Well-manicured

Actor John Neville, of Baron Munchausen and X-Files fame (wherein he played the 'Well-manicured Man', one of the conspirators and ally of the Cigarette Smoking Man), has died. He was a fine actor and will be missed, even if he did help pave the way for the alien colonization of our planet.

X-Files Case Report: "Gender Bender"

"He's the ultimate sex-magnet". (Fox Mulder)

Insular religious sects are always a good breeding ground for tales of supernatural suspense, so it was just a matter of time until The X-Files got there. "Gender Bender" is that episode, and it's...well, I literally could not decide if I liked it or if I didn't.

A man picks up a woman at a dance club – or she picks him up – and they return to a hotel room for a bit of action. Unfortunately for the man, the bit of action turns out to be fatal...and then the woman leaves the hotel room...as a man.

The oddness of the case leads to the summoning to Agents Mulder and Scully, who show up to do their investigative work. A bit of dirt on the victim leads Mulder to conclude that there is some connection between the murderer and a specific area in Massachusetts, an area noted for being the home of a hyper-secretive religious sect called "The Kindred". Mulder and Scully approach some members of the Kindred on the street – they are clearly modeled on the Amish, only a lot creepier – and while Mulder gets nowhere, Scully manages to get one of the Kindred men to open up a bit, by showing concern for their horse. A very odd moment happens then, when the man seems to almost seduce Scully right there, in the middle of the street.

What follows is a delving into some very strange stuff involving the Kindred, their practices when one of their own dies (rituals involving catacombs beneath a barn, slathering the dead with white clay, and holding the bodies in what can only be described as 'gestation tubes', whereupon the dead man starts to acquire the features of a woman).

It turns out, of course, that the murderer is an escapee from the Kindred, and that the Kindred desperately want to maintain their secretive way of life, which means that they want to handle the lapse of one of their own themselves, without the aid of the FBI. This is eventually what happens, when Mulder and Scully track the killer and corner him, only to have the Kindred show up and then disappear with him. When the agents return to the Kindred farm, they find it completely abandoned, with the catacombs sealed with white clay, and a freshly-made crop circle in the field.

Like I said above, I can't decide if I like this episode or not. The standard X-Files creepiness-through-atmosphere is in full force here. And the acting is really top-notch, especially the guy who plays Brother Andrew, the Kindred member who seduces Scully. It was a good choice, casting a guy who is not particularly handsome, as a guy who apparently oozes enough sexual energy to bend Scully to his will. It's eerily believable, in some way.

However, "Gender Bender" offers even less by the way of answers than most episodes of The X-Files, and that's really saying something. Most times we're told, or at least led to suspect, what has been going on, but here...I got nothin'. A religious sect that somehow regenerates its members, changing genders in the process? And they all give off enormous amounts of pheromones? And what is with the crop circle? Were they aliens? I think they basically tried cramming too much into this episode. Supernatural murder through sex is a fascinating concept that could have been explored well on its own (and maybe it was, later on in the series...I don't recall offhand), but here there are too many elements to really be dealt with in any kind of satisfactory way. The Kindred themselves are potentially fascinating, but again, they're in and gone from the series too quickly to say.

I don't know. "Gender Bender" is a typically well-made episode...but it's an atypically unsatisfying one.

X-Files Case Report: Beyond the Sea

"I know that you and Dad were disappointed that I chose the path I'm on instead of medicine, but I need to know: was he at all proud of me?" (Dana Scully, to her mother)

After "Fire" gave us some more background on Agent Mulder, "Beyond the Sea" takes us deeper than we've ever gone before into Scully's background, giving us one of my very favorite episodes in the entire X-Files run. This episode is, simply put, outstanding.

We open with Scully winding up a visit from her parents, who are now heading home. Scully's father is a career Naval officer, who calls his younger daughter "Starbuck". After they're gone, Scully falls asleep on her couch, but awakens to see her father sitting in the armchair. He is talking, but she can't make out what he is saying. Then the phone rings, and when she looks back to the chair, her father is no longer there. She answers the phone, to be told by her mother that her father has just died. Has she seen a ghost?

Meanwhile, two young lovers who have driven out to the woods to make out are abducted by a violent criminal, and a massive search begins. Mulder is called in, because a serial killer named Luther Lee Boggs who is about to be executed is suddenly claiming to have knowledge of the abduction, by virtue of his supposed psychic ability. Mulder, we learn, had been instrumental in Boggs's capture, and in a rare event for the series, he is the skeptical one: he hands Boggs a scrap of cloth that belonged to one of the victims, which provokes a "psychic vision" in Boggs, but when it's all done, Mulder simply says "I tore this off my old Knicks t-shirt."

Scully, however, sees something in Boggs, when he begins spontaneously to sing the song "Beyond the Sea" (which had been one of her father's favorites) and directly addresses her as "Starbuck", which had been her father's nickname for her. Scully is deeply vulnerable, and when Boggs gives her a scrap of information that turns out possibly to connect with the case, she begins to possibly believe. And this time, it is Mulder who is cautioning her. Boggs, sensing that he has a believer in Scully, tells her that he has information that can save the lives of the two most recent abductees...which he will reveal if she intercedes against his execution.

