The X Files - Fearful Symmetry

 The opening of this episode where the elephant is dying on a road after a horrifying truck accident as children with their parents and other onlookers had me in near tears. Before this, you could hear the elephant but couldn't see it. Mulder and Scully talking about the possibility of an invisible elephant goes about like it would between any of us...it is preposterous. But this is the X Files. So what defies logic gets a free reign here.

This episode really left an impact on me. Not only the elephant's demise but poor gorilla, Sophie, brought out of the wild as a protective measure to spare her slaughter at the hands of hunters by Willa, a naturalist who has raised her like a child. Willa's (Jayne Atkinson) former lover, Kyle (Lance Guest; "Halloween II"/"The Last Starfighter"/"Jaws: The Revenge), who helped her "free Sophie", only to object to her holding the gorilla in captivity, is part of an organization who doesn't believe in zoos, seeing them as prisons for animals who deserve to live and run free. Mulder and Scully arrive after the elephant incident, soon with another attack by a tiger, this time, on Kyle's fellow organizer colleague, on the zoo premises to free an animal in order to get the zoo shut down. Meanwhile, Ed Meecham (Jack Rader) is notorious for mistreating the animals as their handler, with Willa hired to keep him in check and try to make sure no other animals escape from the premises. It seems the elephant is an isolated case. When a tiger goes missing, later found miles away from the zoo, having killed Kyle's associate on camera (no tiger is seen, only the guy fighting for his life and mauled to death) and nearly Willa, until Meecham shot it, the board sees no other option but to close the zoo and send the animals to other zoos outside Idaho.

Alien abductions of animals, impregnating them, taking their infants, and supposedly holding them in their own "ark" is quite an outlandish theory from Mulder, with Willa's reaction to that as obvious as it would be from any of us. But the X Files offers plenty of outrageous plot developments and isolated cases where such happenings are almost normalized. A great light appears, as it does to Mulder when he is left by Meecham in a structure as Sophie eventually vanishes, with animals "taken" later dropped off away from the zoo. That danger to the public is emphasized not only at the beginning and middle of the episode, but tragically at the end as well. Willa appealing to Kyle for help eventually leads to tragedy when Kyle decides to later come to the zoo, seemingly to offer his services, only to die by a cattle prod thanks to a surprised Meecham.

Poor Sophie just wanted to protect her baby "from the light" and Mulder is very fortunate that she spares him despite a brief assault out of fear. While the abduction theory cannot be proven, the conservation message about man's responsibility for the near extinction of many animal species is very much pointed and unsubtle, complete with a sign by a church letting us know that the writers of the episode wanted to definitely send a message loud and clear about our culpability in a world encroaching on them. 3/5