X-Files S10E2: Parents just do understand

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.

X-Files S10E1: Unpacking 14 years in 45 minutes

Sestra Amateur: 

X-Philes waited 14 years for more episodes (eight if you count the movie I Want to Believe). On Jan. 24, 2016, they got what they asked for. Sort of. Unfortunately, it begins with a Fox Mulder monologue and anyone who actually reads this blog knows how I feel about those. Twenty seconds into it, my mind started wandering and I had to order myself to pay attention. Meanwhile, by typing this during Mulder’s 2+-minute monologue, I actually lost track of what he was saying and had to restart the episode. Multitasking is hard, but that’s my struggle. (See what I did there?)

In 1947, a UFO crashes on a beautiful day in northwestern New Mexico. The humanoid inside is moving so that’s a good sign. Which leads me to another point: Do aliens use insurance? Life, travel, vehicle insurance could all have claims resulting from one flying saucer crash. But I digress. Military and government officials have converged on the site to investigate, but put a pin in that for now. 

In the present, Dr. Dana Scully receives a phone call from FBI assistant director Walter Skinner. (Jeez, he’s never going to get a promotion, is he?) Walter wants to talk to former special agent Mulder about Tad O’Malley, a right-wing enthusiast who believes current conspiracies date back to Roswell cover-ups. Tad wants to meet Fox. Mulder agrees as long as Scully comes with him.

Sculder and O’Malley meet in Washington, D.C. Tad, played by the always-entertaining Joel McHale, requests they talk in his stretch limo to avoid any spying, prying eyes and ears. O’Malley wants to discuss the X-files, which are still considered closed by the FBI. Mulder isn’t impressed by O’Malley’s ability to make big bucks off of creating controversy and tries to test Tad’s knowledge. O'Malley passes and brings Sculder to meet Sveta (Annet Mahendru), a woman who Fox interviewed as a child abductee. Sveta reveals she was taken repeatedly and impregnated by aliens several times. Mulder wants Dana to test Sveta’s blood for the presence of alien DNA.

Back at the Roswell crash site in 1947, soldiers find a wounded alien crawling away from the UFO. A Man in Black claims it’s dangerous and shoots it. The soldiers follow suit until the alien dies. A compassionate army doctor carries the alien body away from the scene. In the present, Dr. Scully examines Sveta, who believes Mulder suffers from depression and that caused the end of Fox and Dana’s relationship. Sveta knows about Sculder’s baby and realizes Scully has also been an abduction victim, but Dana doesn’t want to talk about it. Mulder and O’Malley have a boys’ day out when Tad brings Fox to meet some paranoid acquaintances of his. They visit a Farraday cage housing an alien replica vehicle. Mulder seems giddy as he inspects the ship. It runs on free energy, not fuel, a technology that has been around for 70 years. Yep, it’s all a conspiracy by the oil companies. This ARV also has a gravity warp drive, thanks to the Roswell UFO.

Tad surprises Dana as she finishes taking her own blood sample. They talk about her surgical work and history with the X-files, but it seems like Mr. O’Malley is taking a personal interest in the unattached Ms. Scully. Meanwhile, Mulder visits Sveta to clarify some of her earlier answers. Sveta now claims men on ships took her babies, not aliens, and there is no one she can trust with the truth. Fox calls Dana to tell her everything they’d been led to believe may be a lie. Too bad he’s interrupting her date with Tad. 

Mulder goes to the former X-files office in the FBI building with Walter Skinner, but all of the files are gone. Skinner claims no one has been in that room for 14 years, but that’s clearly not accurate. Fox stupidly asks who Walter is taking orders from now. Doesn’t he realize Skinner is the one who reached out to him in the first place? Mulder really does come off as a crackpot more often than not. Walter says he noticed a change in the government after 9/11 and he wants Fox to do something about it. Mulder takes the first step by ensuring future contact with his former boss.

