The X-Files: Season 5: Season Finale - The End, prep for Fight for the Future

 In preparation for watching the 1998 X-Files film (I missed out on watching it in June for the film's 25th Anniversary), I decided to check out The End and will watch the sixth season opener, The Beginning accordingly. While I won't write on the Pilot, I will be celebrating the series opener's 30th anniversary in September.

I do admit, though, I'm not all that crazy about The End. William Davis' Cigarette-Smoking Man is back at it again as the Syndicate needs him to do whatever it takes to nab a young boy, a chess wunderkind later determined by Mulder and Scully to possibly be the key to answers of The X Files due to a brain "mode" allowing him possible access to a "human gift" few have ever been able to utilize. Later Mulder learns that all humans likely have it but never knew how to access that lobe of the brain.

A Syndicate assassin (Martin Ferrero) almost shoots the boy, Gibson Praise (Gulka) at a chess game with a Russian genius, hitting the man instead, later arrested by the FBI and held in a federal prison (even there, he's not safe from CSM). No amount of protection Mulder can promise the assassin or Scully to Gibson can make a difference. The End is all about how CSM, when given carte blanche by the Syndicate, remains such a dangerous and obnoxious threat to Mulder and his beloved X-Files.

There is foreshadowing in the episode when Skinner is observing different items in Mulder's office, almost certain the X-Files would soon be decommissioned. 

Along with CSM, Mulder's chief nemesis is a FBI agent, Jeffrey Spender (Chris Owens), who considers him to be a nuisance, and the X-Files an embarrassment. When CSM confronts Spender, even trying to mentor him on how to conduct his career and pursuits, it is revealed he is the young man's father! This is Chris Carter dropping truth bombs for the future of the series.

I'm not crazy about Diane Fowley (Mimi Rodgers). She's clearly a soap opera device to keep Mulder and Scully from any sort of romance. However, Carter had done a pretty good job of never letting series fans have these moments until the second film. Fowley, for me, just doesn't have great chemistry with Mulder, though Carter, through Gillian Anderson's wonderfully nuanced performance, reveals the sadness Sully clearly feels seeing Fox and Diane seemingly finding those past sparks. Even if I didn't ever see them, the show makes the damnedest effort to have Gibson hear the thoughts in the heads of all three, calling attention to them multiple scenes.

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John Neville's Well-Manicured Man -- who does turn up in Fight for the Future -- is shown "sparring" with CSM as the two, you would be led to believe, are two sides of a similar coin except in methods to get what the Syndicate needs. CSM shooting Diane, taking Gibson from a room, and giving him over to WMM is no surprise.

What is a big deal -- and clearly the episode's most memorable moment, an iconic one, no doubt -- is CSM burning down Mulder's office and Scully learning from Skinner that the X-Files will be disbanded by the Attorney General as Spender doesn't take too kindly to Mulder approaching him in a confrontation, proclaiming how he'd end him.

Nice to see the Lone Gunmen make an appearance to give Scully context as to who Fowley is and how she related to Mulder's past. Being there when the X-Files was at its inception, Fowley is established by Carter as quite a pivotal character in Mulder's life and career. So the influence and emotional ties to Mulder does give Fowley some potential manipulative power if she were hiding motives, also allowing Scully to have big melodramatic moments with Mulder in the sixth season.