I've never seen an episode of
The X-Files. The series started back in '93 when I was just three years old, but as an avid sci-fi consumer, procedural lover and a bona fide geek, it's always felt like a looming gap in my pop cultural knowledge. So, hey! This is my Newbie Recap to
The X-Files! I'll be watching and recapping two episodes every Thursday. Without further adieu:
1x01 - Pilot
A procedural start! Girl running through dense woods, she falls. A lone figure emerges in a haze of spacey light. Wind erupts and, in one last blaze of white light, she's gone.
Police find her a few days later, with a couple of bite marks sunk into her lower back. "It's happening again, isn't it?" one of the investigators calls, and hey, it's a pretty great opening.
Cut to Dana Scully bad bitchin' her way into FBI headquarters. All I knew about Scully prior to this episode, is what
The Simpsons parody told me about her, but I was surprised by how much and how quickly I fell in love with her. Rational, competent, and the foil to Mulder's more crazed genius (but we'll get to that later), I was also surprised at how much of her character seems to be imitated in shows I love - like Cuddy in
House, MD and Joan in
Elementary. She's one half of a balance beam, and more fully realised in a few short scenes than a lot of women characters can procure in seasons. In a moment, we learn she's ambitious, intelligent, a doctor who was recruited out of medical school and into the FBI.
In a lot of ways, she also plays as exposition. In this scene, she sets up Fox Mulder or, as she describes him, Spooky Mulder. Mulder has an obsession with the extraterrestial cases in the FBI, colloquially known as the x-files, and the big bosses hire Scully to report on him and the cases. "Debunk them?" she asks.
"FBI's most unwanted" is how Mulder introduces himself, and it's a bad start for him and Scully, even as he proves to know more about her than she anticipated. He wastes no time diving in with her as well, presenting to her on the most hilarious old projector (oh, nineties) the not so hilarious image of the body of the dead girl we opened with and the chemical compound found on her and the rest of the dead girls with the same bite marks. The chemical compound is organic, but unrecognisable. "Do you believe in extraterrestrials?" Mulder asks, and we have the question perhaps of the series. Scully debunks, Mulder hopes. They investigate.
Our Team Science, Team Alien fly out to Oregon to investigate the murders which, at this point, is a few kids deep. The flight enters turbulence, and character-wise, it's an interesting scene. Scully panics, reasonably so, but Mulder doesn't even flinch. He's totally despondent about it, almost lethargically so, like he'd anticipated no less. I haven't warmed to Mulder quite as quickly as I have to Scully yet, mostly because I'm so accustomed to the lenience TV gives to it's ~genius bros~ and it grates on me more than I can say. Anyway, we'll see.
Mulder and Scully end up at a picturesque little town, and end up chatting to the local mortician within a few minutes of their arrival. Mulder's arranged to have his body exhumed, a fact revealed only shortly after Scully uncovers the fact the cases have already been investigated. Mulder plays the genius card. I...roll my eyes a little.
By the time they get to the cemetery though, the slow burn of information comes to an end as we receive a lot of it very quickly. The coroner charges in, hurling accusations at Mulder and Scully, who politely come back at him with one that implies he didn't do his job very well with the other dead kids. He gets called away by his daughter, and we find out that one of the other dead kids died of exposure in the summer. They exhume the grave, the coffin dropping, rolling, cracking open to expose a corpse that is decidedly not human.
Mulder calls alien, Scully calls ape - orangutan to be specific, but neither accounts for the small metal tube found in the body's nose.
They also don't account for the fact that all the bodies found have been from the same graduating class, treated by the same psychologist. We're off to hospital, where we find two more students, Peggy and Billy, who've been in the hospital for four years after a car accident. Billy's in a waking coma, and Peggy, while conscious, seems similarly impaired. Peggy has a psychotic episode, and Mulder wastes no time getting her down and finding the same two bites on her as on all the other bodies.
Cue the conversation this pilot's been asking. Have these teens been abducted by aliens? The script presents both sides of the argument, however backed up at this point, through Mulder and Scully. Mulder believes, Scully doesn't, which I'm guessing now (and from
The Simpsons parody), is going to be a recurring theme.
