In case you missed it, a medley on my feels thus far can be found here. Let season 2 commence!
Little Green Men
… and everything is awful.
My babies have been split up, Mulder’s an absolute state, and Scully is zoning out mid-autopsy. One of her students tells her she’s acting “spooky.” D’ya ever feel like someone’s out to get you? At HQ, she and Mulder pass each other in the hallway and, despite her cracking the most adorable little smile in the history of ever and saying hello, he’s utterly oblivious. The pain is real, people.
Pain will define much of this episode. I’ll try to keep it snappy, because a lot happened and my already unsteady cup of emosh is running over. Firstly, things aren’t as bad as they initially appear. Our forcibly separated heroes are still meeting periodically—in secret and after dark—to discuss any developments they may have come across. A moment of appreciation for the fact that Scully’s even looking for developments—my, how far she’s come. In this instance however, Scully contacts Mulder (by way of a post-it on the photo of Samantha on his desk) just because she wants to know if he’s OK and this is the only way he would see her.
Mulder is now on white collar crime surveillance and slowly dying inside. He laments the fact that he still has no solid evidence, despite everything he’s seen so far. He learned the importance of having evidence from Scully. He then starts questioning whether Samantha’s abduction ever even happened. Scully tries to comfort him and urges him not to give up, but he slides to the floor looking utterly broken. She caresses his hair before she leaves. I am a good person and I do not deserve this torture.
Mulder goes home and has a dream about the night Samantha was taken. It’s actually decidedly low-rent and not how I pictured it—lots of bright, iridescent lights swallow up the house while they’re watching TV; a distorted figure appears in the doorway and Samantha floats up and out the window. He tried to grab his parents’ gun but fumbled and ended up helpless on the ground watching her go. I’m not sure this tallies with how he described the abduction last season, so it’s possible his subconscious is embellishing. It’s all very Close Encounters.
Mulder then receives a tip off from one Senator Matheson. I’m guessing this is the friend in Congress he alluded to last season, as Matheson discreetly informs him (over a wall of Bach to deafen any possible listeners) that extraterrestrial contact has been logged at a facility in Puerto Rico. Mulder has 24 hours before a UFO retrieval team rock up and immolate the place, so he hauls ass. This means he doesn’t show up for work, and Skinner—once he’s satisfied Scully doesn’t actually know where he is—sends her off to find him.
Scully gets into Mulder’s apartment and manages to access files on his computer. The password is “trustno1”, which is effing hilarious. There’s also a message from an unidentified woman on the answering machine, which elicits an unimpressed Scully face and makes me suspicious. Anytoot, she’s just printed a copy of satellite data when two agents bimble in and demand to know what she’s up to. She ably diverts them by saying she’s there to feed the fish and sneaks out with the printout.
Either they’re terrible agents for not realising what was on this piece of paper, or—more likely—they let her go so she could find him for them. Scully takes the printout to a US naval observatory and learns that the data thereon is very similar to a transmission recorded from space in the 70s, the so-called “wow!” signal. There are four observatories in the world with the equipment to pick up such a signal, and after cross-referencing their locations with flight manifests Scully correctly deduces that Mulder has gone to Puerto Rico.
Meanwhile, he’s been having an adventure all his own. He found the observatory and more transmission data, as well as a terrified local man named Jorge who’s been locked in the bathroom for some time. Jorge is delirious with fear and babbles something about lights in the sky, then draws a face on the wall which looks like a UFO. A couple of hours later, Mulder is mid-analysis when there’s a piercing, alarm-like noise and all of the instruments start playing random bits of tape. Jorge bolts out into the storm and Mulder follows him, only to find him dead and contorted against a tree. Dommage.
Mulder drags the body back inside and attempts a rudimentary examination, lest the body decompose quickly and destroy any forensic evidence. I probably should have twigged this beforehand but he’s dictating notes into a tape recorder and guys, they’re for Scully. He’s midway through his examination when he pauses and observes, horrified, “My God Scully, it’s as if he’s been frightened to death.” He then goes on to ruminate about whether all this is some sick, elaborate military joke or the like and notes, “Before, I could only trust myself. Now I can only trust you. And they’ve taken you away from me. Life up to now has been about the need to see her again… but what would I do if they really came?“
Like I said: this episode is filled with pain. I don’t know why I’m so overcome at the thought of him leaving notes for Scully when he’s already said she’s the only person he trusts, but these asides are just so important.
His sad spiel is interrupted by another alien visit. He locks the door and takes out his gun, which refuses to work. The same distorted figure which appeared when Samantha was taken materialises in the doorway. Déjà vu sucks. Scully finds him the next day, laid out on the ground. She freaks out thinking he’s dead, but manages to get him to come to. He groggily informs her that there was proof of contact and snatches one of the tapes before they both do a runner away from the UFO retrieval team. The latter give chase but our heroes manage to escape thanks to some maniacal driving by Mulder, and then we’re back in Washington.
Mulder is summoned to Skinner’s office to be yelled at. This isn’t unlike The Simpsons, you know. Mulder being scolded by the increasingly beleaguered headmaster. But their exchange is interesting – Skinner tells him off for not showing up at his assignment, and Mulder counters by asking why they illegally tapped his phone. Skinner looks taken aback, as if he didn’t actually know this was going on. The perennially-present Cigarette-Smoking Man is standing in the back and tells Mulder he’s being kicked out of the Bureau, but Skinner turns and rails on him and kicks HIM out of the office instead. Yo. It just got interesting.
Mulder is sent back to his assignment, and Scully meets him to listen to the tape they brought back from Puerto Rico. Predictably, it’s blank. Mulder isn’t defeated however – despite his disappointment, he informs her that, “I may not have the X-Files, but I still have my work. I still have you. I still have myself.” There’s hand-clasping. Pain. Enjoyable pain, if I can say that, because this was an amazing episode and the insights into their relationship were vivid and telling. But I’m still feeling it where it hurts.
