X-Files S1E4: A conduit to Mulder's missing sister

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X-Files S1E3: Squeezing in the monsters

Editors' Note: On the rewatch of The X-Files, Lorrie plays the part of Sestra Amateur and Paige  serves as the resident "expert," aka Sestra Professional. 

Sestra Amateur:

“Tempted by the fruit of another. Tempted but the truth is discovered…”  What? Wrong Squeeze?  It's the name of the third X-Files episode? My bad…
 
So there’s a businessman walking through downtown Baltimore. A guy with unnatural eyes is stalking him ... from inside a sewer drain. Funky Eyes kills the businessman in his office. Not really X-File material, right? Just call the Homicide Unit. Oh, did I mention Funky Eyes somehow got into the office through a 18-inch by 6-inch air vent? That does make it more X-Filey.

Scully lunches with Agent Tom Colton, an academy classmate who can’t resist making condescending comments about her partner. Colton asks "Mrs. Spooky" to help him with the case involving the businessman. Funky Eyes also took the man’s liver, and apparently that of some poor college girl as well. She must have attended one of those non-partying schools if her liver was healthy enough for Funky Eyes. Scully meets “Spooky” -- I mean Mulder – at the businessman’s crime scene and Mulder even asks Scully, “Do you think I’m Spooky?” Duchovny, hell yeah. ... Mulder, not so much. 

Mulder does a good job of making Colton look like an ignorant tool. Our guy uncovers evidence that everyone else missed about similar previous killings and pretty quickly too, even by scripted TV standards. The good news is the elongated fingerprint on the air vent is eventually matched to five different crime scenes. The bad news is one of the crime scenes is older than Colton and the other is older than Colton’s mother. 

We learn Funky Eyes committed five murders every 30 years, beginning in 1903. Mulder admits, "I find no evidence of alien involvement." That opens the door to the show's Monster of the Week premise -- that the suspect's fingers elongate at will to about 10 inches. I’m going to assume that manipulation will not be admissible in court. Scully, of course, tries to explain the case with science and points out the liver possesses regenerative qualities. I’m not so sure about that; I eat chopped liver on a regular basis and I haven’t experienced any regeneration perks.

Scully briefs Colton’s team. They definitely give off that superior “jocks in high school” vibe. I really wanted Scully to let them have it, but she joins the stakeout to catch Funky Eyes instead. Maybe she’s the nerd who thinks it’s cool that the jocks want her to hang out with them for the day. Mulder shows up to tell Scully he thinks her profile of the suspect is wrong; the guy would not return to the scene because he’s already conquered it.

But then Sculder catch the suspect, Eugene Victor Tooms, at the scene. Mulder was wrong! OK, only a little wrong. The FBI puts Tooms through a polygraph test. He appears to pass, but only because the narrow-minded jocks – I mean FBI agents -- disregarded the questions about the murders from 1933 and 1963. 

Since he's sprung and still on a mission to kill two more people, Tooms enters a home through the chimney – and we get to see a cool and creepy special effects shot. He kills another drinker and takes a personal item as a trophy. Apparently, he took them from all of the crime scenes. It's a late-breaking, albeit important detail.
 
Scully finally stands up to Colton. You almost want to start doing the slow clapping thing that was so popular in high school movies in which the underdog stands up to the bully. Then Sculder go microfiching – I thought I invented that word but it does exist on the Internet – and locate the sheriff who suspected Tooms in 1933. Fortunately, the retired but still haunted sheriff brought his box of evidence to the retirement home and shows Sculder a picture of Tooms back then. 

Sculder go to Tooms’ old – very, very old – apartment. They enter the apartment in the scene used in the show’s opening credits. Under the apartment, the duo locates Tooms’ trophy collection and a nasty bile-filled nest that even grosses out Mulder. As they leave, Tooms snags Scully’s necklace (trophy!).  It looks like she’s going to be his last victim, at least until 2023. Hey, that’s right around the corner. As expected, Tooms attacks Scully when she goes home, but Mulder arrives to save the day. Tooms is taken away, but he’s clearly planning his exit strategy at the end of the episode.

