'Release' is an episode I probably would have cared more about if it had happened earlier or if Doggett were better developed as a character.
It appears that Luke's murder is finally solved. Because in case anyone wasn't sure, the series is ending and it's time to tie up loose ends.
I think a lot of what happened in this episode was written to try to force closure for some stories they thought were going to go farther, perhaps in a tenth season or maybe just, as usual, in mythology episodes that should have replaced some of the clunkier standalones. There was so much promise for a good serialised story when they introduced Brad in 'Nothing Important Happened Today', but that development went basically nowhere, and while I always kind of suspected he was a bad guy, what they did to his character in 'Release' just felt forced.
Forced because Brad's villainy had nothing to do with the conspiracies of the series and was all about ties to organised crime, which I don't think has ever come up on the show before. I mean, we know it exists, but it was never really an important part of the X-Files universe. Actually, it's really still not.
And while the guy Brad killed clearly was Luke's murderer, the hypothetical 'businessman' (at least that's what I took from his story), the whole thing again feels forced. I know Brad is trying to somewhat make up for his involvement and possibly his inadvertent assistance in Luke's death, but it just didn't work for me.
I suppose it worked for Doggett, though. He got the closure he needed, much like Mulder did in season seven's 'Closure', which similarly felt forced and went to an unexpected place (yeah, I think that plot might be revisited in the finale). I guess in some ways it doesn't matter how he got there or who the murderer actually was so much as the fact that Doggett now knows. His ex-wife (and I think we got a pretty clear indication of why she was his ex-wife and not his current wife) pretty well implied - and we got a decent idea in the show itself - that he's been more or less consumed by this one case since it happened.
That's understandable, to some extent. I think it's probably a little unusual when something your family is the victim of intersects with your work, and that's at least part of what's going on here. Sure, if he weren't a police officer or an FBI agent, he could have gone the vigilante route as so many people might feel inclined to in a situation like that.
There was, however, very little that made this an X-File apart from the apparent psychic with some connection to the crime who lied his way into the FBI, somehow managed to pass a background check despite being very easily found out in this episode, and engineered his way closer to Scully and Doggett and Reyes so that he could 'help' with the case? I mean, yeah, what he said about the true killer is right, but what was the purpose of this?
There have been psychic or vaguely psychic people assisting in cases before, but in the previous instances, those people have been sought out by the investigators. One of them, in fact - Clyde Bruckman - was extremely reluctant to get involved because his gift terrified him. Here, Stuart Mimms just shows up out of nowhere to provide information that really should be readily available otherwise. It's not like he really brought up anything new, he just helped them connect the dots.
Why now? Why not years ago? Or am I just trying to make sense of a story that was shoehorned into the end of season nine because the writers had stopped caring about the show? Or because they thought we cared more about Doggett than we possibly could for having only even known about him for a season and a half?
I feel like one of the mistakes I've constantly made throughout this series is expecting better continuity. It's just never going to happen, is it?
Well, that and this show was never supposed to be about John Doggett. I miss the Mulder and Scully days. (Which, in my case, were only a couple of months ago. So there's that.)
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