The X-Files Season 6, Episode 22: Biogenesis

Getting the band back together, are we? And for a cliffhanger of a season finale, which we haven't seen in a while. I can already tell this is going to be quite a ride.

I've not started watching season seven yet, but obviously it's going to pick up right where this one left off. I think the words, 'to be continued' kind of gave that much away. But that doesn't mean there's nothing else here to talk about just in 'Biogenesis'.

So we see the Smoking Man and Krycek and Diana again for the first time since 'One Son', and it looks like they're still working together and they've found some new conspiracy to join, or started a new one themselves. And this is something I find interesting. The Smoking Man is to conspiracies what a lot of entrepreneurs are to startups and IPOs. Some people in business move from one company to another, taking each one public or getting it acquired, getting their big payout and then moving on. Conspiracy is what the Smoking Man does. It's been his whole life for a really long time. Even with the Syndicate out of the picture, what else is he going to do?

True, it's not like he can exactly get a normal job, and with none of the Syndicate still around to protect him, I'm pretty sure if he were actually captured by the authorities, there'd be pretty much no way for him to avoid an indictment for treason.

But now Skinner again appears to be involved in the conspiracy, and I'm assuming this has something to do with the events of 'S.R. 819'. We know Krycek is involved and that he's the one Skinner handed the tape (tape? Nineties technology!) to, so I'd guess Skinner still knows Krycek has the ability to kill him at any time if he doesn't co-operate. And in the process, he loses Scully's trust.

Oh yeah, and Mulder has completely lost his mind, though it's not his fault. Somehow he's tuned in to whatever powers the artifact has, or rather, whatever powers its text has, because he reacted to the rubbing of it, as well. Of course, so did the monkeys in the lab, so what are they saying about Mulder, exactly?

The real clincher, though, is the reveal just before the end, where Scully is on the beach in the Ivory Coast and discovers what at first appears to be just a missing piece of the broken McGuffinartifact, but on panning out in the final crane shot is shown to be a part of a large, presumably alien, spacecraft that has been there for possibly millions of years.

It's interesting now to tie this all in to the previous plot about alien colonisation. Perhaps the extinctions were the ends of previous colonisation attempts, or the beginnings of new ones. Possibly warring alien factions all attempted colonisation and are battling for supremacy on the planet. The apparent presence of genetic information also contained on the artifact would seem to indicate alien experiments, wouldn't it?

Or, like we were led to believe back in season five, maybe it's all a very elaborate hoax, perpetrated by anti-government or anti-religious groups trying to build distrust in established institutions. Well, they had me with the religion. It doesn't take much to convince me that religious belief is suspect at best. I have a far easier time believing that an advanced species visited the planet and sparked our evolution than that an omnipotent god did.

So my theory is that the spacecraft is real, but that its text has an effect on those who have no stronger beliefs, which would include animals and Mulder. Mulder's strongest believe is that aliens exist and have visited earth. It confirms what he believes to be true. Scully, though, being a religious person already, is less inclined to accept it or pass the knowledge on until she knows more about it.

It's the fail-safe. It's what allowed religion to thrive and theories of alien invaders to be thought of as lunacy. Anything that put people on to the existence of the aliens would be deflected and misdirected. And so, the text from Genesis really was brought from outer space. Those who would believe it was the word of god could read it without experiencing any kind of extreme awareness or behaviour. Those who believed it was truly brought by aliens, like Mulder, would react less positively.

That's really all I can come up with for it now. It seems absurd, but it's very much a chicken and egg problem. Did the text get there because a human wanted others to think it was the origin of religion, or did religion arise from the presence of that text?

Since this episode was 'to be continued', I'm assuming we'll learn more when season seven starts. Which, for me, is only in a matter of hours, as opposed to an entire summer. Oh, thank aliens for that.