The X-Files Love Month

Quoth Wikipedia: "Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise." It's easy to take the title of this episode as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the state of the show in season 9, and on one level that's what it is. However, the title works on the level of the story as well. We learn in this episode of the declining fortunes of the Lone Gunmen, who haven't published in a year and are hanging on by a thread after expending all their resources in a fruitless search for the missing Yves. It's an ominous moment in the mytharc, too: we glimpse Scully, likewise hanging by a thread in Mulder's absence, who with the loss of the Gunmen is now bereft of a major source of support just as all hell is about to break loose. Things are falling apart.

( meta, continued )

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