X-Files S3E20: Going 'Outer' our minds

Sestra Amateur: 

There are a handful of bottle eps from The X-Files that I’ve seen more than once: "Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose" (Season 3, Episode 4), "Triangle" (S6E3), "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" (S6E6), and "Jose Chung’s From Outer Space." In the latter's case, writer Darin Morgan and company reward the fans for their ongoing loyalty and patience. And the actors are clearly having fun with it too. There’s so much to absorb in this one I’m glad we have Sestra Pro to fill in the blanks and really flesh out everything. 

Director Rob Bowman starts with a subtle homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There’s a cute couple named Harold and Chrissy going out on their first date in Klass County, Washington. The car dies, there’s a bright light and a UFO appears above them. Creatures start walking toward them and they look like the stereotypical descriptions of aliens we might have seen on the cover of Weekly World News. 

Harold and Chrissy lose consciousness and the aliens carry them – dummy drag style – toward their ship. I had to do the dummy drag for training once upon a time. That sucker weighed 150 pounds. Chrissy certainly doesn’t weigh that much, but her alien doesn’t seem to have upper body strength. Harold's alien seems better at it. Maybe he’s training Chrissy’s alien … a UFOFTO.  But the aliens are interrupted by a second UFO, one that produces a red light and a very non-stereotypical cyclops beast. The original aliens panic – and start talking to each other in English. What the what?

Three months after the alien/alien encounter, Jose Chung -- played by Charles Nelson Reilly -- meets with Dana to discuss his future novel, a “non-fiction science fiction” story. He has to settle for Scully because Mulder refuses to talk to him. I’ve always associated Chuckles with the '70s (and early '80s) game show Match Game even though his career spanned four decades. His presence in this episode as Jose Chung seems tailor-made for him. Sestra, did they consider anyone else for the role or was it written specifically for the Reilly-meister? 

Jose claims he cannot report the truth because everyone in Klass County has a different account of the incident. In essence, he wants Scully’s “version of the truth,” so she tells him about their investigation. She flashes back to Chrissy’s testimony. Authorities -- Dana included -- believe her to be a victim of date rape, not alien abduction. Harold gets picked up by the cops, denies raping Chrissy and claims they were abducted. The boy passes a lie detector test, but changes his story when Sculder arrive to interrogate him. Now Harold claims he raped Chrissy and refuses to take a lie detector test to prove he didn’t. That’s so backward. Mulder interviews Chrissy and asks enough leading questions to convince her and her parents she actually was abducted. The girl gets hypnotized and “remembers” being on a table surrounded by those stereotypical aliens while they steal her memories. Scully clearly ain’t buying it. Detective Manners, who observed the hypnosis session, doesn’t live up to his name and colorfully tells Fox he ain’t buying it either.

Harold tells the agents what happened while he and Chrissy were trapped on the beast alien’s ship. One of the original aliens in the cell beside Harold is smoking a cigarette. Which is weirder: Picturing other planets having cigarettes or picturing other planets having convenience stores that sell cigarettes? Chrissy wakes up and Harold says he won’t let anything happen to her. She promptly gets yanked out of the cell from above. Nice work there, Harold; you can’t really protect anyone while you’re in the fetal position. Cigarette Smoking Alien keeps rocking back and forth and saying, “This is not happening.” Harold doesn’t even question the fact that the alien speaking English. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have time to. Harold gets yanked out of the cell and is released. 

Harold admits to Scully he and Chrissy had consensual sex – on the first date. Jeez, no wonder he kept saying he was in love with her. Harold’s already whipped. Det. Manners interrupts to tell Sculder – with his usual verbal flavor -- that there’s a possible witness to the abduction. 

Roky Crikenson -- who had been working on the power in the area at the time a la Roy Neary in Close Encounters -- starts to sound like a Lone Gunman when he details Men in Black arriving at his house to deter him from coming forward with his story. MIB No. 1 -- Jesse Ventura – tries to convince Roky he saw Venus in the sky, not a UFO. Really, Jesse should have just taken his printed-out version of events, he had his hands on it. Or maybe the Men in Black just want Crikenson to think they don’t want his story released, but secretly do want the public to know so they can debunk it later. 

So Roky’s story – which is written in screenplay format, how tacky is that?? – describes him driving up on the beast vs. aliens vs. Harold/Chrissy encounter. Crikenson tried to hide by ducking out of sight in his work truck. But the beast alien, now named Lord Kinbote, approached Roky and spoke to him in Shakespearean English -- thou, thee, blah blah blah. Roky claims Lord Kinbote took Crickenson to inner space, not outer space. Ooh, what a twist! 

