Actor John Neville, of Baron Munchausen and X-Files fame (wherein he played the ‘Well-manicured Man’, one of the conspirators and ally of the Cigarette Smoking Man), has died. He was a fine actor and will be missed, even if he did help pave the way for the alien colonization of our planet. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
“He’s the ultimate sex-magnet”. (Fox Mulder) Insular religious sects are always a good breeding ground for tales of supernatural suspense, so it was just a matter of time until The X-Files got there. “Gender Bender” is that episode, and it’s…well, I literally could not decide if I liked it or if I didn’t. A man picks up a woman at a dance club – or she picks him up – and they return to a hotel room for a bit of action. Unfortunately for the man, the bit of action turns out to be fatal…and then the woman leaves theDown the rabbit hole….
“I know that you and Dad were disappointed that I chose the path I’m on instead of medicine, but I need to know: was he at all proud of me?” (Dana Scully, to her mother) After “Fire” gave us some more background on Agent Mulder, “Beyond the Sea” takes us deeper than we’ve ever gone before into Scully’s background, giving us one of my very favorite episodes in the entire X-Files run. This episode is, simply put, outstanding. We open with Scully winding up a visit from her parents, who are now heading home. Scully’s father is a career NavalDown the rabbit hole….
Scully: “I forgot what it’s like to spend a day in court.” Mulder: “That’s one of the luxuries to hunting down aliens and genetic mutants. You rarely get to press charges.” After taking a bit of a break from The X-Files during the summer and first part of the fall, but now it’s time to get back in the swing of things here. We’re still in Season One, when the show is finding its way. “Fire” is another episode that I’m seeing for the first time via this rewatch, and I have to say – it’s a terrific episode. Written byDown the rabbit hole….
“One girl was just abducted.” “Kidnapped.” “Potato, po-tah-to.” (Mulder and Scully) “Eve” is one of the stronger episodes of the first season, and it’s actually a very memorable tale, only partially undone by some poor storytelling in the last act. A shocking murder takes place in Connecticut, where a suburban father is found sitting on his daughter’s backyard swing set. His skin has gone completely white, and there are two distinctive puncture wounds in his neck. Only his daughter is there to see. This sounds like a vampire story at first, but when learning of the case, Mulder’s initial hypothesisDown the rabbit hole….
Hot on the heels of the lackluster “Space” comes an episode that marks a serious improvement: “Fallen Angel”. This is a terrific episode, one that establishes a surprising amount of background for the mytharc that would come to dominate the series. In eastern Wisconsin, a police officer is patroling a rural route out in the middle of the woods when he sees a large fire in the distance. Meanwhile, a military air-traffic monitoring station is tracking something that is traveling very fast and on an erratic flight path. This something disappears from their screens in eastern Wisconsin, and the commandingDown the rabbit hole….
It’s a bit of lore in UFO circles that astronauts saw strange things outside their spaceships during their flights in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days, although – of course – nothing really “official” has ever come of it. This is the basis for “Space”, which is a kind of odd-feeling episode. In one way it feels overstuffed, and in another way it feels undercooked. I’m not really sure what to think of this episode, except to note that it’s the first real misfire of the series. The teaser sequence opens in the 1970s as the first images of theDown the rabbit hole….
“We are not who we are.” Back when I was watching X-Files episodes on VHS releases that only included six episodes from each half-season, the episodes in those packages were chosen for either story (being part of the mytharc) or quality (being judged by the producers as particularly good). “Ice” was one of those episodes in the first set of tapes, and it’s a very memorable episode indeed, even if it too ends up being pretty derivative of an earlier film, in this case John Carpenter’s The Thing. We open at an ice core research station way up in theDown the rabbit hole….
“The machine’s a monster, Scully! It’s already killed two people.” Looking back on some of these early episodes, it’s surprising to me to see how derivative some of these shows were of other, earlier stories from movies and teevee. “Ghost in the Machine” gives us a computer run amok, a computer that’s been given so much authority and sensory input that it achieves sentience and acts in self-defense. Our main villain here is the COS, or “Central Operating System”, but while watching this episode, I kept thinking back to earlier computer villains: the Master Control Program (MCP) from Tron, HAL-9000Down the rabbit hole….
“I’d say you people already suffer from full denial.” (Agent Mulder) The X-Files was so much more than aliens and government conspiracies; it actually drew on just about every occult phenomenon it could find over the course of its run. Here we have a good, old-fashioned ghost story. A businessman named Howard Graves has committed suicide, leaving his trusted assistant, a woman named Lauren, to clean out his office. As she leaves, though, a desktop memento suddenly moves, and she turns back to see it in a different spot than where she left it. Not thinking much of this, sheDown the rabbit hole….