Warning: SPOILERS ahead for The X-Files, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat"
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The X-Files is back for a new and possibly final season. The series first began in 1993, and a lot has changed since then. In addition to stories about monsters and aliens, the core mythology of the series hinged on its portrayal of the deep state of the US government; inspired by conspiracy films of the 1970s, which were in turn inspired by President Richard Nixon and the Watergate conspiracy that ultimately forced him to resign his office, The X-Files featured shadowy cabals who operated in secret and would go to extreme lengths to keep the truth hidden from the public.
Today, the world is different, and The X-Files has changed to offer perspective on the breakneck, nausea-inducing pace of Donald Trump's America. This new season has had winks and nods towards the current administration, beginning with the season premiere, "My Struggle III," in which The Cigarette Smoking Man utters the phrase "fake news," and then grew bolder with episode two, "This," and has finally reached a fever pitch with the latest episode, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat."
"This"
The main plot of "This" throws shade at the current US President by showing the Executive Branch (the office of The President) hindering an FBI investigation into a private contractor, Purlieu Services. The episode pulls no punches and outright states that Purlieu is an American company, though headquartered in Moscow, and its operations have ascendancy over those of the FBI, through direct (and classified) order of the Executive Branch. Elsewhere in the episode, an operative of Purlieu utters the provocative line, "Americans would have been just fine losing the Cold War if they could only make a little money off of it." Some would argue that such a scenario has actually come to pass, depending on the results of the pending investigation into the Trump campaign's knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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The text at the end of the opening credits, rather than the traditional "The Truth is Out There," instead reads, "Accuse Your Enemies Of That Which You Are Guilty." This quote is generally attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the infamous architect of Nazi propaganda, whom the Trump campaign was often accused of emulating. After all, Trump was a businessman, a member of the wealthiest 1%, who ran with the promise of "draining the swamp" of corporate interests and appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton for her supposed crimes.
Ultimately, the swamp was not drained. Trump's Presidential Cabinet is full of wealthy billionaires with no experience in the fields to which they were appointed, and a special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, is currently knee-deep into an investigation of potential crimes committed by, and on the behalf of, Donald Trump.
"The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat"
The X-Files's anti-Trump sentiment really came to a head in the latest episode, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat," written and directed by series veteran Darin Morgan ("Clyde Bruckman's Final Response," "Jose Chung's From Outer Space"). The episode, through the pretense of The Mandela Effect, manages to become a scathing indictment of the president and his supporters, as well as their anti-thought rallying cry of "Fake News."
Reggie "Somebody" drops into Mulder and Scully's lives and claims to know of a vast conspiracy involving shared memory alteration by a mysterious Doctor Thaddeus Q. They. Like most of Morgan's episodes, the plot is a self-aware farce which subverts the holy cornerstones of X-Files lore and pulls them apart for maximum comedic effect, but this one boldly points its finger directly at Donald Trump.
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The Mandela Effect is when a large group of people remember things differently from the way they actually happened, and is named after the curious phenomenon of people mistakenly believing that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. Other examples include vivid recollections of a non-existent movie called Shazaam starring Sinbad as an 'irrepressible genie' (likely confused with Kazaam, starring Shaquille O'Neal as an 'irrepressible genie'), and the spelling and pronounciation of the Berenstain Bears book series (parodied here with Dr. Wuzzle... Or is it Wussle?)
The episode first makes the connection when it makes fleeting reference to the crowd at the president's inauguration, claiming that Doctor They (wearing one of those gaudy "Make America Great Again" hats) was seated atop the Washington Monument during the event. It was "the last remaining seat available," due to the "hundreds of millions who attended," making it impossible to observe the ceremony from anywhere else.
This, of course, is a reference to the underwhelming crowd size at the 2017 inauguration, which was infamously misreported by then-press secretary Sean Spicer, as well as the president himself. In defending Trump and Spicer's remarks about crowd size, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway coined the term, "Alternative Facts," which is where The X-Files comes in.
I Want To Believe?
Near the end of the episode, when Mulder finally meets Doctor They face to face, the eccentric old man immediately opens up with a monologue about the shameless nature of powerful people in the 21st century.
"When's the last time someone admitted doing something they're ashamed of? Even if they're caught on tape, they just say, "That was taken out of context." ...Your time, Agent Mulder, has passed. When people of power thought they could keep their secrets secret and were willing to do anything to keep it that way. Those days are gone. We're living in a post-coverup, post-conspiracy age."
He jokingly calls this era PoCo.
"No one will care whether the truth gets out, because the public no longer knows what's meant by the truth. No one can tell the difference anymore between what's real and what's fake. Take this Mandela Effect. In the old days, I never would have come out and admitted to you that yes, I can change people's collective memories."
And that's the truth of this particular X-File. A man who is happy to share his terrible secret because nobody believes him - or, if they do, they just don't care.
