The second half of this supposedly-final season of The X-Files has been an odd one.  On the one hand, it’s great to see the larger episode order resulting in more stand-alone fare and opportunities for Mulder and Scully to reconnect.  In many ways, isn’t that exactly what the fans of the original run wanted to see?  A sense of closure on the lingering threads of their relationship?  On the other hand, some of the additional episodes felt unnecessary.  “Familiar” felt exactly that, or perhaps like a leftover script from the better days of Supernatural.  “Nothing Lasts Forever” gave us the hint of Mulder and Scully finally deciding to be a couple again, but beyond that, it was a lot of gore and absurdity wrapped in nostalgia.

But those mediocre offerings were light years ahead of “My Struggle: Part IV”, another Chris Carter-penned exercise in needless obtuseness and barely-coherent mythology that utterly failed to fulfill its own stated premise.  Besides leaving plenty of narrative doors wide open, it also forces certain plot and character beats in the seemingly opposing hope that this could serve as a solid ending to the series if necessary.

The biggest problem is that this is pure Chris Carter: a collection of supposedly “cool” moments that don’t fit what we have seen previously all that well.  Carter doesn’t really understand what it means to have a consistent or logical overarching plot, especially since he stopped listening to those who took his ideas and made them compelling.   There’s a reason why the mythology hangs together pretty well in the seasons leading up to Fight the Future and made no sense thereafter; Carter had lots of help getting to that point and made it up as he went along thereafter.  (Yes, the mythology was never planned out ahead of time, but at least once they started and then wrote Fight the Future as a possible concluding piece of the puzzle, they had a roadmap to follow!)

Trying to follow the narrative threads that began in “My Struggle: Part I” to this episode is nearly impossible.  It doesn’t hang together at all, and that’s setting aside that a big chunk of the story is retconned, there’s even less to the “new” mythology than it seems.  Consider, for just a moment, that Seasons 10 and 11 add up to only 16 episodes, far shorter than any of the classic seasons.  Now imagine if all the mytharc episodes in the middle of a season were revealed to be nothing more than a vision!  The sense of stagnation and confusion would be off the charts, and that’s one big reason why this episode fails utterly.

For example, where is the tension in the scenes between Skinner, Kersh, and Cancer Man when there has been practically no build-up of their actual status quo outside of a handful of scenes?  Where is the drama in Reyes’ apparent reversals when we barely understood her actions anyway?  Why saddle Mulder and Scully with dialogue that is so vague that it’s literally impossible for them to even deliver it with any conviction?  And above all, why is Mulder and Scully’s status within the X-Files important when we’ve barely gotten a sense of how they fit into things at all?

Trotting out William was inevitable, but considering that “Ghouli” delivered a fitting end for Mulder, Scully, and their supposed son, it actually took away from the entire story to have him chased around in this episode.  Worse, it literally looked like Duchovny and Anderson read the script and couldn’t even pretend to give a damn.  And it’s not hard to blame them.  Literally everything that happens leading to the scene before the open is incomprehensible garbage, and everything that happens afterward is worse for trying to cram consequences and meaning into a matter of minutes!  Anderson looks so disgusted with her dialogue and the plot around Scully, William, and Cancer Man that she can barely contain it.

I haven’t had much interest in breaking down thoughts about The Walking Dead since the mid-season premiere.  If anything, it feels like the pacing of the story is so slow again that there is little reason to parse things out episodically until they start getting interesting again.  Which brings me to this installment, which has some very questionable ideas interspersed with some intriguing departures.  Unlike Carl’s death, which still feels out of place and unnecessary, some changes and complications are added to the “All Out War” story that add to the suspense.

Many have noted that Simon makes for a more menacing and terrifying version of Negan than Negan himself, and that sentiment rings true throughout this episode.  Excepting some dodgy line deliveries here or there, Simon is a lot more nuanced and manipulative.  Some of it is his desire to cover for his own indiscriminate violence, but his solution to the problem of Rick’s alliance is what Negan threatened to do time and again, yet never could bring himself to execute.

It's almost as if the writers are trying to portray Negan as more sympathetic, perhaps reminding the audience that Negan was entirely justified in his pointed response to Rick killing dozens of his people as an introduction.  Negan is unhinged, to be sure, but the writers have failed to underscore that his methods would be quite reasonable if fashioned in a less self-serving way.  Negan’s intentions of maximized survival would be logical, in fact, if it wasn’t for his practice of making himself a king.  Take Negan’s offer to Rick in this episode alone: it’s incredibly reasonable given the war taking place, and if Rick could get past his ego and stubbornness, he might recognize that the “tribute system” is not too far removed from something more fair, if they could sit down and actually talk things out.

The writers actually highlight this fact (and the notion that Carl’s desire to have Rick and Negan come to an accord) by having Maggie encounter with the women who simply want to share for the sake of a better future.  Suspicion runs deep and there is much to lose by treating the women as a threat to be eliminated.  Taking a more diplomatic route gains Hilltop a powerful ally who hands them the foundation for a more sustainable future.  In other words, the supposedly grown men are too busy posturing in pettiness to come to a mutually beneficial accord, while Maggie gets a goldmine handed to her through kindness.

What still doesn’t make sense, despite the lengths that the writers have gone to justify it, is Carl’s sacrifice.  His choices this season are being used by Michonne and others as an example of how they ought to be treating each other and strangers, and yet that’s not something that Carl’s death needed to tell anyone.  It’s not even logical to say that his example is a grim reminder of what they should have realized by now.  Literally every decision is an echo of past debates over mercy vs. self-interest, and one can easily imagine the same debate between Maggie, Michonne, and Enid without Carl coming into the picture at all.

But this is laying the groundwork for substantially different paths for the series in the future.  One can actually imagine Rick and Negan coming to terms if Simon is revealed as the true threat in the war going forward.  Negan was stunned to discover that his attempt at a targeted, clinical message was turned into a slaughter, after all.  Depending on what happens with Jadis, he could begin questioning his choices in ways that are completely unexpected and different from the outcome of “All Out War” in the source material.  It wouldn’t shock me if the writers, especially Scott Gimple, couldn’t figure out how to make Rick’s choice in the source material make sense, so they felt they had to split the original version of Negan between this Negan and Simon to deliver a conclusion that left Negan around for his intended future exploits.

