I see Dr. George Dawson blogged about an interesting movie he saw. And Dr. H. Steven Moffic watched an interesting play the other day.
I like science fiction. I watched an old X-File show the other night, “War of the Coprophages.” You can read a Wikipedia article for a nice summary of the plot and more. You can watch X-File episodes on the Comet TV network on cable and a few streaming services.
The reason I like this is because of the parody. Many reviewers say it doesn’t rise to the level of satire, and it’s tough to challenge that view. I usually tell the difference based on a pretty good distinction you can find at this web site. Early on in the show you can tell it’s going to be one of the Monster-of-the-Week (MOTW) episodes.
The show makes fun of itself with funny lines and sight gags, several of which could almost make you gag. One makes use of an effect that makes you think a cockroach is crawling across your TV screen. The Wikipedia article calls that a fourth wall effect.
I like the big sign on Dr. Jeff Eckerle’s building where he has a lot of manure which he’s using to research how to make methane from dung. The sign says, “ALT FUELS, Inc: Waste is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” It’s clearly a parody, although I found a legitimate recycling web site in Helsinki which actually uses the phrase “Waste is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” Who knew? I can’t tell if they got the idea from the X-Files.
I also got a kick out the conversation between the scientist, Dr. Ivanov, and Mulder in which Ivanov pretty much sticks a pin in the balloon of Mulder’s conception of extraterrestrials being humanoid—of course they’d be robots according to Ivanov.
Later as the show is wrapping up with Mulder typing his report, he describes the distinction between simple and direct robotic problem solving and human higher brain function, with the latter suffering by comparison because of our tendency to get lost in default mode network ruminations which often go nowhere. He ends up seeing a giant cockroach which looks robotic crawling towards him—and flattens it with an X-File report.
The show is a string of crap jokes, which I loved. But that’s not because I love crap. I just like it when we’re deflated. It cuts us down to size—about the size of a cockroach. Sometimes that’s about the size of the difference between parody and satire.
I have a couple of choices for TV shows tonight. I could watch an X-Files rerun on the Comet network or the “season finale” of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.
Sena and I have been watching the X-Files reruns the last few nights. We didn’t know it was on until Sena happened to catch a couple of episodes. It comes on weeknights between 8-11 pm. They’re the early ones, which were pretty good.
We used to watch X-Files and munch popcorn a long time ago when the show was new. It was good entertainment.
On the other hand, it’s hard to know what to call The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Is it entertainment or investigative reporting? I don’t know how you can say it’s investigative in nature when mostly what you see are guys firing off dozens of hobby rockets to annoy the interdimensional entities who then lob UFOs back at them.
Calling a show a “season finale” doesn’t make me think about scientific TV programs.
I’m betting the skinwalker season finale will be an extravaganza of hobby rockets and dozens of Sasquatches flinging their hairy legs in the air in unison Rockette-style while munching on beef jerky.
I can’t afford to miss that. Sena will watch the X-Files on the TV downstairs.
A couple of nights ago Sena was looking at some old X-Files episodes on the web. It was on the Dailymotion site. For some reason, we could see them without login registration. I think it’s usually required. We watched the full length, The Unnatural episode two nights in a row without ads. It was an inconsistent experience. We saw it in both HD and non-HD modes and got slammed by ads at times and other times couldn’t access the show at all unless you logged in.
The weird thing was that all the subtitles and captions, and even the scenes were shown in mirror image. It turns out this mirror issue is not uncommon. I googled it and others have noticed it on YouTube as well as Dailymotion. You can flip the video out of mirror mode—often for the price of software being peddled for that purpose. The most common reason I saw given for the videos being mirrored was to avoid copyright strikes.
OK, so other than that, a lot of the old X-Files shows were available and Sena watched a little of the brutal episode “Home.” Sena can do a hilarious mimic of part of Mrs. Peacock snarling “I can tell you don’t have no children. Maybe one day you’ll learn… the pride… the love… when you know your boy will do anything for his mother.” Sena always ad libbed “the joy” to the “the pride, the love” phrase.
We used to watch the X-Files regularly, making popcorn downstairs in the kitchen and getting upstairs to watch it in bed just in time.