Nobody Knows For Sure
Trump's many scandals while in office include his failure to immediately condemn the Unite the Right race riot in Charlottesville, during which a white nationalist drove a car through a crowd of protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. Trump's initial response? That "both sides" shared blame. When asked why he didn't directly denounce the alt-right, the president responded, "What about the alt-left?"
False equivalencies like this stem from a lack of moral leadership. This is one way to proliferate disinformation, and it's one method of, as Doctor They puts it, "Sowing the seeds of uncertainty." After all, half the comments on any given story that even mentions Donald Trump will resort to bringing up his political opponent during the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that she is not in power and no longer holds any office in the government.
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As to the truth of Trump and any of the numerous lies and dubious claims made by Trump or on his behalf (most recently, that he is 6'3" and weighs 239 lbs), Doctor They had something to say on the matter:
"Our current president once said something truly profound. He said, 'Nobody knows for sure.'"
As he says this, They raises his right hand and makes a particular gesture, a stilted hand signal which looks like an "OK" sign, but more deliberate. It's a gesture which has been adopted by the alt-right and Neo-Nazi circles as a white power slogan (because the three raised fingers look kind of like the letter 'W,' for white). Every time a known Neo-Nazi white supremacist flashes the "OK" sign, is it a racial dog whistle? Well... Nobody knows for sure.
Donald Trump, But An Alien
As if the episode wasn't obvious enough with its opinion of the 45th President of the United States, the grand finale of the episode makes its feelings crystal clear. Throughout the episode, the mysterious Reggie claims to be a victim, or perhaps everybody else is a victim, of memory manipulation or The Mandela Effect (or, as he believes, The Mengela Effect, but that's just The Mandela Effect at work). He even claims to have founded the X-Files, a statement which directly contradicts the lore of the series (the first case dates back to J. Edgar Hoover directly, and Arthur Dales, played by Darren McGavin, was responsible for them in the 1950s, before they fell into obscurity and were eventually picked up by Fox Mulder), but that's arguably the point of that particular revelation.
Earlier in the episode, Reggie alludes to the game-changing final case he ever solved with Mulder and Scully, which, as far as the two agents know, is a complete and utter fabrication. However, as Reggie is being loaded into a car headed for the Spotnitz Sanitarium (a nod to producer Frank Spotnitz; the same mental hospital also appeared in Darin Morgan's Millennium episode, "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"), Mulder takes pity on Reggie and asks him what happened on their fateful final case.
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According to Reggie, they met an ambassador from outer space, decked out like a 1950s B-Movie alien, who had some bad news for Earth. He makes his entrance by awkwardly riding an escalator down from his ship, an image obviously evoking Donald Trump's often-mocked escalator ride at the very start of his presidential campaign (not to be confused with this, much different, escalator ride). The alien then follows this subtle parody with something a bit more overt, declaring that the "Intergalactic Union of Sentient Beings from all Known Universes and Beyond" are building a wall to keep humans from escaping their solar system.
According to the alien, the wall will be "beautiful, albeit invisible," and will incinerate any probe attempting to venture beyond the celestial border. The alien rationalizes this decision by paraphrasing Donald Trump, stating that Earth is "not sending us your best people. You're bringing drugs, you're bringing crime, you're rapists," which is extremely close to what the president said out loud and in public of Mexican immigrants. As the alien returns to his ship and begins the escalator ride back up into the craft, he pantomimes pressing buttons and proclaims, in a direct quote of President Trump, "Bing bing, bong bong bing."
We're Not Alone In The Universe... But Nobody Likes Us
As the episode comes to a close, Agent Scully, when confronted with the opportunity to return to the nostalgia of her childhood, in the form of a package of long-lost Goop-O ABC (not to be confused with Jell-O 123), she opts not to tarnish the memories of her youth, musing, "I want to remember how it was. I want to remember how it all was." Good and bad, the past is in the past, and it can't be recaptured or made new again. Scully can't recapture her childhood by eating a carcinogenic dessert snack, just like there's no way to "Make America Great Again" by electing a reality TV show host to the highest office in the country.
Perhaps Scully's contentedness in leaving her Goop-O uneaten is a subtle nod to Gillian Anderson's decision to retire from The X-Files for good, and a commentary on season 11's controversial storyline involving William's true father, which shocked many fans and caused some to declare The X-Files ruined forever.
The Mandela Effect is rooted in nostalgia, and Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" promise is rooted in a similar wistful melancholy over days gone by, but The X-Files managed to sum it all up in one of the best hours of television the series has yet produced. Simultaneously jolly and grim, cynically defeatist and yet brimming with the possibilities of an unwritten future, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" is a bittersweet episode which encapsulates the sorry state of America in 2018 and her incompetent, possibly criminal leader, while also offering a dash of optimism towards the future and indulging in just a little bit of crowd-pleasing nostalgia to remember the past.