This episode is outstanding in a lot of ways. The X-Files always had high production values, but this episode raises an already impressive bar, with atmospheric filming that is downright cinematic. Secondly, the script is intelligent, never making the kinds of leaps that lesser TXF episodes often made, and not beating the viewers over the head to get them to come to the right conclusions. The dialogue in this episode crackles, and the acting is flat-out terrific. This is Gillian Anderson's first real chance to delve a bit more deeply into the character of Dana Scully, and she allows us to see hints of the real fears that drive this intelligent and often cool-as-a-cucumber FBI agent. Her fears of disappointing her father, and more importantly, her fear that there just may be something to all this X-file business, start to show through the cracks in her outward strength that this episode shows. Special mention must also be made of Brad Dourif, who plays Boggs with a perfect blend of creepiness, revulsion, and ultimately, sympathy as he walks the "Green Mile", fearful of what he is about to face.

"Beyond the Sea" is also notable for the first real delving into a frequent theme of the entire series, namely, that of fatherhood or parenthood in general. Mulder's father would prove to be the more visible figure throughout the series's run, but it's interesting that the show started going down that road with Scully's father, as Scully is more of a gateway character for the audience than Mulder, who is already a full-believer and is on his own journey. Scully has farther to go, and it's her father's death and the emotions it brings up, specifically her need for him to have been proud of her, within her that starts her on that journey. It's also worth noting that Scully's choices regarding Mulder begin to become clear in this episode, when she turns down Boggs's offer to "channel" her father for her in favor of visiting Mulder at the hospital.

"Beyond the Sea" is The X-Files at its best.

X-Files Case Report: "Fire"

Scully: "I forgot what it's like to spend a day in court."

Mulder: "That's one of the luxuries to hunting down aliens and genetic mutants. You rarely get to press charges."

After taking a bit of a break from The X-Files during the summer and first part of the fall, but now it's time to get back in the swing of things here. We're still in Season One, when the show is finding its way.

"Fire" is another episode that I'm seeing for the first time via this rewatch, and I have to say – it's a terrific episode. Written by Chris Carter, this one has a lot going for it: a strong story, a compelling and eerie villain, and some more of Mulder's backstory with some good character moments.

Our story opens in England, where a government guy is leaving for work. He lifts his arm to wave goodbye to the wife and kids, and sees that his arm is on fire. As his family looks on in terror, the flames consume him right there in his front yard. One person, however, is not looking on in terror: a groundskeeper is looking on in what can only be described as amusement.

Cut to Washington, where Mulder and Scully are completing a court appearance when Mulder gets a message from Phoebe Greene, a woman he worked with during his Oxford days. It quickly becomes clear that this woman was more than a friend, and that she and Mulder enjoyed a relationship that left Mulder with some serious emotional scars. She is in the US to ask for his help in protecting another aristocratic British family that is coming to the US to try and evade the fire-killer, who has the habit of mailing love letters to the wives of his victims.

Being The X-Files, of course, the fire-killer comes along for the ride, deviously working himself into this family's lives as a live-in handyman on the property they rent. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully work with Phoebe Greene to figure out just who the killer is, in hopes of stopping him. Hampering their case are Mulder's antipathy toward Greene, and the fact that he is deeply phobic about fire.

"Fire" is very effectively done, with a compellingly scary villain and the "race against time" factor in the story's unfolding. The episode also boasts some terrific special effects work through the use of flame and fire, although some of this does remind me somewhat of the effects in the movie Backdraft, which had come out a few years earlier. This episode is a well-done thriller.

X-Files Case Report: "Eve"

"One girl was just abducted."
"Kidnapped."
"Potato, po-tah-to." (Mulder and Scully)

"Eve" is one of the stronger episodes of the first season, and it's actually a very memorable tale, only partially undone by some poor storytelling in the last act.

A shocking murder takes place in Connecticut, where a suburban father is found sitting on his daughter's backyard swing set. His skin has gone completely white, and there are two distinctive puncture wounds in his neck. Only his daughter is there to see.

This sounds like a vampire story at first, but when learning of the case, Mulder's initial hypothesis is alien abduction, based on blood loss that resembles that in cattle mutilation cases. Since the daughter reports having seen nothing, Mulder interprets this as a "time loss", similar also to that of alien abduction cases. This is the direction in which things are going, when another murder takes place in San Francisco – under identical circumstances. When Mulder and Scully investigate this one, they find that this victim also has a daughter, who is identical to the daughter of the first victim.

There are a number of twists and turns in the course of this case, but it eventually turns out that the two girls are the second-generation progeny of a woman 'created' in secret US government eugenics experiments that took place at the beginning of the Cold War. The experiments created children with strong psychological connections to one another – and also with deep psychoses. The earlier woman – named 'Eve' – used her job as a fertility doctor to inseminate couples with her own created embryos, leading to the births of identical children on opposite sides of the country – but children who somehow already know of each other's existence.

