The X Files - Pilot

After watching Fight the Future last night, I thought it was only proper I finally get around to writing my blog review for the pilot of the show I will forever adore. As a kid, I can recall watching The X Files for the first time. I was quite excited about the prospects of a Twilight Zone type show set in the 90s. I got so much more than that, though. So much more.

I get all sentimental and nostalgic, sometimes a bit pathetic, admittedly, when thinking about the show as it related to my own growing up with it. I go to YouTube and see fan made dedications to it using BROKEN (the song from I Want to Believe), and each X File devotee puts together the visual edited collage of scenes from the show that just hit the right spot. I can’t say I’m a romantic at heart until The X Files is involved. Then I get all mushy. That said, the moment Dana Scully walks into that basement at the Bureau, finding Mulder studying photographic clips of bodies found with peculiar puncture marks containing a unique chemistry in different parts of the country (Oregon, Texas, etc.), it is a moment I consider frozen in time. It sneaks into the mind from time to time, calling out a smile. It is the starting place to quite a journey, one filled with great heartbreak and deep commitment.

Scully seemed destined for the medical field, but her expertise was unique and the FBI recruited her. Teaching promising agents, Scully is commissioned by members of the government to keep a record of a particular agent named Fox Mulder, a brilliant criminologist, very astute at profiling. But an experience as a child when his sister was perhaps abducted has kept Mulder on an obsessive quest to find her and any evidence of extraterrestrial life. It is a synopsis so many have written before and will afterward. I’m just probably the 1,342,092,423,479 person to write such a retelling of a pilot that would produce a remarkably complex and labyrinthine arc resulting in quite the life altering experiences for Mulder and Scully. Neither could imagine how they’ll need each other.

Scully is tested immediately by Mulder regarding her medical knowledge and her skepticism and science-devotion meshes surprisingly well with his willingness to embrace the otherworldly and fantastic. Because both are brilliant and seem to develop a chemistry and working relationship that is sound and seemingly organic, Mulder and Scully cohesively form a team that, no matter what comes against them or separates them, continues to survive despite all the efforts opposing them.

In a key scene at the very end, The Cigarette Smoking Man carries with him into this gargantuan warehouse a metallic implant that had been pulled from an autopsy of a dead man whose corpse had petrified into something “beyond human” (mammalian, with elongated head, legs, fingers, etc.) by Scully. This was Scully’s evidence regarding what she had experienced that might just support Fox’s work. The key to her assignment to the X Files was to determine if Mulder’s current work could be discredited and closed by the FBI, but he has a member of Congress supporting him. A high school kid named Billy had been losing friends while in a “waking coma”, all carrying the two marks and found murdered in the woods of their Oregonian town. These victims all had the marks and implants inside them. Photographs of the body and evidence of possible alien activity (X-rays, too) soon go up in flames when Mulder and Scully return from a visit to another victim’s crime scene (the girl at Billy’s bedside in a wheelchair), their hotel rooms set afire by some unknown perpetrator.

The pilot sets the formula that defines the series for quite some time. Scully narrowly misses the paranormal/alien/supernatural experiences Mulder has (often literally walking into them), and the pursuit of the truth, even when encountered and in their possession, is often denied them. They get so close, but CSM and his cohorts always undermine them time and again.

I like how Scully becomes energized just when on the road with Mulder. He brings out something in her that was probably non-existent training medical students. Seeing the corpse in the shape it’s in, the implant, X-rays, Billy’s emergence from the coma, the “missed time” (a certain spot they drive across leaves them with a “lost nine minutes”), and incredible light that beamed through the trees (Mulder and Billy’s dad got to see first-hand something that wind-sweeps in and cascades upon them this immense light that momentarily carries off the kid and the town coroner’s daughter before returning them, no longer having the marks on their lower backs); Scully had experiences that the teacher’s room couldn’t quite present her. So onto the next X file, Scully doesn’t quite provide her superiors with the testimony they desire to supplant Mulder with any type of kibosh. All they can do is bury away the evidence Mulder uncovers while Scully uses her scientific theories to explain away the best she can what her colleague and partner comes up with, as each case presents its own complications and challenges.

Scully has this smile when Mulder remarks he's Steven Spielberg when she asks who's there after he knocks. They have the laughter in the rain of the Bellefleur cemetery when going over their conceived understanding of all the events their X file seemed to produce. She recovers nervously from the turbulence during their plane trip from DC to Oregon as Mulder seems relaxed and cool with her surprised at his reaction to such a terrifying moment. His wisecracks, and her retorts. His sunflower seeds, and her sarcasm. Her counter argument to his offered analysis that always results in good debate. They just went together so well. What a duo, such a team. And boy is she a babe underneath that classy, sophisticating, and professional attire. Her comfort in him when she thinks mosquito bites are those alien abduction marks, having him check and his non-attempts to take advantage. The on-screen product was definitely assisted by their casting.