Well, at least the shots were gorgeous.
You have no idea how I had to brace myself for this one. I seriously considered breaking my own cardinal rule and jumping ahead to “Sanguinarium” (4×6). Then I briefly considered skipping this one altogether in the hope that no one would notice, and if they notice, that they probably wouldn’t miss it. My obsessive compulsiveness has prevailed, however, so let’s get this over with…
When writers Morgan and Wong left in Season 2, Mulder and Scully were close partners. Nearly two seasons later when Morgan and Wong come back on board, Mulder and Scully’s relationship has taken on epic proportions, both within the show itself and even more so in the minds of the viewers. When they left, there had been no ultimate trade in “End Game” (2×17), no psychic connection in “The Blessing Way” (3×1), no sacrifice of the Holy Grail in “Paper Clip” (3×2), no “Pusher” (3×17), no “Wetwired” (3×23), etc. etc.
This may be blasphemous, but I think the justly praised writing team who helped shaped The X-Files into greatness had lost touch to an extent. Maybe they’d spent too much time away. All four episodes they would write for this season seemed to be forcing new ground on the audience rather than breaking it. A couple did it successfully, like the glorious “Home” (4×3), while others did not.
For this outing, I think it’s clear where Morgan and Wong stood on the topic of Mulder and Scully. Not that there’s anything wrong with their Noromo position. Heck, that was the 1013 party line at the time. But I think what they failed to take into account, maybe because they had been working on other things and didn’t understand it, was the current state of the fandom and the pseudo-sanctity of the Mulder and Scully relationship.
I’m going to set all Shipperhood aside for this one. I don’t even need it. Even under the premise that Mulder and Scully are and should remain perfectly platonic, I have to have reason to believe that Mulder has suddenly made a connection that has a gravitational pull more powerful than or at least equal to the one he has with Scully in order for this episode to work. That doesn’t happen.
Kristen Cloke, the actress who plays Melissa Reidal and who happened to be engaged to Morgan at the time, called the episode “a love letter from Glen Morgan to me” and indeed that’s what it feels like; a personal exploration of themes more so than an X-File. Darin Morgan used to do this except that somehow his themes always added to rather than subtracted from the series as a whole. He gave new dimensions and flavors to something that was already familiar.
This episode is barely connected to the rest of the series either in tone or content. As such, it feels like a personal indulgence. It fails to consider the ramifications of what it’s proposing and it fails to consider the context of the series at large. Take, for instance, this issue of continuity: In one of Mulder’s past lives CSM was a Nazi Gestapo Officer. Yet CSM would already have been alive in WWII, a fact that you would think couldn’t have escaped Mulder once he was no longer hypnotized. How could he be in both lives at the same time? Hmmm?
It’s moments like this that prove the episode doesn’t really serve the characters either. It reduces Mulder to a fool and Scully to a sidekick. “The Field Where I Died” takes place in an episodic vacuum where the events don’t make sense and it doesn’t matter anyway because the emotional ramifications of these revelations will never be dealt with. Mulder’s supposed past life and the loss of his soulmate are issues never to be seen or spoken of again.
Issues of context and continuity aside, even without that problem and taken just by itself, this episode is almost as boring as “Space” (1×9), and it would be if it didn’t get my adrenaline fired up through irritation. I tried to imagine as I watched what I would be thinking if I were watching this and it were just another TV show, not The X-Files at all. Would I have responded more favorably? I think so, but only by about 20% more. Reincarnation is a hard sell to a Western audience and the advertisements here aren’t appealing. It’s a concept that really has to be done well to be engaging, a feat that’s rarely achieved outside of anime.
Melissa’s voices are too goofy to take seriously so the performance is comical instead of affecting. Sidney in particular is way over the top. And since he’s the first voice we’re introduced to, it’s hard to climb back up from there. Then in a chain reaction, since what draws Mulder to her character is something that I find ridiculous, I find Mulder ridiculous. And if I find both Mulder and his X-File ridiculous there’s little left to enjoy. Ah, those hypnosis scenes are like pulling teeth.
Worst than anything is Mulder who is more caught up in himself than we’ve ever seen him. In fact, he’s a selfish bastard in this one. According to Morgan, in the 20 minutes of footage that had to be cut from the episode were some scenes that supported Scully’s point of view, that Mulder’s past as dredged up under hypnosis was false, a result of mixed-up memories and wishful thinking. It’s too bad they weren’t able to fit more of that plot in to balance the story out. Mulder needed a little undermining here.
