A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
Mythology of The X-Files more significance to what is to come". Todd VanDerWerff of "The A.V. Club" called the third season "The X-Files" "best season and maybe one of the greatest TV seasons of all time", noting it was consistent and "[swung] from strength to strength" between mythology and stand-alone episodes. Michael Sauter of "Entertainment Weekly" praised the new additions to the series' mythology during the series' fifth year. As the show increased in popularity, the mythology episodes even started causing media speculation. For instance, the fourth-season episode "Gethsemane" caused newspapers to run articles on whether or not Mulder had actually died. An article