This is the very definition of a stand-alone episode: it is completely self-contained, adds little or nothing to the overall mythology, and could even be seen as “filler” by those with less tolerance to its quirky nature.  And in fact, reading the synopsis from the press release, it would be easy to assume that this was a gripping modern thriller of an episode.  Instead, it’s a fun commentary on the proliferation of technology, “life convenience” apps and services run by artificial intelligence, and generally the current dependence on systems that we barely control or understand.

There is really no monster per se in this episode, unless one counts the notion of an automated restaurant getting its allies to terrorize Mulder and Scully for not giving a tip.  It’s patently absurd, yet it works because it wears all of that absurdity on its sleeve.  This is just having fun with Mulder and Scully in a world that they couldn’t really explore in this kind of way back during the original run, simply because it didn’t exist yet.  Not to mention that it also explores their semi-relationship at this point without actually coming out and doing so.

Even more impressive is the relative lack of dialogue, allowing Duchovny and Anderson to use physicality and body language.  The entire first act is dialogue free and filled with fantastic performances from both, including a number of all-too-familiar gags involving cell phones, Instagram-esque posting, and much more.  This is The X-Files winking at its audience and sharing the joke that modern uber-connected life can be.

There’s really not much to say about the episode that it doesn’t say for itself.  It sums up, in many ways, the strengths and weaknesses of bringing back a show like The X-Files so long after its original run. Never has there been so much blatant animosity and distrust with the government, so much hopelessness for a bright future.  And yet so much of the old conspiracy angle was born of a different age, and now there is often just a pitched battle to stay ahead of the curve and the clutter.  It is perhaps fitting that this is destined to be seen as the most disposable of the revival-era episodes, yet easily one of the best and most seemingly effortless.

Knowing all of the behind-the-scenes drama that surrounded the betrayal of Chandler Riggs by Scott Gimple and his cronies, it’s hard to come at this episode with a great deal of objectivity.  And make no mistake: Riggs (and the character of Carl Grimes) has been used by Gimple as a sacrificial lamb to regain audience investment with a series that has been woefully mismanaged for the past season or so.  Ever since the emotional peak of Negan’s introduction, Gimple and his writing staff have been flailing horribly to maintain any sense of creativity that might remain.  Carl’s death is merely an attempt to bandage a gaping wound.

As a result, the events of the episode fail to connect in an organic fashion.  It’s not hard to feel horrible that Carl is dying and ultimately takes his own life to spare his father the agony of the responsibility.  Riggs leaves everything on the screen and does everything possible to invest the audience in his character’s final moments.  But it is so blatantly manipulative that it comes across as almost clinical in execution.  We all knew it was coming, so this is simply a slow march into the all-too-well known.

It also doesn’t help that the “official” explanation for the need to kill off Carl makes no sense.  Since the end of the episode foreshadows it, there’s no reason not to mention how the source material handled the end of the All-Out War arc: Rick ultimately chooses not to kill Negan in the name of building a better future.  While this admittedly seems forced in the source material as well, there is more than enough justification within Rick’s perspective to justify it.  Gimple simply couldn’t wrap his head around the audience for the adaptation accepting that outcome without a ham-fisted Carl subplot that makes no sense, designed to deliver Rick’s moral decision on a silver platter with little to no nuance or room for Rick to debate Negan’s fate on his own.  (Let’s leave aside that his distaste for Daryl’s no-prisoners approach would have been foreshadowing enough for eventual mercy.)

Carl’s sacrificial role also takes what is an internal choice on Rick’s part, and thus a motivator for his post-war actions and direction, and renders it largely external.  He didn’t come to the point of mercy on his own; he’s doing it because Carl’s dying words compel him to do it.  Given the depth of Rick’s established obstinance in the face of literally everyone else in his personal history, would he really be driven to adopt a philosophy he wasn’t already following, even under these circumstances?  (Let’s not overlook that Rick literally reacted more to Glenn’s death at Negan’s hands than the death of his son.  Even Lori’s death shook him worse.)

On the one hand, it’s easy to see why Gimple didn’t have Carl die as part of the actual war, despite the fact that it would have been a more organic and logical means.  If Carl dies as a result of the war, Rick would never be able to let Negan live.  Therefore this gambit only works (at least in theory) if Carl dies due to something that has become increasingly mundane.  Rick is suddenly reminded of the real purpose of his actions, supposedly: saving everyone possible from the threat of Walkers.  On paper it’s not hard to see why this decision might have seemed compelling, but given that Carl’s subplot was anemic and ridiculous from the start, it just adds to the clinical nature of Gimple’s numbers-driven plotting decisions.

Perhaps the most irritating point is when Carl is forced to pass the “hope for the future” baton to Judith.  First of all, she has barely existed in the narrative in recent seasons, so it is a fairly obvious attempt to give Carl’s death and Judith’s presence meaning.  But that brings to mind the fact that Carl has always been (in both the source material and the adaptation) the established, relatively well-developed face of the future.  He actually gave the story a point in an increasingly-meandering narrative, because even Negan’s soft-spot towards Carl only matters if Carl is around!  Passing that metaphorical role to Judith sounds great until one realizes that she’s barely on-screen and could also be killed off just as easily once Gimple or the new showrunner decides the ratings need another boost.

One would think that perhaps a parallel plot thread with Morgan, Carol, and Ezekiel debating the finer points of killing and mercy would elevate the narrative.  Instead, it seems like the writers couldn’t figure out that maybe killing off Carl might engage the audience if more time was spent on the characters and how this is affecting them.  Other characters have literally had entire episodes devoted to how people are handling their demise, but Carl gets shuffled off pretty quickly between action scenes with other characters.  It just adds to the sense that it’s all calculated and manipulative.

The biggest task this season finale had to achieve was closure.  It had to take all the major plot and character threads and bring them to something close to a point where the writers could take some time between seasons, see what worked and what didn’t, and pave a way forward.  It’s not at all unlike what every Trek series since the original has had to do after some struggles in their first seasons, so it’s not necessarily a new challenge.

On the whole, the season ends with the end of the Klingon War, forged out of cooperation vs. conquest, and the crew of the Discovery moving on to a new mission.  The peace was brokered by Burnham, so she gets closure on the war that she started by helping place the first stones on the path to the bridges to be built in the centuries to come.  It all hangs together rather well if one ignores how close the Federation came to violating its own ideals in the name of winning a war that is far too expansive to result in the mildly simmering tensions a decade later.

