Sestra Amateur:
After waiting 14 years for Season 10, Episode 1, X-Philes only had to wait one day for Episode 2. This one is probably considered a bottle episode, but there may be enough references to past storylines that it wouldn’t qualify as one after all.
Dr. Sanjay works at Nugenics Technology, a super-secure office building which requires retinal scans for entry. His Monday isn’t starting so well, due to a bout of tinnitus. At least his disgustingly bloodshot eyes still got him into the building. Dr. Sanjay is trying to pay attention during the morning staff meeting but things sound distorted to him. He spazzes during the meeting and bolts from the room. Certain phrases keep echoing in his head, an important one being “Data is the key.” So Dr. Sanjay starts transmitting data to someone, somewhere. When the unbearable tone gets the better of him, he punctures his ear canal – and his brain? – by stabbing himself. Yeah, I think that stopped the noise.
Reactivated Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully respond because of the heightened security clearance required to access the crime scene, a server room for Department of Defense hard drives. Mulder is, as usual, frustrated by government interference. In this case, it’s the re-seizing of his seized evidence. He secretly procures Sanjay’s phone, unlocks it with the victim’s fingerprint and hightails it out of there with Scully being forced to follow his lead. Here we go again.
There’s a contact named "Gupta" who Sanjay had talked with daily. Dana points out his name means "secret." Fox later meets with Gupta in a bar. Mulder actually tells the skittish man he can trust him. Gupta thinks Fox is propositioning him so he tries to unzip his pants in the bathroom. After clearing up the misunderstanding, Mulder mentions Sanjay’s death. I’ll bet that killed the mood.
Scully performs Sanjay’s autopsy. She notices handwriting in the palm of the dead man’s left hand. Gupta tells Fox that Sanjay led a double life and mentioned being worried about his (Sanjay’s) “kids.” Dana finishes the autopsy and meets up with Mulder. Sanjay wrote “Founder’s Mutation” on his hand. The Founder is Dr. Augustus Goldman, the man who was a hot topic of conversation at the morning staff meeting. (Whenever I hear The Founder I think of Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc. And now I want a hamburger.) Scully’s X-rays show Sanjay was possibly trying to access his auditory cortex based on the angle of the letter opener he stabbed into his brain. His freakout at the meeting backs up that theory.
Sculder head to Sanjay’s real apartment, not the one he frequented with Gupta. Inside they see photographs of children who suffer from physical abnormalities. Local police arrive while they’re searching the room and Fox experiences the same type of tinnitus which felled Sanjay. He reads Dana's and the cop’s lips and thinks they’re saying, “Find her” and “Help me.” The next morning, the agents are briefing Assistant Director Walter Skinner and a DOD suit who won’t let them reference the files related to the genetically abnormal children. Skinner runs with the suicide theory and closes the case so the DOD dude will leave. After the door closes, Walter confirms their investigation is still active, but Mulder and Scully do not mention the high-pitched ringing noise Fox endured.
The duo starts reviewing surveillance footage from Nugenics. Mulder notices the swarm of birds that gathered during Sanjay’s audible nightmare outside the morning meeting. Dana points out how Fox experienced the same sounds Sanjay heard before committing suicide. They later reach out to Sister Mary at Dana’s former employer, Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, of which Augustus Goldman is a major contributor. They get distracted by a pregnant girl named Agnes who wants to leave the hospital. Agnes seems scared of Sister Mary and changes her mind about leaving. Sculder learn from Sister Mary the pregnant girls are often homeless. Fox thinks something more sinister is happening with the pregnant girls being used as incubators. Scully thinks Mulder is making it personal because of their son, William. Dana still feels regret for giving up the boy. Fox tells her she did the right thing. Scully later dreams about William growing up and changing into something alien.
Sculder meet with Dr. Augustus Goldman, played by Doug Savant, who I know best from Melrose Place and Desperate Housewives. He describes his hospital as a “cutting-edge research facility.” It almost seems like he and Dana should be working together, based on the work she was performing on earless children in the previous episode. Plus, Tad O’Malley would’ve had a field day with this story. The tour ends when an unruly teenage girl needs to be physically restrained and Fox learns Agnes died after being hit by a car. She’s also no longer pregnant because the baby was surgically removed. Mulder thinks the fetus may still be alive if there’s the presence of mutated DNA.
Sculder’s investigation brings them to Goldman’s wife, Jackie, who Augustus committed to a psychiatric facility after she murdered their son. Jackie claims their 2-year-old daughter had the ability to breathe underwater because of Augustus’ experimentation. She knew the government would come after her for the unborn baby. Jackie defensively attacked Augustus to get away but ended up crashing her car. The tinnitus started and she cut open her own belly based on the communication she received by the tone. After the interview, Mulder realizes the hospital and Nugenics have the same janitorial service. He links one employee to Sanjay’s death, Kyle Gilligan. (Is that name an homage to Bob Denver or X-Files writer Vince Gilligan?) They go to Kyle’s house but his mother refuses to let her juvenile son talk to the FBI agents. Fox assumes she’s not his birth mother and he’s right. Sculder and Mom see the birds gathering and the tone hits Mulder hard. Scully finds Kyle in a barn and subdues him.