Mulder and Scully head out to investigate the woods at night, Scully taking the time to pick something currently unseen off the ground. And then it happens. The same blaze of light in the cold open. The same solitary figure. It's a man from the Sheriff's department though, brandishing a shotgun, and Mulder and Scully are ordered away.
In the car, Scully presents her findings. What she'd picked up was some sort of soil, only sandy, or chalky almost, something that could perhaps be used in a sacrifice. It all goes to shit though when another blaze of light hits them both, and Mulder realises they've lost nine minutes, something he views as irrefutable proof for an abduction. Scully's still not convinced.
Back at the motel, there's a blackout, and Scully discovers three marks on her body not unlike the ones on the victims. In a panic, she finds Mulder, in a strangely charged scene, she shows him and he identifies them for what they are - mosquito bites. It might seem like an odd scene, but it does really well to chip away at the barrier dividing the two for now, allowing for the moment of intimacy that follows. Mulder's sister disappeared when she was just a girl, and his obsession with aliens comes across as more of a desperate need to find her - a boy trying to explain away an inexplicable loss. His ability to apply behavioural models to crime meant he was snapped up by the FBI, which he utilised to investigate his sister's disappearance. They're interrupted with the news that Peggy, the girl from the hospital, has died.
They're distracted from Peggy's body by the fact that the alien / ape corpse is gone, and then from that by Teresa, the daughter of the coroner we saw earlier in the episode at the cemetery. She reveals that she's been having blackouts, waking up suddenly in the woods. That it's been happening ever since she graduated four years ago, and that the same thing happened to the other students who've been dropping like flies. She's terrified. Her terror is contained though when her father and the detective, who reveals suddenly to be Billy's father - the boy in the coma - show up and take her away.
Their attention drawn back to the missing corpse, they make the decision to check out the other two bodies, only to find out they've already been taken. Scully says that Peggy's watch stopped too, just like there's did, and Mulder connects dots only he can see - Billy has killed them all. That all the kids have felt the pull to the woods like Teresa, and that Billy wakes up in those paused minutes and gets them.
There's the same chalky, sandy substance on Billy's feet, and the team takes off into the woods, only to be stopped by the detective and the coroner. Billy's there already, holding onto Teresa, the wind circling them manically. There's another blaze of light, only this time, they get left behind, their bite marks disappearing and Billy waking from his coma.
Back at FBI headquarters, Billy, hypnotised, recalls the abduction, the experimentation by aliens, the fear of it all. The terror they'll come back. Mulder is beyond pleased, but Scully has more work to do yet. In a meeting with the big bosses, she recounts the story and meets their disbelief. The only piece of evidence remaining is the small metal tube recovered from the nose of the corpse, and she leaves it with them. For the first time in the episode, our point of view shifts away from Scully, and with an FBI agent, who takes the vial and re-homes it at the Pentagon, in a lab with many more of it's kind. Mulder calls Scully later that night. The file on the case is gone.
I like a good procedural. I know some people get up in arms over the form, citing it as uninspired, but I really think the opposite. A procedural can do amazing things at exploring different types of crime or conduct, and says things about the people attracted to it. From
Law & Order to
Criminal Minds,
House MD and
The Wire, procedural can unravel a profession and a narrative structure so effectively.
The X-Files seems on track to do this. It does a pretty awesome job of setting up questions for the series to answer (or not), without seeming ham fisted or preachy, and the effect is a pretty compelling pilot. Even with a few things aging poorly (the coffin falling, the tech, Mulder's backwards cap), it has a few timeless elements too. Particularly in Scully, who, for me, anchored the episode with her rationality, her intelligence, and general awesomeness. I'm really interested in seeing where it goes next.
1x02 - Deep Throat
And luckily, I don't have to wait that long. Since 1963, six pilots have gone missing from Ellens Airforce Base after flying experimental aircrafts. Another has gone missing four months prior to Mulder picking up the file, the missing pilot's wife having contacted the FBI after receiving no assistance or further information from the Base. "I thought you were only interested in paranormal cases," Scully tells him, but Mulder knows something we don't.
