X • Files - Back to the Beginning Over and Over Again

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.