It’s fine for the foray into the Mirror Universe to have taught Burnham an important lesson, that the brutal means championed by those like Empress Georgiou are not the right choices for the Prime Universe’s Federation.  The problem is that she literally has to go up against the whole of Starfleet and even Sarek to drive that point home, and that undermines a great deal of the character of the Federation and specific characters in the process.  It’s building Burnham up by tearing everyone else to shreds.  (Also, Sarek smiles far too much for a Vulcan!)

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that Qo’nos (at least the part of it that we get to see) is basically a den of impropriety and aliens that doesn’t really seem to do much to explore the truth about the Klingons and their society.  At least, it might have been time better spent on more details about the schism between the major houses, since that had been mentioned several times as a factor that was complicating and escalating the war.  It’s also at the heart of how the war is more or less resolved, so having very few Klingons in an exploration of their homeworld (even a very specific spot on the Qo’nos) is strange.

It actually begs the audience to consider more and more how the Klingons we see in Discovery don’t seem to match up well at all with any of the versions we’ve seen in the rest of the history of the Prime Universe.  Previously, there were comments about Captain Archer’s visits to Qo’nos, which means the episodes and scenes from Enterprise that explicitly line up with the established lore of Next Generation and subsequent series is supposed to be related.  It’s not just updated makeup effects and appearance; there are elements of history and culture that are radically altered.

One very interesting plot point is that Empress Georgiou is essentially unleashed upon the galaxy, which means that there is a good chance she’ll show up in the future.  At least, one would hope, because there is still the open question of where the Lorca of the Prime Universe might be.  It would be very interesting to see if Jason Isaacs is still part of the equation in the casting rumors for the second season.

My first thought when the promos showed a Skinner-centric episode with flashbacks to his Vietnam War experience was that the disappointing “origin” given in the recent line of comic books would be adapted for this installment.  Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but I can’t say that the new take on his wartime experiences brings much to the table, either.

For one thing, we’ve already had episodes like “One Breath” that delved into Skinner’s experiences during the war and seemed to cover the bases pretty well.  And ultimately this is one of those scenarios where the end of the episode seems to connect some thematic dots with the mind control methods of the Syndicate and even some of the ideas in “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”, yet the presentation is cloying and almost too forgiving of the more ridiculous of conspiracy theories out in the interwebs.

It reinforces one of my long-standing issues with the series as a whole.  While Mulder and Scully were developed and explored in the most minute details, both separately and together, right down to their self-destructive co-dependent cores, the supporting cast was woefully under-represented.  And that has never been more obvious than with Skinner; just the sheer number of times his allegiances have shifted for the needs of the mythological moment is evidence enough.

The closest we get is that Skinner openly states that he will “kiss the ring” and play along with the Syndicate and their allies if that means he can get answers to his own questions.  And while that’s a nice enough sentiment for the past eleven seasons worth of flip-flopping, wouldn’t it have been better if his character had been given substantially more depth and motivation from the start? 

Later seasons of the original run basically made him one of the trusted few, but as with characters like Doggett and Reyes, he wasn’t given the kind of depth before the departure of Mulder to carry the weight organically.  And then the revival simply pushed him back into questionable territory instead of doing something so breathtakingly original as allowing the character to have a solid advancement in the intervening years.  (Notice even Kersh is pretty much in neutral since his original introduction!)

What this episode could have been was an exploration of those missing years and what they meant for Skinner, building on what Kersh says about how Skinner suffered for his advocacy of Mulder and Scully all this time.  It might make Mulder and Scully’s realization that Skinner can be trusted and they’ve been unnecessarily suspicious of him a lot more relevant and contemporary.  In fact, one thing that is very irritating is how the intervening years have never really been clearly addressed, so all of this still feels drastically disconnected from the first nine seasons.

It would be wrong to finish out this review without a word regarding Haley Joel Osment, who plays two roles in the episode and is all but unrecognizable from the young actor we all remember.  His role is essentially a man fueled by paranoia and chemically-induced rage and madness, but he plays the part well and keeps the episode from falling apart completely.

The first season is drawing to a close, and while some plot threads are coming to a clear tipping point, others are remarkably open-ended and complicating the overall sense of continuity.  Opportunities to close some massive plot holes are avoided, even aggressively so, while others progress in ways that boggle the mind.  Yet it’s hard not to acknowledge that this second half of the season has been exploring the kind of philosophical ground that many fans hoped it would.

The writers explicitly set this as roughly a century after the adventures of Captain Archer in Enterprise and they even mention the fact that he interacted with the Klingons.  Which effectively makes all of the events of Enterprise canon within the timeline of Discovery, and that is increasingly hard to justify when the cold war between the Federation and the Klingons in the original series is mere years in the future.  Things are getting very hard to line up in any logical fashion.

I increasingly wish this series had been set in the Kelvin Timeline; given the fast and loose technological advancements in that continuity, nearly everything in Discovery would be possible and could even explain the state of the Klingon Empire in Star Trek Into Darkness.  If it wasn’t for the fact that they make a point of this supposedly being the Prime Timeline, it would make things a lot easier to swallow.

One thing that complicates the entire question of continuity is the inability of the writers to limit or eliminate the spore drive.  On the one hand, even if the spore network exists, it needs someone with the right DNA to pilot the ship, and right now Stamets is the only game in town.  So there are some limitations involved.  But when it comes to Trek, once something exists, there are tons of ways around such restrictions that tend to break the universe, so the best way to handle the situation is to wipe out the network entirely.  Instead, there’s now a new planet full of the spores!

Worse is the drama between Burnham and Tyler.  Tyler’s accusations about Burnham make absolutely no sense, given that he seems to be expecting her to overlook the fact that he’s not even sure about his own personality or stability and he can’t even say that he was definitively the same person when she was willing to open herself to an emotional connection!  Sarek’s discussion with Burnham was at least a bit more understanding, if oddly dismissive; Tyler doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that Burnham has any basis for conflict!

What works far better is the debate over what to do with Georgiou.  While Sarek’s hardliner stance doesn’t quite add up to the serene and diplomatic figure that we have come to know over the years, the debate over whether or not to use Empress Georgiou as something of a weapon against the Klingons is a good one.  I had long suspected that Burnham was being positioned more and more as the voice of reason against figures like Lorca, but this expansion of her role makes a lot of sense.

But the fact remains: fitting the apparent direction that the season finale will take into the larger context of Trek lore is going to be difficult at best, and it’s hard not to think about that when it feels like certain emotional and practical points are being forced along the way.