This is all very eerie and effective, until the final act, when Mulder and Scully are taking the two girls to where they can be treated or observed or some such thing. The girls are planning to kill Mulder and Scully, and their plan is to poison their soft drinks with digitalis, the same poison they had used on their own fathers. The script establishes that the poison has a very sweet flavor, so it's maddening when Mulder and Scully both comment on how sweet their drinks taste but don't put two and two together. Mulder figures things out, though, when he realizes he'd left his car keys on the counter of the truck stop where they'd bought their drinks. He goes back in, grabs his keys, and finds a couple drops of the poison right there on the counter. This whole scene is just awfully done. The rest of the episode is very good; I can't believe the writers (Kenneth Biller and Christopher Brancato) couldn't come up with a better way to have Mulder or Scully figure things out.

My only other quibble is the show's apparent growing reliance on the Deep Throat character to show up and provide an infodump at some point. Mulder always seems to have his source of information that jump-starts his investigations.

Nevertheless, the episode has a nicely chilling premise, its first three acts have enough shifts that we don't know what's going on, and the last scene is one of those niftily eerie ways The X-Files had of ending things on a note of non-resolution. It's a very good episode that is mainly marred by some deus ex machina in the end.

X-Files Case Report: "Fallen Angel"

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X-Files Case Report: "Space"

It's a bit of lore in UFO circles that astronauts saw strange things outside their spaceships during their flights in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days, although – of course – nothing really "official" has ever come of it. This is the basis for "Space", which is a kind of odd-feeling episode. In one way it feels overstuffed, and in another way it feels undercooked. I'm not really sure what to think of this episode, except to note that it's the first real misfire of the series.

The teaser sequence opens in the 1970s as the first images of the Viking Mars Lander come back, revealing fascinating stuff about Mars such as the oft-cited "Face on Mars", a mountain that is said to look like a sculpted humanoid face. (Of course, the official explanation by NASA and most scientists is that the mountain is a natural formation that bears little, if any, actual resemblance to a face and is only similar to it in the Viking survey photos owing to issues of light and resolution limitations in the camera. But of course, that's exactly what they'd want you to think, isn't it!)

Cut to the "present day" (meaning, 1993), when one of the early astronauts is now running Mission Control in Houston. And there's something weird about this guy, in the way his face seems to shift when he is alone in his hotel room, shifting so it looks like the Face on Mars. He flashes back to his spacewalk during a Gemini mission, a spacewalk during which he reported something coming straight at him. Will this thing rear its ugly head now, during a space shuttle mission? Naturally!

But even so, this episode's approach toward the paranormal element is kind of odd. It's understated to the point where Mulder doesn't even really hypothesize about something "possessing" this astronaut hero of his until the very end of the episode; during much of the show, Mulder and Scully are mainly doing actual FBI-type investigating.

I really don't have much to say, ultimately, about "Space", because...well, it's not that good of an episode. Nor is it really a bad one, either; it's the first one I've watched in this project that feels to me like a filler episode. Oh well; you can't win 'em all.

X-Files Case Report: "Ice"

"We are not who we are."

Back when I was watching X-Files episodes on VHS releases that only included six episodes from each half-season, the episodes in those packages were chosen for either story (being part of the mytharc) or quality (being judged by the producers as particularly good). "Ice" was one of those episodes in the first set of tapes, and it's a very memorable episode indeed, even if it too ends up being pretty derivative of an earlier film, in this case John Carpenter's The Thing.

We open at an ice core research station way up in the Arctic, on a glacier-bound spit of land on the north coast of Alaska. Everyone in the station is dead, save two men, who are beaten and bloodied; these two end up with their guns trained on one another – before they each lower their guns. And then, still staring at each other, they both lift their guns to their own temples. Cut to an outside shot of the station, as we hear the two gunshots. After the titles, Mulder and Scully are sent with a doctor, a biologist and a geologist to find out what happened to the expedition. What drove the original group of scientists to kill one another? And whatever that may be, is it still there?

Well, this is The X-Files, so we already know that the answer to that second question is going to be "yes". What results is a finely-crafted episode that follows the tried-and-true formula of locking our heroes in a small place, secluded from any possibility of rescue, and then giving them reasons to not trust one another.

It turns out that the scientists there had been drilling ice core samples from the glacier, which turns out to be on top of a meteor impact crater, and that something was in the ice: a worm-like parasite that invades a host and then causes it to become paranoid and aggressive. This thing got into the scientists and drove them to kill one another, and of course it's still alive and kicking. This is made quite clear by the infection of the seaplane pilot who flew our heroes up there in the first place, when he is bitten by the dog who is the only remaining living thing in the station. Thus the episode plays out as "Who is infected, and who isn't? Who can be trusted to still be themselves, and who cannot?"

