The X Files / Pilot / Notes*

 I was just noticing while revisiting the Pilot of the show this moment in the episode where Scully is afraid that the marks Mulder revealed to her found on supposed victims of alien abduction in different places in the country might also be on the small of her own back, rushing to Mulder's hotel room in terror. Mulder doesn't hesitate to take a look and assure her they are mosquito bites. What I appreciate about Mulder is that he's not written as some crass typical male who might look at Scully and attempt to seduce her despite their obvious chemistry. Through the years Anderson and Duchovny have been asked why they just have that onscreen magnetism, this dynamic that is just not easy to manufacture. And they clicked the moment Scully entered Mulder's case room, a veritable caseload dungeon, cluttered and claustrophobic, confining and messy. It was kismet, stars aligned, whatever you want to use to describe it. But when Scully rushes to Mulder's room, there is no discomfort or feeling of a threat. Mulder respects her and later is very open to her about why he works the X Files, why he's so passionate about the extraterrestrial angle so many laugh at him and mock him about. What I appreciated about Scully was while she has skepticism--obviously--she doesn't write Mulder off. It is those little things that I appreciate about the show. Yes, Scully won't just buy what Mulder is selling. She is a scientist, first and foremost. Verifiable, scientific proof is what Scully is after. If Mulder is to be taken seriously at all, scientific proof through the help of Scully is essential. But even when there are pictures taken by Mulder, and X-rays and exams by Scully (burned up in Scully's room), a body that is misshapen and elongated like an orangutan that doesn't resemble the corpse of a human victim, and this great light in the forest where teens were abducted, the Cigarette-Smoking Man's efforts to conceal this truth, hiding away the metallic object found in the nose of the corpse (missing, robbed from the morgue) in a box deep within the Pentagon, that proof--discarded and banished from the eyes of a public--remains elusive and buried.

And that is such a constant in the X-Files. The burial of the truth because we are determined not to deserve it. I've watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries where that is explained by those interviewed...how could a public at large be told something such as the existence of alien life? We clearly couldn't handle such truth. It would cause panic. And now the government is starting to declassify such files. That curiosity that has only grown in the ensuing years for the proof Scully wanted to scientifically provide and Mulder wanted to fight, scratch, and claw to dig up and declare as evidence. The show, for me, will remain such a conversation piece, a relevant pop culture treat to go back to over and over again. Yes, ad nauseum.