As lame as Roky’s tale comes off, Mulder points out it confirms part of Harold’s account. Since Chrissy’s account is the only one not matching the others, Fox arranges for her to be re-hypnotized. This version starts to sound like Harold’s, but she throws the Air Force into the mix. Now it sounds like a conspiracy version of her first account. Scully claims Mulder and the hypnotist were leading Chrissy with their line of questioning, but it’s a moot point as Det. Manners then claims someone has found a real-live dead-alien body. Sounds like an oxymoron.

Abductee wannabe Blaine Faulkner talks to Jose about meeting Men in Black (disguised-as-a-woman Scully and mandroid Mulder). Blaine claims Dana grabbed and threatened him, but Scully vehemently denies that account. Faulkner shows up at the alien autopsy and Fox lets Blaine use his video camera to document it. The footage ultimately gets made into a video with the Stupendous Yappi as host. Remember that charlatan from "Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose"? Dr. Scully discovers the dead alien is just a human male wearing an alien costume. Pretty sure that part didn’t make it into the video. Blaine gets sick and runs out of the room and probably out of the building with his priceless footage. 

Dana identifies the body as Air Force Major Robert Vallee. The Air Force arrive to take Vallee into custody for desertion, but learn he’s dead. Blaine goes home and watches the footage but Men in Black No. 1 and 2 break in and steal the tape. MIB No. 1 does a nice wrestling backbreaker which renders Faulkner unconscious. Fox smacks Blaine awake. On his way back to the hotel, Mulder finds a naked Lt. Jack Schaefer -- also known as the “this is not happening” Cigarette Smoking Alien. 

At a diner, Schaefer uses his fork to turn his mashed potatoes into Devils Tower – another Close Encounters reference. Jack claims his job is to fly a UFO and abduct people who are taken to the base and hypnotized into thinking they were probed by aliens. The Air Force arrive to take the lieutenant into custody. But Jose had learned a slightly different account from the diner cook, one that had Mulder pursuing a ridiculous line of questioning and eating a lot of pie.

Fox finds the Men in Black in Dana's room. Again, No. 1 does the bulk of the talking, but we finally see No. 2 and he looks an awful lot like Alex Trebek. Scully claims she doesn’t remember any of it. Then Det. Manners calls to say they found the bleeping UFO. Of course, Major Vallee and Lt. Schaefer's bodies are recovered in the wreckage. Surprisingly, this investigation has more closure than most X-Files cases.

Mulder finally visits Chung and implores him not to write the book. Jose asks what really happened to Harold and Chrissy that night, but Fox can’t answer the question. We do learn what happened to Blaine, Roky, Harold, Chrissy, “federal employee Diana Lesky” and “Raynard Muldrake, ticking time bomb of insanity,” though. Sestra, since we’re not going to be blogging about Millennium, do you want to cover Jose Chung’s appearance there?

Sestra Professional:

I do consider "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" my favorite episode of television ever, albeit with an asterisk. As a pop-culture junkie in a world full of shows running the gamut from hilarious to intense at my fingerprints, how do I arrive at this conclusion? Let me try and explain -- hopefully in a less convoluted manner than the plotline of "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." 

Truth is as subjective as reality: The first shot of the episode clues us in to the fact that we're in for something different and special. We appear to be looking at a spaceship moving slowly through the heavens, but then we find out is we're actually just seeing the undercarriage of a platform. Then standard formation on shows in The X-Files vein, two kids spy a UFO -- or two -- in the middle of nowhere. The first aliens look a lot like we'd expect them to, as Sestra Amateur points out, but hmmm, the second one seems kind of cartoony. Something's not right here.

And that's the key to a Darin Morgan episode. He may pen images and ideas that have been presented 1,000 times over, but he'll give us fresh looks and inspired reactions. Yeah, lanky Mulder has seemed rather "blank and expressionless" for almost three seasons, and we don't really process that because he's great with quips. Fox ran an alien autopsy program to further cash in on the success of the show, and Morgan rips that to shreds during Scully's procedure when the alien is revealed to just be a human in an intricate costume.

At the same time, Darin takes us to places we hadn't previously considered. A military-industrial-entertainment complex? That's just wild enough that it could be true. The non-fiction science fiction -- what a great idea for a literary genre. But there's also room for some recurring themes. After wordy pontifications, many of the characters' motivations get boiled down to "How the hell should I know?" or "dead man" threats. 

Those kids' stories couldn't be more bleeping different: Rob Bowman's directorial skills sure get a workout in this episode. He filmed the hypnotic sessions very similarly and in slightly distorted fashion so that the psychologist putting Chrissy under hypnosis mirrors the alien leaning in to examine her during her recollection. During a subsequent session, even Sculder wind up in similar positions in the room as Air Force personnel conducting an interrogation.

