The X Files - Jump the Shark

I just want to get this off my chest: fuck Fox for wanting to kill of The Lone Gunmen! Okay, now that I have gotten that out of the way, the episode, “Jump the Shark” (clever title, yuk, yuk!) has Byers, Frohike, and Langly assisting Agents Doggett and Reyes on a mission to retrieve the missing former colleague, Yves Adele Harlow, and tolerate the former Man in Black (who brags to Reyes and Doggett about working at Area 51) that kidnapped her, Fletcher, who claims she is a Super Soldier. Also involved (albeit with very little to do) is former “intern”, Jimmy Bond, who had been following after Yves into Europe and back to New Jersey. While Fletcher eventually cops to staging the whole opening of the episode (complete with kidnapped blond in bikini, bombing of a boat, and threats from his boss), his calling attention to Yves as a Super Soldier, nudging Reyes and Doggett to call upon the help of The Lone Gunmen. Eventually because The Lone Gunmen had to sell off a good majority of their equipment in order to try and find Yves (ending their publishing of the conspiracy paper), the technology left isn’t up to par for such a delicate mission without help from another computer genius a bit smarter (and more vocally cocky about his abilities as opposed to Langly’s) than them. When Yves emerges to kill a immunologist/professor, spraying him with poison and removing from his torso something later identified in autopsy to Reyes and Doggett as shark-cartilage organ purposely surgically attached to the victim, The Lone Gunmen and Jimmy could be close to finally locating her. It isn’t until the foil Yves’ efforts to snatch a second guy in a hotel room that The Lone Gunmen realize she’s actually trying to prevent a terrorist attack! The shark-cartilage was actually containing a virus that would eventually deteriorate inside the person carrying it spreading to anyone nearby. Two bio-terrorists carried it, one killed by Yves, the other on the loose. The guy targeted by Yves was a decoy while the professor’s accomplice was actually visiting him when Yves fled the scene of the first cartilage sac torso removal. At a scientist’s conference, the second bio-terrorist must be upended by The Lone Gunmen, sealing him in a room, sacrificing themselves in the process in order to contain the virus, keeping it from killing those inside the building.

 

I just felt frustrated by the episode. I can’t say I enjoyed it much at all. While I really liked how the show allowed the Millennium conclusion with Lance Henriksen to be shored up in an episode, giving the arc closure, the failed The Lone Gunmen series that didn’t make it past one season didn’t get the same kind of send off. Yves and Jimmy (and Fletcher, sad to say) are left to mourn The Lone Gunmen and reflect on their sacrifice from the series. This does feel like a desperate attempt to bring a conclusion to the series without necessarily doing right by those involved in The Lone Gunmen. I think many involved in “Jump the Shark” would have done things a lot differently. I like to think those who wanted Byers, Frohike, and Langly dead might reconsider now that some time has passed (seventeen years) such a desire. That shark cartilage is involved in helping carry the virus is a cute bit of humor that didn’t really improve what the episode does to beloved characters X-files fans grew to love and appreciate. I would hate to think that the trio of actors were blamed for their series’ demise…they didn’t behave much differently but the show just decided to be so different from The X-Files, I can see why it was rejected by fans who might have clung to it more had it been in the same spirit of the show so identifiable to the trio. Yes, Skinner (making a cameo appearance) does get them burial plots at Arlington, honoring their memory and service to the country they loved, so that was a nice addition to an otherwise underwhelming adieu to The Lone Gunmen.

I think what leaves the bad taste is the complete lack of Scully involvement in the story and Mulder’s absence, considering how he was their introduction, is such a sore spot I couldn’t recover from. It just doesn’t seem right that the very agents they were so involved with for so long aren’t a major part of their final story. Scully gets to attend their funeral but I don’t know if it was Anderson’s tone or countenance (sometimes I just felt she was trying to summon something to get through the series although her spirit was as far away as Mulder) or just the sorry use of her that left me, as a devotee, with a hurt soul. Season Nine has often left me disappointed and even apathetic, but this episode just actually angered me. I guess because The Lone Gunmen had a special place in my fan favorite heart, if you are to kill them, I would have preferred the story to have a bit more pomp and circumstance…at the end of a season with the Cigarette-Smoking Man and his cohorts up to no good. Hell, even if Super Soldiers were involved and The Lone Gunmen were part in a big Mulder government conspiracy plot that actually proved they were right about their paper’s claims I might have forgiven killing the trio off. But I would just have preferred you didn’t waste them because you were unhappy that the series didn’t do as well as you hoped. But, alas, what’s done is done. 1.5/5