Anyway, we could watch the mirror version of “The Unnatural,” comfortably despite the backwards captions. This is one of our favorite episodes. There are many obvious references to racism and identity. I looked all over for a simplified plot summary, but found a lot of them have glaring mistakes, are too long, and wouldn’t fit with my simple-minded geezer interpretation. So, I’m going to cobble together something from reading a number of them. I’m not saying it’ll be straightforward.
I have to call it a Monster-of-The-Week (MOTW) episode because that’s what a lot of writers do. It refers to X-Files episodes that usually feature some paranormal creature or a criminal with a supernatural ability.
Here’s a tangent I can’t resist because we just watched Mountain Monsters Sunday night for the first time, and I think it was the first episode of the new season of this show which has been on for 8 seasons. It is surely a parody of several shows of the Bigfoot adventure type. It’s basically an ongoing MOTW series featuring a cast of characters who survive on sasquatch snacks and cryptid colas and stage uproarious, slapstick comedy searches for legendary creatures (some of which are apparently part of genuine local folklore) like Spear Finger, the Smoke Wolf, the Cherokee Death Cat, and a dozen others, some of which are unfortunately prone to violent attacks of diarrhea, which Wild Bill (arguably one of the funnies members of the cast) did a side-splitting impression of by hanging on to a couple of trees and sticking his butt way too far out in a stunningly hysterical pantomime of projectile Hershey squirts, all the while getting more and more bug-eyed, cursing a blue streak and brandishing a gun which looked like a kid’s toy you could find at Walmart. The camera angles are all too perfect. We laughed until we cried.
Anyway, getting back to The Unnatural, the show is basically the reminiscence of an ex-cop named Arthur Dales who was assigned to protect a black baseball player named Josh Exley from being killed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Actually, Josh is an alien who shape-shifted into a black man because he loves the game of baseball. He can also sing the old Negro Spiritual “Come and Go with Me to That Land” on the team bus so well that it was recorded on YouTube and one commenter said he’d pay $100 for a full version of it.
The episode starts with Fox Mulder finding an old newspaper clipping about a baseball game in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, the site of so many UFO crashes that the local landfill could not keep up with all the debris local ranchers were trucking in from the fields. He finds a story which shows a picture of an Alien Bounty Hunter in it. This is an executioner who also shape shifts and knocks off other aliens who misbehave by threatening to expose the alien colonization project going on at the time.
The KKK is threatening the team of black players and the head of the gang is the Alien Bounty Hunter. He’s after Exley because he threatens to expose the project simply because he loves to smack home runs and, even though Exley thinks the game of baseball is meaningless, it’s perfect because you can chew tobacco and get knocked out by wild pitches—which leads to him getting beaned and bleeding green blood on the catcher’s mitt. He wakes up speaking alien but because he remembers he’s from Macon, Georgia, everybody thinks he’s OK. The catcher’s mitt is sent to the lab guy for analysis.
Officer Dales finds out Exley is an alien after he breaks into his room and sees him in his alien form. After Dales wakes up from fainting a half dozen times, Exley tells him that he’s an alien; he’s forbidden from intermingling with humans, and he masquerades as a black baseball player because he loves the game and to escape notice. The way Exley puts it, “They don’t like for us to mingle with your people. The philosophy is we stick to ourselves; you stick to yourselves—everybody’s happy.”
Where have you heard this before? It sounds like Jim Crow to me.
The Bounty Hunter, masquerading as Exley, kills the lab guy and Exley is now fingered as the murderer. Exley and Dales have a short talk while playing catch in the ball park in which Exley says it’s time for him to face the music and go back to his family. When Dales basically asks him why the human race can’t be his family, Exley takes either a surprisingly Green Supremacist attitude or just states the facts saying, “We may be able to look like y’all—but we ain’t y’all.”
In the end, the Alien Bounty Hunter executes Exley. But just before he kills Exley, he tells him to show his “true face” so he can die with dignity. Exley says simply, “This is my true face.”
And while he dies in Dales’ arms, despite Exley telling him to get away because his green blood is poison to humans, Dales sees that it’s red and says “It’s just blood.”
I don’t know exactly what this means and some have called it ambiguous. I speculate that this might have been the culmination of a transformative process and it reminds me of Atticus Finch telling Scout (in To Kill a Mockingbird), “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
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