Speaking of our leads, Scully's got as good of a handle on the goings-on as it's probable to have, even with extended fan girling at the sight of her favorite author. She shows extreme patience with Chung where she would be rolling her eyes and guffawing if her partner posited similar theories. Mulder tries really hard to get to the bottom of things as usual, but after getting knocked down by others' accounts of him and perhaps dispirited by his discussion with the Cigarette Smoking Alien (sans mask), even he's willing to dismiss the case with a "How the hell should I know?"

You really bleeped up this case: I have to devote some time and space here to Detective Manners, spiritedly portrayed by Larry Musser (who we've seen in S2E14's "Die Hand Die Verletzt," Manners' first directorial foray into The X-Files, and will see again in two more episodes. So he probably had gotten the Manners-isms down pat.) Morgan wrote the character's "colorful phraseology" for director Kim Manners, who did some acting in 1970 but ultimately decided against taking on the part. 

Your scientific illiteracy makes me shudder:  In fact, every single character in this episode deserves more air time in the blog, from Men in Black No. 1's diatribe on perception to Blaine Faulkner wanting to be abducted because he doesn't want to find a job. And yeah, there are several nods to my favorite movie of all time -- Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- but don't think for a second that's why this is my favorite episode of TV. There's just as much entertainment to be found in Jose explaining why he prefers the term "alien experiencer" over "abductee," the cook's account of Mulder's pie eating and Blaine's description of Fox's yelp as in Schaefer building a Devils Tower out of his potatoes. Just to name a few, because they come fast and furiously over 45 minutes.

You ever flown a flying saucer? Afterwards, sex seems trite: To truly figure out this story, even though we don't particularly need to understand the through line to enjoy it,  I think everything hangs on the lieutenant's version of events. Jack details the soft-option kills -- nerve gas, low-frequency infrasound beams, high-powered microwaves -- that explain the missing time detailed in abductee reports. Their subsequent hypnosis leads people to believe they were probed by aliens. So, as Morgan sees it, the UFO phenomenon might just be covert intelligence operation utilizing secret military airships. 

But what about Lord Kinbote? That other unexplained alien still makes us wonder whether there's still more to be gleaned. "I'm absolutely positive me, my co-pilot and those two kids were abducted, but I can't be absolutely sure it happened. I can't be sure of anything anymore," Schaefer says. "I'm not even sure we're having the conversation.  I don't know if these mashed potatoes are really here. I don't know if you even exist." 

Do we discount witnesses because their recollections make them sound like lunatics? Just because Roky's account has Shakespearean dialogue, does that mean it didn't happen at all? Or was he just remembering it that way because that's how his brain needed to process that? One thing's for sure, the doctors' method of stealing memories seems more effective than Clorox. Thanks to Jack, Mulder's version of what happened in the diner seems a lot more plausible than a cook who just remembers Fox eating plate after plate of sweet potato pie. 

How the hell should I know: Maybe this is of those pop-culture litmus tests. If you think everything that went down -- Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek included -- were psychological tricks, you're probably on the straight and narrow. But if you think the kids ran into a real alien, perhaps you're a pie-eyed dreamer.

Chung's conclusions on the characters who made it to the end of the saga bring us back down to Earth rather quickly. Well, Mulder getting his enjoyment out of life by watching vague Bigfoot video elicits a chuckle, but Harold remains lovelorn as Jose puts Darin's bow on the story. "For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways on this planet ... we are all alone."

Can't wipe this: According to the official third-season episode guide, the name Jose Chung was a recurring practical joke created by the writing staff. John Shiban would call the office about an unsolicited script using that moniker. ... Morgan used callbacks to his previous episodes, including the previously mentioned return of the Stupendous Yappi and the autopsy show, "Dead Alien! Truth or Humbug?" The last word of the title was the first script he wrote The X-Files (S2E20). ... According to The Complete X-Files, Darin was inspired to build a show around a writer by a Truman Capote lookalike. With Capote and first choice Rip Taylor unavailable, Reilly auditioned and won the role. "It was one of the hardest episodes to shoot because he was so funny," first assistant director (and Lone Gunman) Tom Braidwood recalled in the book. "He would have people laughing between takes and during takes."

Guest star of the week: Charles Nelson Reilly, no doubt. He may not have initially been on Morgan's radar, but the writer found so much to appreciate that he penned (and directed) the sequel "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" on sister show Millennium. I don't want to divulge too many details, but it takes Chung in a whole other different direction -- annihilating everything from Scientology to the downbeat nature of lead Frank Black. And here's where my asterisk comes back into play. "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" is my favorite episode of TV ever ... unless I've just watched "Doomsday Defense."