REVIEW: "Jose Chung's From Outer Space", X-Files, 4/12/96

[munc...@netcom.com]

Six Degrees of Separation

by Sarah Stegall

copyright 1996 by Sarah Stegall

"Weirdness!" -- Frohike

Someone please come take Darin Morgan gently by the
hand and lead him away from "The X-Files"...
...to his very own series. This man deserves a forum
of his own. "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" is perhaps the
last X-Files script we will get from Morgan, and if so, he's
going out with a bang. His twisted wit, his involuted sense
of reality, and his razor-sharp perception are unparalleled
not just in "The X-Files", but in television writing in
general. He is, frankly, superfluous on a show about the
paranormal. Everything the man writes is *already*
paranormal. To get the full flavor of Darin Morgan, I
suspect you need to set him against the most banal, most
suburban of landscapes and turn him loose. Since "The X-
Files" is anything but banal and suburban, the effect is
diluted. Contemplate, for example, the intrusion of a
Stupendous Yappi into "Homicide: Life on the Streets".
Writer Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) interviews
Dana Scully for a book called "From Outer Space", about
alien abductions. Flattered by the attention of one of her
favorite authors, Scully opens up about a recent case where
two teenagers out on a date disappear, only to reappear
later with tales of abduction and hypnosis. Mulder and
Scully investigate, only to find the case unraveling before
their eyes when Scully's autopsy reveals a dead alien body
to be an Air Force officer decidedly out of uniform, and the
girl's second hypnotic trance reveals that she was put under
not by a grey skinned alien but by an Air Force doctor.
Every witness who steps forward gets weirder and weirder,
until we are faced with hollow-earth enthusiasts and Dungeon
& Dragons burnout-cases seeking escape from their mundane
lives in the arms of alien space brothers. The infamous Men
In Black wear the faces of Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Alex
"Jeopardy!" Trebek (what genius cast this episode?).
Flashback segues into flashback, stories conflict, cross
over, and reduplicate like the storylines of an old Marvel
Comics cosmic makeover. Mulder emits a classic girly scream
and Scully threatens a man with death if he talks about
finding a dead alien body. Talk about out of character!
It works because Darin Morgan, like a water strider,
has developed a knack for skating across the outer skin of
reality without quite breaking the surface tension. Somehow
Mulder chugging Frat-House Screwdrivers in "Syzygy" didn't
work for me, but Mulder eating five or six pieces of sweet
potato pie in a row did. Perhaps it worked because it isn't,
really, Mulder. There's a famous bit by standup comic
Steven Wright that I love: "Last night someone came into my
house and replaced everything in it with an exact
duplicate." In "Jose Chung", Morgan took away Mulder and
Scully and replaced them with replicas that were
microscopically off, just enough to set up a standing wave
of dissonance in the brain without setting off the intruder
alarms. Darin Morgan's powers of observation are so acute
that he can render back Mulder and Scully, not to mention
the rest of the universe, with all the right details but in
subtly and disturbingly *wrong* colors.
Take, for example, the scene where Mulder finally meets
Jose Chung, when he comes to plead with Chung not to publish
the book. I was so sucked into this universe that it wasn't
until the episode was well over that the joke hit me--
*Mulder*, of all men on earth, pleading with a man not to
print a book about alien abductions! And I swallowed it
hook, line and sinker. Darin Morgan is a dangerous man.
There were, of course, innumerable in-jokes. As long as
Darin Morgan can hold a pen, David Duchovny's "Jeopardy!"
appearance will never be forgotten. Darin boosts brother
Glen's show with a character wearing a "Space: Above and
Beyond" T-shirt, on a night when X-Files star David Duchovny
made a cameo appearance on "Space". The mind reels. The
Cursing Detective is named Manners, after director Kim
("Humbug") Manners. Morgan even gets in an in-joke on Fox
Network and his own "Humbug": Japp Broekker returns as the
Stupendous Yappi, flogging an "alien autopsy" conducted by
Dana Scully! Die-hard fans will be vivisecting this episode
well into the summer. The general confusion over Clyde
Bruckman's "autoerotic asphyxiation" remark will be as
nothing compared to some of the discussions generated by the
Cigarette-Smoking Alien, the Alien From Another Place, and
the teenagers (did they or didn't they?).
Director Rob Bowman got in a few visual jokes of his
own: the Caddy carrying the Men in Black not only looked
like the Batmobile, it moved like it. Editor Heather
MacDougall must have pulled off a miracle of editing to turn
this disjointed and complex script into a story not only
coherent but wickedly funny. Her quick-cuts of Mulder
eating pie and asking questions reminded me forcibly of the
endless cherry pies of "Twin Peaks", while scenes beginning
in one location and ending up in another teased our sense of
place and time. (How often did the camera pull back from a
close-up to locate the viewer in Another Part Of The Forest
entirely?)
But in the end, the genius of "Jose Chung" springs
squarely from its author. Darin Morgan doesn't write
scripts, he creates origami stories that unfold into deeper
and deeper complexity, until we are jarred out of our
complacent Friday night couches into a world where Greys
smoke and Mighty Morphin Power Ranger villains drop from the
sky to interrupt an "alien abduction". Darin Morgan's
brother Glen invented my favorite catch-phrase on "The X-
Files": "We are not who we are", and Darin takes the phrase
literally and metaphorically to the limit in this twisted
tale of abductees and conspiracies. His encyclopedic
knowledge of classic films shows in his homage to "Rashomon"
and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".
Beneath the subtle in-jokes and the fractal geometry of
the plot, however, lies the heart of this story:
alienation. As Jose Chung says at the end, "Although we may
not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways, on
*this* planet we are all alone." In his earlier scripts for
"Humbug" and "Clyde Bruckman", Darin Morgan went below the
surface of comedy to discover the tragedy of the human
condition: that we long for connection but cannot quite
achieve it. Those of us who cannot find a connection
(meaning) somewhere end up as lost and isolated as Bruckman
or Lt. Schaffer, who was unable to assure Mulder of his own
existence. It is this insight that raises Morgan's work to
the level of art, rather than a light entertainment that
will be forgotten in a week. He understands on a profound
level that to laugh at pain is to learn to endure it, and he
understands that the deepest pain is the pain of being,
ultimately and finally, alone in the universe. To escape
that pain, we invent what we need: aliens, lava men, and
Lord Kinbote. Or Air Force officers and Men in Black with a
sinister agenda.
I have only one concern about Morgan's work: that he
will begin to parody himself, that his art will degenerate
into mere shtick, and what is now needle-like wit will
devolve into sophomoric jibe. As long as he aims at more
than merely getting attention, he will be at the top of his
craft. The one thing I would hate to see is a Darin Morgan
so desperate for a laugh that he sacrifices anything, even
his own caustically funny vision, for a cheap laugh. It
almost happened in "War of the Coprophages", but "Jose
Chung" shows his balance restored. Morgan knows us too well,
and skewers our foibles too sharply, to make us entirely
comfortable, but if he can retain that edge which rides on
his acute observation of his fellow humans, he will be a
comedy writer for the ages.
My congratulations on an excellent episode, which gets
five out of five sunflower seeds. If this is farewell,
Darin Morgan, it's a really classy exit.

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Sarah Stegall*http://www.webcom.com/munchkyn*munc...@netcom.com
SCULLY & MULDER IN '96!
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