What is our responsibility to what we create and release into the world?
When does that responsibility end?
Most importantly: Am I super-bad person for loving my Keurig?
Credit: Ed Araquel/Fox
His fans called him the Band-Aid Nose Man.
This time, though, they did it together.
Like other installments in the revival, Home Again tried to do too much.
Still, I was moved, provoked, and spooked by this creepy and overtly political hour.
I was also impressed by the storys mordantly articulated interest in culture making and cultural consumption.
While not the equal to Home (a tough benchmark to match!)
The date: Today.
Feb. 8, 2016.
Lincolns Birthday, Recognized.
A more optics-savvy politico might have chosen a different day to start hosing the disenfranchised and dispossessed.
But Cutler neither old school Republican or new era liberal had no heart for the unfortunate.
After finishing his political wetwork, he made like Pilate and literally washed his mitts of it.With hand sanitizer.
From his POV, the homeless people he had hosed into the gutter only had themselves to blame.
They had been warned!
A close-up on the flier, illuminated with siren lights, opened the show.
The headline: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE!
So began an episode prickly with progressive complaint.
And then The Trashman Cometh.
A stiff, chilly breeze blew a YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE!
notice off a wall and forced the squatters to take shelter inside their tents.
They knewexactlythe storm that was coming.
When the truck rumbled away, it left behind a tall, shadowy figure dressed in a shoddy trenchcoat.
Cutting to a long shot, the figure seemed to blend into the surroundings.
We didnt detect him again until he moved.
It was as if the shade had emerged from streets itself.
Something swarming with flies.
Something smelly, too.
So rancid, it made him gag.
Something like HIS GUILT.
Home Again hit the trash motif really hard.
Still, it worked.
Cutler armed himself with the gun he kept in his drawer.
But the creature stalking him was immune to bullets.
He was a gestalt being, a symbol made incarnate, indestructible and incorruptible.
Somewhere in exile, Bruce Wayne slow claps, then sips a cappuccino with Anne Hathaway.
The door blew off its hinges.
Before Cutler could fire a shot, the hulking intruder had ripped off his arms.
The phantom menace then returned to his phantom garbage truck.
It threw Cutlers arms into the back and climbed in after them and nestled into the rubbish.
I discovered the cure for cancer, but the government cut my funds.
NEXT: A call you never want to get
Enter Mulder and Scully.
We got a low-angle shot of the agents extending their IDs to camera.
Withdrawing their badges, they stand revealed in signature attire.
Chris Carter says he reshuffled the order to give the miniseries a stronger arc.
While examining Cutlers beheaded corpse, Scully got a call.
Her eyes played a trick on her when she looked at her iPhone.
The name that popped on the screen was William, her son.
She was mistaken: The name was really William Scully, Junior, her big brother.
Scully had to get there to represent her wishes.
Go, said Mulder gently.
We stick with Mulder for now.
It was our Trashman, all right.
As Mulder mulled the image, he wondered about the strength needed to tear a man asunder.
Hanged, drawn, quartered an old punishment for high treason.
An interesting allusion for a story indicting society us for betraying our obligation to each other.
A bloody footmark that lacked any identifying skin print.
A Band-Aid gooey with sticky, gum-like material.
And who are these two fine representatives of the city of brotherly love?
Nancy Huff, appalled by Landrys treatment of the homeless, was trying to stop him.
(She called him a douchebag, which prompted Mulder to joke about the bickering pair being married.
I found this more odd than funny.
Guess Mulder has a pretty low opinion of marriage.
Yet despite an annual act of charity serving Thanksgiving dinner to Phillys unfortunate, Nancy wasnt motivated by altruism.
Mulder coolly shamed their selfishness.
He slammed both for appearing to care about the homeless when really they only cared about their agendas.
What I dont hear is who speaks for them?
Think: Band-Aid solutions to social problems that fail to treat underlying causes and only make problems worse.
