As we begin a new season, the first question you should ask yourself: Do you need to remember what happened at the end of Season 5 or what happened at the end of the blockbuster X-Files movie? The answer is … yes. Luckily, there’s a recap for both at the beginning of the episode. I’ll let Sestra Pro cover the technical changes the show made behind the scenes, but she was right about one thing, it is brighter.
In Phoenix, Arizona, which now could really be Phoenix, some engineers commuting from work at the Rolling Hills Nuclear Power Plant take an unscheduled pee break in the desert. Afterward, one guy named Sandy develops chills and his body becomes opaque. The next morning one of his co-workers finds what’s left of Sandy; something had burst out of his chest – think Kane in Alien – and turned the poor dude into a bright red, bloody mess.
Sculder are brought before yet another review panel, this one led by Wendie Malick as Assistant Director Maslin, to discuss his office fire and the spaceship in Antarctica. I’ll admit, when Fox tries to explain the The Syndicate’s master plan from Fight the Future, he sounds crazy and paranoid. Too bad GoPro wasn’t invented until 2002 because that would have helped Mulder’s case. And bonus points to one of the panel members who questions Sculder’s travel expenses. That does give a sense of realism to the scene.
Meanwhile, The Syndicate has moved on to the Phoenix fiasco. Cancer Man assures The Elder he can and will take care of the problem. CSM later interrupts Gibson Praise’s brain surgery to tell the doctor to wrap it up. We know he’s a villain, but it’s still a dick move to be openly smoking in surgery, especially when the patient’s brain matter is exposed. I was expecting him to stamp out the cigarette in the kid’s head like his own personal ashtray.Assistant Director Skinner tells Mulder that he is not going back to the X-files. He then assigns Fox the Phoenix fiasco, which technically he doesn’t have the right to do ... because Agent Spender has commandeered Mulder’s old office and it's there where he breaks the news that Agent Fowley, out of her coma and back at work, has taken over the X-Files.
Sculder visit Sandy’s crime scene in Phoenix. Clearly the gouge marks in the wall and hardwood floors were not made with a human hand, as the investigator’s report claims. Fox does a better job than the crime scene unit and finds a broken non-human fingernail in the wall. Mulder accurately determines what happened, and Scully’s main dissenting opinion relates only to the creature’s abbreviated gestation period. Cancer Man and Gibson arrive outside where Gibson psychically tracks the creature. He also does a good job of keeping CSM’s driver/goon from going inside the house to check. I think young Praise is protecting our heroes. He also pushes Cancer Man’s fear button a little bit. The kid’s got a mean streak. Not even realizing what happened outside, Sculder argue about the science/alien aspects of the case, but Dana reminds him of his speech in the movie before the near-kiss/bee sting. Good to know she still plans to keep his work honest.
Rolling Hills Nuclear Power Plant is clearly run by a crack team of engineers. One of the reactors is a few degrees off so Homer (nice inside joke, FOX) checks the reactor and promptly gets attacked by an unknown creature. Local emergency crews and the new X-files team (Fowlder? Spendley?) are already on site when Sculder arrive and are denied entry. Diana subtly accuses the old team of filching the Phoenix fiasco file. Our heroes are about to leave when they find Gibson alone in the back seat of a car and take him to a nearby motel. This is where Scully’s medical background really comes in handy, normal people would take him to the hospital. Fox wants Gibson to help them find the creature, but Dana wants to keep him safe and hospitalized. Agent Fowley shows up at the motel to defend her current assignment and tells Mulder the creature is still in the reactor, which has been sealed off by the NRC. (I was wondering why the National Racquetball Club would have any say in the matter, but they probably mean the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.) He goes with Diana while Scully takes Praise to a nearby hospital. Inside the reactor, Mulder and Fowley find a slime trail and some gouge marks. He really needs to start carrying latex gloves with him or stop touching everything.
Of course, Cancer Man’s goon re-kidnaps Gibson. This time I blame Dana -- one for going to a local hospital, two for not having additional security around the boy at all times and three for leaving him alone while she called Fox. Did she even notify Skinner or anyone else at the FBI that she recovered a missing kidnap victim?!? Maybe she was rattled because Gibson knew she still wanted to study him. On a side note, it was pretty funny watching her yell at the orderly, played by Benito Martinez, future Captain David Aceveda on The Shield. Mulder and Fowley are chasing the creature around the reactor while Gibson leads the goon to the same location. The teams end up on opposite sides of a locked door, with Praise and the goon on the winning (losing?) side. Bye, bye goon. Gibson and the creature seem to communicate, but we don’t really get to see what happens. Sculder are brought back before the review panel and reassigned to Assistant Director Kersch, played by James Pickens Jr., who has been enjoying a lengthy run on Grey’s Anatomy. (I like him better as a doctor than a Fed.) Sculder have to relinquish all X-files related material or risk immediate dismissal. And Spender’s papa makes an unannounced visit in which they talk about breaking Fox's spirit, blah blah blah. At least Spender knows his enemy well enough to assume Mulder has no intention of quitting. Fox doesn’t even wait for the ink to dry on the order before he goes back to working on recovering his burned case files.
