“Milagro” (season 6, episode 18; originally 4/18/1999)
In which Scully meets a heartless writer…
Back before I got involved with writing about The X-Files—maybe even before I started writing for the AV Club, in those lonely days when my life had no purpose—I came across a rerun while flipping through the channels on my television set. Something about the images which flickered across the screen caught my attention; something spoke to me in the brown-gray shadows and funereal orchestrations, a dimly lit message whispered directly to the listening depths of my grasping subconscious. I allowed myself to engage with the program in a way I could not remember having done before, fully giving over to the impressions generated by the performance and scripting of another thread plucked free from life’s ragged blanket. And in the throbbing minutes of my temporary enchantment, I was set aloft to wing on flights of mercurial fancy, to probe the abyss of sky above and contemplate the myriad fantasias of the cosmos. When it was all over, my brief flight sent back to earth with the rapidity of a Icarus and his molten wings, I was left to question the meager accouterments of my unexamined existence, and ponder, as my heart beat in time to the pulsating rhythms of the spheres, just what in the fuck was that?
“Milagro” is a pretentious, self-serious, intermittently insulting chunk of television which works far better than it deserves to; the performance of John Hawkes (of Deadwood, Winter’s Bone, Martha Marcy May Marlene fame, along with a lot of other great shows and movies) and the absolute batshit weirdness keep this from being the write-off it probably deserves to be. But it’s still not very good, because it’s pompous, and because it treats Scully with a sort of ill-defined contempt that forces the viewer to ask some really uncomfortable questions about just what Chris Carter thinks of the co-lead of his most famous (and best) show. Admittedly, Carter didn’t come up with the story. That particular honor falls to John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz, who’ve both done good for the show in the past. But Carter did write the teleplay, and the meta element of a writer writing about a writer writing about one of his (Carter’s) best-known characters is too obvious to be ignored. It’s bad enough that poor Scully is once again relegated to victim status; even worse, the episode makes her a puppet of Hawkes’ creepy infatuation, before he gives her up upon realizing she’s already in love with Mulder.
None of this makes much sense, which is par for the course for the episode on the whole. Things pick up a bit in the final act, when an actual plot that’s more than just “creepy guy is creepy” emerges, but so much of this episode rests on the supposed poetry of Carter’s agonized prose that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. In the cold open, we see Hawkes (who we later learn is playing Phillip Padgett, which, to be fair, is a good name for a dweeby writer) alone in his apartment, staring at his typewriter. There are note cards tacked to his wall (a reference to the X-Files’ writers room), but while they offer some vague thematic material, apparently poor Phil is having a hard time getting going. So finally he bites the bullet and rips his heart out of his chest, which is really what writing is about. I don’t mean as a metaphor; I mean this is literally what you have to do to be a writer. Oh, and then you have to leave your heart floating in the downstairs furnace, but everybody knows that.
“Milagro” is full of this strangeness, and while I respect the show for committing to the premise, I have to wonder if anyone on the production staff ever realized how silly all of this is. There is no single element of the episode that acknowledges the absurdity of the premise, or the loopiness of Phil’s writing and creepy/obsessive monologues. Any fan of The X-Files is willing to put up with the occasional baroque scripting, but there are scenes in this hour which are severely cringe-inducing, most notably a pair of ill-advised voice overs in which Phil seemingly narrates a third person view of Scully’s inner monologue. It’s just awful, full of weird insinuations about her being weak and womanly, which somehow leads to Scully’s initial dislike of Phil being translated into burgeoning attraction. Maybe Phil has some kind of magic ability to influence people with the power of his laughable prose, but whatever the reason, it’s like watching someone’s fan fiction getting brought to life. Which is literally the premise (we learn later that Phil is doing all of this, including killing people via a fictional character, to catch Scully’s eye), but it’s played with such deadly, agonized seriousness that it’s perilously close to camp. There are all sorts of interesting things you could say about a man who makes up a story to woo a stranger, but this episode is fixated on the sort of vague philosophizing that always makes Carter’s monologues so goofy. At least in a mythology episode there are aliens and conspiracies and flying saucers; here, we get a guy in a hoodie who runs around showing everybody his Mola Ram impression.
The worst is what this does to Scully, who is reduced to a victim waiting to find out which handsome man will rescue her. There is some precedent for Dana being attracted to potentially dangerous or unstable men, but that attraction shouldn’t rob her of her identity. In “Never Again,” she was drawn to a stranger who just so happened to have murdered his downstairs neighbor; but that episode went to great lengths to justify her fascination as an extension of her struggling with her relationships with both her father and Mulder. Even more importantly, Scully was the one making her own decisions, aware she was probably doing something dangerous but not stopping because the danger was part of the appeal. In “Milagro,” she’s just a puppet, reduced to having her motives defined by others. Again, there’s some potentially compelling subtext in this, like in the way the came lingers on Gillian Anderson’s “muscular calves” minutes before Phil mentions them, but her lack of agency throughout the hour undercuts any commentary. She’s strangely not present, to the point where honestly don’t know if Phil’s writing influenced her, or if she was legitimately attracted to him. Ambiguity is fun, but not when it’s this non-committal.
Yet there is something strangely fascinating about all of this, enough to prevent the episode from being a complete trainwreck. Hawkes is excellent, and is one of the few actors who could sell Phil’s first monologue to Scully without coming across as unbearably creepy. The script never gives us much sense of just what kind of writer Phil is supposed to be (he mentions having a few novels published, but they weren’t popular), and Hawkes manages to find a center in a character whose obvious symbolism threatens to send him floating off into the margins. He’s interesting and nearly likable even when the script isn’t, and that holds the hour together until its final act, when a sort of plot finally develops. It turns out Phil’s obsession with Scully was somehow powerful enough to bring a character to life—Ken Naciamento, a disgraced Brazilian psychic surgeon—which lead to the heartless (ha!) murders Mulder and Scully have been tracking. Ken arrives at Phil’s door when Phil realizes Scully can never love him (she’s in love with Mulder, oooooo), and the story finally manages a good twist; at first, it seems like Ken is going to attack his creator, but then they both realize that Scully’s death is the only possible end to the book. Determined to save her, Phil brings his manuscript downstairs the incinerator, but Mulder stops him from burning the pages, giving Ken enough time to break into Mulder’s apartment and attack Scully. So Scully is a damsel in distress, but she does (sort of) save herself by firing shots at Ken; the bullets don’t harm him, but they get Mulder’s attention, which gives Phil the time to burn his book and die.
It’s not a terrible conclusion, although it doesn’t entirely save the rest of the episode. “Milagro” is sometimes hypnotic, intermittently compelling, and occasionally horrid; it has all the profundity of a late night jam session between two stoned (male, single) philosophy majors. But it’s just so disorienting that I can’t help marveling it exists.
Grade: B-