"Ice" was written by James Wong and Glen Morgan, a duo who were behind a lot of the best X-Files episodes of the first few seasons, and who went on to be the main force behind the second season of Millennium and the creators of the Final Destination series of horror films, among other things. Their work is marked by excellent character writing and snappy dialog, and they manage to create just the right air of distrust among the principals, even between Mulder and Scully. Notable also is the episode's supporting cast, featuring teevee stalwarts Xander Berkeley, Felicity Huffman, and Steve Hytner (later Banya on Seinfeld).

"Ice" is a terrific episode, one of the best of the first season and of the show's early run.

X-Files Case Report: "Ghost in the Machine"

"The machine's a monster, Scully! It's already killed two people."

Looking back on some of these early episodes, it's surprising to me to see how derivative some of these shows were of other, earlier stories from movies and teevee. "Ghost in the Machine" gives us a computer run amok, a computer that's been given so much authority and sensory input that it achieves sentience and acts in self-defense. Our main villain here is the COS, or "Central Operating System", but while watching this episode, I kept thinking back to earlier computer villains: the Master Control Program (MCP) from Tron, HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the M5 from Star Trek's original series episode "The Ultimate Computer".

This episode is pretty straightforward, then, and there's really not even any ambiguity in the way it unfolds, so we're not even watching the mystery unfold for ourselves as Mulder and Scully investigate things. We know, right from the teaser, that it's the computer that's doing it all, and the rest of the episode is mainly waiting for Mulder and Scully to get there, too.

It's not a waste of an episode, by any means. The production values are typically excellent, although the episode does, by virtue of its subject matter, seem a lot more dated than some of the other episodes I've already watched. This was still the age of computers being gigantic machines in rooms, with lots of blinking lights for no reason; the word "Internet" isn't mentioned at all. Mulder's informant, Deep Throat, shows up to add some helpful paranoia about the government's interest in a computer that can defend itself, which is really when the episode starts to become more than simply a boilerplate story of technology gone haywire.

The other notable aspect of the episode is the introduction (and fairly quick dispatching) of one of Mulder's old partners, a guy who has fallen on hard times in the FBI – not unlike Mulder himself – but for different reasons. There's an interesting dynamic between these two characters, and it's a shame that the writers basically introduced this guy to provide a personal connection for Mulder's involvement in the case later on when he gets killed off.

Sorry to make this entry so short, but I'm really hard-pressed to come up with anything much to say about this episode. It's just kind of "there".

X-Files Case Report: "Shadows"

"I'd say you people already suffer from full denial." (Agent Mulder)

The X-Files was so much more than aliens and government conspiracies; it actually drew on just about every occult phenomenon it could find over the course of its run. Here we have a good, old-fashioned ghost story.

A businessman named Howard Graves has committed suicide, leaving his trusted assistant, a woman named Lauren, to clean out his office. As she leaves, though, a desktop memento suddenly moves, and she turns back to see it in a different spot than where she left it. Not thinking much of this, she takes it with her. Cut to later, when she stops at an ATM on her way home. She is jumped by a couple of hoodlums who drag her, screaming, into an alley. Cut to still two hours later, when two young people come along, looking for a place to "crash", when they find the bodies of the hoodlums. The men were killed by having their throats crushed from the inside, and they've been exposed to so much electrostatic electricity that even though they've been dead for six hours, their bodies are still twitching on the slab and their tissue hasn't even started to cool.

Mulder and Scully get wind of this when they are brought in to consult by a pair of taciturn NSA agents (or CIA or some other shadow government group). When they share no information with our FBI heroes, Mulder speculates that they are involved because the case shows earmarks of psychokinesis. They begin to suspect that Lauren is somehow psychokinetic, but it gradually turns out that it's really Howard Graves's ghost that is behind everything.

A fairly standard story plays out: Graves, it turns out, was actually murdered by the business partner who claims to have loved him like a brother, and Graves felt a father-like devotion to Lauren, owing to his having lost a three-year-old daughter years before who would have been Lauren's age in the present day. Howard Graves has not left this mortal coil because he still has work to do.

This tale, of course, is somewhat strongly reminiscent of the movie Ghost, which had come out a few years earlier. It's a nicely done episode, mostly interesting for the performance of Lisa Waltz as Lauren, for some nicely brisk writing, and for the fact that the show seems to be going in one direction at first (psychokinesis) but actually turns into something else (ghosts). It's also interesting in that Scully's skepticism is dialed back a bit, and at the end she seems quite accepting of the ghost story.

Finally, this episode continues to demonstrate just how the world has evolved in less than twenty years since it originally aired. When Mulder and Scully must look for information on Howard Graves, they aren't able to just Google the guy; Scully has to spend quality time with a microfiche machine, manually searching through newspaper archives for a mention of the guy. Shadows aired about eighteen years ago; eighteen years before that, I suppose Kojak was the norm of teevee police procedurals. The distance between the world depicted in Season One X-Files and Kojak seems a lot closer than the present day and the world of Season One X-Files. I even remember reading commentary on Usenet, back during the first couple of seasons, in which Mulder was made fun of for always having his cell phone with him!

Next up: "Ghost in the Machine".