The writers showed us not every single plot is going to revolve around alien conspiracies. There’s a definite emphasis on the “us vs. them” mentality between the X-Files duo and other respected divisions of the government. Scully is put in awkward work-related positions and you can almost see the career advancement options slipping away from her, even this early in the series. If Scully was as career-minded as Colton, she would never put up with Mulder’s crazy-but-true-theories. Instead, she looks out for Mulder like he is a younger brother being bullied. Mulder can certainly hold his own, but he doesn’t have to fight his battles alone anymore. 

I’m going to listen to some Squeeze, maybe have some "Black Coffee in Bed." I’m "Tempted."


Sestra Professional:

There's great back story to The X-Files' first Monster of the Week episode. Chris Carter had the FBI agents vs. aliens (and government) thing sketched out, but it took Glen Morgan and James Wong to open up a whole other File cabinet. As Morgan recalled at Entertainment Weekly Fan Fest in late October, the writing partners were sitting in their little cubicle trying to figure out what in the world they would write about when one of them looked up at a small vent. "What if something was in there?" That launched a great first stand-alone ep and a whole other world of possibilities for the show.

It took a while for them to show him in this episode -- a la Jaws? -- but Doug Hutchison set a high bar for the series' guest stars too, even if his character could easily wiggle his way around that bar. He's uber-creepy without any redeeming qualities, it's no wonder he could beat the polygraph test. The effect of Tooms reaching all the way down a victim's chimney is so cool, he's proverbially stretching past previous sci-fi TV barriers in the process.

"He should stick out in a crowd with 10-inch fingers": The lines in this ep also kill. Mulder was funny in the first two, but he really hits his stride in this one. "Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?" he says, his voice almost breaking while trying to shake bile off his hand. 

Meanwhile, Scully's shoring up her end as a worthy match for Mulder. "Look, Dana, whose side are you on?" his classmate asks. "The victim's," she retorts. And now we're taking sides as well -- namely hers. 

To back that up, she even gets to make one of those wild stab-in-the-dark guesses that Mulder already specializes in. The FBI's brilliant serial killer profiler thinks Tooms wouldn't come back to the same site because he's already proven it to be accessible. Scully thinks he would return because he's frustrated with not being able to score some more livers. Scully gets to be right this time, and they catch him. (It's OK, 'cause Mulder eventually tops her anyway with his strange-but-true elongated finger print theory.

The detective who obsessively investigated the case in 1933, but wasn't allowed to in 1963, has a lot of paperwork on the crime. And although it's clunky for him to say the death camps and Kurds and Bosnians "gave birth" to a human like Tooms, he brought a lot of the emotion to his scene. He was changed by the violence he saw at the mutant's hands. Someone else thinking about the victims. Maybe he did keep the scrapbook because he was unable to shake it.

"Just listen!" Mulder implores his partner to believe his supposition that Tooms is a genetic mutation and five livers provide him sustenance so he can hibernate for 30 years at a spell. But Scully doesn't listen to guys with bile on their fingers. And I do hope he washes those before partaking of more of his trademark sunflower seeds -- making their first appearance in this ep.

We also begin the Scully-in-peril adventures in "Squeeze." Mind you, Scully in peril is different than Mulder in peril. Mulder in peril usually means he's broken into some government area he doesn't have clearance to be in. Scully in peril, by contrast, usually means the bad guy has gotten his hands on her.

But contrary to how Sestra Am put it, Scully was an important part of the wrapup. Yeah, Mulder helped by showing up, but she's the one who handcuffed the guy to ... her tub? Why does that work? 'Cause can't a guy who gets in and out of vents with ease work his way out of restraints faster than Harry Houdini? 

Anyway, Tooms is creepy to the very end, building a new nest and looking through the slot at what surely will be future freedom. And why Scully's thrilled to have documentation of the abnormalities, Mulder's looking at the bigger picture and even a moral to the story. Society protects itself with bars on windows or high-tech security systems -- and in this case, it just ain't enough. 

More kudos for the show's composer, Mark Snow. He provided the perfect score to go along with the misdeeds of Stretch Armstrong (aka Funky Eyes), actually sounding like bugs crawling all around you. It'll be a recurring -- and very effective -- piece of music.

Guest Star of the Week: With apologies to Hutchison (and because he's already been mentioned at length... get it, length?) ... Donal Logue. He looks like a baby! Scully's buddy has a case that's "out there," but he wants to use its projected outcome to work his way up the ladder. Being as he's not Mulder or Scully, he's probably going to come off as a little foolish. And he does.

