X-Files S3E10: The numbers game

Sestra Amateur: 

If Sestra Pro and I had planned this a little better, "731" might have been reviewed closer to 7/31, but 7/15 it is. We left off with Stunt Double Mulder jumping onto a train even though Scully – via Mr. X – warned him not to. Instead of picking up there, we see an Army vehicle ram through the locked gates of Hansen’s Disease Research Facility. Which is more unnerving, breaking into a disease-research facility or breaking out of one? After gaining access, soldiers start herding figures who look suspiciously like Close Encounters of the Third Kind aliens in light-blue pajamas. Someone with horrible skin and white hair watches from the trap door of an oubliette. (See what I did there?) The unseen patient follows the truck on foot and watches a firing squad assassinate the pajama party and leave the bodies in a mass grave. Looks like this is going to be one of those lighthearted X-Files eps.

Back to the cliffhanger. Mulder lands on the train and loses his phone. Scully gets annoyed because he won’t (can’t) answer her. Dana pulls a gun on Mr. X to get answers, but he quickly disarms her. X lets her know everything is related -- what’s on the train, who killed her sister and whatever is on the implant in her neck. At least he gives her gun back. It’s dark outside when Fox finally gets inside the train. He seeks help from the conductor, who looks familiar probably because he’s played different roles in several X-Files eps. At least Millennium shows him some love and lets him play the same character twice. The conductor directs Mulder to the compartment of Dr. Shiro Zama – aka Takeo Ishimaru -- but it’s empty except for a briefcase. Fox gives the briefcase to the conductor for safekeeping as well as his backup gun to keep Dr. Zama there when he comes back.

At FBI headquarters, Dana learns more about her implant. It sounds like the technology really has the potential to mess with her mind. Scully finds out it was made by a Japanese company linked to good ol’ Dr. Zama in Perkey, West Virginia. Fun fact: The scientist analyzing Dana’s chip has a bit of a crush on her. 

Back on the train, that Red-Haired Man is about to assassinate Dr. Zama with piano wire when Fox strolls down the hall to save the day. Actually, Mulder doesn’t see them enter the bathroom and he has no clue what’s going on behind the closed door, so let’s bid a fond farewell to the doctor. When Mulder does find Zama’s body, he’s clearly irked (Fox, not the doc, who just looks surprised). Unfortunately, a passenger and her son see the corpse. Mulder, in the future, don’t touch a dead body then try and console a boy by patting his head, at least wash your hands first. Zama’s bad karma may seep its way into the kid’s psyche. 

Meanwhile, Scully makes it to Perkey – alone, at night – and sees some blue pajama-clad people running away from her. Dana finds the severely skin-damaged group hiding below her. They beg her not to hurt them and reveal they live on the Hansen facility grounds as an unofficial leper colony. The lead leper tells Scully about the death squads that eliminated hundreds of deformed Hansen patients. Sounds like the cure was worse than the disease. The leper in charge takes Dana to the mass grave, which is still exposed. A helicopter arrives and scares off the leader. Foot soldiers find Scully and hold her at gunpoint while she hears shots fired behind her, probably killing the lead leper. 

Mulder’s searching the train for Zama’s killer -- maybe it was suicide – but finds an “alien” instead. Fox finally sees an alien! Unfortunately, Red gets the drop on him and tries to take Mulder out with the piano wire too. The gun-toting conductor shows up and saves his life. Now subdued, Red claims to work for the NSA, but he doesn’t seem to know Mulder. Is it my imagination or did Fox seem a little irritated by that? Red claims there’s a bomb that's been accidentally triggered on the train, so if Mulder shoots Red he might set off the bomb. 

Scully gets brought before the Elder – one of Cancer Man’s inner-circle peeps. He really needs a better nickname. He’s not Cigarette-Smoking Man, Red-Haired Man or Well-Dressed Man. How about Somber-Exposition Man, since he’s actually going to give up some information? Dana says she knows Zama and Takeo Ishimaru are the same person. In turn, the Elder knows a lot about her. 

The Red-Fox standoff continues back in the locked train car. Mulder’s about to try and get them out when Red’s cell phone goes off. Turns out, it’s the Elder calling so Dana can talk some sense into Fox. She reveals she is in the train car where her implant was … implanted. And finally, she tells him there really is a bomb on Mulder’s train. So, do answers that Fox doesn’t want to hear still count as answers? Apparently not, because Mulder pretends he has a bad connection and hangs up on his partner. 

Fox puts the conductor to work so they can safely separate the bomb car from the rest of the train as the timer quickly counts down. Mulder passes the time questioning Red and learns Zama found a way to make soldiers immune to chemical weapons. Since Fox can’t give up his quest altogether, he assumes it’s an alien-human hybrid locked in the car with them. Red makes a good point that if it was an alien, no one has come to save whoever – or whatever – is in that compartment.

