Themes
"Requiem" explores Mulder's desire to leave his pursuit of the truth behind him. Michelle Bush, in her book Myth-X notes that the episode's theme is his "realization that maybe it's time to get out of the car". The irony of the episode, however, is that as soon as Mulder's discovery of absolute proof of alien life appears, he is subsequently abducted and taken away.
While in Skinner's office, the camera angles and position of the characters reveals that the scene is intended to be a recreation of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting The Last Supper. Skinner is standing in Saint Peter's spot, and Scully is standing in Judas Iscariot's place. Bush argues that, in this manner, the show is suggesting that Scully, like Judas, directly affects the fate of the savior, in this case Mulder. She notes that Scully's actions result in a fate that "could not be realized without her participation". This is not the first time Scully has been compared to Judas in the show; in the previous seventh season episode "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati"—which is heavily based on Nikos Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation of Christ—features Scully in a role with direct literary parallels to Kazantzakis's heroic interpretation of Judas.
Read more about this topic: Requiem (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“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)
“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)