X-Files S1E2: We're on Deep background

Editors' Note: On the rewatch of The X-Files, Lorrie plays the part of Sestra Amateur and Paige  serves as the resident "expert," aka Sestra Professional. 

Sestra Amateur:

Southwest Idaho … just when you think nothing exciting happens there, the Army Military Police are raiding a house on what looks to be a peaceful street. Inside they find a poor guy wearing only tighty whities and looking like he’s suffering from the worst allergic reaction ever. That can't be good, which is probably why it's in the teaser.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., Mulder is trying to get Scully drunk and wants to show her something. Too bad it's just info on Tighty-Whitey Man, also known as Colonel Robert Budahas, who appears to have been kidnapped by the military.  Apparently, a similar fate has befallen six other military pilots. Mulder goes to the little boy’s room and gets a friendly warning from Jerry Hardin. I know his character will be called "Deep Throat," but I prefer to use only one nickname per blog. Besides, he already has the episode title.

On the phone with Scully, Mulder hears clicking and assumes his phone line is tapped. He looks out his window and sees a van, so now he thinks he’s being watched too. The next morning S&M – not a nickname, just an abbreviation – meet with TW Man’s wife, who tells them about the rash, his personality changes and a newly acquired taste for fish food. Mrs. TW Man sends them to another pilot's house. That guy spends his days making fly fishing lures and pulling out his hair one strand at a time. His wife is much less forthcoming and Scully articulates to Mulder a perfectly reasonable medical explanation -- a syndrome produced from extreme stress. From there, they go to interview an Army colonel who blows them off. A reporter named Paul Mossinger tries to get information from Mulder and Scully, who blow him off. I’m sensing a theme here. 

Sculder go to a restricted area where they watch lights that first move like the dancing baby in Ally McBeal, which actually aired four years after this episode, then move like squirrels chasing each other before whooshing away ... very Close Encounters-ish. They meet two teens running out of the restricted area, hide them and then feed them. (One of them is played by another familiar TV redhead, Seth Green! Can't wait to get to the Buffy recaps.) Mulder tells Scully his theory that the U.S. government is building planes with UFO technology. When Scully balks, Mulder reminds Scully that UFO means "unidentified flying object." Score one for Mulder.

TW Man returns home and looks perfectly fine, but his wife claims it’s not him. Looks like we flipped the channel from Close Encounters to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Mulder quizzes him until TW Man chokes on a flight question. Maybe he is a pod person after all. Nah, it’s more likely that the military just removed the knowledge from his head.   

Sculder leave and are intimidated by men in suits who clearly don’t care that they’re FBI agents.  After that, Mulder finally tells Scully about Hardin and the phone tap. But he leaves Scully and returns to the restricted area with the teens. Mulder walks all the way to the airstrip and stands there while a flying slice of pizza – I mean a triangle-shaped UFO – hovers above him and shines a spotlight on him. I guess we’ve changed back to Close Encounters again. The UFO bolts and Mulder tries to outrun man-made Jeeps, but is unsuccessful. Military guys strap him down and take him away.

The next morning, Scully can't make a long-distance call. Guess her day is going as badly as Mulder’s night did. Scully figures out that Mossinger actually works for the government. She forces him at gunpoint to drive her to Mulder, who looks like hell and appears to be suffering from amnesia not unlike that of TW Man. Sculder drive away in Mossinger’s car. Overall, Scully’s (alleged) first carjacking went pretty smoothly. 

Sculder go see TW Man, but his wife refuses to cooperate with them anymore. Now she's been body snatched! OK, it was probably just the military convincing her not to cooperate anymore.

Back in D.C., Scully is working on her field report. She does use the phrase "unidentified flying object," which is technically what it was since they, you know, never identified it. Mulder asks Hardin if they’re here – are we watching Poltergeist now?  He tells Mulder, “They’ve been here for a long, long time.” Is he being honest or just messing with Mulder’s head? Time – and 200-plus episodes – will tell. In the meantime, now I want to go watch Close Encounters or Invasion of the Body Snatchers ... subliminal impulses?

Sestra Professional:

Our basic premise was pretty well set up in the pilot and now we get to expand on the basic principles including our new old friends, "Mulder sees something Scully doesn't" and "When they do see the same thing, they don't agree on what it is."