Perhaps think: destructive solutions to problems, i.e.
cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Definitely think that maybe Im totally overthinking this.
Anyway, this entire conversation took place in an alley below the tagged billboard.
NEXT: Are you there, Margaret?
kindly, Mom, dont go home yet, she said, referring to heaven.
Margaret made this choice after Scullys miraculous return from near-death back in One Breath is season 2.
Why did Margaret request to see her estranged son Charlie before lapsing into coma?
What was the significance of the quarter on a chain found on her neck?
Scully wanted her mother to wake up and answer the questions and to connect with her one last time.
She didnt have to despair alone.
Mulder showed up to rock the ship again!
Scully: Youre a dark wizard, Mulder.
What else is new?
This tender exchange might have be my favorite moment so far in the entire revival…
Charlie called.
Margarets eyes fluttered open and she looked at Mulder.
(A corollary to the Band-Aid Nose Man.
Regardless: Scully just couldnt deal.
The experience had pushed so many buttons that she was emotionally tweaking and overloading.
The monster not only stank, but it oozed pools of maggots.
But the visual also suggested someone trying to keep from smelling their own rotten stench.
Another metaphor for denying problems instead of engaging them in a meaningful way.)
He believed Trashman would kill again.
But the monster already had.
While Mulder was in Philly with Scully, the Band-Aid Nose Man had pulped three more victims.
They included a pair of hustlers responsible for stealing the billboard right from under or rather above Mulders nose.
They made a living swiping street art and selling the pieces to collectors and auction houses.
(This bit of business raises the hotly debated question: Who owns street art?)
In yanking limbs and heads, the Band-Aid Nose Man made some (splatter) art of its own.
Apparently, Trashman killed a lot of rich, powerful, oppressive people.
The Trashman of Home Again certainly fancied himself a hero of the people in his own cracked mind.
Mulder and Scully tracked him to the basement of a dilapidated tenement in a blighted part of Philly.
He ranted on behalf of the homeless (they got no voice, man!
He lambasted mans lack of personal and social responsibility.
If you dont see a problem, there isnt a problem, he said.
And: We treat people like trash.
If he didnt look them in the eye, he said, they left him alone.
*Mulder and Scully found Trashman by following his young assistant.
The kid, African-American, escaped them during the downward spiral into the underground.
This following dialogue took place.
Mulder: I wasnt going to shoot the kid, and I dont do stairs.
Scully: Back in the day, I used to do stairs in three-inch heels.
Mulder: Back in the day?
Scully, back in the day is now.
The moment played to our nostalgia and revival excitement, especially when Mulder lit up his high-powered flashlight.
Specifically African American kids?
Thats not a thing of the past.
Thats still our now.
But Trashman accepted only limited responsibility for the Band-Aid Nose Man.
Mulder wasnt having any of this.
(Just like those art thieves.)
Scully was even more disturbed by Trashmans testimony.
Did Trashmans social critique of personal responsibility indict her, too?
She also believed this: If you made the problem if you made the idea then youre responsible.
Mulder and Scully realized that the Band-Aid Nose Man had one last target: Daryl Landry.
Could Mulder and Scully get there in time and stop the Band-Aid Nose Man from dismembering and decapitating Landry?
A taut, race-against-time sequence answered the question definitively:
Nope.
In one epilogue, Trashman gathered his stuff and fled his fetid basement.
Do you agree with the storys perspective on personal and social responsibility?
What is the responsibility of culture makers to influence, consumption, and precipitant of their work?
When do parents stop being responsible for their kids?
And perhaps most important: Is Keurig responsible for the K-Cup apocalypse?
Because guys, Ilooovemy Keurig.
In another epilogue, Mulder and Scully went to the beach to scatter Margarets ashes to the ocean.
They sat and talked and processed.
She then connected this to Margarets words about William.
Thats why she said what she said to us.
But she felt the loss and felt guilty all the same.
Does he doubt himself because we left him?
What questions does he have of me?
The same I have of this quarter?
