CARTER, Chris (Creator), “The X-Files – Season 1”, Ten Thirteen Inc./Twentieth Century Fox Television, 2001-2002.
I
spent some time at home alone the other week and I developed a sudden urge to
re-live the adventures of one of the X-Files’s best villains – Eugene
Tooms. Entering this rabbit hole meant taking a few stabs at the assembled
material because, while I always remember that there’s a Tooms episode entitled
“Tooms”, I always forget what the first episode in which he appears is
called. I always know that it’s a fairly early episode, but there’s another
story called “Conduit” – a likely contender for the title of a story about
a villain who can slide through pipes - on the first disc which always throws
me off. Long story short, I ended up watching the whole first season. Perhaps
after this I won’t forget where to look in future!
Running
through the material assembled on the DVD set, it’s interesting to note how
this series took off and how it learned to walk after its initial crawling
phase. As seen in the most recent iterations of this show, Chris Carter and
crowd are sentimentalists about TV, especially the type of programming that
predominated from the 60s into the 80s, and their tendency to crib from that
source in regard to everything from actors to storylines starts to be revealed
by walking down this particular memory lane. It’s clear that Carter had a solid
vision of what he wanted this show to do, and that vision is a strong framework
which propelled this series into the phenomenon that it later became.
There
are low points, however, although most of these boil down to personal taste.
For me, I can do without the so-called “Mythology Episodes”, recognizing of
course that much of the over-arching tension of the series and the
inter-character strife depends directly upon this element. There’s a lot of “Monster-of-the-Week”
(MOTW) type stuff going on as well that, uniquely in these early stages, falls
flat and never gets re-visited, causing some head-scratching in later seasons.
A feature of strong television shows is their ability to reintegrate past
material and to generate story from such revisiting; many opportunities for
such growth get seeded here and are – with the weird exception of Tooms – never
followed up.
Many
of these first season episodes are peppered with the daily minutiae of
Mulder and Scully’s (especially Scully’s) workaday routine – signing vehicles
out of the car-pool, collaborating with old associates, inter-office politics,
etc. Later seasons dispense with this stuff entirely, short-cutting it for
brevity’s sake, which tends to sever the show loose from its moorings, from my
perspective at least, and elevate the main characters out of the real world in
which they’re supposed to be grounded. Fortunately, at this early stage, Carter’s
cringeworthy fascination with Nazism is not so blatantly on display – a
definite plus.
I
didn’t watch these episodes in any particular order – I watched the Tooms stuff
and then cherry-picked my way through the rest, until – once I’d decided for
sure that I was going the see them all – I’d ticked them all off. In reviewing
them though, I’ll take them disc-by-disc:
Disc
One:
We kick things off (“Pilot”) with what will later become a by-the-book abduction scenario for our Filers of X. Scully gets dragged from her cozy position at Quantico to become a watch-dog for Mulder’s activities and they head out to Oregon in an uneasy alliance. The first mission sees aliens and shady government operatives enabling the abductions of teenagers and the ensuing cover-up of that activity, involving the replacing of buried bodies with ring-in simians. Our dynamic duo is harried and harassed, their hotel rooms burned to destroy evidence, and with local officials warning them off. Much is speculated upon and much is learned with Mulder becoming increasing annoying due to his unwillingness to share what he knows with his new partner.
In
episode two – “Deep Throat” – Mulder is directed by his eponymous
informant to check out the goings-on at an air force base in Idaho. Initially,
the duo is called in by a concerned housewife whose air force pilot husband
went missing and then re-appears in a state much worse for wear, leading her to
suspect military shenanigans. Mulder, of course, jumps to the conclusion that
the air force is test-driving new aircraft, modified from captured alien tech,
at which notion Scully just rolls her eyes. Siding with local bored teenagers
to gain access to the base (Seth Green in an early pre-“Buffy” role),
Mulder gets captured by the authorities and Scully dances a delicate two-step
to have him relinquished. In the end, nothing definitive is learned and even
the housewife backs away from her “I demand answers!” stance. It’s interesting
to note that Jerry Hardin who plays Deep Throat is very similar in appearance
to Darren McGavin of “Kolchak: Night Stalker” fame, Carter’s
self-professed inspiration for much of the “X-Files”.