Of course, the main draw here is meeting Jerry Hardin as someone who knows a lot more than Mulder and Scully do. Is that a "meet cute" in the bathroom? He's willing to share information, but only up to a certain point and then Mulder and Scully will be on their own at their own peril. If he risks losing Mulder, he lobs a softball about why the agent is so obsessed to get a response like, "All the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive."

"Sucker": I don't know, Mulder. If you call a photo you bought at a UFO nerd hangout "not entirely dissuasive," maybe Scully's right about you being a sucker. But the argument, excuse me, discussion they were having about the pilots sitting around like plates of mashed potatoes (to keep Sis Am's Close Encounters theme going) is a much better example of the two sides going with what they know. Mulder says test pilots are supposed to thrive under stress and must have been security risks, while Scully counters nervous breakdowns and that the science or medical technology to do what he's contending doesn't exist. Mulder comes right back with the fact that the science or medical technology to fly whatever it is that's appearing in the night skies isn't supposed to be around either. 

"You think if maybe we ignore him, he'll go away." And we're off on another running theme of the government going to extreme lengths to stop their own people. Mulder and Scully are driven off the road and relieved of their files, film and bullets on grounds of national security. With the return of the kidnapping victim they were originally investigating, Scully believes they're asking questions they have no right to ask, Mulder couldn't disagree more. So while he's getting close enough to her to tell her about Deep Throat and the tapping, he's not at the point where he won't go his own way when need doth arise.

Which segues nicely into the show being able to show Mulder another light show of more substantive means with Scully not around. She wouldn't go, he had to go, so he went. You might say he felt compelled to be there. (Yes, another Close Encounters reference.)

Lest we lose respect for Scully, she does a lot of threatening in this ep. She declares she's going to put all of Mulder's nonsense about searching for UFOs on the taxpayers' dime in her field report when they get back to D.C. But that's mild compared to what she does when Mulder steps his foot in it at the air base. Scully pulls her gun on the reporter-turned-security man and cautions that she will have every newspaper in America writing about the experimental aircraft if she doesn't get her partner back.

After having his car jacked out from under him, security dude says, "Everything you've seen here is equal to the protection we give it. It's you who have acted inappropriately." If he hadn't  misrepresented himself as someone else completely prior to that, I might have even agreed with him on that score.

Now might be a good time to start a "Guest Star of the Week" element on the blog. Seth Green! Two redheads in the same shot? Oh yeah, nowadays people call 'em gingers. Much fun to see him pre-Oz as the stoner with quite a large amount of info stored up about the base, although he and his girlfriend probably just go there to see a show better than Pink Floyd's laser light extravaganza.

And last but not least, I think this show provided the first veiled reference to Mulder's dubious sexual proclivities. His informant's name alone is kind of telling. Yeah, it's a reference to All the President's Men and Bob Woodward's Watergate informant of the same name, and Mulder probably considers it cool in that regard. But he's totally getting off on the fact that it's also the title of a notorious adult film, at least that willl become more apparent as we progress in the rewatch.

X-Files S1E1: The truth is in here

Editors' Note: On the rewatch of The X-Files, Lorrie will be playing the part of Sestra Amateur, and Paige will serve as the resident "expert," aka Sestra Professional. It'll quickly be discerned as well that Sestra Am's coming from the Scully viewpoint and Sestra Pro's definitely more of a Mulder. 

Sestra Amateur:

I was very late to The X-Files party. I did not watch the show as first-run episodes and I don’t think I saw any of them when they first went into syndication. My viewing took place on DVDs and on Netflix, before “bingeing” became a trend. Back then I called it “marathoning,” which sounds less detrimental than bingeing. I’ve seen all of the episodes at least once and viewed some choice bottle eps more than once, courtesy of Sestra Paige. I know I preferred the stand-alone stories to the ongoing mythology, but maybe that’s because I just didn’t “get it”. I also liked the humorous ones over the serious or scary ones. Maybe the main arc will make sense to me this time, but I’m not very optimistic. As long as I’m enjoying the ride then maybe the destination won’t matter.

“The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts.”

