With The Zone blessing us with five episodes of The X-Files every week, I was never going to have the time (or the MySky capacity) to give every episode the hilarious snarky recap it deserved. That’s why I recapped the whole thing in haiku format. But really, beyond the details of each particular case and the overarching mythology which steadily develops, my comments would have been pretty consistent:
- Scully’s hair is always perfect and I want all her trench coats, but I cannot get onboard with these long-line American business jackets
- Everyone else in the FBI needs to reconcile their snark of Mulder’s obsessions with the fact he’s clearly a damn good agent
- Scully saves the day again because Mulder gets himself into a bind
- Yay, Smoking Man! or Yay, Deep Throat! or Yay, Assistant Director Skinner! as appropriate
The most common theme, in among the monster-of-the-week and Scully-never-sees-shit tropes, is that despite our protagonists being themselves government agents, the government (especially the military) cannot be trusted with power. Related to this, apparently Scully and Mulder are the only people from their graduating classes who aren’t obsessed with climbing the corporate/FBI ladder.
And Scully really never sees shit. If I have one tiny gripe, it’s that her scepticism is a little too tenacious, and I would just love to see more of how she describes what happens in her field reports. She’s smart enough to find any number of plausible explanations of things, Agent K-style, but when we don’t see what they are, it’s easier to feel she’s just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.
There’s some aspects to the show which are, tragically, still revolutionary: the tall self-assured alpha male is the true believer who trusts his instincts, and the woman is the critical, sceptical scientist demanding rational proof of everything. There’s absolutely no suggestion of romantic tension, which is still the downfall of otherwise amazing buddy-cop dramas like Castle and The Mentalist and even sci fi stalwarts like Doctor Who.
And almost inevitably, when one agent gets into a scrape and has to be rescued, it’s Mulder who trusts the wrong people and Scully who kicks down the door with her gun drawn to save her partner. It’s not always left to Mulder to be the rules-breaker either; in episodes like Ghost in the Machine Scully is given the choice of the Right Thing and the Proper Jurisdictional Thing, and chooses to risk her career (more than it’s already been blown by working on the X-Files) in order to stop advanced technology falling into the wrong hands; and in The Erlenmeyer Flask she breaks into a top-secret military research facility to find the evidence which Deep Throat can exchange to save Mulder’s life.
The individual storylines haven’t aged well, simply because they’ve been such a template for every single vaguely-supernatural show that followed (and half of the paranormal rubbish on Discovery Channel). The advanced AI will murder everyone who tries to shut it down; the small town authorities are covering everything up; human evolution is not a settled, linear series of developments and humanity itself is a social construct which can and is often torn down or subverted. None of the twists will surprise a 21st-century nerd. But they’re also not as clunky or incoherent as other sci fi shows of their generation (i.e. Next Generation’s abysmal first season).
Roll on, season 2 – in haiku form and only at Recaps in Hindsight.
The Things Scully Has Seen
Someone on Twitter noted that it would be great to have a comprehensive list of all the weird, otherwise-inexplicable things Dana Scully has seen in her work on the X-Files – yet still refuses to really believe the way Mulder does (or at least, is still somehow sceptical about government coverups.)
For season one, this list includes:
A teen’s body either stolen from its grave or devolved into an orangutan with a brain implant (ep 1); weird time loss (ep 2); a super-stretchy dude breaking into her apartment through a narrow grate (ep 3); a little kid channelling satellite transmissions through TV static to create an image of his abducted sister (ep 4); brainworms that make people go crazy covered up by the military (ep 8); two people/beings completely disappearing while under military surveillance plus an abductee with trademark scars behind his ear (ep 10); secret government cloning projects (ep 11); her father’s ghost (ep 13); humans exuding extreme pheromone levels, people changing physical sex, mass overnight disappearance of an entire town (ep 14); transcripts of a plane shooting down a UFO, an examination table obviously not intended for humans, time distortions (ep 17); a little girl who with no prior knowledge disfigures dolls in the exact way a murdered cop was disfigured, and happens to be on the scene when everyone involved in his murder dies, including seeing bright blue light fill a room and explode the aquarium he was drowned in (ep 22); bacterial DNA with nucleotides that don’t exist in nature; a frozen alien/hybrid baby (ep 24).
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