Something for Thursday

First of all, a bit of administrativia: the post immediately below this one was supposed to run yesterday and I screwed up the publishing. Oops.

Now: not music, but a scene from a teevee show today: the closing scene from “The Unnatural” from The X-Files, an episode David Duchovny wrote and directed, in which his Agent Fox Mulder visits an elderly former FBI agent named Arthur Dales about a curious incident in Agent Dales’s past. It turns out that this Arthur Dales was actually the brother of the former FBI agent Arthur Dales, though both were named Arthur. Anyway, this Dales was a cop in Roswell, NM in the late 1940s, and was assigned to protect a black baseball player named Josh Exley. Of course, Exley turned out to be an alien who loved baseball, and a very strange period story emerges, in which the show’s decades-long alien conspiracy intersects the world of baseball. Honestly, it’s one of the show’s very best episodes.

One thing that makes it great is that the present-day Arthur Dales was played by the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh, who just died this week after decades of appearing in seemingly everything. Walsh was an outstanding actor, and he will be missed.

I couldn’t find the actual scenes of Walsh and Duchovny talking in the episode, so I’ll just share this scene, which concludes the episode as Mulder and Scully take a break from all their alien-chasing and conspiracy-pursuing to bond–pretty romantically, too–over a bit of batting practice. The song heard throughout the scene actually weaves through the entire episode; it turns out that the alien ballplayer in 1947 also had a great singing voice.

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