Pornokitsch

On a critical level, I understand the need for this particular reverberating circuit. Batman: TAS was a kids' show, and there are robust stereotypes out there that kids need or prefer a sense of closure. Also, TAS was essentially episodic; seasons weren't built around character-development or long-term story arcs. I'm sure that in some quarters it's felt that juvenile audiences aren't especially analytical about their entertainment; they'd surely be far more interested in watching Batman kick the Penguin's ass and put him back in Arkham again than watching the Penguin finagle his way out of the asylum. Of course, I think this was a serious underestimation of the audience, but that's another post for another day.

The great thing about these final four episodes of Season 1? The audience gets to revisit a character, essentially the Scarecrow, whom we last saw being locked away in the X-Files' own version of Arkham.

"Squeeze," the second episode of the first season, introduced what would become a typically X-Filian take on a hoary urban myth: a man is murdered in a room locked from the inside. By a bile-spitting, trophy-taking serial-killer. Who can contort his body so as to squeeze through improbably small spaces, as it turns out. Although the monster is an interesting one, the episode itself isn't that great; the actors weren't comfortable with their characters yet, and the tone is off. The episode closes with the monster, Eugene Victor Tooms, being locked away in some sort of asylum, blinking balefully at his observers and making himself a comfy mucous nest in a dark corner.

This image, (not the spittle, but the Unsettling Resolution of monster-focused plots), would itself become a X-Files trope. The Jersey Devil, for example, might die, in "The Jersey Devil," but the episode's final shot is of her children, still running wild in the Jersey woods. The resolution isn't neat, as with Batman: TAS, but it's clear that the episode is over and the story is finished, at least for the purposes of the series.

This trope had become pretty firmly established over the course of the first season, so it was a real treat to find the episode "Tooms" near its end. The Joker finagles his way out of Arkham, and Batman can't make anyone believe that he's an unrepentant killer. If you can suspend your disbelief long enough to accept that Tooms would ever be released from his prison/asylum, what follows is a pretty good episode. Where, among other things, Scully calls Mulder "Fox." For the first and last time, we pray.

Oh, and appropriately, one urban myth is taken out by another - the escalator of doom! Your grandma was right; if you leave your shoelaces untied when you step onto an escalator, you will be dragged down into the bowels of the machine and squashed.

Various other urban myths get their due in the final episodes of S1; liquid nitrogen, for example, makes a memorable cameo in "Roland." (An episode that seriously disturbed me when I was 14. Turns out, a decade and a half hasn't reduced the squick factor much.)

The final shot of the season has Mulder, looking like death warmed over, broken-heartedly informing Scully that the X-Files have been closed down. It's a gorgeous moment from Duchovney, and Jared and I were taken by it enough to pop out and buy Season 2 within a few days of finishing off S1.

Above: Gillian Anderson is not very tall.