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 13th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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