Back in the day, this Season Four ender would have been a shock to the system to see one of the X-Files principals left for dead as a result of suicide. Knowing now that there were five more seasons to go it's not too much of stretch to figure that Mulder would somehow find a way to return in Season Five. I can't remember what happened in the follow up because after all, it's been a couple decades, and I'm just now getting around to view and review the entire series episode by episode. So I'll just have to wait and see.
So with everything Scully and Mulder have seen and done before, the story here is another one of those that tends to contradict and obfuscate the existence of extraterrestrials and the UFO's they came in on. It's cleverly put together with a research team traveling to the Yukon Territory to discover an alien encased in ice. Core samples of the location suggest that this is the real deal, and Mulder's belief is all but confirmed, until Scully outwits a former Defense Department employee who spills on the conspiracy involved in planting the alien and virtually everything else conjured up by the government to keep Mulder running around in circles.
Meanwhile Scully's skepticism remains at an all time high while her cancer is aggressively metastasizing. One thing that didn't make sense to me was the amount of blood on the back of Scully's shirt after she took that tumble down the stairwell, courtesy of Michael Kritschgau (John Finn), the former DOD researcher mentioned earlier. Unless her fall caused some damage to break skin, which seemed highly unlikely, there's really nothing there that would have resulted in those awkwardly placed blood stains.
I found the choice of title for this episode to be quite interesting. Gethsemane was a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem where Jesus Christ prayed and his disciples slept on the night before His crucifixion. The historical event is often referred to as the Agony in the Garden, and as it relates to the fate of Mulder, contains an element of betrayal, with Jesus stating that wicked people were about to come and take Him away. I wouldn't put Mulder in the same category as Jesus Christ, though his despondency at the end of the story suggested that he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
So with everything Scully and Mulder have seen and done before, the story here is another one of those that tends to contradict and obfuscate the existence of extraterrestrials and the UFO's they came in on. It's cleverly put together with a research team traveling to the Yukon Territory to discover an alien encased in ice. Core samples of the location suggest that this is the real deal, and Mulder's belief is all but confirmed, until Scully outwits a former Defense Department employee who spills on the conspiracy involved in planting the alien and virtually everything else conjured up by the government to keep Mulder running around in circles.
Meanwhile Scully's skepticism remains at an all time high while her cancer is aggressively metastasizing. One thing that didn't make sense to me was the amount of blood on the back of Scully's shirt after she took that tumble down the stairwell, courtesy of Michael Kritschgau (John Finn), the former DOD researcher mentioned earlier. Unless her fall caused some damage to break skin, which seemed highly unlikely, there's really nothing there that would have resulted in those awkwardly placed blood stains.
I found the choice of title for this episode to be quite interesting. Gethsemane was a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem where Jesus Christ prayed and his disciples slept on the night before His crucifixion. The historical event is often referred to as the Agony in the Garden, and as it relates to the fate of Mulder, contains an element of betrayal, with Jesus stating that wicked people were about to come and take Him away. I wouldn't put Mulder in the same category as Jesus Christ, though his despondency at the end of the story suggested that he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.