Sestra, you’re the expert, so here’s one for you: What have you learned about the actual documented accounts? Is that just creator Chris Carter stirring the pot with the first frame? OK, back to the show. A young woman is running through the Oregon woods in a nightgown. She’s terrified, she trips. She may as well be in a horror movie like Friday the 13^th or The Evil Dead. But then you see bright lights, the world’s weirdest windstorm and the featureless, opaque man standing over her. The next morning, local law enforcement are examining the crime scene and the body. The young woman, Karen Swenson, has two moles (bites? warts?) on her lower back and a terrified official asks, “It’s happening again, isn’t it?” Guess so, buddy.

Later, Dana Scully arrives at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to learn about her new assignment. Scully is an agent with medical training (I’m sure that will come in handy). She knows Agent Fox “Spooky” Mulder by reputation and learns about the existence of the X-Files, which she describes as “unexplained phenomena.” Her boss wants “proper scientific analysis,” which sounds like quite the euphemism for proving Mulder wrong. In the background, a man is calmly and quietly smoking a cigarette.

So Scully goes downstairs -- how many levels down is the basement? -- to meet Mulder, who quickly appears to be an odd combination of brilliant and paranoid. He explains to Scully the connection between the dead woman in Oregon, a dead body in South Dakota and one in Texas -- they all have the two red markings. Mulder asks Scully whether she believes in extraterrestrials and she says no, basing her opinion on the logic of aliens traveling great distances exceeding energy requirements. That’s actually the wrong argument for her to have, but it wouldn’t make sense to have two believers so early in the game, would it? Why wouldn’t it be possible for another planet to have life sustaining capabilities like Earth? Just because we cannot find it in our own solar system does not mean it does not exist elsewhere. It’s very close-minded for a scientist. Mulder probably would have been a believer even without his personal experience. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So Scully insists there’s a medical explanation for the deaths, you just have to know where to look. Sounds logical to me.

They fly to Oregon to conduct an investigation. Turns out, the four victims there were from the same graduating class. There’s some turbulence on their flight just prior to descending which may or may not be related to what happens in the episode. Later, while Mulder is driving, he and Scully experience electronic interference -- the radio changes channels on its own (nothing good was playing anyway) and the digital clock goes wonky. Mulder stops the car and marks the ground with an orange X in spray paint. As Roy Neary would say in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “This means something. This is important.” 

Mulder and Scully get to the gravesite of one of the victims, whose cause of death does not make sense to Mulder. Maybe people do die of exposure …. in seven hours … in July … in Oregon. The medical examiner, Dr. Nemman, who conducted the first three autopsies, shows up with his daughter, Theresa, and starts raising hell. He wants his daughter to wait in the car, but if he didn’t want her involved then why did he bring her along? Maybe she is also “important.”

Ray Soames is brought up from the ground, but the frayed straps pulling out the coffin break and he goes a-tumbling down. No mystery there; if you use frayed cables, then they’re going to break. As a result, the casket opens and we see a distorted, withered corpse. 4D-TV needs to become a thing because everyone acted like he really reeked too.

Now here is where it pays to have an agent with medical training. Scully can perform the autopsy!  Right there and then! So while Mulder is circling the body and taking pictures, Scully is trying to do that on a body that is in “advanced stages of decay.”  (Wow, there are going to be a lot of euphemisms on this show.) Scully tells Mulder it’s not human, but I’m sure she’ll learn to watch her phrasing in the future because you never want to tell a man who is looking for aliens that the body you’re inspecting is “not human.” She also says the body is likely a primate such as an orangutan. Guess that makes this a necropsy. Quick! Someone call the vet! Scully recovers a metallic implant from Ray’s nasal cavity.  Wonder what that’s about.

Mulder and Scully learn there are two live victims at a local hospital who survived a car crash four years prior. Billy Miles is in long-term care in a waking coma. Peggy O’Dell is in a wheelchair, but boy, does she get spastic when Mulder tells the doctor he wants her examined. Mulder, of course, deduces that the victims were abducted.

The FBI agents head into the forest where Scully hears rumbling, sees bright lights and spots a strange man walking toward her. But it’s not an alien; turns out it’s just the detective who tells Mulder and Scully to leave because they’re trespassing. But Scully has grabbed a handful of some type of dirt from the site and shows it to Mulder while they're driving away. At the same time, the compass spins, there’s a bright light and the car stalls. Then get this, Mulder and Scully lose nine minutes of time! And, of course, it happened right where Mulder marked the X on the roadway. Spooky indeed.