X-Files Case Report: "The Jersey Devil"

"Unlike you, Mulder, I would like to have a life."

As I wrote in the intro to this series, I didn't become a regular viewer of The X-Files until the show was in its third season, so there are a lot of episodes from seasons 1, 2, and 3 that I have never seen. That's one primary motivation for doing this series in the first place, now that we live in a time when watching old episodes of shows that we may have missed is one of the easiest things in the world to do. I remember how it wasn't always thus; watching reruns of Star Trek as a kid, on an independent teevee station, meant that I could go quite some time without seeing a particular episode – and, in fact, there actually is one episode of Star Trek: The Original Series that I have not seen, to this very day. (It's "Dagger of the Mind".)

So, the fifth episode of The X-Files is the earliest in the series that I have never seen. "The Jersey Devil" is a pure "monster of the week" tale: there are no hints of government conspiracies or alien abductions here. Instead, we have some kind of wild thing on the loose in the woods outside Atlantic City, NJ. We first see this thing in the teaser sequence, set in the 1950s; a family is driving at night on a back road to Atlantic City, when they get a flat tire. The father is jacking up the car, says something to his wife, and while he's in midsentence gets violently yanked into the woods where he is partially eaten. Cut to the present day, when something is preying on homeless people in the back streets of Atlantic City.

Mulder, of course, immediately connects the dots between the current murders and the case from 1950-something, and immediately postulates the existence of something called the Jersey Devil, which is apparently some kind of cannabalistic beastie living in the Jersey woods and preying on people. Eventually it turns out that the current Devil is a descendent of the one from the 1950s, and is actually a female.

Along the way, Mulder ends up annoying the local police, as he so often does. This leads to a typically X-Files-ish ending as the police are intent on doing one thing, Mulder is intent on doing another, and as often happens, Mulder ends up deeply disappointed.

There's really not a whole lot to say about this episode. Part of the reason is that the show's mystery is short-changed by quite a bit of screentime devoted to Mulder and Scully's personal lives – that is, Scully's desire for a normal personal life and Mulder's lack of awareness that there even is such a thing. Scully goes to a friend's kid's birthday party; she goes on a date with some guy. The date is predictably interrupted by the waiter who comes over and says, "Agent Scully, you have a phone call." Guess who it is. (This was the early 90s, when the only person on teevee who obsessively used a cell phone was Fox Mulder himself.) At this point in my rewatch, I'm wondering how soon the show will reach the point where we stop hearing so much about their personal lives.

This episode is basically OK – not great, not bad. It's the first "meh" installment of the series. The next one up is "Shadows".

X-Files Case Report: "Conduit"

"I want to believe."

At this point in the series, we've already seen the poster in Mulder's office that would become one of the iconic props of The X-Files, the one with the flying saucer on it and the slogan in big letters at the top. That poster always struck me as slightly odd, in the context of Mulder's office: it states "I want to believe", but as is very clear from the outset of the series, Mulder already does believe. But it turns out there's one thing that Mulder isn't sure he believes or not, a thing which is one of the most important aspects of his character. It is whether or not his sister is still alive and will one day come back to him.

"Conduit", our fourth episode, is the second to deal with alien abduction as its subject. Here, though – quite strikingly, as in comparison with the pilot – it's not nearly as clear, from the way the episode frames its events for the viewer, that abduction is really what's happened. There are odd things that happen, to be sure, things that probably can't be explained without resorting to alien abduction hypotheses, but at the same time, we don't see strange beings carrying out abductions, as we do in the pilot. The evidence is much more circumstantial, which makes for a generally creepier episode.

The story takes place in Iowa, where a family is camping beside a lake when there are bright lights, loud sounds, and sudden enormous heat. When the effects subside, the teenage daughter is missing, and the young son has started to show some very strange signs of having been, well, messed with a bit. For one thing, he is spending hours in front of a teevee that is tuned to no channel, claiming to be receiving signals from the television, which he is translating as sheet after sheet after sheet of paper of 1s and 0s. It turns out that the 1s and 0s encapsulate almost totally random pieces of data and information – bits of music, detail from Da Vinci drawings, and the like – and the sheets of binary also turn out to be something else, in one of the episode's best "surprise" moments. All this leads Mulder to suppose that the boy is a "conduit", being used by aliens for some purpose.

Of course, Mulder believes that the girl has been abducted by aliens, and of course Scully is unwilling to commit to that hypothesis with the evidence at hand. The missing girl is a juvenile delinquent, and she has been known to hang out with a local biker gang, leading most people to suppose that she has simply run off with them. Things take a dark turn, however, when the girl's boyfriend's body turns up, and when NSA agents turn up, claiming that the boy has somehow gotten hold of classified information.

Mulder is particularly driven in this episode, insisting on continuing the investigation into the girl's disappearance when all evidence seems to have run dry. His motivation is quickly made clear, as this episode begins to flesh out the great driving force behind Mulder's work: the abduction of his sister when he was a child. The episode ends with Scully listening to a tape of a hypnotic therapy session Mulder once underwent, which concludes with the interviewer asking Mulder if he believes that his sister, Samantha, is alive and will come back; Mulder replies, as the final credits begin, "I want to believe."

