REVIEWED BY: Jennifer J. Chen ON: March 28, 1999
ORIGINAL AIR DATE: January 4, 1998
The problem with making a sequel is that it is inevitably compared to the first, and unfortunately Kitsunegari doesn't really come close to being as good as Pusher. The feeling of the entire episode can be pretty much described by one question: how the heck did Scully know where to go at the end of the episode? Okay, I know that as intelligent viewers we are supposed to infer certain details, especially ones that don't necessarily detract from the overall plot--but this was too much. Mulder hadn't called her, so are we to assume that Linda Bowman lured her there to play the game? It'd be nice to get any kind of clue one way or another--or hey, maybe I can use this opportunity to slide in a perceived Shipper moment: maybe Scully knows Mulder so well (though she doesn't believe anything he says during the whole episode) that they communicate telekinetically now--who needs cell phones? But this is exactly what the viewer was made to feel during the entire episode--unsure of what we were supposed to know and what we were supposed to believe. Because of our Pusher knowledge, they had to turn things every which way in order to surprise us--but they couldn't make up their minds even to be stable on that. Do we have Pusher knowledge, or don't we? And no matter how much I appreciate the fact that they have to pull the rug out from under us in order to be original and not tedious, couldn't they have found a way to make the is-it-really-Scully? moment suspenseful without having her tell him facts that anyone could have found out (whoa, deja vu moment back to Dreamland)?
The failing of Kitsunegari lies in that it was basically a sequel to Pusher, but it did not assume enough that the viewer was already familiar with its predecessor. I could have really done without that self-congratulatory speech in the beginning that Scully and Mulder make to the other FBI agents. And I certainly didn't need all the "reminders" that were present throughout the episode describing what had happened in Pusher. Now, it may be argued that they wanted this episode to stand on its own, so that people who hadn't seen Pusher could enjoy it. I say that it could have stood alone better without all the references to the past. What those references could have implied was that there were other important things that happened in Pusher that they weren't regurgitating—what if those things affected the overall understanding of this episode? And in many ways, it catered too much to the uninitiated viewer—it made parts of it really tedious. For instance, when the Japanese agent comes in to translate "kitsunegari" to "fox hunt," do we really need Scully to connect it with "Fox Mulder" for us? It would have been much more effective if they had simply focused the camera on Mulder—even the uninitiated viewer who didn't know his name was Fox would have figured out that it had something to do with him. If they had cut all these extraneous things, there would have been an extra ten minutes for more interesting moments.
I didn't quite understand what was with Modell's sudden change of heart. He regrets what he's done in the past, sees it as wrong, and wants to protect Mulder and other people? Has getting shot by Mulder made him mend his ways? Now that he's seen the error of his past actions he wants to save his sister from the same fate? He was so chilling in Pusher—one of the best human-monsters in the history of the show. This episode reduces that, though I like him more. And perhaps because this was a repeat viewing and I already knew that Mulder was right, but Scully was irritating the heck of me. Couldn't she once take Mulder's side, go out on a limb? So many times, I wanted him to just get really pissed at her (especially where Skinner asks him to step away from the case and hand over his gun), but Mulder loves her and understands her more, I guess, because he never does it quite to my satisfaction. The closest he gets is when he interrupts her and says, "Listen, do me a favor, Scully. You call me when you think I've come to my senses." In many ways, this episode reminded me of how I felt when I first saw the movie The Usual Suspects—and when I saw it the second time. The clues were so obvious—so up front for one to find, but it isn't until the second viewing that one is able to catch and appreciate them. Great writers and great actors are able to pull this off.
Those annoyances aside, it was still a pretty good episode. It can't touch its predecessor, but rarely are unplanned sequels a worthy match to the original. I thought that both Gillian Anderson and the actress who played Linda Bowman did an excellent job. When they were supposed to be the other character, they portrayed it with amazing skill—I was able to see Scully under Linda Bowman's physical appearance, and likewise, I was able to see Linda Bowman under Scully's physical appearance. But it was also subtle enough that the first time I watched this episode, I really wasn't sure, heightening the suspense and excitement of the moment.
There were a lot of revealing Mulder moments that made this episode worth watching—and worth watching again and again. Even considering all the flak he had been getting from Scully—and her showing yet again that she doesn't have unconditional faith in him—he doesn't crow about being right all along. He feels no triumph. Even A.D. Skinner admits that he was wrong and that Mulder was right (which I really respected him for). But Mulder replies, "Then how come I feel I lost?" It's eating away at him that he almost shot Scully—it's the only thing that matters to him. The strife between them, the case, everything else disappears except that he had almost betrayed Scully.
The look of horror and loss on his face when he thought that Scully had shot herself was heartbreaking—it was like watching his reason for living vanish right in front of his eyes. And though as a relationship purist I would normally concede that he should have known and recognized the real Scully from the fake, in this case I can cut Mulder a lot of slack. First of all, he is only human—he is just as susceptible to "pusher" powers as others (and in fact fares better than most). Second of all, the trauma of seeing Scully--Scully--shoot herself in the head, dead, with blood pooling onto the ground beneath her, I imagine is agonizing enough for him that any control he may have had would understandably have left with her. In this way, Linda Bowman was much smarter than her brother—she knew what made Mulder tick and she used it to her advantage. For Mulder, it may have been a greater evil to let Linda Bowman off if she had been the cause of Scully's death. He wanted to avenge Scully's death, to kill the person who had shattered his life. But though he is so hard on himself because he fell for Linda's mind games, I remember that in the end, he did listen to what his Scully was telling him. When Scully-looking-like-Linda fires her weapon, he has already uncocked his gun; at the most critical point, he is never in danger of firing his weapon at Scully. He knows that he would rather live with letting the real killer go than to shoot Scully by mistake—it is Scully who makes him realize this, when she says, "She wants you to shoot me. She knows you'll never forgive yourself." It is nice to know that Scully knows her Mulder—and she knows to some extent what she means to him. Scully harbors absolutely no hard feelings when Mulder turns his gun on her—her concerned, "Mulder?" after she shoots Linda has got to be one of the most effective uses of his name in the show. The emotion that Anderson is able to convey in just those two syllables truly touches the heart. She doesn't have to say anything else for us to know that the only thing on her mind is the well-being of her partner.
So when Mulder tells Skinner that he feels he lost when Skinner says that he won Linda Bowman's game, it's possible that he means out of pride, that intellectually, he wasn't able to resist her powers of persuasion. With Modell, who was looking for a "worthy adversary" to play mind games with, Mulder was able to come out the victor because of Scully. But Linda Bowman got Mulder to seriously almost shoot Scully—and that is what I think he really means by feeling that he lost the game. He was made vulnerable enough that he had been a threat to his partner, had been a danger to her life—and it is this knowledge that brings him to his knees and makes him feel defeat when he should have been feeling proud of his success. But here is the beauty of Vince Gilligan's work, and in this case, Tim Minear's as well. Mulder and Scully's actions, to a Shipper, are so obviously the result of love. But to a non-Shipper, their words and actions are just as easily construed to a platonic meaning, as well. For a non-Shipper, Mulder in the end was referring to his intellectual loss. In this way, Gilligan is able to write episodes that are universally admired, by watchers who lean in all different ways when it comes to the Mulder/Scully dynamic.
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1999 by Jennifer J. Chen