Next
comes “Squeeze”. This is the first Eugene Tooms episode and is the title
I always get wrong. Dragged to a crime scene where the murderer’s point of
access is a complete conundrum, Scully’s bemusement is undercut by Mulder’s
awareness that clusters of five similar deaths have been taking place at
30-year intervals since the start of the century. In another nod to the “Night
Stalker”, the duo is directed to a retired police officer who had a
personal interest in the case, and they begin to unravel the mystery of an
immortal mutant human who can slide through tiny spaces and who hibernates for
30-year intervals emerging to devour the livers of five randomly-chosen
individuals. Our heroes track Eugene down but are stymied by the fact that
no-one is going to get behind their ‘crackpot’ theory concerning Tooms’s
uncanny abilities. Tooms gets locked away before he can chow down on his
crucial fifth organ, and we’re left with a cliffhanger indication that a jail
is no place that can hold a guy who can slide between bars…
“Conduit” plumbs some more UFO lore (specifically, the events surrounding Falcon Lake in Manitoba, which took place starting around 1967) to retail a
story about people being abducted by aliens from campgrounds on Lake Okobogee
near Sioux City in Iowa. Scully is advised that Mulder has requested travel
expenses for a trip to Sioux City based upon a tabloid article about a missing
girl and it is revealed to her that Mulder believes his sister to have been
similarly abducted. For my money, this is the absolute worst thing they
could have introduced to Mulder’s backstory, because it becomes a useless
pain-in-the-backside from this point onwards. Anyway, the girl goes missing,
her much younger brother starts channeling UFO chatter through television
static (alarming the government flunkies), and the kids’ mother goes from
helpful to interfering as the (unseen) Men in Black go about their business in
the shadows. We’re left with Mulder quietly sobbing in a church over a picture
of his sister Samantha, an image which is about as trite as it is possible to
conjure.
In
these first four episodes, we see shady government intrusion in a ‘boots on the
ground’ fashion that we’ll never see again. The
Government-within-the-Government has operatives everywhere, shutting down
Scully and Mulder with ham-fisted abandon: rooms are torched; witnesses are
coerced; local pillars of the community turn out to be paid enforcers. It’s
refreshing and believable, but it all gets junked as the popularity of the
series evolves. It’s interesting too to see the nuts-and-bolts of the agents’
daily lives (even if that shot of Scully wandering through the partitioned
office space gets used more than once), since it grounds them in a
quasi-reality quite distinct from the other-worldly superstar status they
assume later on. For my money, they should have brought back Fran from the
carpool, or at least given her some lines and screentime.
Disc
Two:
The guy who gets killed and eaten in the pre-credit sequence of this next episode (“The Jersey Devil”) is the same guy who dies of an embolism from “straining too forcefully” while on the toilet during the later season story “War of the Coprophages”. He shows up elsewhere in the X-world also, but I’m always reminded of that ignominious death every time I clap eyes on him. Still, he’s doing his bit for public health, I guess. Anyway, blink and you’ll miss him here, he gets partially-devoured by the Jersey Devil in the early 50s and photos of his corpse fire Mulder’s investigation in the present era. Of course, Mulder’s probing of the matter is found to be objectionable to the Sherriff’s Office in Atlantic City and he gets walloped and thrown in jail for his pains. He then bands together with other local experts and almost finds undeniable proof of the creature’s existence before the irascible Sherriff shuts him down. And where is Scully in all of this? Hosting children’s parties and going on blind dates arranged by her sister. As you do.
“Shadows” was a story cobbled together after network
heavies insisted that Scully and Mulder be seen to be helping “ordinary
people”. This episode involves a company doing shady business deals with
Islamic terrorists: one joint-CEO commits apparent suicide, and his devoted
secretary starts receiving supernatural assistance against those intending to
do her harm. Called in when two muggers are found dead in an alley from strange
causes, Scully and Mulder trace the goings-on back to the secretary and unearth
the conspiracy with ghostly assistance. As tales go, it’s alright, however the
secretary is one of the most unsympathetic characters that the “X-Files”
has ever coughed up.
In
1995, author Philip Kerr released a novel called Gridiron, about a
hi-tech building that gains Artificial Intelligence and starts playing with its
occupants in the fashion of a video game. This “X-Files” episode - “Ghost in the Machine” - lifts that
concept in its entirety and runs with it here as a Monster-of-the-Week
narrative, adding some connective tissue to weave it into the world of Scully
and Mulder. If you’ve read the book, you’ve seen this instalment; I’ve done
both. Neither is much chop.
