Essential X-Files: Milagro
This is the eighth and final episode in my rewatch of the eight X-Files episodes that Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz have called essential viewing for the movie: the Pilot, Beyond the Sea, The Host, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Memento Mori, Post Modern Prometheus, Bad Blood, and Milagro.
The plot set-up: Victims are being found with their hearts missing but no other cuts or incisions.
Teaser: We meet a writer with an obvious case of writer’s block. He goes into the bathroom, and that’s when you know something bad is going to happen. In XF-land, nothing good ever happens in the bathroom. He stares at his reflection before pulling out and contemplating his own still-beating heart.
As we find out later, the writer is Phillip Padgett, Mulder’s new next-door neighbor. The actor, John Hawkes, goes on to join Brad Dourif from “Beyond the Sea” on HBO’s Deadwood, a show I highly recommend.
“Milagro” is an interesting episode. At the surface, it’s very skeevy. It’s a story about a writer obsessed with and in love with Scully. We know it’s Chris Carter writing all this purple prose about his character Scully, even as the writer in the episode is doing it.
It, however, is also a story about how the writer doesn’t understand and actually completely misreads his characters. Padgett doesn’t know why his killer kills. Also, he’s so enamored with Scully that he moves into Mulder’s apartment building to get to know her. He starts writing his masterpiece novel with the intention of meeting her through it. He realizes later though, that what he thought he knew about her was not really so. And this breaks his heart.
I wonder if this is some sort of confession by Chris Carter. Did he realize, while in the process of writing her, that she (as her own entity) was someone different than who he had thought her to be? There’s a scene in this episode where Mulder and Padgett discuss whether the writer invents the characters or if the characters choose the writer.
But would this, a very thoughtful navel-gaze at the writing process, be enough for it to have been included in this “essential” set? I just don’t think so.
Connection to the movie? I think Chris Carter is trying to retro-con “Milagro” into being The Episode where Mulder and Scully first realized their mutual feelings. Strange, it’s never had that reputation before.
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