O’Malley burns his bridge with Scully by sensationalizing her current surgical work on children born without ears. Pretty sure Dana doesn’t want her patients’ photographs appearing on Tad's (or anyone’s) web show. Unfortunately (luckily?) she’s distracted by the blood test results, which she wants retested ASAP. Scully’s hoping to hear from Mulder, who is having a covert meeting with an old contact at the National Mall. Turns out, the old man is the compassionate army doctor from the Roswell incident, who, 10 years earlier, reached out to Fox because he didn’t want to take his secrets to the grave. Mulder reveals the alien conspiracy doesn’t involve actual aliens, but humans abducting other humans and subjecting them to experimentation. The old man tells Fox he’s close. Apparently he’s not close enough to expose everything because the old man leaves with the final answer still hanging in the air.

Scully goes to see Mulder’s house to check on him. She assumes he’s having one of his usual “save the world” manic moments. He claims O’Malley has been right all along about the human conspiracy, but Dana’s not buying it. Their moment is interrupted by Sveta, who is staying with Mulder. Scully, acting like she was punched in the gut (heart?), gives up and is about to leave when Tad arrives. They convince her to hear out Mulder, who gives Scully a history lesson dating back to World War II and leading to eventual world domination. (Yes, really.) O’Malley plans to go public on his show with their theories. Scully adds to the momentum by telling Sveta her blood shows no evidence of alien DNA. But what a difference a day makes; the next day, Sveta publicly recants her allegations and Tad blames it on the government. Sveta disappears, the ARV and the scientists who worked on it are blown up by the military and O’Malley’s website has been shut down (gasp!)

Fox meets with Dana in her hospital’s parking garage. He implores her to not give up, but she’s worried about Sveta’s safety. Scully tells Mulder she retested Sveta’s blood (and genome) as well as her own and their results were the same. Dana’s now on board to help stop the human conspirators. At that moment, Skinner conveniently calls them into action. Meanwhile, on a dark, deserted road, Sveta’s car shuts down. She thinks she’s being abducted again (the UFO above her with the green laser light certainly supports that theory), but she actually gets firebombed instead. At the end of the episode, information is relayed to one of the conspirators, an elderly man with a nasty smoking habit. Hey, isn’t he supposed to be dead?!

Sestra Professional: 

The Sestras saw the first episode of the revival at New York Comic Con in October 2015, but it didn't air on Fox until late January. The predominant memory I have of watching it with legions of other dedicated X-Philes was how excited everyone got at having the original credits music back with Mitch Pileggi's name finally included in that incarnation. That's kind of backed up by my blog from the event, and I'm having a similar reaction six years later.

"My Struggle" doesn't start out very smoothly, it's heavily reliant upon us being so invested in the characters we watched for nine seasons and two movies that we will take anything they give us. So hearing the opening words "My name is Fox Mulder" is akin to being airlifted to an alien spaceship. There's the inevitable recap -- the disappearance of his sister, how he came to be involved with the X-files and Dana Scully ... yadda yadda yadda. I guess that was just in case someone who had never watched the series or seen the movies happened to be tuning in for the first episode of what was billed as an "event series."

Life's become a punchline: Fox's voiceover says -- in the typical Mulder overbaked voiceover fashion that we'd come to know and even miss (everyone except Sestra Am) in the years since we last saw Sculder -- that we must ask ourselves if UFOs are a hoax. Are we truly alone or are we being lied to? And then there's an example that the technology for showing a UFO crash on television has gotten a lot better since the original series went off the air.

In similar fashion, Dana and Fox are shoehorned back into the action -- seriously, a medical doctor about to go into surgery has to act as Mulder's agent? With the rest of the next two seasons already in my rearview mirror, I'm willing to pinpoint this tiny sliver of a moment as when the character once deemed one of the best female role models on TV started to get pushed off that mantel. 

That doesn't take away from getting to see Mulder and Scully again, even with the opening eye-rolling attempt at banter about Fox's choice of transportation. I'll admit it, I'm always happy to see them too. Joel McHale's arrival infuses some air into the proceedings, even if Tad O'Malley isn't willing to roll down his windows. 

