[Mr. Furious]

One of the things I always loved about the show was that we (as the viewer) were watching as almost (at times) an omniscient interested third party. We were privy to the private thoughts of both Mulder and Scully and we got to share in Scully’s wonderment of Mulder and his beliefs and Mulder’s appreciation of Scully who was his tether to this world. By the time season 8 rolled around, the writers were losing some of the “special-ness” of the series. The monsters didn’t shock us and it was getting hard to believe it would shock Scully. In fact, her move from skeptic to believer in season 8 wasn’t that hard to imagine.

What was difficult was the speed at which it occurred. Scully had spent the past 7 years disbelieving, having her beliefs challenged, and then only to disbelieve again. Someone that rooted in “disbelief” needed a larger turn around period. I suppose it makes sense that the watershed moment would have been Dogget’s disbelief and Mulder’s disappearance, but it never felt organic for me. It never felt like a natural extension of who Scully was.

When Mulder was brought back in season 9, he was more of a bumbling idiot, third wheel. Gone was the day when Mulder bordered on tortured genius, he was now a hack, a has been, a character the writers used as a quick means to an end and to show the lunacy of the first seven seasons. They insulted the viewer by suggesting that the man we knew for the past 8 years was nothing and his cause lost in a quagmire.

The depths of the writers confusion continued by trying to deal with four stars who each needed air time and they forgot about the simple beauty of guest stars who could fill the first third of an episode without Mulder/Scully appearing. They forgot to give us a break with the conspiracy theories and took us down avenues the only ended in dead end after dead end.

By the end, we (the viewers) were no longer peering in on Scully and Mulder. We were just watching another TV show that had lost what made it special. The conspiracies were boring and the characters were shadows of their former selves.