The series has been using William as a McGuffin for so long that I wasn’t actually expecting them to reveal the boy (now a teenager).  This episode actually pulls it off without making the entire idea of William and his alien-DNA-derived abilities too far from the usual X-Files mark.  In fact, James Wong continues the tradition of understanding the mythology and its implications far better than Chris Carter ever seemed to, like so many of the veterans of the original writers’ room.

At the heart of the episode is a commentary on how today’s internet-driven urban legends and “monsters” don’t have the depth and pathos of yesteryear.  Quite frankly, a lot of the “monsters” of the current age couldn’t hold a candle to the conflicted natures of a Dracula or Frankenstein’s Monster, or even a good number of the urban legends that X-Files used to explore (and Supernatural and Fringe after it).  What resonance does something like a “ghouli” possess?

Enter William, who is in fact a fairly sympathetic “monster” of sorts.  Not only that, but as hinted so often (going back to the eighth season!), William is possibly the epitome of the human/alien hybrids that have been the result of experimentation for decades.  It’s nice to have the writers finally state what I thought was such an obvious extension of the mythology; if Purity and alien DNA has been present on Earth for millennia, and then the Syndicate purposefully experimented with the effects of combining the genetics further, it just about explains everything that has ever been encountered over the course of the series.

The episode doesn’t shy away from the fact that we are practically programmed to be sympathetic to William and his plight, yet what we see on-screen suggests someone that has a lot more control over his abilities than he contends.  How much of the harm that he inflicts is truly accidental?  That’s at the heart of the “sympathetic monster”, though.  They can do horrible and questionable things, yet you still want them to get away with it.

At least the red herring of William’s death was just that; it began to bring back the awful memories of the ninth season when all the promise and potential of Doggett’s character arc came crashing down.  Or for that matter, when the writers chose to end the mystery of Samantha’s fate by simply killing her off.  It was all too possible that the writers would play that game, but they took a much better approach by forcing Mulder and Scully (and the audience) to contemplate that letting William go is a more fitting resolutiion.

As soon as Lorca’s true nature was revealed, the story was inevitably going to quicken its pace.  I’m just a bit surprised that the jaunt into the Mirror Universe is over already, leaving quite a few major holes in the overall continuity tapestry along the way.  And I’m not even talking about the fact that Discovery came back nine months later than they left to a war where the Klingons have gained considerable territory.

But I’ll start there: how does one reconcile the state of play of this war with the idea that things have become little more than a broiling cold war in the space of a decade?  While the idea of Discovery potentially taking a trip back through time to fix the mistake is always on the table, that doesn’t feel like the trajectory of the narrative at this point.  Instead, it seems to be pointing to Empress Georgiou as the architect of the Federation victory.  Or, at least, forcing the familiar detente.

But how do they get Empress Georgiou back to the Mirror Universe?  Or will they kill her off before all is said and done?  It’s getting very messy, which is ironic, since the previous episode set things up rather well for a tidy resolution to all of the apparent continuity issues.  It’s feeling more and more like those who say this will need to be written off as a story told from a particularly biased and inaccurate point of view are the ones with the right idea.

Ultimately, it’s how the writers seem to drop the ball on giving the story a clear sense of direction that disappoints.  I’ve said it before, but if this were a one-season story arc, then the question of the overall point would be moot; it would essentially be the various adventures of different ships in different eras with the same name.  That’s a great concept that allows for different looks and tones season to season, but if the story is going to continue with these characters, then it’s hard to understand what the journey is about.  There’s just something hollow within the execution.

What comes to mind almost immediately is that Lorca’s true goal, the insurrection that he leads, and the resolution to the spore drive crisis should have all been the final three episodes of the season.  It should have been given more scope and depth to make the events really stick and mean something.  The end of this episode would have made for an interesting season finale, at least, and would have also given the writers a bit of time to sit back, rethink a few things, and figure out how to line things up correctly.

That’s not to say this was a horrible episode.  It was visually strong, there were solid performances, and the show continues to be highly entertaining.  It just feels like these episodes could have been hitting out of the park, and instead we received something closer to a highlight reel of the more substantial vision that might have been.

Right from the start, Darin Morgan was the go-to guy for writing X-Files episodes that made tons of self-aware meta-references and skewered the show’s sense of self-importance.  Most of Morgan’s scripts feel like a thinly-veiled campaign to deflate Chris Carter’s considerable ego.  But more than that, they are often a commentary on society at large at the time of writing and serve to explore the characters in unusual but insightful ways.

At the heart of the episode is the story of a man who has lost his mind, Reggie Something, who manages to nonetheless expose at least the surface of a government campaign to get the public to question its own memory and understanding of events via the Mandela Effect.  By the time Dr. They points out how this is precisely how the Trump Administration’s PR machine works, one is left to ponder if there is even such a thing as “the truth” to find out there, when it can simply come down to whose Big Lie is most persuasive.

What is confounding in terms of reviewing or dissecting such episodes is that they stand essentially for what they are; there’s not much that needs to be added to the equation of what hits the screen.  Also, the episodes have a particular brand of humor that is best experienced rather than explained point for point.  So much of the episode is basking in the body language, the interplay, and the clever use of footage from yesterday (and marveling at how young they look in those clips!).

One could take certain elements of the Dr. They concept and apply it to the mythology in various ways, since there is the open question of how much Mulder and Scully have uncovered or been told over the decades is remotely true.  We’re not even supposed to be sure if Cancer Man was telling the truth in the season premiere, and that’s a plot point!  It reminds the audience in several different ways that there is a futility in what Mulder and Scully have been attempting all this time, and perhaps it makes sense that their “mission” has culminated in the very personal matter of William and seeing, as best they can, to his future.

It seems more and more apparent that the second half of the season is going to be all about revelations in the Mirror Universe and the fight to survive long enough to make it back to the Prime Universe, which is frankly quite the adventure.  While there are still some big questions as to how this story might play out beyond this first season, it definitely feels as though a coherent season arc is coming to fruition.

The best part about this episode is how it utilizes Empress Georgiou.  I love how Michelle Yeoh had this opportunity to come back into the story, and it serves to underscore the differences not only between the Terran Empire and the Federation, but the different way that Michael’s life unfolded.  Since Michael’s personality and that of her (presumably dead) doppelganger are disturbingly similar, a point driven home in previous episodes, these conversations play out with a surprising amount of nuance.