This episode is very well written and directed – the production values of even the early episodes of The X-Files are superb – but I did find the episode marred by something that probably wasn't its fault. The first five seasons of The X-Files were filmed in the Vancouver, with locales around that city doubling for whatever locale the episodes were set in. Usually this worked out fine, but there were times when it really didn't. Now, I don't expect that Lake Okoboji will be familiar to anyone who doesn't have some kind of connection to Iowa, but it amused me – and, unfortunately, undermined the episode a bit for me – to see Iowa's Lake Okoboji stood in for by a Vancouver-area lake, surrounded by very tall pines and hills higher than you'll find pretty much anywhere in Corn-belt Iowa. This had the effect of ejecting me from the story a bit, but I'm not sure what the producers really should have done – made up a different locale, perhaps.

The next episode will be the first of a bunch from Season One that I have never seen before. We'll see what happens. I, too, want to believe!

X-Files Case Report: "Squeeze"

On the trail of a killer, Mulder and Scully find, in an abandoned building, a giant nest made of old newspaper scraps and bound together by some kind of fluid that Mulder reaches out and touches.

SCULLY: I think it's...bile!

MULDER: Is there any way I can get it off my fingers without betraying my cool exterior?

For the most part, episodes of The X-Files can be grouped into three categories. The first two episodes, the pilot and "Deep Throat", were also the first two episodes in the "Mytharc" category. That's short for "mythology arc", and it is those episodes which tell the serialized story that takes place over the entire run of the series. One of the other two categories hasn't shown up yet, and I'm not sure when its first appearance is, so we'll hold that one – which I call "Creepy Comedies" – in abeyance. The third category, though, makes its first appearance here, in the third episode of the series. These are the "Monster of the Week" episodes: self-contained stories that don't advance the overall storyline of the show, but instead pit Mulder and Scully against...well, monsters. You can't have a SF/horror show without monsters, can you?

Now, I should point out that those categories aren't hard-and-fast; there are "Monster of the Week" episodes that are also "Creepy Comedies", and there are overlaps the other way as well. The categories would become more clearly marked in later seasons, when the big Mytharc episodes would be saved for the beginning and ends of the season and the sweeps periods in between, with everything else mostly being MotW's or CC's. In the first few seasons, however, things were much more of a free-for-all. (I tend to think that's one reason why the show's mytharc in general became harder and harder to follow, but we'll address that as we go, I suppose.)

"Squeeze" introduces us to a particularly nasty killer whose MO is to somehow enter dwellings or offices, violently murder the occupant and rip out their liver, and then depart again without leaving any trace of entrance or exit. That is, any normal trace of entrance or exit. He's got to get in and out somehow, and Agent Mulder will be the one to figure it out, much to the chagrin of fellow FBI agents who view him as a total crackpot who isn't even worth having around on standard investigations (which this turns out to not be). Mulder's tendency to odd theories leads him to look for evidence where no one else even thinks to look, which then leads him to discover that the current killer's fingerprints are identical to those of a killer from a series of similar crimes thirty years ago...and thirty years before that...and thirty years before that.

However, the FBI agents in charge of this case don't want to hear any of this, and for his troubles, Mulder endures a lot of mocking as he pursues the investigation in his own way. Scully's loyalties are challenged as she is presented with an opportunity to further her career and steer herself back into a more "normal" path up the FBI ladder, as opposed to "wasting her time" following Spooky Mulder on his wild alien chases. I suppose it's no surprise which path she chooses, in the end, especially when in a bit of spite the other FBI guy (whom she knew from FBI school) torpedoes Mulder's stakeout of the real killer.

As for the killer himself, Eugene Victor Tooms is one of the series's creepier creations. He is clearly not insane, but he is terribly, terribly dangerous. Tooms hibernates for thirty years, and when he awakens, he must find sustenance – by consuming human livers. And there's something about his skeleton and his musculature that allows him to contort his body in ways that allow him to crawl through ducts and chimneys that are barely big enough for a large cat. Tooms's serene expression when being questioned is chilling, as is the way he smiles at episode's end as he looks at the tiny slot on his asylum door through which his guards put his meals.

This episode establishes to a great degree how sceptically Mulder is viewed by the rest of the FBI, and not for the last time is Scully put in the position of having to choose between expediting her rise in the Bureau and sticking with Mulder in his bizarre investigations and crazy theories. Those decisions get easier as the series goes by, but early on, the show does a very good job of showing that Scully is seriously thinking about these things. She doesn't know Mulder well enough, yet.

Eugene Victor Tooms would return later in the season, in the episode "Tooms". We'll get to that one soon enough, but for now, "Squeeze" is another early high-point in the series's run.

X-Files Case Report: "Deep Throat"

"Mr. Mulder, why are those like yourself who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on this Earth not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary?"

"Because...all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive."

"Precisely."