In
each successive season of the “X-Files”, it became routine to take the
X-Filers out of their comfort zone – a range of homogeneously-anonymized
Canadian towns masquerading as places in the US – and dump them in extreme and
remote locales – also, for the most part, in Canada. This story – “Ice”
– is supposed to take place in the northern fastnesses of Alaska, where a team
of geologists researching Arctic ice core samples has come to grief. Channeling
“The Thing” as hard as it can, our heroes identify, thwart and contain
an alien virus released from the permafrost and save the day, despite the
director of the episode telling them to act as manic and unhinged as possible. Not
a great moment for Scully and Mulder, but okay for their first ‘away game’.
In
these four stories we see that the producers of the show were maybe not so
confidant that their vision would be embraced by the viewership. These tales crib
so madly from all kinds of well-established sources – “Poltergeist”; “The
Thing from Another World” (aka. “Who Goes There?”); “2001: A
Space Odyssey” (by way of Gridiron) – that there’s an air of desperately
trying to soothe TV heavyweights informing the atmosphere. It must have seemed
to Carter and Crew at the time that television audiences weren’t as receptive
to their sourcing from the urban legend motherlode as they would have liked.
They shouldn’t have worried… Things of note: we spent a bunch of time trying to
fathom Scully’s social life in these few stories and we also saw the start of some
inter-jurisdictional pissing contests which arise conveniently now and then as
the needs of the stories demand. The genius programmer from “Ghost” – as
obnoxious as he was – was allowed to drift away into oblivion, where he might
well have been a useful contact to be unearthed in later seasons. That episode
as well, saw right inside the shadowy government conspiracy, giving us a few
moments with the ‘bad guys’ as they reviewed their encounter with Mulder –
something that happens less and less as time goes on.
Disc
Three:
This is one of those moments when something that seems cool - some feature of the zeitgeist – spurs a kooky X-story that pops like a party balloon in the light of subsequent examination. In “Space”, Scully and Mulder are brought in on an investigation of sabotage in the NASA space shuttle program by one of the technical support crew. It transpires that the former astronaut head of the program is being possessed by a ‘space ghost’ which he encountered while he was out space-walking, and which he inadvertently brought back down to Earth with him. There is a preponderance of imagery riffing off the infamous “Face on Mars” which nowadays – with much better, high definition camerawork – has become a case of myopic wishful thinking of the Hubble variety, and it makes this episode completely un-watchable nowadays, quite apart from the confused and rambling unfolding of the tortured storyline.
In
“Fallen Angel” Mulder gets a 24-hour window to investigate what seems to
be the case of a crash-landed UFO. Dodging military ‘husher-uppers’ loaded for
bear, he sneaks past the perimeter sentries and begins poking about.
Inevitably, he gets caught and Scully is sent out to drag his sorry arse back
to Washington; but he changes tack, encounters an amateur UFO investigator in
the inevitable aluminium caravan, and becomes the target for the crash-landed
alien, to the military’s further annoyance. It’s clear that this maudlin NICAP fellow,
Max (along with the “Ghost in the Machine” programmer), was the
prototype of what would later become the introduction of the Lone Gunmen
characters, and it must have tested positively enough with the punters to green-light
those characters’ facilitation into the X-World. That being said, however, this
guy is about as pathetic as they come. There’s also an interesting moment of
casual sexism in the story, where the radar operator who spots the incoming UFO
is derided for being ‘just a girl’: we seem to have come a long way since then.
Maybe.
Another
MOTW episode and another lost opportunity for reintegration. In “Eve”, two
young girls on opposite coasts of mainland USA overpower and kill their fathers
in identical gruesome fashion at the same moment in time: Mulder is almost
wetting himself with excitement while Scully tries to deconstruct every theory
he comes up with. It transpires that the girls – codenamed “Eves” – are the
product of Government experiments in eugenics, illegally unleashed into a
private in vitro fertilisation clinic. The girls are super-smart,
psychic and psychotic on top, and try to poison Scully and Mulder in order to
avoid being locked up with others of their kind from earlier experiments. It’s
compelling and intriguing and the entire concept – multiple cloned criminal
masterminds and their hi-tech prison compound – is completely forgotten and
dropped by the X-World from here on in.
