- Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense — The one where Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) must protect Charles Nelson Reilly from a cult of Selfologists, founded by a fellow named Onan. Even more irony than usual; it turns out the murderous Selfologists, and the destruction they bring, got their start when someone criticized their leader for being "too dark", as most people had criticized the series itself.
- Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me — The one where the demons meet in a coffee shop to catch-up on the soul destroying business. They each tell an absurdly tongue-in-cheek immorality tale, ending in the silent realization of their ultimate loneliness.
Finally: What do all these episodes have in common? They were all written by the same man, Darin Morgan.
Charlie Kaufman's got nothing on this guy.
The offbeat strangeness is what first impresses you about these works, but the true beauty is in the way he used the freedom of the imaginative nature of the shows to let him work the offbeat strangeness into something human. The horrible pitfall of all of what is now termed "serialized imaginative fiction" (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc) is that the mythology becomes the end rather than the means. The characters just become pawns to describe the universe.
It is clear that Morgan had no interest in the mythos of either of the shows, other than to the extent he could use them for satire. Even the actors themselves were little more than fodder for wisecracks. In 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space', Scully's hair is described suspiciously as being "a little too red." In 'Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me' the demons comment on Frank Black's dire countenance (there is no countenance more dire than Lance Henriksen's). The net effect of all this self-referential satire is that all the extraneous baggage such as the series mythos or the dominant personalities are trivialized and we are left with the human story at the core in plain view.
Article comments
1 - Bill Sherman
I agree that Morgan's scripts for X-Files are some of the best that show saw - makes me wish that, instead of just doing those bloated full-season boxed sets, Fox put out some anthology discs with the better stand-alone episodes. I know I'd buy a two-disc X-Files set of those four Darin Morgan shows. . .
2 - David Mazzotta
Sign me up for one of those too.
By the way, if you want more background on Darin, you can check out Darinland for more details than you care to know.