I didn’t know where to add this but I did return to “Pilot”
and “Deep Throat” at the beginning of the first season. As I have been moving
through the ninth season, I must admit I’m ready to get it over with. I
realized while watching the first season that emotional attachment is lacking
because I left the series as it entered past the year 2000. I guess this is
very much a 90s government / military paranoia show where the alien
conspiracies and pursuit of the truth behind all supernatural phenomena Scully
and Mulder encountered (and those in power trying to stop them from revealing
what they learn) so by the ninth season the formula had tired and needed a
break. I credit Gish and Patrick for their efforts to help Anderson maintain
the series in Duchovny’s absence but I felt the bloom was off the rose, a rose
that sustained itself for quite a while.
I noticed in “Deep Throat” when Mulder and Scully travel to
Idaho that the car was a Cutlass Sierra. I drove one of them back in the early
2000s. It was a lemon, and I remember the car dying in the middle of the road
on me one time. But I liked it despite it being ready for the junkyard so
seeing the agents in pursuit of leads to determine what the Ellis Airforce Base
was keeping secret is always a nice memory to return to. This show is such an
integral part of my teenage life. I had to steady the antenna just right in
order to pick up Fox just to watch it. Those were the days when I had only a
few channels. Kids today have it made. At any rate, the Pilot had Mulder
checking mosquito bites on Scully, giving us a chance to see how she was
starting to become influenced by his claims of the possibility of UFOs and
extraterrestrial life. Hardin didn’t come in until the second episode, so we
get Blevins bringing in Scully to establish what her new job would be for the
FBI as Cigarette-Smoking-Man shadows in the room like some dark figure later to
conceal a key piece of evidence found by Scully inside the body of a supposed
abducted victim. What mattered to me in the Pilot was Mulder and Scully just
immediately hitting it off. I like how Scully can’t help but grin when Mulder
makes an aside that is truly witty. And both are so attractive and fit so well
together, I completely understand each time I watch these early episodes again
just why they worked so well on screen. Scully just laughing at Mulder’s
theories about the abductees in the cemetery (the graves dug up of all victims
so that the agents couldn’t investigate them, while their hotel room, with all
their confiscated evidence of the victim they had exhumed, burned up by those
who don’t want them to have the truth available to them for the public to eventually know) as the rain pours, just shrugging at
his hard-to-swallow details defining how unexpected her journey already has
been. The lost time in Oregon (when Mulder and Scully either leave the forest
where bodies are found or drive to it in the Pilot), the military strongarming
Mulder to leave Idaho although he’s unwilling to budge until he has evidence of
the stealth jets (whose pilots seem to suffer from nasty mental effects while
operating them) using alien tech (in “Deep Throat”), and the constant
interference of either government or military forces keeping Mulder from truly achieving
what he sets out for (the hotel burned, graves dug up, files removed of abductees,
memories erased (Mulder suffers an “experience wipe” on the base when he
actually sees a ship that hovers over him with a light beaming down on him in
one of my all-time favorite moments in the series); all of this reminds me just
why the ninth season never quite grabs me as the series did in the beginning.
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