Mark
Sheppard, before being Badger on “Firefly” and Crowley in “Supernatural”,
began his TV life as Cecil “Bob” l’Ively, a pyrokinetic firebug in the first
season of the “X-Files”, in the episode entitled “Fire”. This is
an awful episode. It’s nothing to do with the concept, or the performances of
the villain, his victims or of our main cast – it’s completely the wrong-headed
addition of a British Scotland Yard agent with history concerning Fox Mulder
from his days at Oxford University. This contrived romance is truly hideous:
it’s badly performed, poorly constructed and cringeworthy in its execution.
Scully rolls her eyes a lot in this episode and it’s nothing to do with the
possibility of there being a psychic arsonist on the loose. The British agent
drops the ball of this investigation time and again (to the detriment of her
clients) in her vulpine need to sink her claws into Mulder and his reactions
are entirely of the hot-and-cold variety, impelling the viewers to cry, “for
Christ’s sake! Make up your mind!”. The writers also throw in a reference to
Mulder being afraid of fire – something that never gets raised again. Not
recommended.
“Fire” also ends with yet another super-powered
villain locked in a high-security prison facility, being experimented upon by
shadowy powers-that-be. Don’t worry though: along with almost every other
instance of this type of villain, we’ll never have to worry about encountering
them again, more’s the pity. Can you imagine the mayhem that might ensue if
l’Ively, the Eves and Eugene Tooms had all broken out and banded together? An
opportunity lost to my way of thinking…
Throughout
this selection there are further efforts at tinkering with the backstory of our
leads. With “Fire” the die is cast and from now on, Mulder’s past cases
and career path will keep barfing-up rationales for meeting new people and
re-visiting past scenarios, while Scully constantly moves forward from the nest
of her family with very few ghosts of her past life (with some exceptions)
coming back to haunt her. Fox has history and a complex network of connexions;
Dana, generally speaking, doesn’t. That’s what has been decided upon at this point.
Disc
Four:
Now, here is where everything comes together, and we get an “X-Files” episode that’s pure magic. It’s likely that what makes “Beyond the Sea” work is simply the presence of Brad Dourif playing the villain, Boggs; there’re more than a couple of creaky additions to the plot, but his bravura performance really sells it. We get introduced to Scully’s family, especially her father played by Don S. Davis, on loan from “Stargate”. He dies of a heart-attack (ironically) after Christmas dinner at Scully’s place and she is awakened by his ghost appearing to her in her house and trying to impart a message. Later, after the funeral, Scully and Mulder are trying to trace a young couple abducted by a serial killer once affiliated with another violent offender – Boggs – currently on death row. Boggs claims that his first brush with death – he was given a last-minute reprieve – blessed him with psychic powers and that he can lead the FBI to the kidnapper’s lair through visions. Mulder sets a trap, which Boggs falls into, and dismisses him; Scully, however, sees something which leads her to believe that Boggs is the Real McCoy. Boggs’s terror of death is palpable throughout this story and his desperation to try and win a deal almost makes the viewer sympathise with him. There’s enough equivocation to leave Scully’s head spinning as she tries to work out if he’s genuine or not but it’s her last act of absolute cruelty – denying Boggs’s wish that she be a witness at his execution – which has to be the unkindest cut of all.
Two
things bug me about this otherwise excellent instalment. All the way through,
despite the fact that he’s always the first to fall for a conman’s fake
psychic-show moves, Mulder tells Scully she mustn’t fall for Boggs’s patter,
implying that he’s the only one allowed to do that; the second thing is
that, in talking to Mulder about her ghost-dad’s appearance to her at the
moment of his death, Scully blithely says, “visions of the dead by loved ones at
the moment of death are a common psychological phenomenon” to which I say, what
the-? How is this “psychological” and why hasn’t it been completely explained
and de-mystified? ‘Cause to my knowledge, it hasn’t.
In
“Gender Bender”, the X-Filers come across real, gosh-darn’ tootin’
aliens and get completely outfoxed by them. These aliens exist in a small,
reclusive, apparently religious enclave, similar to those of the Amish;
however, they exude pheromones which bend humans to their will and can switch gender
after marathon sex (which kills any human they do it with). One of them goes
rogue and rampages down the eastern seaboard of the US, and the Filers of X set
out on their case. Everything winds up back at the aliens’ home turf where Mulder
splashes through a bunch of mud and Scully gets romanced by one of the police
officers from “Silence of the Lambs” in a funny hat (after which she
throws up). Before arrests can be made (and the actual existence of
aliens cried from the rooftops) the outsiders make some crop circles and
vanish. As with other MOTW beings, these aliens are never heard from again and
they fail to measure up to the producers’ later view of what aliens are
actually like in this series (which, obviously, is why they got sidelined).