This also turns out to be a plot point, since all those hints that Lorca is an oddity in the Prime Universe finally come to something substantial.  While the detail that the light from the Prime Universe causes sensitivity to those from the Mirror Universe is a new addition that adds fuel to the fire that this is a separate Mirror Universe entirely, it explains why Lorca was so dramatically more martial, unorthodox, and psychotic in earlier episodes.

This twist is particularly interesting because, unlike the clunky reveal with Tyler/Voq, this begs the viewer to go back to earlier episodes and really see how well it was constructed.  My recollection is that it adds up, but there will also be a bit of work in the next episode to follow through on what Empress Georgiou was speculating.  The biggest question is how much of Lorca’s apparent plan was dependent on convenient plotting.

There is definitely a direction that is forming with the Stamets subplot within the spore network, which is good to see.  Not only is it hinting at the method by which Discovery will go back to the Prime Universe, but also a way for the spore drive itself to be rendered ultimately useless.  And that’s necessary to cut off the implication that the technology should have been available on an ongoing basis in the Prime Universe (or any other, for that matter).  So that potential definitely makes me breathe a little easier, along with the implication that Lorca only pushed so hard for its use to facilitate his own endgame.

But the death of Dr. Culber continues to be an open wound, and in some respects, this episode rubs a lot of salt in that wound.  We get a proper goodbye between Stamets and Culber, at least, but if this is what the producers meant when they said that his death scene wasn’t the end for the character, it’s going to feel like a real cheat.  I suppose that one could take some solace in the fact that Stamets/Culber was the only relationship with depth enough to have the impact that it did when Tyler/Voq went rogue, but it doesn’t change the context of what happened.

There are three episodes left this season, and still quite a lot of ground to cover to bring a lot of the open threads of the narrative to a conclusion.  I suspect the general tone of the opinions for Discovery will depend greatly upon how these final few episodes deliver.

I was a bit wary when I saw Chris Carter’s name in the credits for this episode, after the ugly revelations of the season premiere.  Would Carter continue to demonstrate the lack of perspective regarding his own characters that has plagued the revival?  Or would he deliver a solid stand-alone entry?  The results are a little muddled, especially when it comes to tying the mysteries to the relationship between Mulder and Scully.

Frankly, ever since I Want to Believe, the relationship between Mulder and Scully has been a confusing mess.  They’re not technically a couple, but it’s practically impossible not to see them as one when they reserve a certain easy banter and chemistry for each other.  Even those who didn’t want them to be an active couple would likely agree that they had a particularly strong bond, despite the undertones of co-dependency involved.

The general rule of thumb for any stand-alone episode is that the central plot concepts and the character work should add up to a certain amount of novel storytelling.  If the central plot, from location to mystery to twists, is strong enough, then letting the characters remain relatively static usually works, since the audience is fully engaged.  So-called “bottle episodes” are the other extreme, where the lack of variation and novelty in location is counter-balanced by character exploration.  The Holy Grail, of course, is a strong combination of the two, where the plot progression neatly dovetails with character insight.

So the main problem with this episode is that the central conceit is an interesting enough idea, but the execution is all over the map.  Not only that, but in the interests of nostalgia, Carter once again has Mulder and Scully working out of the old office, which seems contrary to the point of the previous two episodes.  What exactly is their status now, anyway?  These questions plague the episode in a number of ways.

The same problem pervades the mysterious doppelganger powers themselves.  Frankly, things just happen without much theorizing or investigation of any import or interest.  Mulder and Scully are largely in reactive mode, and that is never a good sign for any episode of The X-Files.  But it’s especially problematic when the audience really is just watching things play out, too.  It’s the very definition of pedestrian, and it’s a story about killer doppelgangers, so that’s quite an accomplishment of sorts.

Even with the occasional cute moment that kinda-sorta meshes with the previous episode’s portrayal of their relationship, Mulder and Scully seem almost disinterested over the whole thing.  They might as well shrug at the fact that people are dying, and there’s just a lack of energy from them throughout.  The guest cast tries to make up for it, but it’s just not enough.  It’s hard to believe that a limited stretch of episodes would so quickly deliver what feels like filler.

Discovery’s ordeal in the Mirror Universe continues, but this episode is largely focused on the relationship between Michael and Tyler.  And as one would expect, it does not end well, though it serves to unravel more of the mystery around Tyler and what happened to him during his time with the Klingons.

Tyler reveals that he is actually Voq.  In essence, Voq went deep undercover in the form of Tyler to infiltrate the ship that posed the most danger to the Klingons in the war, which tracks somewhat with the interest in the spore drive that the Klingons showed earlier in the season.  It’s a plot point that only really works because of Lorca’s unconventional attitude about field promotions and assignments; as much as events conspired to put Lorca in a position to trust Tyler, there was really no way Voq or anyone else could have known what would happen once Tyler was on board.

It also feels like the kind of plot twist that would work better if the audience knew the characters longer or better, which gets back to some of the early observations about how the writers push too fast or too hard on certain plot and character beats.  Michael and Tyler’s relationship is really just beginning, so while the sense of betrayal is there, it’s not as potent as if the audience had lots of time to know Tyler in his role on the ship under normal circumstances.

But that twist at least works on some level, and supports much of the fast-paced plotting that centers on Michael and her attempts to negotiate her way through the Mirror Universe.  There are complications galore, and most of them play on the question of how much or how little the characters differ between the universes.  And the revelation that Georgiou is the Empress of the Terran Empire is a perfect touch; not only does it bring back a character that didn’t have enough screen time, but it makes the entire episode an exercise in breaking Michael down.

It’s that potential that makes it so easy to forgive the leaps that got us to this point.  Michael actually feels like the central character finally, and all of these experiences are designed to maximize the stress that Michael must endure.  And that, in turn, serves to reveal the kind of person Michael ultimately is.  At least, that’s the theory; the question is how well the writers will deliver on the execution.

Meanwhile, Tilly is doing her best to restore Stamets, but it doesn’t seem to be working.  Instead, his further immersion in the “spore network” brings him into connection with his Mirror Universe doppelganger, which will likely serve as the means to his restoration and thus a way back home.  With the purpose of the Mirror Universe sojourn for Michael’s character study now front and center, it gives this portion of the story arc a discernable lifespan.

It also makes me wonder if the speed of the narrative beats is a relic of the original plan to have this setting and crew be a single-season arc.  It would all make a lot more sense, or at least feel less unnecessary, if there was an expectation that all the plot and character threads would not to be resolved in the next few episodes.  It actually leaves me mildly concerned how they intend to push this past its original intended run.