Once again, he’s out to save a lost young woman who the world would rather forget than help. I’d like to love him for this, I really would, but he’s drawn to women who have already given up on life, who’d prefer to sink than struggle for air. Watching him try to save women who don’t want to be helped, knowing that his mission is doomed, is not television for the faint of heart. I’d rather watch “Oubliette” (3×8) and you know that’s saying something.
What glimpses of magic this episode does have are largely due to consummate director Rob Bowman, who makes it beautiful to watch if nothing else. In fact, I highly recommend just turning the sound of and letting it play. Oh, but then you’d miss a luscious score from Mark Snow so that won’t do. I guess you either just grit and bear it or you don’t.
As I don my Shipper cap again for a moment, let me just say that this episode feels slightly mean-spirited (an unintended slight, I’m sure). Like pouring cold water over a fresh hot meal so that no one will be able to eat it.
Just as uniting Mulder and Scully in a cloud of romance would have drained tension from the show, so too would have building an unequivocal “No” into the narrative. It would have taken away the hope of many. Indeed, I remember feeling rising panic after I first saw this episode (it was already in reruns and nobody warned me), but the fact that Season 5 had already begun to air and there was no trace of the ghost of Melissa Reidal buoyed my spirits.
“The Field Where I Died” takes itself too seriously, bloated on its own weight and import. Overwrought is a word that comes to mind and it’s probably the one episode in The X-Files’ cannon that I would willingly erase, yet…
Entertainment Weekly once famously called this episode “Stultifyingly awful.” In retrospect, I wouldn’t go quite that far. The production value is too high. All in all, it certainly has the best of intentions and you can tell a lot of effort went into this one on everyone’s part. But when I ask myself if I’ll ever watch it again… I get queasy.
It’s Over at Last:
There is that one, brief moment of lightness and joy…
Mulder: Dana, if, um, early in the four years we’ve been working together… an event occurred that suggested or somebody told you that… we’d been friends together, in other lifetimes… always… wouldn’t it have changed some of the ways we looked at one another?
Scully: Even if I knew for certain, I wouldn’t change a day. Well… maybe that Flukeman thing. I could’ve lived without that just fine.
But then…
“I wanted to sum up Mulder and Scully’s entire relationship with that question Mulder asks Scully afterwards, if we had known from the beginning that we had lived all these lives, would it change anything, how would you feel?’ ” Morgan said. “I just wanted to raise that question between the two of them. I’m not sure what the answer is. My feeling is that she is holding on to some skepticism. Her answer in the episode — “I wouldn’t change a day” – might be a little ‘tee-vee.’”
Way to quench it, dude.
D+
Keeping it Brief:
John Mark wasn’t the writer of The Book of Revelations. It was another John.
Exactly which version of Mulder was a soulmate of Sidney’s??
The quote from Kristen Cloke is nabbed from here:
http://www.littlereview.com/getcritical/interviews/cloke.htm
The quote from Glen Morgan is shamelessly lifted from here:
http://etc1013.wordpress.com/1997/10/01/cinefantastique-4/
Hear-hear. Nail on the head!
I loved the concept of a past life episode, and exploring the civil war was very cool. Outside of that it was lame, lame, lame. That past life Sidney was like nails on a chalkboard, and Mulder’s regression comical. Gah!
Someone somewhere called Sidney a Vaudeville character, which I think sums it up nicely.
Hi there. I don’t know you, but I agree with every single syllable of this post. This episode has long been a thorn in my side, and not because of OH NOES ANTI-SHIPPY (something I felt concerns raised at the time were dismissed as) but because it’s wrong, it’s just not RIGHT for there to be some rando that Mulder is a “pair” with that isn’t Scully. Mulder and Scully are a pair. The resonance of the show is built on this, more than I think anything else, and if you throw it off balance the show ceases to work. The SHOW, not the episode. You don’t have to go out and say that Mulder and Scully have been a pair since the beginning of time, in a cosmic sense, and will be a pair eternally. No one is asking you do that. But what you can’t do is introduce universes, the beginning and end of time, cosmic whatever, soulmates — and then say that Mulder is that with someone else. Who’s a one-episode guest star. And then go back to business as usual. The idea of them having dumped water on our hot meal, for no good reason, is exactly right. (And the whole “Scully was also there and stuff!”, I’m sorry, is bullshit.)