Oh, and Nicholas Lea, later to be Mulder’s nemesis Alex Krycek, shows up as the
only one of the rogue alien’s bonk-buddies to stay alive afterwards.
There’s
an interesting sideline to this: in discussing pheromones, our duo skate around
the idea of humans creating them. To be clear: humans do not exude pheromones.
At all. Unlike “Space”, where a higher powered telescope put paid to the
idea that there is any kind of face on Mars, thus destroying the main plank of
the show’s plot, the dialogue here tiptoes around the central notion of the story
and, by a miracle, manages not to fall over into the realm of ludicrousness.
Unfortunately, while cheering this win, the rest of the tale crashes and burns
into a dumpster fire.
In
“Lazarus” there’s a departure: we meet an FBI agent under whom Scully
studied and with whom she conducted a brief affair, thus seeming to destroy my
theory that Scully’s adventures mostly never spring from her past. There’s that
‘mostly’ in there to get me off the hook, however. Here we have two bank
robbers on a spree, being pursued by Scully’s ex-lover who is unaccountably
driven to bring them to justice. In apprehending them during a heist, the
driven agent is shot and Scully kills the robber; during the ensuing paramedic
travails, the consciousnesses of both men switch bodies and the former Agent,
now the revived bank robber, tries to return to his partner and restart their
dangerous crime career. There’s lots of talk of PTSD and over-empathising with
the target of one’s obsessive mission, before diabetes and a vicious betrayal
sees everyone put out of everyone else’s misery. The only real supernatural
touch – a body-hopping tattoo – is completely overlooked by all parties during
the course of the proceedings. Nice touch.
“Young
at Heart” sees yet another
rogue doctor dodging ethics committees and doing whatever they damned well
please in order to pursue a scientific breakthrough. Here it’s experimentation
on victims of progeria – a disease which causes accelerated decrepitude in
children - in an attempt to reverse the effects of aging (somehow). Our doctor
performs illegal surgery on a prison inmate after which he is declared dead,
despite evidence to the contrary provided by another inmate. The supposedly
dead prisoner springs from Mulder’s ever-fertile back-story and turns out to be
the ferocious killer he should have shot when he had the chance, regardless of
the regulations, and who is now Hell-bent on vengeance, starting with Mulder’s
friends. Our villain is cunning and intrepid – also, much younger in appearance,
and therefore harder to spot in a crowd – despite having a salamander’s paw for
a hand. Mulder beats himself up relentlessly over the situation while Scully does
some useful sleuthing and they finally bring the murderer to justice (again).
At
this point we have the second oblique Nazi reference which Carter has chosen to
sneak into the ongoing narrative. The rogue doctor in “Young at Heart”
mentions that his colleagues used to call him “Dr. Mengele”, after the
notoriously sadistic German prison-camp medic. This, along with the eugenics
mentioned in “Eve” is the thin edge of the wedge of Carter’s flirting
with Nazi tropes throughout this series. Here it’s just a casual name-drop;
later, after discussions of Operation Paperclip have entered the narrative, the
gloves come off and you get a solid sense that, sooner or later, Carter will be
dressing up his entire cast in Hugo Boss designed SS-uniforms. And this he does,
before the series concludes.
Disc
Five:
“E.B.E.”, the title of the first episode on Disc Five, stands for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity and Mulder promises to deliver evidence of such a thing to his new chums, the Lone Gunmen. He doesn’t deliver, however, just as this episode also doesn’t deliver any kind of consistent narrative. This is a so-called Mythology Episode and exists merely to provide connective tissue to other similar episodes and to round-out various side characters. Among those characters are Director Skinner and the Smoking Man, Deep Throat and, most importantly, the Lone Gunmen, who are established here for the first time. There’s some waffle about a truck carrying a UFO across the US, Gulf War Syndrome being a side-effect of alien visitation and a lacklustre break-in by the X-Filers of a covert military base which reveals nada. Nothing to see here. Moving on:
I
dislike “Miracle Man” as an episode because to my way of thinking it
trivializes the infiltration of American political life by religious cultism, despite
the oft-declared separation of Church and State. After recent months of
watching the AmeriKKKan Electoral Farce, I had to steel myself in order to jump
into yet another exhibition of religious snake-oil merchandising. This story is
fine, on balance, but it gets muddied by the bizarre Mythology-extending notion
that the after-effects of alien abduction – specifically, the remorse Mulder
feels over the loss of his sister - are things which can be identified and
healed by the Divine Grace of Gentle Jesus (Praise the Lord!). I think not. At
one point, Mulder says outright to the titular miracle man that he’s not going
to get into a fight with him using religious rhetoric and this is exactly my
position with this type of crap also. I always feel like I need a bath after
this kind of thing…
We’ve
skated across half-a-dozen different Fortean tropes by this stage of the
proceedings, so it seems hardly surprising that we’d finally grab onto some
werewolf action. It’s not that clear-cut however: with “Shapes” we take
a dive into Native American mythology and pad around awhile with some
skinwalkers. Springboarding rather obviously off the oft-reported Fortean goings-on
at Skinwalker Ranch, we learn of a rancher fighting a legal dispute over a
boundary line which the tribesfolk claim meanders over into reservation territory.
