgan

Season 11: Waiting for Godot William

Previously on The X-Files...  I was daunted by the prospect of slogging through six more low-Sci-Fi-content episodes of Waiting for William (also known as Season 11 of The X-Files). However, Darin Morgan provided another episode mocking agent Mulder's mid-life crisis and in so doing he managed to top his own funny Season 10 episode, "Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster".

Recursive Sci Fi

Twilight Zone-like teaser
Lost episode from the 60's:
"How to Serve a Paranoid Schizophrenic"

For me, as a Sci Fi fan, the best part of episode 4, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat", is that it is an amusing type of recursive science fiction story. Morgan's meandering tale begins with a page out of the Twilight Zone; a short teaser scene about evil invading Martians who are altering people's memories.

Mulder can't handle the truth.

The Trump Effect
Episode 4 ends (well, almost) with a Morgan-twisted alternate version of "To Serve Man". A space alien (who would be disgusted by the prospect of having to be near humans, let alone eat them) explains that because Earthlings are such big liars, a solar wall has been built around Earth's star system. Humans are free to explore as far as Uranus, but no further. Even the Voyager spacecraft is returned deported back to Earth in order to prevent anything human from contaminating the rest of the galaxy.

Mulder receives a book from the space alien that contains the TRUTH about everything. Mulder opens the book and starts to read the TRUTH, but he soon cries out in dismay and collapses... HE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH.

Reggie Who?

Mulder, Reggie and Sugarboobs

This scene in episode 4 where the TRUTH and all alien secrets are revealed to Mulder is played for laughs and viewers have to wonder if the depicted encounter with a space alien is only happening within the insane thoughts of agent Reggie Somebody. The entire episode is presented by Darin Morgan as a Post-Conspiracy Era nightmare in which Donald Trump's penchant for lying becomes the inspiration for a Sci Fi story about Dr. They, a mad scientist who can alter people's memories.

Dr. They develops
mind control technology

Agent Reggie desperately tries to get help from Mulder and claims that he is fighting to not be erased from history by Dr. They.

Could Reggie have actually been Mulder's original partner in the X-Files office? Episode 4 includes several altered scenes from the 1990s The X-Files with Reggie inserted into the cases. In one of these, Reggie shoots Darin Morgan (playing the role of the shape-shifter Eddie).

Parallel Universe

"What if Reggie is from a parallel universe?"

Wrapped in paranoia and oozing with incoherence, Reggie baffles Mulder with tales of how "They" is out to get him. Mulder is unwilling to believe that Reggie's existence could have been completely edited out of the memories of Fox and Dana. Mulder considers an alternative hypothesis: that Reggie is from a parallel universe. In another scene showing an alternative X-Files history as told by Reggie, it is Reggie who greets Dana upon her first arrival in the X-Files basement office. Reggie calls Dana "sugarboobs" and assures her the the X-Files is a guys-only operation.

searching for a lost (or false) memory

Scully, playing the level-headed agent, investigates Reggie's background and discovers that he is an ex-NSA employee who apparently learned about the X-files through wire-taps before snapping and becoming psychotic.

dressed for a night of fun

Then, after viewers are ready to conclude that Reggie's stories of having been on the X-Files investigative team are all lies, Skinner walks by and sees Reggie being hauled off (wearing a straightjacket) to the Spotnitz Sanitarium (he's carted off in a Ghost Bustersesque ambulance).

Mulder's memory of watching
The Twilight Zone and eating
Jiffy Pop popcorn when he
was 10 years old

Through the entire episode, Reggie has had beads of sweat on his giant forehead, and both Fox and Dana have mocked him for his seemingly almost nonexistent grasp on reality (at one point, Reggie claims to have been the 100,000,000th person at Trump's inauguration). But Skinner asks, "Why are they taking Reggie away?" Also, apparently in episode 2 there was an image of Reggie flashed briefly on the screen as part of the mass of digitized X-Files documents. Through all of episode 4, Morgan plays with the idea that none of us can trust our memories... anything might be true. And in the Trump era, it no longer matters if conspiracies are made public because nobody will believe them anyhow.

The Darin Morgan Effect

Do you remember me being smaller?

I'm thankful that for this episode there was no fist fight for Mulder and no lamentations from sugarboobs Scully about her imminent spinsterhood. In fact, at the start of the episode, Dana and Fox have a dinner date planned. However, they end up having to deal with the mystery of Reggie and the Men In Black-like guys who keep popping up and trying to grab Reggie. Anyhow, Dana should know better than to try to distract Fox from important matters such as hunting for Sasquatch.

Don't you remember GOOP-O?

Finally, one of the dudes chasing Reggie chastises Mulder for having become completely irrelevant and useless. Mulder shouts, "Do you know who I am? I'm Fox Freaking Mulder!".

Two big reveals
I remember you being smaller

While Mulder gets to fondly remember Jiffy Pop and a non-existant episode of The Twilight Zone, Scully is enthralled by an old childhood memory of making Goop-O A-B-C, an alternate universe brand similar to Jello 1-2-3.

the danger of disappointing
X-Files shippers (see)

2 Big Reveals
Thank you Darin for yet another reminder that we should not take science fiction too seriously. Fun is number one. And as for snarky meta-narrative, the idea that we (and the almost-over X-Files) are in a post-conspiracy era (where the Truth no longer matters) feels like a fitting bookend for the entire X-Files saga.

Next: episode 5 and the power of telepathy

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