And I agree that it feels mean-spirited, and that it’s probably not intentional, but what it is is thoughtless and off-key and out of touch. I honestly do not understand how people who obviously know how to write could have looked at this episode and looked at the themes of it and the show overall and decided that it made sense and they should go with it. It’s hard for me to understand it without coming to the conclusion that they simply did not give a shit about Mulder and Scully anymore, Morgan wanted to write about his girlfriend and give her a sweet role, and that’s it. It felt like a slap in the face, like a guest who comes to your house and starts using it to run his telemarketing business. OK, I’m being melodramatic, but you get the idea. (I also have a theory that they were MUCH more heavily edited in their first stint, and as the returning heroes, they were pretty much given free rein. Mulder was originally supposed to sleep with Melissa in One Breath, apparently, among other flourishes that were probably best pruned.)
Morgan and Wong’s early episodes are so fantastic (One Breath is still my number one of all time, I think), and I was so excited for them to return in season 4, and I was so disappointed with what felt to me like their overriding, obvious agenda and shoulder chip (their show had failed; they came back to X-Files and started writing whatever they wanted and putting in their Space people with little to no regard for established storylines). I like many things about Never Again, but it’s never an episode that I will love, and not because of the M/S friction — I LOVE M/S friction. Because it seems like a detour, because so much of the story is about Ed Jerse, because I’d be more interested in a seemingly “out of character” moment for Scully if I trusted that the writers knew who Scully was. Plus, in that episode they have an issue of Entertainment Weekly (which had recently given them the F for TFWID) prominently at the bottom of a birdcage. I wanted to yell through the screen at them to grow up and do the goddamn job they were being paid to do. With the characters they helped to develop. Instead of writing whatever Mary Sue fic crossed their minds.
Well! Clearly I still have a lot of leftover ire about this. I also have only managed to watch this episode once, I think. And I was never so relieved to see a stupid MOTW with bloody FX and barely any character interaction than I was with the relative breath of fresh air that was Sanguinarium. Nor was I ever so glad for a lack of continuity, since, indeed, they never addressed anything in this episode again.
I came across this post by chance, and I’ll definitely be checking out the rest of your blog. If I comment further I promise they won’t be novel-length.
Hi there. I don’t know you, but I agree with every single syllable of this post.
Hi there! I don’t know you either but I’m pretty sure we’re kindred spirits.
…not because of OH NOES ANTI-SHIPPY (something I felt concerns raised at the time were dismissed as) but because it’s wrong, it’s just not RIGHT for there to be some rando that Mulder is a “pair” with that isn’t Scully. Mulder and Scully are a pair. The resonance of the show is built on this, more than I think anything else, and if you throw it off balance the show ceases to work. The SHOW, not the episode.
That’s a fabulous point right there. They ended up stretching Mulder and Scully almost to their relationship’s breaking point in Season 4, but they didn’t quite crush it and instead brought them back together soon thereafter. If you read that interview with Glen Morgan, you’ll find that they originally planned for Scully to betray Mulder by the season’s end, creating a breach in the relationship. I daresay it might have been good drama, but it would have been the death knell of the show.
You don’t have to go out and say that Mulder and Scully have been a pair since the beginning of time, in a cosmic sense, and will be a pair eternally. No one is asking you do that. But what you can’t do is introduce universes, the beginning and end of time, cosmic whatever, soulmates — and then say that Mulder is that with someone else. Who’s a one-episode guest star. And then go back to business as usual.
It’s just such a stretch to believe that this unstable mouse of a woman has a powerful connection with Mulder. It’s both hard to accept as a stand-alone and hard to mentally place in the larger whole. This should rock Mulder’s world to the point that he’s never the same. Either that, or it should end with some sense that none of what he remembered really happened and chalk it up to a powerful memory. They did a much better job of giving Mulder a one time connection later on in Mind’s Eye, and it wasn’t some life altering experience either.
And the whole “Scully was also there and stuff!”, I’m sorry, is bullshit.
YES.
what it is is thoughtless and off-key and out of touch.
“Off-key” in particular rings resonant.
I also have a theory that they were MUCH more heavily edited in their first stint, and as the returning heroes, they were pretty much given free rein. Mulder was originally supposed to sleep with Melissa in One Breath, apparently, among other flourishes that were probably best pruned.