When they get back to the hotel, Scully is about to take a shower when she realizes she has two bumps on her back! She shows Mulder who tells her they are just mosquito bites and Scully hugs him in relief. Then Mulder tells Scully his back story -- his sister disappeared when she was 8 years old and Mulder was 12. As an FBI agent he learned about the X-Files, but someone higher up is preventing him from learning more. Nevertheless, he's still on the job because he has friends in Congress. Scully tells Mulder to trust her, but based on his original paranoia when he met her, I wouldn’t count on it. And just because he’s paranoid, doesn’t mean someone isn't out to get him, right? Mulder tells Scully he tried deep regression hypnosis to find out what happened the night his sister disappeared. He recalled a bright light, a presence and was paralyzed from doing anything about it. He's bound and determined to learn what the government conspiracy seeks to keep from him.  

Mulder and Scully then learn Peggy, wheelchair-bound Peggy that is, ran in front of a truck and died.  While investigating this, someone trashes the lab and steals Ray’s body. Someone also sets fire to the hotel they were staying at, conveniently (or inconveniently for them) destroying all the X-rays and pictures as well as Scully’s computer.  Even in 1992 – the year the ep takes place – they can’t even try to recover the data off her hard drive??? Theresa shows up and begs for their protection because she keeps finding herself in the woods and has the moles on her back. The agents go to a local diner where she is easily found by her father (the medical examiner) and Billy’s father (the detective). Mulder takes Scully back to the cemetery to exhume the other bodies, but someone beats them to it. If the locals are trying to cover something up then why didn’t they just cremate the bodies in the first place?

Mulder deduces that comatose Billy is the killer, so they go to the hospital and Scully inspects Billy’s feet. Guess what's on them? The same dirt as the sample she took from the woods. So back to the woods they go again. They're separated and get attacked by Detective Miles. But Billy is there, standing, walking and carrying Theresa. There’s the bright light, there’s the weird windstorm. When the light disappears, Billy is awake and alert, Theresa is alive on the ground. Oh, and Billy’s bumps are gone.  (Are Theresa’s gone, too?) What the hell just happened??? Mulder remembers he has a partner and goes to look for Scully, who missed all of the weird action (naturally).

Back at FBI Headquarters, Billy is undergoing deep regression hypnosis to try and recall what happened to him and the other kids. He said they all saw the light for the first time when they were celebrating their graduation in the forest. All of them were gathered as test subjects and an implant was put into Billy’s nasal cavity.  The “light” (which apparently spoke English, but no one questions that) gave orders to Billy. Scully, her boss and the smoking man observe from a separate room.  Scully reveals to her boss that she still has Ray Soames' implant (communication device?) and it was the only evidence not destroyed. She further explains that she tested it and could not identify the type of material used to make it. What about the victims in South Dakota and Texas? Any follow-up done there? At the end of the episode, the Cigarette Smoking Man secures the implant in a case with other such objects in a giant evidence room in the Pentagon. Crazy Mulder may be right, there is apparently a conspiracy here!

I know my big sticking point with the series will always be the common sense angle. I just have to remind myself this is based on fiction so some concessions have to be made for the sake of story. 


Sestra Professional:

Sestra Am diving into the midst of the rewatch with zeal and gusto, you're a regular Sculder ... or is it Mully? And questioning everything, beginning with the first words. According to creator Chris Carter, there are elements of the pilot (and other stories from the first season, I surmise) taken from alleged UFO accounts. So maybe no Billy Miles or wheelchair-bound Peggy O'Dell, but it's probably more like the little details, such as missing nine minutes and bites/warts/moles/markings?

I can't remember when I started watching the show, I think I might have been "rinsed out" by the government to keep that information from surfacing. I wasn't watching from the pilot, but I was on board before the videotapes started coming out with a couple of episodes on each of them in 1996 (the start of the fourth season). My best guess-timate is somewhere in the second season. It quickly became my favorite show of all time.

It's a strong pilot, setting up Dana Scully as a variation on Clarice Starling (The Silence of the Lambs) with a medical degree that helps carry the story and gives her continuing reason to doubt in the face of her partner Fox Mulder's mostly unwavering optimism. She expects to find all the answers through science, all she has to do is look for them.