Scully goes in an interesting direction, she calls Senator Matheson and tapes an X to the window in Mulder’s apartment. She kills time while watching the Alien Autopsy video and sees Zama entering the code to get out of the train car: 1013 (“I made this!”) 31. Fox is momentarily relieved to see it worked. Red then clocks him upside the head and stomps on him a bit. Yeah, Red seems like the type who would kick a person when he’s down. So the assassin escapes – and promptly gets shot and killed by Mr. X. He checks on Mulder who is bloody and unconscious, then tries to get to the person/thing locked in the car. With seconds left, X chooses to save Fox just before the explosion. 

One week later, Mulder can’t get any answers. And now we’ve come full circle. Dana brings Zama’s briefcase to Fox, and he’s convinced they’re not the same Japanese journals he saw earlier. Turns out Mulder’s right, somehow Cancer Man has them. You know, it really takes a lot of work to keep a conspiracy alive. Fox just doesn’t appreciate that. 

Sestra Professional:

Cough, cough. Remember, David Duchovny made the jump, his stunt double only went over the railing. And c'est la vie, we'll be off July 31, so we wouldn't have delivered a blog done on that date anyway. Actually, "731" was a reference to a unit of the Japanese Army that experimented on prisoners of war, as the Japanese doctors -- with the U.S. government's knowledge -- have done here. 

I find the conclusion of this two-parter to be somewhat unsatisfying. As we learned last week, The X-Files made these two episodes together because of the big action sequences, the controversial train jump and subsequent explosion. But that means there's not a lot of meat on the bones of these two stories. I'll give them some credit for the emotional impact of the death of the leper test subjects since we've all been implanted by the horrors of the Holocaust. And at least Mulder gets to see his alien. 

I don't have time for your convenient ignorance: Holding a gun on someone just doesn't glean the amount of information it used to. I was distracted by Scully's "you smug son of a..." line anyway, since the Season 3 blooper reel shows Gillian Anderson going a little overboard to the giddy delight of the crew. But X's declaration that Dana's implant holds more than I can ever tell you feels so hollow, he obviously could impart quite a bit more information.

But I have to say I was pretty pleased for that conductor, played by Michael Puttonen, who has Sestra Am stated has been seen on the show before as the motel manager in "Deep Throat" and Dr. Pilsson in "Sleepless." That conductor had a pretty exciting story to tell about his day after he gets home, if he made it home.

Agent Pendrell also can make some entries into his diary. He sure knows his stuff, giving Dana lots of info on the neural network that had been placed in the back of her neck. But I'll take him to task for one particular line --  "there's no information, except for this." Well, Pendrell, if there's a this, then there is information. That piece of paper.

Back on North by Northeast, that Red-Haired Man doesn't look so red-haired to me, even when he's out of the shadows. Where's Damian Lewis when you need him? "You're gonna die, you know that?" Red chides Mulder. "What do you care? You were going to kill me anyway." Thanks for voicing our concerns, Fox.

The protracted Sculder phone conversation lays out the agents' positions pretty succinctly. Scully's firmly believes that the government has been experimenting on human subjects, be it the disease and radiation tests on the lepers or the implementation of the tell-tale chip in her own neck. And Mulder's not going to budge from believing it's all about human-alien hybrids.

This non-red-headed Red-Haired Man knows an awful lot for an assassin. Why would he be toting his piano wire across the country killing people and not sending others to do it in his place? But his line about someone showing up to save the hybrid certainly seems to back Mulder's case when X shows up in the nick of time. That's a pretty big step for a guy who didn't want to get as involved as Deep Throat.

And according to Steven Williams in the official third-season episode guide, that choice came none too soon. "X was starting to get a little bit irritating to the fans," he said. "He'd come on and say some nebulous shit, some ambiguous sort of thing, and people would say, 'Come on! Just give him the information.'" 

Apology has become policy: The show deftly utilized the fact that the United States had, at the time, recently expressed regret for secret radiation experiments conducted into the mid-70s. So Scully's speech to Mulder at the end about apologizing for what couldn't be covered up holds water, although we didn't seriously think she'd be able to sway him from what he just saw, did we?

It was the heat of the meta: Director Rob Bowman took some heat for accidentally destroying two cameras during the filming of the train bomb, according to the third-season episode guide. ... Also noted in the guide was special effects makeup artist Toby Lindala's big challenge, creating the mass grave with 25 masked actors -- most of whom were children -- along with 25 prop bodies. The job needed to be completed in five days, and some of the masks used were modified from those used in previous episodes.

Guest star of the week: I gave Stephen McHattie some guff for not looking particularly ginger, but the tense scene between Mulder and Red stands out as the acting highlight of the episode. It manages to hold the tension despite the fact that even the most naive viewer would guess the assassin wasn't going to be long. Nice symmetry in the fact that McHattie's well known for some other numerical titles, -- 2012 and 300.