With so much mythology covered in the premiere, it’s time for the new season of The X-Files to put its best foot forward.  Meaning, of course, any kind of episode that involves someone other than Chris Carter.  Glen Morgan comes onto the stage to deliver what feels like a much better representation of what a modern X-Files episode can offer than, say, retroactively stating that Scully was medically raped. Again.

If these new seasons are essentially all about delivering a mixture of nostalgia and aligning with modern sensibilities in the same instant, then this episode works to achieve that goal rather well.  Putting Mulder and Scully on the run after the events of the premiere is a solid choice, as it is a lot more believable than trying to shoehorn them back into the familiar confines of the basement office.  Having the mystery center around Langley is the nostalgic icing on the cake.

Perhaps it is just the difference between the global state of play since the tenth season; things seem a lot more unstable and anxiety-inducing in the world now.  And so having Mulder and Scully in a more tenuous situation seems appropriate, even as the episode makes the statement that the pair are more than capable of handling themselves and threats with characteristic banter.

The return of Langley is an interesting turn of events, to say the least.  He’s not back from the dead in the conventional sense; instead, his consciousness was copied and uploaded into a private server.  Setting aside the lost opportunity for a bit of a callback to “Kill Switch”, one of the more interesting standalone episodes of the original run, this is a nice way to tie current concerns about the advancement of technology into the current material.  The current Syndicate, or at least the faction working against Cancer Man, is using a virtual “think tank”, and Langley is staging a bit of a revolt.

It’s not so much that this is something bold or new in an era when this sort of story concept shows up on dystopian shows all the time (I’m looking at you, Black Mirror).  It’s that it places one of the better supporting characters from the original run in a context that would absolutely disgust and horrify him.  Langley, along with any of the Lone Gunmen, would never want to have his mind slaved to the demands of the kinds of evil conspirators they endlessly fought to undermine.

Morgan has a solid history of delivering episodes with standalone plots that factor into the larger mythological scheme, and this is another example of that deftness.  It’s proof, to an extent, that the concepts of the mythology don’t have to be nearly so overwrought and poorly conceived as the Carter-driven entries.  Handing over the reins to someone with experience with the franchise but a less clunky delivery would be ideal.

More importantly, these are the kinds of episodes that fans would happily see populate an entire revival season.  The mythology didn’t really need to come back once Colonization was avoided.  A single episode to set the stage that the remnants of the Syndicate were constantly trying to take control of government and corporate power would have been more than enough to frame dozens of entries of this caliber.  It’s sad that Carter couldn’t set aside his ego enough to let that happen.

The mid-season cliffhanger promised horrible consequences for pushing untested and questionable technology too far in the name of expediency in wartime, and so it wasn’t too shocking to see that the Discovery wound up in parts somewhat unknown.  What was surprising, in a rather good way, was that the Discovery found itself in another universe, one that is either the precursor or a variation upon the Mirror Universe.

The advantages are immediate.  For one thing, it could explain rather tidily why the Discovery has never factored into the Prime timeline’s continuity previously: it is a ship that was all but officially disavowed or downplayed by Starfleet Command in the first place, but might also have been lost to parts unknown.  If Stamits cannot find a way to control the spore drive again with enough finesse to deliver them back to the Prime universe, then they could simply be trying to survive for the rest of their existence.

Things go wrong quickly, both on and off the ship.  But the item that is most likely to cause the most controversy is Tyler’s killing of Dr. Culber.  It’s highly unfortunate because not only is he a vital member of the crew and a character that was getting solid development, but this is the straight-up murder of a character that is openly gay.  As much as I don’t think that one can apply a blanket judgment on such fictional circumstances, in the current hyper-aware environment, it isn’t a good look.

Entry in a Mirror Universe (I’m still not sure it’s the same one we know from the rest of the franchise) does give the writers a chance to explore the existing character in contrast to aspects of their personality given extreme form.  This is most useful and meaningful with Tilly, a character that the writers have gone out of their way to make a bit “adorkable”, to say the least.  The persona she must adopt in this new universe, Captain Tilly, is confident, driven, and quite frankly very alluring.

It's something worth reflecting on, in terms of the audience’s reaction to a more dominating presence, but there is an intriguing nuance to how it plays out.  Tilly represents an extreme difference, which only serves to highlight how little some of the other characters differ between the universes.  Some of them fit into the cutthroat madness all too well, and that point is not lost on them, either.  Burnham, for example, seems to be able to adapt quickly, which bothers her tremendously.

I’ll be the first to admit that Stamets’ abilities are so vast at this point that anything is possible, and they could end up getting “home” sooner rather than later.  But that’s a plot device that the writers should be wary of overplaying.  Killing Culber is a questionable idea, but sticking to that loss would be a bold plot point that would drive the stakes even higher.  Bringing him back would make the entire situation feel even more manipulative as a whole.

The tenth season of The X-Files was a mixed bag.  While some of the “monster of the week” episodes were as strong as ever, the new additions to the mythology seemed contradictory and needlessly revisionist (not to mention characteristically obtuse).  With only six episodes to work with, there seemed to be missed opportunities.  So while having ten more episodes for this presumably final season gives fans renewed hope for a more balanced farewell, the memory of those missteps from Season 10 linger.

“My Struggle II”, the tenth season finale, was particularly frustrating.  Beyond being typically complicated and even contradictory in terms of character motivations (I’m looking at you, Monica Reyes), it also ended on a gratuitous and unnecessary cliffhanger that represented everything that Chris Carter had done wrong with the series mythology over the years.  Why keep the series so blatantly unresolved, when there was no guarantee of a chance to provide a conclusion?

At the onset, this episode threatens more of the same.  All those plot points that made fans want to throw things at their television screens in “My Struggle II”?  It was just a “vision” playing out in Scully’s head.  So the cliffhanger that enraged so many fans was utterly meaningless.  Instead, it boils down to the same search for William by various conspiratorial forces that dominated the tenth season.  That much of the narrative thrust of that short season is quickly retconned out of existence is irritating, to say the least.

But more irritating is the constant revisionism of character histories.  Cancer Man’s motivations continue to be tossed in a blender along with his personal background (why does he have a new real name?).  While the episode eventually reconfirms certain plot points revealed during the original run, other items are completely ignored, forgotten, or casually dismissed.  While the Syndicate’s plan was always tied to managing a “planned Armageddon”,  it seems too simplistic and reductionist to have Cancer Man pushing so hard for it.  And the notion that there are other remaining Syndicate members goes completely against the events of the sixth season, when practically everyone in the original Syndicate was killed off in spectacular fashion.

