YES! This episode made me extremely happy, and if you've been reading this blog, you know exactly why.
Forget the episode. Well, don't, but forget about it for a moment. I'm going to skip ahead to the glorious ending.
When they showed the TV screen with the countdown to the new year, I started getting a little anxious. While it's not a tradition I particularly care one way or the other about, I know a lot of people are into sharing a New Year's kiss. After what they said to each other at the end of 'The Sixth Extinction', after like all of season six, I started to wonder if this could be the moment.
And it finally was. And Mulder was himself and Scully was herself. It wasn't the past or the future or a dream or a hallucination or a shapeshifter or an alternate reality. It was Mulder and it was Scully, and they finally kissed. For real.
OK, now that I've got that out of the way, let's talk about the episode. I haven't watched Millennium. It's not available on Netflix streaming, and discs are a little inconvenient (mostly because I haven't finished watching the discs I have now). But it's also only tangentially related. I had initially considered watching it and writing about it in this blog, but that would have just pushed out the end of The X-Files with something that was largely separate from it.
So I don't know where the crossover points are, or even which characters had appeared on the other show as regulars and who was introduced just for this episode. As a result, I'm basically going to treat it as a normal X-Files episode.
I liked the more fleshed out (hah!) zombie mythology than you tend to see in zombie movies and shows. These zombies served a specific purpose and there was a specific way people could be protected from them. And that way is what led Mulder to discover the truth about them. Not that it exactly helped him except that he apparently brought just enough salt with him to pin himself against the wall in the basement after the zombies were set on him, so there's that.
I'm pretty sure I fell victim to some standard modern zombie tropes when Mulder ran out of bullets, and I said out loud, "What he needs now is a shovel!" but quickly amended it to, "Or a Scully." Yes. This is something the show needs to do more often. Put Mulder in danger and let him be rescued by Scully. That's two episodes out of the three and a half so far this season, isn't it?
I know this played into a lot of the doomsday scenarios voiced around Y2K and the various threats at the celebrations, and I remember around that time being pretty unsurprised that nothing too awful happened. Of course, it would a year and a half later, but not because of any digits flipping over. I get Scully's complaint, like Toby's on The West Wing, and I remember the various debates at the time, and basically the bottom line was sure, the millennium didn't really begin until 2001, but what's more interesting, all four digits flipping over or just the last one? I was just glad when 2011 arrived and people stopped wearing those ridiculous glasses (except it became such a Thing that they ended up modifying them since and now they look even more ridiculous).
So, like Y2K and the various terrorist threats of late 1999, this was essentially just a race against time. The small twist where we got the reveal that Frank Black (really?) had been a member of the Millennium Group after all, but arrived just in time to save Mulder and presumably save the world from zombies. I'm not too into stories that reunite parents and children, but it was definitely sweet that he got to see his daughter again at the end, and it looks like his life was largely starting to get put back together.
Other random observations and stuff.
I guess Mulder doesn't know about Scully's tattoo, because he might have mentioned it when looking at the picture of the ouroboros. "Hey, it's the symbol of the Millennium Group. Also your tattoo. Is there something you're not telling me?"
Apparently for the episode, which actually aired before the end of 1999, they used digitally altered footage of the New Year's Rockin' Eve 1999 and had Dick Clark himself come in and dub over it as if it was 2000.
I was at a concert on December 31, 1999 seeing Moxy Früvous. They had a laptop PC on stage and just after midnight, checked to see if it was still running. It was, and everyone was mildly disappointed, but I was not particularly surprised. I mean, really, some of the things people expected to happen were kind of hilarious. No, plumbing systems did not depend on knowing what day it was - as long as gravity continued to work, so would flushing the toilet.
Mulder/Scully! I can't say it enough. I really hope they move forward with this and don't just pretend it never happened or treat it like it was 'just' a New Year's thing.
Can you imagine if the world really did end and that was the last episode of The X-Files that anyone got to see?
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