Plotting Board

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff. 

The Truth Is in Here

Characters' motives and goals make a simple story meaningful and significant. Make conduct personal to make it momentous.

Sitdrams Work, Too

Some of the subtitles the authors give to the reviews of X-Files episodes they discuss identify each of the episodes' respective situations; rather than being a situation comedy, or sitcom, The X-Files, it seems, is often something of a situational drama, or sitdram, as it were: “Pilot,” “In which Mulder meets Scully”; “Deep Throat:” “In which a massive conspiracy takes shape”; “Fire”: “In which Mulder faces an old flame”; “Young at Heart”: “In which Mulder has to track down an old foe”; “The Calusari”: “In which there are even more evil twins”; “Piper Maru”: “In which we meet some very strange oil”; and plenty of others.

The Connect-the-Dot Plot

Some X-Files episodes offer a series of images connected by their plots: “Pilot” shows disappearances, Handlen observes, “strange happenings in the woods, . . . little bumps on people's skin [and] . . . a weird, inhuman corpse in a coffin” (4). This connect-the-dots approach to plotting maintains mystery and suspense while providing unity and coherence by delaying the revelation or explanation of the cause of the strange events.

Balancing the Marvelous and the Uncanny

As Tzvetan Todorov points out, the fantastic exists only as long as it is not resolved as either natural (scientifically or rationally explainable) or as supernatural (scientifically or rationally inexplicable). In the former case, the apparently fantastic is uncanny; in the latter, it's marvelous.

Like most other fantastic fiction, The X-Files balances the marvelous and the uncanny, allowing a series of events to be explicable or not, depending upon one's perspective: For Mulder, science or reason can explain little, if any, of the bizarre incidents he observes, while, for Scully, almost everything she witnesses (including most of what Mulder sees) can be explained by science or reason.

For example, as Todd VanDerWerff explains, there is, in episode two of season one, “a spirited argument about whether the phenomenon the two [Mulder and Scully] observed has a paranormal or a scientific explanation” (11). The same is true, pretty much, throughout the series.

Plot Generators

The X-Files uses two plot generators to keep the action coming, episode after episode, week in and week out: “mythology” and the Monster of the Week (MOTW): “The first two episodes of the first season introduced some of the ideas that would power the mythology,” such as “alien abductions, UFO sightings, government conspiracies, and secrets,” while the MOTW provided variety, preventing the series from rehashing these elements and becoming boring an “repetitive” as a result.

As Handlen explains, “The genius of The X-Files as a premise lies in its infinite potential. Centering the show around a department of the FBI devoted exclusively to investigating strange or inexplicable cases means The X-Files can encompass any number of urban legends [and] can cross between science fiction, fantasy, and horror with ease” (11-12). (Later, to this list, the authors add “weird science” and “dramatic stories” of “the personal lives of Mulder and Scully” (14), the latter of which approach sometimes gives the series a soap opera-like character.

MORE next post!