Aliens couldn't find this place: So Tad brings our reunited heroes off to see Sveta, who seems a little demure but relatively calm for someone who has been abducted multiple times and been repeatedly impregnated by aliens. Sveta says she has alien DNA, not sure why that would be a thought rolling around her head, but still going with it, cause ... Fox and Dana are working the case!

Sveta's got an intermittent mind-reading thing going on, so while that solves my previous question -- she knew it would intrigue Scully and Mulder -- it's another bit of a weak premise with no prior reasoning behind it. Still with them, though, cause my X-Files interest overcame killer cats and goat suckers. It can certainly survive a problematic UFO starter story. 

I've never felt so alive: Much more interesting to me was the free-energy gambit. (Show creator Chris Carter, the writer/director of this episode must have gotten some really good intel in his downtime in this regard.) The spaceship hovering in an electromagnetic field and then seeming to vanish has piqued my interest. Well, mostly.

The flashback scenes coming out of the desert don't up the ante immediately, as they're rather formulaic and clichéd. And while I can't blame O'Malley for hitting on Dana, it's not something I particularly want to see. Sveta continues to show insight that helps move along the story, but it doesn't feel organic. And we couldn't very well have an event kickoff without the immortal words that "(Insert name here) is the key to everything." Why must there always be a key? I'm eager to get to the Darin Morgan episode, because he never builds his story foundation in an obvious manner and it always retains its structure and integrity.

I was being led by my nose through a dark alley to a dead end: My concerns get waylaid when we finally see Skinner. David Duchovny and Mitch Pileggi do a nice job delivering some chunky bits of dialogue designed to melt away the 14 years since the characters have been in each other's orbits. They've still got it, and I'm jonesing to see more of it.

More good groundwork is set. Scully's concerns over her blood work raises eyebrows, and we finally find out the connection between the crash at the beginning of the episode, the obliteration of the alien and Mulder's informant. This should have segued perfectly into the "You are on fire" scene between Fox and Dana. But even that's impeded by the need to throw out the old chestnuts -- "you want to believe" and "the truth is out there." It's done with such a heavy hand that it undermines what should have been the highlight of the episode and the hallmark of the return.

Next, Mulder spews a lot of interesting information that bridges the gap between the H-bomb and where we are now. There's just so much there -- ideas amassed by Fox for so many years -- that it's too much to take. O'Malley piles more on top of that with concepts Carter uses to bridge the distance between the end of the regular show and the event series. I thought Dana would bring us out from under the weight of this oppression by saying that going public with the fear-mongering claptrap was incredibly irresponsible.

We have a small problem: But then there was some kind of total particle reversal. Not sure why the guys who solved the free-energy problem were blown to bits and returned to the atmosphere, isn't that technology that could be of use in the longer term? O'Malley's disappearance was abrupt, but I can go along with that in the name of the continuing story. And, of course, the biggest news of all -- Scully had just said a test proved Sveta didn't have alien DNA, only to do another test that proved they both have it. Um, if we're talking about fear-mongering claptrap, perhaps a medical doctor who thought a particular test's results weren't conclusive shouldn't give the result out as fact. And finally, hey, there's our old hollowed-out nemesis seemingly intact. Maybe he had used some of that super-soldier technology that's been otherwise disregarded to regenerate, and it just doesn't work on the part of the body abused for decades by tobacco.

So I'm left totally confused and overwhelmed with information ... and I'll admit that I like that. Welcome back, X-Files! Oh yeah, are you gonna get around to telling us what happened on Dec. 22, 2012 -- the planned date of colonization?

Guest star of the week: Joel McHale enters the fray with a lot of energy and charm. Tad O'Malley could have come off as even more of an annoying know-it-all than he does. What McHale actually accomplishes is giving us a glimpse into how people like O'Malley become legends to the public.