Ironically, the “big twist” that many probably expect me to deride is a surprising follow-up to a narrative oddity from the seventh season.  “En Ami” was a strange but effective episode that featured Scully and Cancer Man working together, and the scene where Scully just happens to wake up in a bed in pajamas raised eyebrows at the time, to say the least.  And when Scully was later pregnant at the end of the seventh season, some speculated that the events of “En Ami” were all too indicative that it was something sinister.  Bringing that suspicion back into full blown is an intriguing choice, even if it underscores the tension of digging deep into items of the mythology while ignoring or revising vast aspects of it.

On the other hand, the current stakes are precisely what they once were: an old and fractured Syndicate trying to use a virus derived from the essence of aliens that once sought to colonize Earth to reboot humanity for various purposes, promising various players the possibility of immunity in exchange for paving the way.  And once again, Mulder and Scully are caught in the middle, especially now that Scully’s son William (still possibly Mulder’s, since Cancer Man always lies) is old enough to be showing off all the emerging abilities hinted at in the ninth season.

The first half of the eighth season has been remarkably rough and slipshod.  In essence, the story is simple: Rick’s alliance builds off their successful repulsion of the Saviors at the end of the previous season and launches an attack on Sanctuary, but things eventually fall apart when the battle plan isn’t followed.  By the end of this episode, the good guys have really taken it on the chin hard, but they are ready to bounce back.  And then the ground falls out from under Rick’s feet.  Sounds compelling, right?

Only it has been anything but, given that Rick’s plan is never properly communicated to give the audience a sense of whether or not things are going well, the characters make idiotic decisions that lead directly to the conflict lingering long beyond necessary, and even Negan ultimately gets weakened yet again by threats that barely come to pass.  The Scavengers are recruited over the course of two episodes, just to run away almost immediately in this installment.  It’s so confused and unfocused that it merely underscores why many felt like the show needed a creative boost after the drastic drop in ratings in the seventh season.

Of course, all of that culminated in yet another extended episode that proved, once again, that it almost never works to the benefit of this series when they do so.  Much of this episode felt like marking time, or padding out time, or both; regardless, it felt like the episode could have been much shorter than an hour than needing to be longer.  And that included the ridiculous “foreshadowing” that lacked so much subtlety that the audience didn’t wonder at whether or not Carl was actually being killed off, but why the producers would be so short-sighted as to alienate even more fans.

When I say that, I’m not talking only about the story itself, though there are issues with the notion of removing Carl when he has always been portrayed (and remains in the source material) as a symbol of hope in the dark apocalyptic world.  Instead, it’s how the deed was done, and the ugly truths that are coming out of the woodwork, despite the efforts by Scott Gimple and the rest of the production staff to spin this as “necessary to Rick’s story”. 

For one thing, despite hints from Gimple that this was a mutual decision or a long-standing creative plan, this has been completely debunked.  For one thing, Chandler Riggs not only didn’t ask to be released, he had been promised by the Gimple himself that he would be around for at least three more seasons (which would, presumably, be the remainder of the series at this rate).  Riggs was convinced enough to buy a house near the production in Georgia and plan his college life around those promises.  Then, before Riggs turned 18 and despite everything, Gimple informed the young actor and his parents that he was being written out.  (There is the even more disturbing implication that his pay scale would change when he was legally an adult, and this was Gimple’s way of avoiding that cost.)

If this decision smacks of desperation, of coming up with something shocking to generate buzz on the level of Negan’s introduction, as an attempt to use a high profile departure to help turn around a massive ratings decline, then that’s probably because that’s the most logical interpretation.  What’s worse is that the story elements that were introduced to help set the stage for Carl’s departure not only don’t make a lot of sense given the timing and the massive war taking place, but it insults the intelligence of the audience by happening outside of the conflict that it has been asked to invest in for several episodes.

The explanation given by Gimple and others, that this is meant to prove to Rick that it’s important to save lives for when the war is over, so some measure of civility remains intact, falls entirely flat.  For one thing, Gimple admits that he can’t understand why Rick lets certain people live at the end of the conflict, and so he supposedly came up with this as a means to that end.  But hasn’t Rick already been horrified by Daryl’s draconian measures?  Hasn’t Jesus been upset by Maggie’s decisions to be more and more punitive?  I could go on and on, but this season has already beaten that message into the heads of the audience several times.  Carl’s sudden decision to pursue mercy for a random survivor doesn’t add much to the equation, especially when showing that mercy to one of the Saviors would have at least tied his demise to the conflict.

Writers of television shows (and movie sequels) strive not to repeat themselves. At least, the good ones do. Provide the main characters with new challenges to face and handle, and hope that such adversity will lead to some semblance of growth. In a sense, that hasn't really been possible since the writers room in season one of The Flash set the bar so high. The past two seasons have seen the writers of this show repeat themselves ad nauseum, even as there is the appearance of minor differences from that stellar first year. The writers were too reliant on speedsters as villains who were always trying to one-up Barry in terms of speed (which made his assertion that he's "the fastest man alive" in the opening show concept narration something of a false conceit). Season four has brought on the non-speedster villain in the Thinker, and so far, the writers still appear to struggle in writing even decent Big Bads for Barry to battle.

That's both on the writers and the actor playing the Thinker. The writing somehow makes it so that the actor underplays his role as a professor with a debilitating physical malady, who was struck by the particle accelerator explosion and resulted in an expansion of his intellect. How threatening can a person who outthinks his more physical opponent be? I give it to the professor: His misdirection ploy does blindside. There had to be some connection between Amunet kidnapping Caitlin in order to save a youth who was one of the twelve on the bus from the season premiere, and the larger overall arc, but the episode stalled itself in getting to that point.

There were distractions all over the place: Cisco and Ralph Dibny squabbling over the fact that Ralph is a socially inept jackass; Iris having to "make the tough call" as team leader in choosing who the team should rescue from peril; the obfuscated true purpose of why Amunet is even needed. I do enjoy Katee Sackhoff as an actress, but her fey British accent still grates on me, and her character isn't as dangerous as she, or the writers, thinks she is.