"Nobody here but the FBI's most unwanted." From the beginning, we like Mulder because of his obvious wit and intelligence. And if you weren't sold on Scully before the motel room scene in which she worries about the marks on her backside, her moment of frailty surely got that job done. On top of that, a strong hint of chemistry with Mulder inspecting said mosquito bites by candlelight. So right off the bat there's a "to ship or not to ship" vibe. Just for the record, Carter repeatedly said in the early years that he never ever wanted the duo to become romantically involved with each other. We'll be addressing that a lot as the rewatch goes along, but my initial gut response was that it wasn't necessary to further my interest in either the characters or the show.

With the plot well covered by Sestra Am, I'll delve into some more seminal moments from our first look into The X-Files. First of all, I think Scully smiles more here than she does in all the other episodes of the series combined. She can't keep one off her face when she speaks of "Spooky" Mulder's nickname in her boss's office, until she sees that the cigarette-smoking man is not quite as charmed by such talk. Mulder's pithy comments about some of the places and people they meet as part of the investigation also elicit some grins, as does his description of himself as Steven Spielberg when announcing his presence at her motel room door with authority. And then there's the almost hysterical laughter that emanates from her while recounting Mulder's theory in the forest.
 
"We lost nine minutes!" The fundamental differences between the leads are clearly drawn, first in the graveyard scene when Mulder's theories baffle Scully at the same time she's unable to find scientific reason why things are happening. When their car conks out right where X marked the spot and Mulder notes the time lapse, Scully claims time can't disappear because it's a universal invariant. After the vehicle mysteriously restarts with neither of them actually in it, Mulder replies, "Not in this zip code," and Scully's smiles vanish. 

"They stole the corpse?" Scully gets a pretty good look at what the ensuing years will bring when all the evidence they've been accumulating gets wiped out by an unexplained fire. But, ah, wait a minute, maybe she is a worthy match for Mulder, for she pocketed the Billy Miles implant that proves something is indeed going on in Oregon. She may not believe in E.T.s, but you better not count on her for debunking either. She's not exactly a cookie-cutter agent.

Another of the recurring themes is the "Mulder sees something that Scully doesn't" angle. A sure-fire way to keep Mulder believing and Scully not. Because it's the very first episode, it's not particularly bothersome, perhaps because they were both covering a wide swatch of forest around the time of the episode's denouement, but expect a lot of this kind of thing in the future,

And let's not forget the early introduction to the sister Samantha saga. The basic premise gets tweaked slightly as the mythology grows, but basically freaked-out pre-teen Fox was unable to stop his sibling's abduction by aliens -- at least that's the way he remembers it. It's what drives and guides Mulder. David Duchovny has it down pat right out of the box. When he comes up with his wild theories, well, to quote the poster on his wall, "I want to believe."

Gillian Anderson seems so young and green in the pilot, but she's got the gravitas that makes the character work. In her hands, Scully can be bewildered by what's going on around her without jumping to wild conclusions. When Mulder states he knows who the killer is, her inclination isn't the same as his -- to blame "vegetable" Billy Miles. She's got her money on the detective or someone else who is actually conscious. When the ash she finds in the forest matches the dirt on Billy's feet, she doesn't know what to think or how to prove it. Her truth is not out there, she expects good and well to find it through the science right in front of her.

The X-Files set a standard that would be followed on television for years afterward, both in terms of look and style. It plays like a 45-minute feature film. For five years, Vancouver afforded the show the widest array of locales and Mark Snow's music makes everything feel like Mulder's academy nickname. The general banner of unexplained phenomena gave license to the widest array of subject matter -- from conspiracy mythology to "Monsters of the Week" to comedy episodes to serial criminals -- and often encompassing more than one element at the same time. The pilot's a worthy introduction to all of that and a helluva jumping off point.

An introduction to Sibling Cinema

For a couple years, sisters Paige and Lorrie have been doing "Sibling Cinema" on Facebook. We're beginning a whole new chapter in that story as the "sestras" set about to rewatch their favorite television shows and films on this blog. One will be a so-called expert and the other a casual fan. Join us every week for a new installment.

First up: Season One of The X-Files.