The Host
This is a juicy horror episode and a nice bit of frivolity after the intensity of the opening installment. Though it’s not without its key moments; notably, Mulder learns that he and Scully have an unidentified “friend” at the Bureau.
The episode opens with a sailor on a Russian ship being sucked into a tank of water. A while later, on the other side of the world, a body is discovered in a sewer in Newark. Skinner dispatches Mulder to investigate, something he’s not best pleased about. After seeing the body and telling local law enforcement to ship it to FBI HQ, he storms in on Skinner mid-meeting and demands to know why he’s been sent on a wild goose chase. Skinner tells him to cop on, in as many words, and to be fair it’s obvious there’s more to this than meets the eye. Don’t be so stubborn, Mulder. I have faith in your bespectacled boss.
He meets Scully later, out in the open this time, as she requested last episode. He mulls over leaving the Bureau, prompting her to suggest he look for a transfer to Quantico. Mulder rules it out, saying they won’t allow the two of them to work together and right now that’s the only reason he can think of to stay. I feel your pain, friend, but Scully’s can-do attitude will not be beaten. She says she could at least request to do the autopsy on the body he recovered and see if there’s anything untoward.
Another man is attacked down in the sewers of Jersey, but he survives. He’s pulled out with a strange bite mark on his back. Mulder arrives to interview him and gets a mysterious phone call from someone claiming to be “a friend” at the FBI. I want to say this is Skinner, but that seems way too obvious. Whoever it is doesn’t say anything of note yet but gets Mulder thinking. He goes to visit Scully (hurray for their having a legit professional excuse to see each other!), who found a live worm-like creature during the autopsy. She says such worms attach themselves to their prey using a sucking-like mechanism but it’s too small to explain the wounds on the second victim’s back. Mulder tells her about the phone call and asks if she’s launched some kind of campaign on his behalf, to which she replies that she’d never betray his confidence. Obviously she wouldn’t, Fox, you nitwit. Stay the course here.
The second victim dies later after coughing up another worm thing. It swims down the shower drain and disappears. A sanitation worker then spots a gigantic worm creature in the water at a treatment plant. It’s gross and bloated and not unlike that zombie down the well in season 2 of The Walking Dead. Mulder calls Scully up and asks her to come and see it. She’s been researching the fluke worm she found. Someone shoves a paper under her door while she’s working. It’s one of those hyperbolic conspiracy theory journals (not The Lone Gunman) and includes a piece on the Russian ship incident from the opening scenes. Scully checks her autopsy records and discovers that the victim had a Russian tattoo on his arm.
She brings this info to Mulder, who’s thrilled at the prospect of telling Skinner that his suspect is “a giant bloodsucking worm.” Said worm creature has retreated into a bathroom at the treatment facility and Scully eyes it through the door with fascination. She also takes this opportunity to inform her erstwhile partner that she’d consider it “more than a professional loss” if he decides to leave the Bureau. Ah stop, lads. Please. I’ll break up this beautiful love scene with a screencap of the gross worm thing.
Skinner—bizarrely—wants to put it into a psych facility. Mulder gapes at him with stupefaction and says it’s not a man, it’s a monster. Skinner acknowledges that this should have been an X-File, but defends his decision and says, “We all take our orders from someone, Agent Mulder.” Oh well now. Is he the friend in the FBI? I hope so. I like him a lot. I feel like he’d be class to go for a pint with.
Somebody makes the poor decision to let US marshals transport the worm creature (no disrespect, but wtf. Where are your secretive CIA battalions when you need them?) which, of course, escapes, taking one of them out along the way. It crawls into a portaloo and is sucked up by a sanitation truck. Mulder shows up to the crime scene the next day and gets another call from his mysterious friend, who says that success in his current assignment is “imperative” as reinstatement of the X-Files must be “undeniable.” That is an interesting choice of word. Will they need to go public with some of this?
The K-9 unit tracks the creature’s scent to the portaloo and Mulder, having just noticed a sanitation truck go by, realises it’s probably been taken to a treatment plant. He hurries over and discovers that the waste collected by the trucks is filtered at the plant before being dumped out at sea. Remembering Scully’s discovery about the sailor’s body, he twigs that this could be the creature’s aim. He and one of the workers trap it in a tank that empties into the harbour. It grabs the worker but Mulder manages to rescue him, and when the creature goes to crawl down the tank into the harbour he jumps on a lever to close the gate and cuts it in half. Grotesque crisis averted.
He and Scully meet later to discuss the case. She’s done some further research and discovered that the Russian ship had collected waste material from Chernobyl in the aftermath of the meltdown. Essentially, it seems the creature was a nuclear-induced mutation. The closing scenes suggest it – or another incarnation of it – is still hiding out in the sewers in New Jersey. Remember when they found DNA on the New York subway which couldn’t be matched to any known creature? Here you go.
This was fun and raises lots of questions for the season ahead. We have the intrigue of their secret confidante, Skinner’s disgruntled motivational strategy with Mulder, and our heroes not even attempting to disguise how much they adore and miss each other. There’s a part in the episode where Mulder first broaches the prospect of a giant bloodsucking worm creature and Scully laughs, observing that it’s just like old times. Sob. Please get them back together soon.
Also, was Gillian Anderson expecting a baby when this was shot? I spy lots of strategic camera angles and a noticeably rounder face. Adorbs.
Grace Duffy is a pop culture devotée and sometime film critic currently catching up on her classic sci-fi. You can read more on her blog, Tumblr, or catch her frequent TV liveblogs on Twitter.
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