There's a reason Modell
is a name so close to Mulder's own in Pusher. It's the old story of the
face-off between two sides of the same coin. Maybe you don't see it, maybe
you disagree with me, but Modell is what Mulder so easily could have been.
Mulder, so obsessed, so likely to forget the people he's trying to help
or who are trying to help him, is in his own way, from time to time, as
egotistical as Modell. What Mulder doesn't have is Modell's will to power,
and after seeing this episode, I think we can all be grateful for that.
Pusher sports one of the scarier villains of recent X-Files fame. He lacks
the charm of an Alex Krycek or a Vasily Plaskow; but Modell, played chillingly
normal and chillingly small by Robert Wisden, forces our attention. We
can't take our eyes off him, nor can anyone else in this episode, because
he's just compellingly evil. When Modell greets the agent who's been tailing
him, "Frank Burst! The guy with the great name!" he seems so alarmingly
real, like the guy you say hi to in the hall every day at work. Both
Robert Wisden and writer Vince Gilligan deserve praise for this villain,
fully as good, in his way, as Eve or Cecil L'ively from the first season.
It's easy to tell why I like the story so much. It has clues; there are
secrets, and we discover some of the answers to them during the course
of the story, though not, of course, all, because this is the X-Files.
Why is Modell buying bodybuilding shakes in the grocery store at the beginning?
They provide him with the strength to put the "whammy" on people -- a necessary
part of the explanation of any psychokinetic behavior, since as a biochemist
friend of mine points out, the energy the brain would consume doing
such a thing is phenomenal. The clue he leaves at his escape scene needs
to be deciphered, literally, by Mulder, who in a return to one of his great
moments as a detective sees that the slide is in the projector backwards
-- the word is RONIN, not NIN OR. There's even a bit of actual detective
work as the agents track down the ads Modell has been placing in "American
Ronin" as Osu, his
translation of The Pusher. If you're
new to the series, you may not realize that Mulder and Scully used to do
this all the time -- actual investigative work. It's cool, isn't it? The
story, acting and direction are all good, but it's the relationship element
that has elevated this episode to one of the canonical episodes of the
X-Files oeuvre. (That and the word "Cer-ooooo-lean", which has come to
represent "the whammy" in X-speak and the delightful MiSTie of this episode
which circulated on the net shortly after this episode first aired in February.
You can picture the MST3000 crew sitting in the theater chanting it, can't
you? "Cer-OOOOOO-lean.") Some of you fell for Fox's advertising Tempa as
"Mulder and Scully's most intimate moment." Bullshit. This episode is chock-full
of the stuff that keeps 'shippers afloat. From Scully sleeping on Mulder's
shoulder during a stakeout (did you like how Mulder called Scully "G-woman"?
A nice dig on Modell's cheesy bad-guy-speak, and it's our tip-off
that Modell has a self-aggrandizement problem, not a rotten writer doing
his dialogue) to Scully taking Mulder's hand, so briefly, so lightly, in
the last scene, this episode is chock-full of the stuff die-hard romanticists
live for in the ever-suspended sexual tension of this show. The allusion
to Svengali is nice (in the first season they would have just shown it;
in the third season they feel compelled to draw our attention to it and
EXPLAIN it, in case we didn't get it, though I did like the way Mulder
then stuck the warrant to the TV.) There's a cute allusion to Flukeman
on the front of the news rag in the grocery store (appropriately, Modell
laughs.) There are also a number of good one-liners in the grand
tradition of the show, including the one I still can't believe Anderson
delivered with a straight face, "Explain to me the scientific nature
of the whammy." This episode has the perfect tension between the two leads,
Scully pursuing her scientific explanation doggedly but backing Mulder
up to the higher-ups when there's a question of Modell being a murderer,
Mulder spewing his wild ideas in court but wanting to really convince Scully
and working with her to find the answer. And you can't get away from it,
the final confrontation between Mulder, Modell and Scully is damn tense.
Rob Bowman gets the best from all three actors in what could have been
a hackneyed cop-show showdown but instead becomes an edge-of-your-seat
suspenseful revelation of the interaction between Dana and Fox. Again,
Modell isn't the kind of villain you hiss at; he's the kind of villain
you cringe from, even as he delivers his almost laughable soliloquy eulogizing
himself as the perfect warrior. He even adds a delightful weight to the
scales when he reminds Mulder that after all, Scully shot him, he saw it
in his files. This is the kind of thing that writers' handbooks really
help in a show; actual continuity references! Fantastic! Scully is frantic
with worry over Mulder and much more interested in saving him than in herself,
but we can't help but be mesmerized as we watch her face when Mulder turns
a gun on her. One tear. As perfect as Scully's beautiful face itself in
that moment. We are getting Mulder's viewpoint and like him every part
of us cries out against what Modell is making him do. And for once, Duchovny's
blank face stands him in good stead; even the eyes are blank and dark,
only the voice gives away his hatred for Modell at that moment. I started
when Mulder said "I'm going to kill you..." then finished "...Modell."
There was no pause, it was just the horror of the moment that made it so
important how Mulder finished that sentence. If he could say that he wanted
to kill Scully, all hope would have been lost. But he didn't. God, this
is great stuff. Some grist was added to the angst-mill when some fanfic
writers decided that Mulder was a little too willing to pull the trigger
on himself. I agree that Russian roulette solitaire would not be entirely
out of the question for the moody Mulder but he is seldom in that dark
a place; he is on the whole too driven by his own obsessions to be much
interested in suicide. But there's no doubt he fights a hell of a lot harder
against pulling the trigger on Scully than he did on himself. We're more
tense as the chamber goes around; though statistically it's always a one
in six chance, we've seen two empty chambers go by and it's hard not to
feel your blood pressure rise when the thought of the third shot comes
around. So yeah, I could add some stuff about agents going alone into a
hostage situation or against an adversary who is armed and known to control
minds, but why bother? The truth is if Ten Thirteen Productions could put
out a show this good every week they'd be number one in the nielsens and
Chris Carter would rule television. But even if that's never going to happen,
it's nice to get eps this good once in a while, isn't it? |
Pusher