The episode, in effect, stalls altogether, until the final revelation, which is rather complicated. DeVoe pulls a body switch, forcing all of his consciousness and intellect into the young telepath that Caitlin was forced to perform delicate surgery on, and leaving his dead shell of a body at Barry and Iris' loft for Barry to find. The body was stabbed by a knife that was among the wedding presents that Barry and Iris received. Barry is arrested for the murder of DeVoe by the Central City police before he can clean up the crime scene and get out of there. He definitely could have done it before Captain Singh and company even busted into the loft, yet he doesn't for reasons. It's obviously clear that he didn't kill DeVoe, and yet, the writers want us to buy the whole parallel between Barry and his father, who was framed for the same kind of crime.

I continue to be saddened that so many Marvel Cinematic Universe fans are willing to write off Agents of SHIELD as if it has never evolved past the early days of the first season.  Especially given that those early days were later revealed to be mere starting points for massive character development and evolution.  Agents of SHIELD has become something very different than what it seemed to be at its inception, and the current incarnation is a series at the top of its game.

In the wake of the Framework incident at the end of the fourth season, Agent Coulson and most of his team are taken away and exposed to a Kree monolith.  They wake up in what appears to be part of a space station, and it takes most of the first part of the story to explore what exactly their circumstances might be.  As it turns out, those circumstances are far more bizarre and terrifying than anticipated; they have been sent about 100 years into the future, to a time when Earth has been largely destroyed and the Kree have taken control of the remnants of humanity.

What works so well is how the various characters (minus Fitz, who is a notable absence) react and adjust to these new circumstances.  Everyone essentially reverts to their strengths and does the best to survive and gather as much intel as possible.  By now, the characters are a fairly well-oiled machine, so it’s not hard to simply sit back and watch them do what they do best.

The one exception to the rule is Mack.  One problem with removing the team from familiar surroundings and dropping them into the future is that context can be easily lost.  Mack went through a horrible crisis in the Framework, particularly the season finale, and that explains why he seems so out of sorts in this double episode.  But it’s easy to forget that context when there are so few reminders of it in the episodes themselves, so Mack just seems a bit out of character for a while.  While the apparent emergence of the Framework is Daisy’s mind hints that additional context may come, Mack’s behavior is dismissed easily enough to keep the proceedings enjoyable.

The most impressive aspect of the premiere is how naturally it introduced the new society and the various levels of the Kree threat.  Kasius is quite disturbing on many levels, and Simmons’ position as one of his “superiors” has a lot of potential for calamity.  Generally, no one seems to be in a safe position, even if Fitz is supposedly working on the problem.  After all, someone made the decision to send them into that future, and someone had to have certain expectations about what would happen once they were there.  There are too many hints for that to be a red herring.

I’m not sure if this season will follow the same general format as the previous one, but I hope that it does.  The shorter mini-arcs worked beautifully to keep the storytelling concise and focused, and while the current setting seems rich with potential plot elements to explore, it also seems like things could feel dragged out or repetitive if the team is constantly up against similar threats to their lives.  For now, though, this “reset” of Agents of SHIELD is a complete gamechanger and another example of why this is a “hidden gem” of the MCU.

After two middling middle chapters, Crisis on Earth-X goes out with a bang. There's a bit of everything thrown into this concluding episode, likely because everyone involved both in front and behind the camera saw the end and wanted to go for broke. It's not entirely unexpected, but on top of two extended, sometimes-chaotic, overly-filled-with-CGI action sequences, the writers manage to squeeze in an admittedly emotional subplot that continues the consequences of the very end of Part Three.

And yes, the emotion surrounding the death of Professor Martin Stein is dented by the fact that Victor Garber has wanted out of Legends of Tomorrow for a while now, everything around the subplot works on an emotional level. I didn't expect this kind of pathos to be present in a shared universe where death is treated like an inconvenient hiccup, but that only makes the scenes shown here all that more impressive. The connection between Martin and Jax has been a running thread not only in the background of the past three parts of Crisis on Earth-X, but also a running subplot through the current season of Legends of Tomorrow.

So the stakes between the two of them are much more heightened than say, the marital issues of Oliver and Felicity, or the sister bonding between Kara and Alex Danvers. I certainly believe that Martin considers Jax the son he never had, and that Jax has always regarded Martin as a father figure to replace his absent biological father, and that connection makes their inevitable separation all that more painful and heartbreaking. Not only that, but Martin had significant interactions with the characters in The Flash so his death affects them as well as the Legends. They were Martin's surrogate family, on top of the growing family that he wanted to get back to.

Speaking of the Legends, they do factor into the action sequences that fill out the rest of the episode. They enter STAR Labs at the most inopportune time, right as Thawne is about to cut out Kara's heart. They thwart that, as well as participate in taking out Metallo-X in a flashy and spectacular manner. Like the various missions of the Legends, the battle sequences are filled with CGI, though the production staff has learned how to harness everything so that the sequences don't look as fake or cheap as it could have been if they tried something like this crossover just a couple of years ago.

The STAR Labs battle is an appetizer for the full-on battle sequence that occurs over Central City. The crossover event really commits to the comic book aesthetic, putting out various action and group shots that look like they've leapt straight from the comic book page onto the small screen. The Right Stuff-esque shot as the heroes walk in a straight line towards a bunch of Nazis is an even better improvement on the smaller shot from Part Two. The episode maintains this epic sort of feel to everything throughout the course of the battle. We get to see all sorts of cool sequences, from Supergirl and Overgirl duking it out in the skies above Central City, to Killer Frost transporting Zari and Amaya on an ice slide towards the Nazi Waverider, and Oliver battling Dark Oliver as Kara carries an exploding Overgirl towards the atmosphere and away from danger. Because Crisis on Earth-X committed to making Dark Oliver and Overgirl a romantic couple, the pain Dark Oliver feels over his wife's death is palpable, even if that lasts just for a moment before Oliver shoots him dead. He did promise earlier to kill his dark doppleganger, so the episode pays off what was hinted in chapters before.

It all ends in an all-too-neat manner, though that's not a criticism of this huge crossover event. It had to end that way so that the writers could advance the arc that started all of this: Barry and Iris finally get married by Dig, who's been absent for the entire "crisis." Not only that, but Felicity decides to change her entire stance on not getting married to Oliver, something that's also been a running thread through the previous three parts of the crossover, and make it a surprise double wedding! I consider myself very tolerant of the Oliver-Felicity romance so I didn't mind this unexpected development, but I wouldn't be surprised if those fans who hate the relationship would hate it. The crossover comes full circle, and gets an altogether entertaining sendoff.