Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it, along with a whole bunch of other things you didn't want because you didn't really think through the potential consequences of your wish.
'Je Souhaite' was a pretty fantastic episode. Cringeworthy at times, but really pretty brilliant.
Sure, it's not entirely original, but I don't think 'The Monkey's Paw', from which elements of this episode were obviously taken, necessarily was, either. The moral of this story is millennia old. So the quality is all in the execution, not the plot itself.
After all, it makes perfect sense that people would make selfish and short-sighted wishes. Everyone wants a quick fix to their problems, or absurd super powers, and there is always a price. You know one of my favourite shows is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that show deals with the same issue in a number of Anya's plots in the later seasons, too.
This story is everywhere.
But The X-Files definitely does it justice.
OK, so the Stokes brothers are perhaps the most absurdly out of touch and incompetent characters ever featured on an episode of The X-Files. I can see the warning of, "Be careful what you wish for" applying more to people like Benito Mussolini and Richard Nixon than these two clowns. Of course, apart from wishing for incredibly mundane and generally useless things, the biggest mistake they make is simplicity.
If you wish for a boat, perhaps wishing for it to be in water would be a better strategy. (Though now that I think about that, you'd also have to specify that it be water that is suitable for that kind of boat and accessible to you, otherwise it might end up floating in the middle of the ocean. SEE? This is what I'm talking about.)
The invisibility wish is a pretty standard one, but comes here with a huge case of unintended consequences. And I like how Jenn can't explicitly spell out to anyone making wishes why their particular wish might be a bad idea, but she hints at certain flaws in some very amusing ways. As soon as Anson started crossing the street it was pretty obvious what was about to happen. At least it was a truck that hit him - the driver probably just thought he hit a big pothole. An ordinary car would have been seriously damaged by that impact, though.
And of course, that's around the time Mulder and Scully got involved, and that only led to more amusement, and one small disappointment which I'll get to at the end. Scully seemed to be enjoying covering Stokes's body with powder a little too much. I think at one point she's grinning and maybe doing a little dance as she does his face.
So this episode really wouldn't be what it is if Mulder or Scully didn't get a chance to make wishes. I'm curious as to what Scully might have wished for, but I think Mulder provided plenty of entertainment with his wishes and his general conversation with Jenn. As soon as he started talking about peace on earth, I got worried, because that's certainly one of the easiest things not to misinterpret, but to achieve through almost trivial means. Sure, you can claim you've solved an equation by multiplying both sides by zero, but all you've really done is reduce it to a trivial case. So removing all human life on the planet, which is more or less what I expected to happen, does create 'peace on earth' (though one might argue that Mulder's anger towards Jenn for the way she did it was unpeaceful and therefore she did not grant the wish).
Mulder fell into the trap of thinking he was somehow smarter or less foolishly greedy than the Stokes brothers, and I think the point is, and that Jenn reiterated, everyone essentially wants the same things, or thinks they do, and nobody really thinks through the consequences of their wishes. Which makes Mulder's second wish similarly poorly thought out. Why not use the word 'and' in your wish, especially after Jenn implied that maybe you could? "I wish for all the people to be returned with no memory of their absence, and with peace and good will in their hearts and minds." But hey, shortsighted wishing. It's a thing.
And it was then pretty obvious what his third wish would be. The show may have been trying to imply that he wished for Scully to be with him, but no, that happened naturally and was an extension of the development between them we've seen all season. The one truly altruistic wish, especially given Jenn's story, was to set her free. Much as Buffy's vengeance demons couldn't make their own wishes, she needed someone else to do it. Someone who had seen the consequences of his own selfish wishes (peace on Earth, Mulder? Really?) and who knew there was nothing to be gained from even attempting a third wish for himself.
Now we get to wish for a good finale, right?
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