"They're here, aren't they?"

"Mr. Mulder, they've been here for a long, long time."

That exchange comes at the end of "Deep Throat", the second episode of The X-Files. Even more than the Pilot, "Deep Throat" establishes a lot of the groundwork for what is to come over the course of the series. More tropes are introduced: Government secrecy and conspiracies; government collusion with apparent alien visitors; shadowy governmental agencies which are apparently above the law; the continual failure of Agents Mulder and Scully to come away from their investigations with any proof at all of what they know to be the case. And most importantly – indicated by the title of the episode – the establishment of an inside source of information who will be Mulder's confidant and informant, but who may or may not be on Mulder's side.

This story takes place mainly in an Idaho town near an Air Force Base that does not appear on any maps, due to the secretive nature of its work. A pilot there has turned up at home, cowering in the corner and covered with terrible rashes and skin lesions. The Air Force takes him into custody, and holds on to him for several months, telling his family nothing at all of his whereabouts or status. Somehow Mulder gets wind of this and tells Scully that "we're heading to the Spud State to investigate a little kidnapping." When Scully asks why Mulder is interested in an apparent kidnapping with no "paranormal" element, Mulder replies, "This case has a smell to it. A certain 'paranormal bouquet'."

But before leaving for Idaho, Mulder is confronted by a dark-suited man who tries to warn him off the case and tells him that he can give Mulder information when it is in his best interest to do so. We'll never learn this man's name; we will only know him as "Deep Throat" (which I don't recall anyone in the show actually calling him). This, too, will be something of a meme throughout the show's run: people telling Mulder things in sufficiently vague terms that he doesn't really have a great deal of choice to make.

Off go Mulder and Scully to Idaho, where they learn that experimental aircraft are being tested – but the aircraft are capable of speeds and maneuvers impossible in current aeronautical technology, which leads Mulder to hypothesize that the government is working on technology gleaned from the UFO that crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 (the Air Force base in the episode being one of the places to which wreckage of that craft was taken). Suddenly the missing pilot is returned to his family, but he seems very strange now, oddly passive and childlike, and he can't remember anything. Mulder thinks he has had memories erased, but Scully thinks that's impossible; more likely, the strange pilots up there are the washouts of a testing program who couldn't handle the stress.

Anyway, our two agents meet a couple of teenagers (one of whom is played by a young Seth Green) who like to sneak onto the AFB grounds and watch the test flights (which happen at night), which of course leads Mulder to do the same...only he gets caught, after seeing one of the aircraft up close and personal. Mulder's whisked away by men who are doing something medical to him. Meanwhile, Scully is on her own and has to figure out how to get Mulder back, which she finally does – only to discover that he has no memory of the last twelve hours. They return to Washington, with Scully indicating in her field report the completely inconclusive nature of their investigation. Mulder, meanwhile, meets again with his new informant. The exchange above closes out the show.

"Deep Throat" is a fine, fine episode, and in retrospect, it's probably one of the most important in the series's run. It establishes so much of the dynamic that would later dominate the show's developing mythology, especially the knack Mulder has for being right while never being able to come up with any evidence. I also like how Mulder and Scully are still at odds quite a bit of the time, with the trust between them still not there and with Scully basically approaching her assignment to the X-files with professionalism but also with skepticism bordering on conviction that all of it is complete BS.

This episode also establishes the high level of production values that were a key part of the success of The X-Files. Many shots are downright cinematic in nature, as is the way the showrunners are able to shoot around the Vancouver area in ways that double for the less-mountainous areas of Idaho. I also liked the framing of the episode's final scene, in which Mulder is jogging on a college track when Deep Throat comes to visit him; there is a nice combination of long shots and close-ups that makes the scene nice to look at. The X-Files is often credited with bringing cinematic production values to television, and it's easy to see this influence in this episode.

So, what is to come? The truth, after all, is out there!

(Oh, this was also the first episode to use the show's signature titles sequence, complete with Mark Snow's distinctive X-Files Theme and the "Truth is out there" tag line. The pilot's credits had simply run over the opening scene, after the teaser.)

X-Files Case Report: "Pilot"

So I've decided to embark on something of a long-term project here: rewatching The X-Files. I'd like to rewatch the entire series, start to finish, series pilot to final episode of Season Nine, with the first movie (Fight the Future) thrown in between Seasons Five and Six, and culminating in the movie from a couple of years ago (which I still haven't seen). Obviously this will take a while, and while I'm not going to try to do this on a weekly basis, I'm hoping for at least two or three of these a month. Maybe more, when I watch them in clusters, as may well happen.

Why? Well, why not? Among the blogs I follow which focus on F/SF/H stuff, rewatches of movies and teevee series and re-reads of books and book series are always in vogue, and right now, nobody that I follow is doing an X-Files rewatch, which gives me a niche. This also gives me a longterm source of content (always nice), and it gives me an excuse to revisit a show that was once beloved to me.