I had no idea about that plot point and I shudder at the thought. But if it’s true, you’re theory may be right. I had thought that this desire to drive a “realistic” wedge between the two main characters was something brought on by the then state of Morgan’s love life (he was in the middle of divorcing his wife and his romance with Kristen Cloke was fresh) and the fact that Morgan and Wong had been working so long on their baby, Space: Above and Beyond, only for it to be canceled prematurely. They came back to The X-Files, but judging from his interview, their hearts weren’t that into it. And if they had gotten to kill off Frohike like they had planned…
Morgan and Wong’s early episodes are so fantastic
Most definitely!
I like many things about Never Again, but it’s never an episode that I will love, and not because of the M/S friction — I LOVE M/S friction. Because it seems like a detour, because so much of the story is about Ed Jerse, because I’d be more interested in a seemingly “out of character” moment for Scully if I trusted that the writers knew who Scully was.
We must be drinking the same milk.
I came across this post by chance, and I’ll definitely be checking out the rest of your blog. If I comment further I promise they won’t be novel-length.
Novels are fun! I read them while I should be concentrating on my job.
I was really interested to see what you had to say about this one, as someone who has been watching the series since the beginning and knows all about the controversies about this one I could not wait to hear what you had to say about it. I wouldn’t agree totally with you on it, but I do understand where you are coming from. I was thirteen when I first watched this one and I adored it I have to say, I thought it was beautiful and sublime and yet rewatching it nowadays, I can only see the faults and flaws. I loved Kristen Cloke’s performance back then, now I don’t, it really is hammy and over the top, not to mention the issues with the continuity and timeline, issues that would be furthered with Morgan and Wong’s next episode.
Allegedly Morgan and Wong had stipulations when they came back to the series, one was that they used their Space people in the show (nothing necessarily against that idea, they’re all talented people), but they didn’t want to rewrite other people’s episodes and they wanted to do their own thing, and it shows a little.
I don’t hate this one as much as you do, in fact I can see the wood through the trees and adore Mark Snow’s music and the photography which is lush and beautiful, but it’s funny how time passes and opinions change. If I were a teenager now, I’d probably be disagreeing with you wholeheartedly, but now I’m a little older and wiser and I can’t help but see your point.
Great write up as always by the way, I’m glad you didn’t skip it.
No, in the end I just couldn’t skip it. Oh the sacrifices one must make for an obsession!
I’m still trying to come up with conditions under which it might have worked. And I’ve trolled the internet and found some fairly reasonable people who have enjoyed it and they mainly seem to be those who enjoyed the acting and the premise, two issues I still can’t resolve in my own mind.
I think it might have worked if more evidence had been given that this was all a psychological drama of Mulder’s own making… that would have allowed me to not take the results of his hypnosis so seriously and also discount some of the high drama as just an emotional escape. He and Melissa are taking part in a shared delusion. Come to think of it, that could have been a great way to explore some of the darker aspects of his character.
But without that being realized, it’s hard to swallow an eternal team of Mulder, Scully, Samantha and CSM that has this random character of Melissa at its core. She’d have to be more significant than she is.
For what it’s worth, I found one of the deleted scenes:
INT. CAR – DAY
Mulder and Scully’s car barrel at TOP SPEED toward the compound. Mulder’s expression is intent as he races toward the compound. Scully is intense. Something catches her attention O.S.
SCULLY’S POV – ROAD SIGN
As it quickly streaks past FRAME, a large wooden road sign indicateds “KAVANAUGH Road”
Scully considers, looks about, seeing, O.S. …
SCULLY’S POV – ANOTHER SIGN
“Temple of the Seven Starts/ SULLIVAN Field – 1 mile.”
WIDER
Scully considers, turns to Mulder, shouting above the car’s ROAR.
SCULLY: Mulder, this road is called “Kavanaugh”. The field is marked Sullivan Field.
Mulder continues to drive, not hearing her.
SCULLY (cont’d): They’re obviously named after those people. You subconsciously processed the names. that’s how you “knew” of their past existence.
Like he cares. As Mulder PUNCHES the engine…
Precisely. I love the idea that the lead characters of the series are souls connected through time, but this can only work I feel if it’s a substantial part of the show as a whole, but it’s not, it’s essentially just a part of a stand alone and they’ve merely filtered it through this week’s guest character.
As for Morgan and Wong, they were still writing for the series as if they’ve come back to the middle of season two, that the key developments in the relationship and the mythology have not happened. They’ve made the soul of the CSM a Gestapo in World War II, yet in Apocrypha he was already working as the man that we know and love and hate in a 1953 flashback, which of course will be contradicted yet again in Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.
Nice find with the deleted scene by the way.
That’s such a perfect summary right there.
