The X-Files Finale Review: My Struggle II (Season 10 Episode 6)

Well, the bad news is that The X-Files is over. The good news is that…The X-Files is over.

In all honesty, I went into The X-Files Season 10 Episode 6, “My Struggle II” with an open mind: I turned my X-Phile brain on and just let myself enjoy the mythological roller coaster the writers had in store for the audience. This proved to work: I enjoyed myself far more by poking fun at the plot issues as opposed to being frustrated by them.

However, the undeniable reality is that this episode is still a bit of a mess. A mass extinction event suddenly takes over the US (and only the US, leaving the rest of the world presumably watching these events with both horror and geographical puzzlement), and Scully concludes extremely suddenly that everyone’s vaccinations from their childhoods have suddenly turned on them, thanks to alien tampering.

How Scully gets to this conclusion, we’ll never know. This plot changes halfway through the episode, when Scully again concludes with no scientific backing that chem trails from airplanes have sprinkled the American public with something called the Spartan Virus, and that the alien tampering to human DNA is actually the key to saving everyone, not the threat they assumed it was. Scully’s blood alone can save them all.

Unfortunately, these revelations come at the cost of a beloved character, Agent Monica Reyes. She doesn’t die, thank goodness, but her personality and backstory are essentially assassinated in order to make her an agent of the Cigarette Smoking Man.

Reyes has betrayed everything Scully and Mulder hold dear and teamed up with the man currently taking responsibility for everyone falling deathly ill. Poor Reyes. Though her motives were understandable on a basic instinct level (survive no matter what), it’s completely at odds with the kind, unfailingly loyal woman that The X-Files spent two seasons developing, and destroyed in a single episode.

You came to tell me you’re a coward?

Speaking of the Cigarette Smoking Man–what a delightful, cartoon-like villain. The show doesn’t bother explaining how he survived being blown up all those years ago in the Season 9 finale, but somehow I find myself okay with that. Sometimes, you don’t get to know how the moustache-twirling villain popped back up from certain death with half a face and a hole in their throat–you just accept it, and move on.

The emotional heart of the episode is (unsurprisingly) the relationship between Mulder and Scully. While Scully tries to save the world with the help of her own blood and the ever-doubting Agent Einstein, Mulder sets out on his own journey to take out the Cigarette Smoking Man.

Mulder and Scully remain separated throughout most of the episode, but extremely present in one another’s minds as they go about their respective tasks. Mulder even wishes for Scully while quite literally dying on the Smoking Man’s chair. Scully moves hell and high water to get to Mulder with the virus she and Einstein create from Scully’s alien DNA. It’s a touching and emotionally charged gesture, only tainted by the fact that their reunion comes sixty seconds before the episode ends.

Old Smokey saved your life. Suppose I should thank him.

Having the two separated is narratively and emotionally unfulfilling. With only six episodes in the season, the hope for more development in their seemingly undefined relationship isn’t really too much to ask, but is more than the finale is willing to give. The audience is once again left frustrated by the complete lack of growth in both the characters, and their relationship.

The finale is also unwilling to answer the William question. His existence was a constant presence through all six episodes of the revival, so it seemed almost natural for that plot to begin to coalesce in the finale.

That isn’t so. The only mention the ever-mysterious William gets is when Scully mentions needing his part-alien stem cells to help cure a far gone Mulder of the virus. After all that build up, it really feels like a slap in the face for the show to once again put off any kind of resolution for the child Mulder and Scully share. What was the point in building in all that emotional turmoil in both characters, only for it to go nowhere? Will we ever actually meet William?

We may never know, because the aliens show up to take Scully, and it’s all over.

“My Struggle 2” is a dizzying mishmash of pseudo-science and half-baked conspiracy theories, much like “My Struggle”–the season opener–was. In all honesty, this episode needed a good two hours to tell the story it seemed to be trying to squish into one. There’s too much plot still sitting unresolved (William! Scully’s DNA! Sveta! No, really–what happened to Sveta?) for the show to just suddenly be over.

So, here’s hoping for Season 11. See you on the other side, The X-Files. I still believe the truth is out there.

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