The life and death of Jose Chung
I loved the episodes of “X-Files” and “Millennium” that featured Charles Nelson Reilly as writer Jose Chung. And who wouldn’t? Reilly played it straight (for once), but they were entirely tongue in cheek.
This brilliant seven-and-a-half-minute clip from “Millennium” gives the history of the recently conceived religion Selfosophy. It is riddled with clever in-jokes, not least of which is naming the guru, Onan Gupta, after the famous self-abuser in the Bible.
This next clip, about three minutes, is from the end of Jose’s first appearance, on “The X-Files.” To me, the ending provides a fitting epitaph for Charles Nelson Reilly, except I can’t quite decide what it is — and that makes it all the more fitting.