Scully and Mulder get called in after a native man is shot and killed, mistaken
for some kind of wild beast, but not before he wounds the rancher’s son.
Reservation life is graphically, and rather miserably, portrayed here and the
usual ‘is he, or isn’t he?’ tropes of werewolf fiction run their course until
the final reveal. It’s a good story, but Scully’s willful blindness as to
what’s going on sometimes pushes credulity.
In
“Darkness Falls” we have the second of two ‘away games’ in this season.
After “Ice”, it was obviously thought that these long diversions into
strange and new territory were good for ratings, and so, here we are. Unlike
that other episode though, this is more of an “X-Files” story, more its
own creature rather than an homage to a science fiction mainstay. This tale
tells of a band of loggers working in the far distant back-blocks of wooded
terrain in Washington State. After mysteriously vanishing, the FBI (i.e.,
Scully and Mulder) are asked to investigate, Mulder revealing that it’s not the
first time this has happened and that another logging team vanished in the same
area at the turn of the century. In due course, we meet a forestry ranger who
respects both the wilderness and the logging companies’ desire to make profits;
a logging company representative who is concerned only about the bottom line
and couldn’t give a rat’s about trees; and an eco-terrorist who freely
acknowledges endangering logging crews but claims to have evidence that the
loggers are breaking laws in order to cut down protected old growth pines. It
turns out that he’s right, and the felling of certain of these trees releases a
type of mite which – due to the quantities in which it is able to swarm – can
suck a human being dry in no time flat, later using the dried husk as a cocoon
for breeding more of its kind. The only thing that keeps them at bay is light
so, when darkness falls, it behoves our heroes to have a light burning. There
are many twists and turns in this tale and the end is a particularly equivocal
one, leaving the viewer with a sense of disquiet.
There’s
a sense of working towards quantifying the Mythology in these four episodes,
possibly as a knee-jerk response to the unfortunate events of “Gender Bender”.
“E.B.E.” simply lays out a bunch of stuff for the fans, without even
trying to massage the material into a coherent narrative, while “Miracle Man”
gets completely broken by an injection of unwanted and unnecessary Mythos
material – specifically the useless meanderings over Mulder and his sister. Even
the ending of “Darkness Falls” is designed to flag notions of shady Government
intervention, however it doesn’t damage the preceding episode overall. It’s as
if the creative team won network approval after the generally white-bread stories
of Disc Two and here they’re frantically making their mark as hard as they can.
Disc
Six:
In “Tooms” we have the conclusion of the Eugene Tooms saga. Our vicious mutant comes up for parole and, despite Mulder’s best efforts, he is released once more into an unsuspecting community. Having been deprived of his fifth liver by the Filers of X last time, he immediately sets about obtaining this prized morsel so that he can fall back into his usual thirty-year hibernation. Mulder, however, has other plans. He interferes with Tooms’s machinations several times (during the course of which we seem to be offered the notion that Tooms is attracted by a certain shade of blue, an ill-conceived and unnecessary wrinkle to this villain’s modus operandi) and Tooms finally lashes out and murders his psychotherapist. The race is then on to apprehend him before he beds down for his thirty-year nigh-nighs. It transpires that a shopping mall has been built over his usual haunt, so he builds his bile-nest beneath the escalator; Scully and Mulder locate him there and finish him off by the simple expedient of turning the moving stairs on. Problem, as they say, solved.
