X-Files--"Zero Sum"

Bad news for team Scully: Gillian Anderson was off filming her part in The Mighty during the production of “Zero Sum,” so Scully is not in it. Her precencce is deeply felt, however, with a necessary sense of urgency. She is said to be in the hospital due to complications from her brain tumor. Scully plight is the catalyst for the action of the episode as Skinner is secretly pit against Mulder to cover up a syndicate plot in exchange for a cure for her.

“Zero Sum’ is very much a Skinner episode and a very welcome one as he returns to the tough as nails G-man you would expect the Assistant Director of the FBI to be. The fourth season has been an act of redemption for the character after being poorly represented in the third. You may recall last season Skinner was pepper sprayed, then beaten up by a woman, shot, had an affair, and was framed for murdering a prostitute--none of which reflected well on him. In the fourth season, he has returned to the take charge, no non-sense guy.

Understand, he is most certainly not on the right side of the law here, but he has logical reasons for working with the Syndicate. He is sacrificing of himself, particularly to save scully, but also Mulder, whom he advised not to make a deal with the syndicate in exchange for a cancer cure. Skinner did not follow his own advice. It costs him here, as he is framed for murder and winds up no closer to helping Scully than he was before.

I question the value of structuring the story as it was. For the teaser and entire first act, we witness a postal worker being killed by a swarm of those killer bees the clones were harvesting. Skinner quietly goes about erasing e-mailed photos of the incident off mulder’s computer, cleaning the crime scene itself, and then stealing the woman’s corpse in order to burn it, all while posing as Mulder. When the detective who contacted Mulder about the death in the first place winds up murdered, Mulder suspects the Syndicate is to keep him off the matter.

The tension of the story involves Mulder getting closer and closer to discovering the culprit is Skinner. It was also his gun that killed the detective. That is all well and good, but the episode would have been far more interesting if we had discovered the clues pointing to skinner as Mulder did rather than us knowing right off the bat what skinner was up to. As it is, we are anticipating mulder’s sense of betrayal when he discovers the truth, but it could have been a double whammy if we had felt betrayed right along with him in a big reveal. As it is, the matter is resolved quickly once Mulder learns skinner is only doing what he was about to offer himself up for several weeks ago.

As I have said before, I review what is and not what I think should be. Mulder is nearly incidental to the plot. He shows up several times to announce he is waiting for evidence from the lab, evidence which will chip away at Skinner’s cover up of his actions, then disappears. This is a completely Skinner-centric episode as he learns to his horror he has been covering up an experiment to use bees as tramsmitters of smallpox. Yet he cannot pull the trigger when he finally confronts the Cigarette Smoking Man because there is still a chance he will cure Scully.

While Skinner is being yanked around by the Syndicate, I do not feel his character is being degraded as he was during some of the sillier incidents he was involved in throughout the previous season. He is a tormented man committing immoral acts for what he believes is a higher purpose, then is even further torn when he realizes what he has done has allowed the Syndicate to infect a classr of children to small pox through a bee swarm attack. But what else can he do but try to clean the mess up as best as possible while still walking the razor’s edge for Scully. I feel for him. He is good, though flawed, guy here.

“Zero Sum,” a game theory concept that one’s gain is directly proportional to an opponent’s loss, manages to give our regular heroes a break from acting while still furthering the mythology. I like Skinner as a character, and “Zero Sum” is the better of his centric episodes up until this point. It is not that great overall because of the structural flaw in the narrative I mentioned above, but it is worth watching.

Rating: *** (out of 5)