Shortly after accepting the case, Mulder gets accosted by a man by the name of Deep Throat (?) who tells him to drop it. This seems to take Mulder by surprise which surprised me a little. Mulder seems the sort to have heard this a bit. The situation is aggravated though when Scully calls him later, and Mulder realises his phone is being tapped. Things are getting dark, stakes are being raised.
Scully and Mulder head out and visit the wife of the man we saw in the cold open. At this stage, he's been missing for months and all her enquiries are being redirected. She takes them to another military wife who had the same thing happen to her husband. Only, her husband's been returned to her, a shell of his former self.
There's a lot of spooky stuff happening in this small town, and Scully and Mulder's presence seems to aggravate things on a base level. From the military wives to journalists, small town bar keeps, they're not just lifting a rug but blowing at the dust bunnies who've made their home there. It doesn't help that strange lights have started up at night, something Mulder and Scully head out to investigate.
They run into a couple of stoner kids (Hi, Baby Seth Green!) who tell them they think the bright lights are UFO's being released from a base. Needless to say, Mulder is intrigued. Scully rightly points out that they are pretty high. ("You could've shown that kid a picture of a flying hamburger and he would've told you that was exactly what he saw.")
In the car, Mulder is ecstatic. He shows Scully some blurry photos, and states his case that the military is experimenting with alien technology in their aircrafts. Scully tells him he is cray.
Overnight, the missing pilot is returned home, on first glance, in full health, but it quickly becomes apparent that he has no memory of what has happened and, in the words of his wife, "is not himself." He appears mellow and simple, with an academic knowledge of his life. Mulder tests him a little more abstractly, and the missing pilot folds like a house of cards. "I think they rewired that man's brain," Mulder says, and darker seeds are planted, hinting at things to come, but more on that later.
Leaving the scene, they're accosted once again by men in suits. Their photos are destroyed, files ruined, intimidated, and ordered to leave town. Mulder is stuck between indignant and mortified, and the combination proves a fuel, propelling him back towards the base on his own in the dead of night. Those bright lights are back, only this time, Mulder's on the runway, ready for them. A triangular craft hovers, lingers, the proof Mulder wants.
It's short lived. He's grabbed by soldiers, and in one of the more harrowing scenes of the series so far, his memory is tampered with. Rewired, as he'd earlier stated. Meanwhile, Scully's on his tail. The journalist who'd harassed them earlier in the episode turns out to be a security operative from the base. Holding him at gunpoint, she makes him guide her back to the base and exchanges him for a confused and uncharacteristically quiet Mulder. He doesn't know how he got there, but does know who
he is, so small victories, I guess.
Scully writes her report, and Mulder, jogging around a local running track, is confronted again by Deep Throat. "They're here, aren't they?" Mulder asks.
"They have been here for a long, long time."
This is such a dark turn for a series only two episodes in. It sticks with the procedural structure, but twists it dramatically, using our expectations not as something to meet, but to revert. The sequence with Mulder in the military hospital was HORRIFYING, and left you genuinely unsure of his future in the series (I can only imagine what it would've been like at the air date), and the questions posed in the Pilot are restated dramatically. If Episode 1 was naive, this episode is all about starting to set us straight.
Conspiracy and government secrets are being clearly set up as major themes for the series, an interesting choice steering us away from a typical monster of the week structure and into some deeper, more disturbing questions. It'll be interesting to see just how deep it decides to go.
Stray Thoughts in 1x01 + 1x02
- I didn't realise the
I Want to Believe poster was actually
in the show (it appears in Mulder's office). I thought it was just a promotional tool!
- Lol, nineties fashion.
- So far, the VFX have been pretty tame, which has done really good things in terms of the aging of the series. The simplicity of the alien lights, the boils on the pilot and the bites on the abducted kids have been really good at straddling that line of could-be-couldn't-be in terms of alien-ness.
- I definitely warmed more to Mulder in episode 2, but I think he is very much a part of this stock of weird male genius' which does get my back up a little. It's such a tired trope nowadays that I have to keep reminding myself that this was twenty years ago and not in the time of
Elementary, Sherlock, House, Forever, etc.
What did you think though? Love it? Hate it? And how does it stack up with the rest of the series?
