There has been a problem with agent Scully and agent Mulder’s relationship from the beginning. From the show’s onset, the core part of the two main characters has been that Scully is a sceptic and Mulder wants to believe, but the direction of the narrative quickly made this characterisation unsustainable. The continuous scepticism coming from Scully loses its credibility in the beginning of the 1st season of X-Files. Therefore, the outbursts of scepticism make her look like she is actually deliberately trying to annoy people and it makes you want to grab her through the screen and yell out, “What the hell is wrong with you?!”.
In this particular episode, the aforementioned problem comes to a pinnacle as the whole script wears the face of agent Scully. After four seasons of both characters personally witnessing all kind of aliens and alien activity, we are supposed to believe that agent Scully, due to a single conversation with some stranger (who both assaults and tries to flee from her), is suddenly convinced that everything in the past was a lie; that the never-doubting agent Mulder might actually doubt himself; and that agent Scully believes that agent Mulder might actually shoot himself because of that doubt.
The story in this episode, however short, is so far up its own butt, that it threatens to open an all-consuming cosmic singularity.
If Gethsemane and its two follow up episodes were put at the beginning of the X-fiels, they may have worked. In fact, with a little correction, the story would have been quite intriguing, but you cannot just ignore a library of preceding events, only to create a plot twist in the last episode of the season to keep the public interested. The fact that this attention-grabbing plot twist is clearly the purpose of the whole episode, just makes the already poor writing appear worse – it’s not just writers having a bad day, but a conscious conniving conspiracy. And even though the next episode in the series will claim that some of the characters’ behaviour was a fabrication, it will not undo the problems that this episode causes. In fact, Season 5 will continue to push the ridiculous character arch.
This thing is an insult to the fans in visual form.