With Mulder presumed dead in the finale episode of the Second Season, a new character called the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) shows up at William Mulder's (Peter Donat) funeral to warn Scully that her life is in danger as well. I get the biggest kick out of the way the series came up with descriptive names for some of their most notorious characters, like Deep Throat, Smoking Man, the Alien Bounty Hunter and so on. I don't know if 'Well-Manicured Man' was the best the writers could have come up with for this one, who we'll come to learn is the leader of the Consortium that held a top secret project under wraps for the past half century.
It's never really made clear how Mulder could have survived the torching of the boxcar he was hiding in during that Second Season cliffhanger, so the viewer has to come to some conclusion on your own. My interpretation is that there was a tunnel of some sort underneath the buried boxcar that gave him enough clearance to avoid suffocating or burning up. The Navajo ritual ceremony performed on Mulder while he remained unconscious for three days gives rise to the episode's title, 'The Blessing Way'. During that time, Mulder has a dream vision in which both his dead father and Deep Throat convince him to hang on and survive in order to keep the memory of the truth alive, that truth being the circumstances that led him to obtain a fifty year old secret government file on the existence of UFO's and extraterrestrials.
One thing I noticed that's still bugging me and I can't figure it out - check out the scene in which Scully observes Skinner returning to his car after he came back from her apartment and she wasn't there. He gets in the car from the street side, and the steering wheel of his car is on the wrong side! It's as if he was driving in England with the steering wheel on the right side of the car instead of the left. Anyone on that?
The other irritant to my mind was why Mulder would have kept the digital tape file from The Thinker in a desk drawer of his FBI office. It would be one of the first places for someone like Skinner to look. This bothered me about as much as Mulder leaving the door to his apartment unlocked in the prior episode so anyone could simply walk in, which Scully did, and took a grazing bullet to the forehead for her effort.
Well, even with those asides, this was a compelling episode, which ended in a deadlock between Scully and Skinner, guns drawn and ready to take each other out with the slightest wrong move. One thing I think the story didn't take advantage of, and it would have provided some interesting comic relief, was Mulder returning to Washington following the Navajo Blessing Way ceremony, and requiring him to refrain from bathing and changing his clothes for four more days. Can you just imagine that one, he would have been a ripe verbal target for the Lone Gunmen.
It's never really made clear how Mulder could have survived the torching of the boxcar he was hiding in during that Second Season cliffhanger, so the viewer has to come to some conclusion on your own. My interpretation is that there was a tunnel of some sort underneath the buried boxcar that gave him enough clearance to avoid suffocating or burning up. The Navajo ritual ceremony performed on Mulder while he remained unconscious for three days gives rise to the episode's title, 'The Blessing Way'. During that time, Mulder has a dream vision in which both his dead father and Deep Throat convince him to hang on and survive in order to keep the memory of the truth alive, that truth being the circumstances that led him to obtain a fifty year old secret government file on the existence of UFO's and extraterrestrials.
One thing I noticed that's still bugging me and I can't figure it out - check out the scene in which Scully observes Skinner returning to his car after he came back from her apartment and she wasn't there. He gets in the car from the street side, and the steering wheel of his car is on the wrong side! It's as if he was driving in England with the steering wheel on the right side of the car instead of the left. Anyone on that?
The other irritant to my mind was why Mulder would have kept the digital tape file from The Thinker in a desk drawer of his FBI office. It would be one of the first places for someone like Skinner to look. This bothered me about as much as Mulder leaving the door to his apartment unlocked in the prior episode so anyone could simply walk in, which Scully did, and took a grazing bullet to the forehead for her effort.
Well, even with those asides, this was a compelling episode, which ended in a deadlock between Scully and Skinner, guns drawn and ready to take each other out with the slightest wrong move. One thing I think the story didn't take advantage of, and it would have provided some interesting comic relief, was Mulder returning to Washington following the Navajo Blessing Way ceremony, and requiring him to refrain from bathing and changing his clothes for four more days. Can you just imagine that one, he would have been a ripe verbal target for the Lone Gunmen.