I’ve been obsessively reading through that Morgan and Wong interview and I’ll get into MOCSM in a couple of days, but I think their timeline issues to an extent are a result of their disconnect from the show. CSM’s history in this episode doesn’t even match the the history they set up for him two episodes later! Let alone Apocrypha. And it’s a history that they apparently planned to be cannon.
Sigh.
Where was Chris Carter when this mess was written? He is the one that should be checking the context/continuity of the story within the XF universe.
I did like the premise of the story, but obviously the soul-mates should be Mulder and Scully.
That was Morgan’s comment about the CSM backstory mix-up in the upcoming Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man. Someone more familiar with the mythology on the staff should’ve caught it. But we’ll get to that!
A right on-the-spot analysis.
I roll my eyes every time Scully says “I wouldn’t change a day. Well maybe that flukeman thing.” I would expect her to say, “Except for the death of my sister”, as it was work-related. But then I might just be too dramatic, whatever.
Well, as you said, at least there were some nice shots.
I like the idea of past lives, but this one was just like, what?! I’m always left semi-confused by what I just saw. For once I can say I didn’t like the purple prose in this one. Not when Mulder is waxing poetic over someone else. Blah!
So, my re-watch of The X-Files takes place primarily via HuluPlus on my phone at the gym. I watch at least one episode almost every morning — sometimes more, depending on how much time I have. It’s great; I’m always excited to get out of bed and head to the gym even when it’s still dark outside and I know I’ll probably be at work for 14 hours that day (woe is me, am I right?).
Anyway, after “Unruhe,” I saw this episode was next, and I was like, “Ugh please no.” And I just couldn’t do it right away. I had to go and watch 3 episodes of Lost in between. A 3-day break! Insanity! But then I put on my big-girl pants and finally got it done.
I’ll be interested to see how many episodes of Lost I have to watch before I can sit through “Never Again.” That episode is to me what this episode is to you.
“But then I put on my big-girl pants and finally got it done.”
That’s it. That’s it exactly. That’s the only way I made it through The Field Where I Died… and Never Again for that matter.
P.S. 14 hours? No wonder you have to start the day with The X-Files!
Whoa. X-Files while working out? Me thinks you’re brilliant.
God bless the first world. The idea of watching something online (let alone via your phone, not a computer) is laughable where I live (in South Africa). Then again, it’s probably healthier for me and my obsessive streak that I can only watch old episodes on DVD at home.
Healthier, yes. The convenience and options I have in terms of having access to everything related to this show – well, it’s just dangerous.
I have to say that being the first time watching the episode I really love the fact that nobody likes this epidose except me. I really love this episode!!! Ignoring the weird and poor parts to it I think I like it just based on how Maulder’s and Scully’s portray themselves in it. The stroy isnt the strongest but the characterization they portray is the key. The dumb story was just needed to get this across.
Granted this is coming from someone who hasnt seen the series before and doesnt know how it all ends but it brings about something of my own beliefs and I truely think the episode does more then the regular episode.
Granted ive always liked the odd (That Jose Chung episode was dirt IMO), so yeah im not suprised but I think the episode was one of the better ones. One that makesw you think and is different for the regular episode. I appreciate that. Plus I find the ignorable, ignorable.
I do have to say thanks to everyone else, its great to see the feedback people have. I love reading this stuff
And by way of furthering discussion, here’s a review by Eamon where he discusses how much he liked this episode the first time around: The Field Where I Died
You are a better person than I. I skipped this episode because I couldn’t bear to watch it again. Reading through all the comments though really got my wheels turning. Where ~was~ Chris Carter for this hot mess? It was brutal (from a hardcore shipper perspective, that is), and even from the noromo perspective, I just don’t think in general it was a true testament to their partnership. Meh.
Funny, that you would want to skip over this episode too; I thought I was the only one who hated it. During my recent marathon, I forced myself to watch it due to… well I don’t know. OCD? Respect for the show to watch EACH one in succession, regardless, it was forty-eight minutes of my life (or any previous ones) I’ll never get back.
I thought I am the only one who finds that episode boring, unnecessary and wrong on many levels. I didn’t like Duchovny’s acting in this one, he gets overemotional, it looks forced, and accidentally funny sometimes. I find the idea of a random character put into the story like that ridiculous. Absurd. It’s like the writers were disrespecting towards not only the storyline, but also the audience. I never knew there was a story about one of the writer’s girlfriend behind this, that would explain a lot.