“Born
Again” is a tale about
reincarnation. A cadre of police officers have made-off with a bunch of cash
stolen from a crime scene and agree to leave it untouched in a bank for ten
years while the heat cools down. One of them has a bad case of conscience about
it all so the others bump him off: more cash for the survivors – woo-hoo! The
dead guy’s widow re-marries to one of the tontine partners and life goes on.
That is, until another cop in the precinct brings in a lost little girl hanging
around outside the station. One of the bent cops is asked to find out her
particulars and he inadvertently takes a dive through the upstairs window of
the precinct building while alone with her in the interrogation room. Slowly,
all members of the crew get whacked and Mulder leaps to the conclusion that the
little girl is the reincarnation of the conscience-stricken dead cop. I mean,
it’s possible, right? You can practically hear Scully’s eyes rolling all
through this episode.
With
“Roland”, we have an instance of something that will never, ever happen
again in the world of television production: the portrayal of handicapped people
by actors who are not so afflicted. Nowadays, the first port of call for
casting characters such as these would be to find actors who were really
disabled in this way, in order to demonstrate that values of equal-opportunity
existed within the production house. Is this a kind of Black Face? Handicap
Face? Well, it’s something like it and we’ll – thankfully – never see its like
again.
The
titular character here is a profoundly mentally-handicapped surviving twin, the
other half of which pair was a mathematics prodigy and whose deceased head is
now being maintained cryogenically for future use. The frozen twin is Hell-bent
on finishing a set of equations which will allow an aircraft to be built that
could surpass Mach 15, and, to do this, he psychically drives his handicapped
brother into writing and testing the equations at the laboratory where he works
as a janitor. Oh, and he also forces him to murder all the other scientists who
are trying to take credit for his life’s work, too. Luckily, Mulder is on hand
to spot the less-than-obvious clues and reveal the solution.
The
series ends with “The Erlenmeyer Flask”. This is a twisty Mythology
Episode full of the sorts of go-nowhere leads and vanishing evidence favoured
by these types of stories. Scully and Mulder are directed by Deep Throat to
investigate a high speed car chase which ends in a harbour facility – the
police are suspicious of Mulder and send him away, but not before he realizes
that the cars in the chase were switched at some point. Following this lead
takes them to an experimental monkey lab where they find a taciturn scientist
and not much else: he later turns up dead, murdered by a mysterious crew-cut
man. Mulder decides to break into the scientist’s home and, while there,
answers the telephone and speaks with the missing driver of the crashed car.
This encounter leads him to a storage facility full of large tanks containing
the unconscious bodies of several identical men. When he later returns here
with Scully, all of the evidence has been removed and Deep Throat meets them,
reprimanding them for being too slow. Mulder gets huffy and tracks down the
missing car-driver only to see him die at the hands of the crew-cut man.
Poisonous gas emitted from the driver’s body takes Mulder out and he is taken
hostage. Later, Deep Throat contacts Scully, giving her the means to access a
mysterious base and steal an alien foetus: this gives them the ability to
barter for Mulder’s return. During the exchange, the crew-cut man guns down
Deep Throat and leaves Scully and Mulder behind. Mulder rings Scully some days
later while recuperating to inform her that the X-Files unit has been shut
down. *Phew!*
One
reason why I dislike these episodes is that they’re too dense and impenetrable
and, rather than being laced throughout the other episodes in the series, are
mashed together into hard-to-digest blobs in lumps throughout the season. The
narrative aspects are woeful and sometimes – like “E.B.E.” for example –
aren’t even real stories; they’re just weird tone poems to the conspirasphere.
Also, anything that happens during them of any real consequence inevitably
vanishes or – as in this instance, as the last episode in the season – has no
consequences at the start of the next season. Everything gets wiped clean and
we just start all over again. In a word, they’re frustrating. Back when these
episodes were first aired however, we were all novices at the “X-Files”
game and hadn’t twigged to the ‘rinse and repeat’ nature of the ongoing series
lore.
*****
What’s
the takeaway from re-visiting this fannish televisual mainstay? For those
interested in TV writing it’s an interesting exercise in how essential
connectors within the plot become edited out as understood options in later
stories. In this season (and in the second season too – I’ve checked), such
activities as signing cars out of the FBI carpool (hi Fran!), hiring rental
vehicles, checking into hotels and catching aeroplanes and busses to get to
crime scenes, are shown alongside the more outré elements of the
investigations. Later seasons assume the fans know how this stuff is done and
drop it from the narratives. To my way of thinking, this lessens the credibility
of the work, making our main characters seem like super-beings for whom such
trivial activities are beneath their notice. Our Filers are willing to call
upon experts and to rope them into their investigations also, in ways that they
eschew in later seasons – the investigating group at the end of “The Jersey
Devil” for example could almost be a “Cthulhu Now” gaming team. Our
duo become more self-reliant, almost to the exclusion of everyone else, in
later stories.