Don't get me wrong, there: as far as I know, I still love The X-Files. The show was an iron-clad, "can't miss it" event at Casa Jaquandor for most of its run. But with relatively few exceptions, I only saw the episodes a single time each, upon their initial airings; and there are quite a few episodes from the first three seasons that I've never seen. I'm interested now, seventeen years after Season One, partly in how well the show has aged. We'll see!

My fandom of The X-Files was slow to blossom. I was only dimly aware of the show's existence for most of the first season. In fact, this was back when FOX was still a fairly fledgling network with only a couple of notable shows to its name (The Simpsons, Married With Children), and if I remember correctly, back then, FOX didn't even have enough shows to put together and entire weekly lineup. (In some ways, FOX still doesn't. There are no 10:00 shows on FOX.) I heard of this show that had FBI agents investigating paranormal stuff, but I didn't watch until my mother, who did watch, recommended the show to me. So I saw a couple of episodes during the first season and came away somewhat favorably impressed, but my attention wasn't grabbed enough to make me a regular viewer until somewhere in the middle of Season Three.

I'm lucky that I came along then, and not later; the show's "mytharc" was still pretty manageable at that point, and a new viewer could pick up the basics pretty quickly. I do remember, though, a special episode that aired sometime toward the end of Season Three that was basically a summation of the show to that point. I found that very helpful, and a short while later, the show's popularity led to video releases of early episodes. Of course, this was before DVD, so these video releases consisted of sets of VHS tapes with two episodes each, and only selected episodes at that – no complete seasons here, just the most important "mytharc" shows with a few of the better "monster of the week" shows thrown in. Anyway, I was hooked, and I didn't fall by the wayside until Season Nine, which struck me as rudderless, pallid, and just too-much-of-a-good-thing. We'll see what we find as we go, though.

Which brings me to the Pilot Episode. It opens with a teaser sequence, set in the Pacific Northwest, that shows a girl in her nightrobe running through a forest, until she stumbles in a clearing. Here she is met by a human-shaped figure (whose features we cannot see) who is accompanied by a brilliant light; the wind whips up, there is lots of noise, the leaves are blown in circles around them as the light brightens. Cut to twelve hours later, and the girl's body is found in the clearing by the cops, sporting two circular wounds near her backside. The chief ID's the body, noting that she went to school with his son; another cop says, "Class of 1989? It's happening again, isn't it?"

Cut to Washington, DC and the FBI Headquarters, where a beautiful young agent named Dana Scully reports to her superiors for assignment. She is to work alongside another agent, named Fox Mulder, who has been using his time to investigate cases that are outside the official FBI mainstream. These cases, called "the X-files", are the kinds of thing nobody wants anything to do with – except for Agent Mulder, who later suggests that it's only by way of his friends in Congress that he is able to do this work at all. Scully is being assigned for her scientific, skeptical approach; when she asks if she is being expected to debunk Mulder's work, her superiors manage to say Yes and No in that wonderful bureaucratic way of not saying much at all. Off Scully goes to meet Agent Mulder, who has just caught wind of this strange case brewing out in the Pacific Northwest. After some introductions, Mulder briefs Scully on the odd case and the wounds on the bodies (of which there are four), and then they're off to Oregon to do some investigating.

This really is one of the better pilot episodes to a show I've seen. In the space of about five to ten minutes, we get: an intriguing mystery for the first episode; an establishment of a supernatural/paranormal mood; the introduction of our two main characters, both to us and to each other; the establishment of certain tropes within their relationship; the tense conflict between the official FBI and Agent Mulder; and some initial conflict between Mulder and Scully. They would later come to trust each other in the implicit way of two people who are absolute soul-mates, but there is still constant tension between her skepticism and his willingness to take wild leaps in logic in order to press his case. (Oh, and in the first scene in the FBI Headquarters, there's an ominous looking fellow lurking in the background who is always fingering a lit cigarette.)

This first case of theirs also sets up so many of the tropes that would dominate the show for the entirety of its run. Alien abduction. Lost time. Mystery elements that are never able to be conclusively explained because the evidence is somehow destroyed or compromised. Implants of unknown origin. Secret government storehouses where old evidence is squirreled away, never to be seriously investigated again. Autopsies of mysteriously deceased persons, and autopsies of mysteriously deceased things that may or may not be persons. Locals who are unwilling to talk to the two FBI agents, and the one local who is. The fact that Agent Mulder is haunted by the disappearance/abduction of his sister. And the solving of the mystery in an unfulfilling way that leaves Scully nothing to report on.

I also noticed that the show's look that would dominate the first five seasons – dark, cloudy, foreboding, often raining – is in full effect here, as is the moody synth-driven music by Mark Snow (minus the famous main theme, which wouldn't arrive until the second episode). I was surprised, watching the Pilot episode again, to see just how much of the show's eventual theme and feel was present right there from the beginning. Everything except The Truth being Out There. But don't worry – it is. Oh yes.

(Oh, and I promise not to make this series into one long love-letter to Gillian Anderson. But I had no recollection of the pilot featuring a scene with her in her underwear...her skin lit only by the light of a single burning candle....)