Themes
Gordon said that love is the central conceit of the episode. Although, in the myth of the Golem, the creature is soulless, Gordon took "some liberties" with the legend. He wanted "Kaddish" to "literally be about resurrection". Ariel creates an imperfect reflection of her husband by crafting the Golem from mud. In essence, she is trying to play God, a role that Gordon later likened to Victor Frankenstein, the scientist from Mary Shelley's famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1823). However, Ariel and Frankenstein differ in the fact that Ariel's flaw was related to her "loving too much, not being able to let go, because of the cruelty and injustice of what she suffered." In this manner, Ariel's motivation for creating the Golem are "slightly more romantically skewed".
Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, analyzed Gordon's portrayal of racism and anti-Semitism. They wrote that Gordon "makes very convincing point" when he argues that hatemongers like Carl Brunjes—who are openly hateful of other cultures but would never, personally, hurt them—are "just as guilty" as openly violent individuals, such as the "three Nazi thugs who beat and shoot a defenceless man."
Read more about this topic: Kaddish (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)