Afterward, Scully shows Mulder test results indicating her recent virus is actually part of Gibson’s DNA, which is part of all humans’ DNA. For some reason though, it’s active in the boy and inactive in everyone else. So if Praise is extraterrestrial, then everyone is. Fox should consider that a win, he found his aliens and they are us. And back in the reactor, Gibson is sitting around while the creature enjoys a nice “bath,” until it sheds another layer of skin and looks like a stereotypical alien. Um, why is no one looking for Praise?? I can’t tell whether he’s the luckiest kid in the world or the unluckiest. Unfortunately, since we don’t see young Gibson again this season, it’ll be a while before we get some answers. Sestra Professional:
Welcome to sunny California! (Opening with a shot of the brightest star in the galaxy was a dead giveaway, wasn't it?) We're now basically inhabiting the polar opposite of the universe the show resided in for five years. And after the excitement of the feature film, we're basically mostly back to the end of the fifth season. Somehow everything and nothing happens in "The Beginning." It was a letdown on Nov. 8, 1998, and it still feels like one today.
So we've lost Well-Manicured Man and Krycek is nowhere to be found. In their places, we have Jeffrey Spender and Diana Fowley. This is not a good tradeoff. As fine an actor as Chris Owens is, he can't keep mini-Spender from coming off as a small-minded twerp. Mimi Rogers has as many scenes with David Duchovny as Gillian Anderson does. That'll endear the show to no shipper. It's a good thing some fun episodes are coming up, because what formerly was the show's strong suit -- the mythology -- is fast turning into its weakest link.I didn't see Men in Black: I guess they had to come back from the movie with a conspiracy episode, but in truth, the bulk of it is not particularly interesting or intriguing. Chris Carter penned it and everything about it feels reminiscent of the creator/show runner. This is particularly true on the dialogue front, from the weak putdowns uttered by the carpooling engineers to Skinner spouting off about "bringing to heel a conspiracy whose members walk the halls with absolute impugnity" instead of speaking understandable, unpretentious English.
The Syndicate has been whittled down to Cigarette Smoking Man and others so humdrum they're just referred to as First Elder and Second Elder. Spender doesn't believe in the "paranormal mumbo jumbo" and Fox's former flame is starting to show her true colors. Even CSM seems more trite with cardboard dialogue like "It's him or it's us." He shows fear -- something we never would have expected from a man who never let anything affect him for five seasons -- and Gibson Praise voices it, even if Cancer Man won't.
I see your renowned arrogance has been left quite intact: So our heroes have to testify again, just like they did at the end of the movie to get the X-files reopened. The board they face utilizes a new buzz word -- "spaceling"-- and refers to the last third of what was in the movie as a "rattletrap account of high adventure in the Antarctic." That's not a good sign. Scully's focus is on the virus, all she's thinking about is the science. She seems to have ignored what was all around her in the subterranean alien headquarters and forgotten what she said via closed captioning -- "I saw it ... I saw it too..." -- at the end of the movie. Dana still follows Fox around, kind of like a puppy being trained to do something it doesn't want to. I have softened my stance on Assistant Director Kersh, though. If Sculder are going to be working in another part of the bureau, it's intriguing for them to report to someone a lot less amenable than Skinner.Fox and Diana tracking the creature in the power plant should hold more suspense than it does. Mulder has got a pretty good handle on what's going on, having figured out the creature sprung forth from the first victim's body and heat advances the creature's growth. He's pretty ill prepared for trying to capture it at the plant, though. Fowley lets him take the lead a lot like Scully does, the difference the latter appears to be more overtly supportive of the work. Although Diana ultimately just keeps tabs on Fox, possibly what was originally envisioned as Dana's role when she was first assigned to the X-files.
I'm a very special lab rat: There's no actual reference to Scully's late daughter, Emily, in the dialogue when Dana's treating the wise kid for the minimal amount of time she's able to keep him in her care, but Anderson somehow imbues that through her body language. The most intriguing aspect of "The Beginning" winds up being Gibson's telepathy with the alien. With that conduit, the boy truly may be the best chance Sculder have to prove their theories. We won't see him again for many moons, so hopefully it's not their last. Hey, score a point for science (finally) as Scully brings some solid proof into the mix at the end of the episode. With the genes from the claw matching Praise's, she posits the theory of "junk DNA" -- remnants already present in chromosomes that lie dormant in regular human beings, but are "turned on" in Gibson. The thing about us all being extraterrestrial always gave me pause, though. If we're from Earth, we're not extraterrestrial, right?
Mulder. So smart, about some things, so dumb about others. (Why wouldn't he have seen Men in Black, it's right in his wheelhouse!) He can figure out alien gestation, but he can't see that Fowley's report to the board was self-serving for her. Even Scully can admit that without a blood test.
Meta from La La Land: Moving from Vancouver to Los Angeles meant bringing a whole new crew on board for Season 6. Bill Roe, a former camera operator, was hired to bring the right mood and atmosphere as a cinematographer. "Bill Roe not only lights the scene but sets the shot with the operator," Carter said in The Complete X-Files. "The operator has a tremendous amount of input, but Bill does both where (previous cinematographer John Bartley) simply leaves the camera work to the operator." ... According to the official episode guide, co-executive producer Michael Watkins and Carter tapped the show's casting director, Rick Millikan, to play the engineer who incubated the alien. Millikan spent most of his time on set casting for Season 6, Episode 2 "Drive." Oh, and he paid himself scale for his acting. ... Although Duchovny helped initiate the series' move to Hollywood, Anderson came to quickly appreciate the shift. "It seemed like we had more time off once we moved down south," she said in The Complete X-Files. "In the first year in California, I think I had more days off than I ever had in five years of the show combined." 
Guest star of the week: There are a lot of accomplished actors in the Season 6 premiere and yet the strongest performance comes from Jeff Gulka, who was only 11 at the time. He elicits sympathy for young Gibson Praise, who can call any character on the carpet through his mind reading. I'm not buying what Mimi Rogers, Wendie Malick and Arthur Taxier are selling, but I definitely cotton to Gulka. Just one thing, Gibson, can you tell us where Krycek is?
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