Kyle reveals he’s Jackie’s son and is trying to find his sister. They take him to Dr. Goldman – his father – who agrees to let Kyle and Molly meet. Turns out, she’s the unruly teenage girl who inadvertently interrupted Sculder’s tour with Augustus. Kyle breaks Molly out of her room and together they kill dear old dad. They also forcefully restrain Dana and Fox until Skinner arrives. After the dust settles, the kids are gone but Mulder still has a vial of Kyle’s blood. Later, it’s Fox's turn to dream about life with William. Of course the dream becomes a nightmare when Mulder envisions William being abducted like his sister, Samantha. I’m still trying to figure out why Sculder only have one photograph of their baby … and it’s the same photograph.
Sestra Professional:X-Files fans know how this goes ... the season's opened with a mythology-based episode and now it's time for a stand-alone show. But wait? They can't do that in the event-series format of six programs! So no time like the present for adding some more layers to the back story. That definitely raises the stakes in a hurry.
The writer/director charged with starting to get the William story rolling without it falling down the hill was James Wong, known around these parts as half of the legendary writing partnership with Glen Morgan that birthed the likes of Tooms and the Peacock family. This is his first solo venture and directorial credit for the show, although in the interim, Wong helmed the major feature films Final Destination and Final Destination 3. Now I'm left wondering what happened with Final Destination 2.
I haven't known pleasure for quite some time: "The Founder's Mutation" points toward a rather exciting new direction the series easily can and will slide into a la Black Mirror. It's a place where science and technology converge and angst and -- in our case -- supernatural things occur as a result.
Sanjay suffers a physical malady not unknown to people who sit on corporate meetings. It's a wonder that kind of meltdown doesn't happen with more frequency. (Maybe it does and we're just not privy to that information.) At least we're back in familiar territory. Fox is running with a theory, and Dana is shooting it down every which way she can -- from grounds it's not a traditional X-file to ... well, it's pretty much that. First, the death was caused by a guy jamming a letter opener in his ear, and second, they don't have a warrant to obtain information the way her partner was doing it.
Sestra Am pointed out the possible connections stemming from the name Kyle Gilligan, and the last name of one of the series' legendary writers certainly stands out for me, but I would not discount her first theory. I also was struck by the use of Gupta, since the philosopher in fellow X-Files writer/producer Darin Morgan's Millennium episode "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" also was named Goopta. Maybe Wong was as big a fan of that masterpiece as I am.
I'm familiar with Edward Snowden: It's a little obvious to say Mulder falling victim to the high-pitched frequency is reminiscent of his troubles in "The Sixth Extinction" two-parter that kicked off Season 7. Or that it's more like the noise Bryan Cranston was hearing in Gilligan's creation "Drive" (S6E2). It's also easy for me to draw a parallel in the direction of Close Encounters of the Third Kind since it's my favorite film of all-time. In Steven Spielberg's 1977 movie, main characters don't hear things other people don't, but process information others just aren't getting.
Scully uses some subterfuge we're not exactly used to seeing her do to get closer to the-non-McDonald's-founder, and it's kind of refreshing. Dana knows Skinner's OK with them flying under the radar and that's kind of a green light to say what she needs to in order to make headway on the case.
Meantime, I'm getting distracted by a few familiar faces -- starting with Sister Mary, played by Dead Like Me's Christine Willes (Delores Herbig, as in her big brown eyes) and pregnant Agnes (Kacey Rohl, who served in the pivotal role of Abigail Hobbs on Hannibal). I couldn't shake reminders of their prior characters. Not to mention Doug Savant, who gets to play a character about as polar opposite from his Melrose Place persona as it is possible to be. Must have been fun for him.
Was I just an incubator? Well, Dana, you were at least serving an incubator here to let us know that we're definitely not in a stand-alone episode. Perhaps it could have been accomplished with more subtlety than a full-on expositional scene listing how and why Scully gave her son up. But I'll give all the the credit to Gillian Anderson for handling it the best way she could. We did feel Dana's pain.
And the alternate-reality scenes with William definitely provide a boost to the proceedings. A lot of fan-fiction writers had their respective ways with surrogate stories involving the child given up toward the end of Season 9, and now The X-Files powers-that-be get their turn at it through Wong. (This too gives off "Sixth Extinction" vibes, as a result.) Anderson is even better in these moments. As if we didn't already side with Scully all the time.
Of course, it's Mulder who connects the dots first and notices that we seem to be looking at next-level alien-human hybrids. But it's Scully who pushes the pedal to the medal because her instincts as both a doctor and mother have kicked in simultaneously.
Believe me, you can't unsee that: My concern that we returned to the days of "The Sixth Extinction" gets the hard shove when we see the combination of Kyle and Molly acting more like the Eves in their self-titled 11th episode from Season 1. What a relief, kind of like when that high-frequency noise shuts off for anyone being incapacitated -- well, those who haven't shortened the process with a sharp object.
Fox spends his quality time in his alternate reality with William discussing aliens and his affinity for rocket ships, but Mulder-as-father apparently wouldn't push his ideals on his son the way he did on everyone he has ever known in the actual world. That's kind of heartening, at least until his dream turned into a Samantha-abduction nightmare anyway.
Guest star of the week: My favorite performances came from our leads. Beyond that, Christopher Logan just nailed the pre-teaser performance that served as the ep's catalyst. Kind of incredible to empathize so deeply with someone we watched for five minutes.
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