In
line with this, there seem to be more FBI-based experts in these episodes also.
Along with them there is a bunch of equipment that they try awfully hard to
convince the viewer to be real when it patently is not – audio and indentikit
software just does not look like, or do, the sort of things that they achieve
in these stories. Graphology, on the other hand, is a seemingly tried-and-true
investigative mainstay, the only qualification required being a willingness by
the handwriting expert to flirt outrageously with Fox Mulder. Sadly, the amorous
graphologists fall by the wayside in due course, also.
This
show covers a huge chronological space and over the years the changing nature
of society and technology makes investigative techniques displayed in this
early season seem odd and downright peculiar. People don’t take photos of
everything they see, for instance, because no-one has a mobile telephone with a
camera (the ‘phones they do have are monolithic!). Scully finds
fingerprints and calls FBI headquarters to tell them that she’ll “modem them
over to Washington” at the earliest opportunity. What does this gobbledy-gook even
mean? At one point she’s standing in line at a grocery store and, after her
purchases are rung up, she writes the store a cheque. A cheque! What the Hell
is that? This is definitely a walk down Memory Lane for some of us, but for
younger viewers they must be left scratching their heads and wondering what on
earth’s happening.
The
torches are interesting too. Early on in the season, Scully and Mulder have
simple, bog-standard torches. A few episodes later, these are noticeably
brighter. Then they get larger, but with massive batteries attached – almost
the size of car batteries – and, behind the blinding cones of light they emit,
the producers are obviously hoping that we won’t notice. Then they start
imperceptibly to shrink down to normal dimensions once more. I’m left
wondering, was torch technology propelled forwards simply by the needs of this
television program? From one perspective it certainly seems that way.
A
final fun derivative from re-watching these early seasons is watching how often
they re-use certain actors, hoping that we won’t notice them walking back on in
a different hat. Of course, back in the day when an episode of “X-Files”
was a once-a-week event on free-to-air TV, the likelihood of us ever noticing
was slim to remote. The fact that the same footage of Scully sashaying through
the open plan FBI office space could be re-used without any thought that someone
might protest, shows how slim this possibility was. An “X-Files” actor
might be a second-string FBI agent one week and sleazy john knifed by a spooked
streetwalker the next; Jersey Devil munchies one season; dead from a burst
blood-vessel while on the potty, later on. Even shady truck drivers like
Ranheim – transporting wrecked UFOs in a truck across mainland USA – turn out
to be funicular railway operators “ascending to the stars” in the very next
season.
What’s
most interesting to watch though, is the nebulous way that Scully and Mulder
start to crystallise into shape as each episode goes by. These sorts of shows
are the creations of many contributing individuals and so the characters get
passed from person to person and modified according to the desires and demands
of everyone involved. There are writers and directors who definitely wanted
Scully and Mulder to get together; there are those for whom this was a
least-favourite option; and then there are infinite shades of intention in
between. Watching these episodes is like a roller-coaster of nuance as the
creators all try to find that sweet spot which would satisfy everybody. Most
likely they hit that point at about Season Five, I’m guessing.
This
show is pretty fundamental to TV fandom. It is a touchstone for supernatural
investigation, regardless of whether you like it particularly, or if you loathe
it. It arose during the time of ‘serial-killer chic’, buoyed by such things as “The
Silence of the Lambs”, “American Psycho” and everything ever written
by Patricia Cornwell. It (along with “Twin Peaks”) rang a change in the
depiction of government agents in books, television shows and movies – before the
80s, ‘G-men’ were always faceless drones; here, they began to be personalized in
the same manner that Private Investigators were during the 30s and 40s. Without
this ground-breaking vehicle there would be no “Supernatural”, no “Buffy,
the Vampire Slayer”, nor a slew of other supernaturally-based prime-time investigative
TV shows. Re-visiting the first season, it’s fun to see the initial tottering
steps taken by the show – where they compromised; where they bent under network
pressure; where they took a mis-step – but it’s impressive how true, overall, the
show is to its basic premise and how they work to refine and promote that
vision.
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