Essential X-Files: The Pilot
Previously, I said I was going to rewatch the eight X-Files episodes that Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz have called essential viewing for the movie: the Pilot, Beyond the Sea, The Host, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Memento Mori, Post Modern Prometheus, Bad Blood, and Milagro. Being pretty much spoiler-free for the movie, here’s some of what I thought in going through the Pilot again.
Teaser: Ah, Vancouver.
Scully’s assignment:
How about that brown tweed pantsuit? How sad is it that she’s still better dressed here than in the promo pictures for the movie?
- I wonder what the Cigarette Smoking Man would be like in today’s world. He’s smoking right inside government offices. Surely, that would make people suspicious enough to send him to Guantanamo.
- We meet Scully first so she’s our surrogate. We’re told she’s a trained medical doctor and that Mulder has a degree in psychology from Oxford. The writers seem to be able to remember the first fact but not the second.
Basement office:
- Whoo! Mulder glasses. That caught me unawares. Actually quickened my heartbeat there.
- Great intellectual combat right off the bat. I’m sure everyone had to work really hard to get this challenge-and-rechallenge patter down for the first episode, but it is so important. It shows their interplay and how they slip into the spaces of each other’s thinking.
- And of course, the chemistry is great. Even is she’s on an apple box.
Others:
- Established series staples: sunflower seeds for Mulder, the Ford Taurus as the rental car, Scully getting hit in the head so she just misses the phenomenon.
- Scully’s story about joining the FBI is a bit less straightforward given what we will learn in “All Things” (Season 7).
- Scully dialog: “Damn it, Mulder, cut the crap!” Hee! She’s so frequently and energetically pissed off in this episode.
- Mulder says he was paralyzed as his sister Samantha was taken away. He attributes his inability to help to alien influences. I believe we find out later that he was just so scared, as any twelve-year-old boy would be. But the thought is so sad that he had to make up a life-consuming story to protect himself from the trauma.
- In typing her field report, Scully writes: “Agent Mulder’s insistence of time loss, due to unknown forces’[<–], cannot be validated or substantiated by this witness.” Oh, Scully. That’s an unnecessary apostrophe. Luckily, it got eaten up in the motel fire. Perhaps it is correct in her second version.
As you may be able to tell, I’m a Scullyist. And this is one last thing I’ll say about the way their investigative partnership is handled on the show. Right from here, the first episode, you see Scully trying to find evidence, to apply some semblance of investigative technique to the case. Mulder already has his mind made up. It really gets my goat that as the series progressed, he gets to be right practically all the time—unearned.
It just so happens that what he went in thinking is actually the case. Scully says there’s no evidence that the kids have been “riding around in flying saucers.” Mulder says she means no scientific evidence.
No, Mulder, no evidence at all. Go find some.
In the end, I don’t know if we do find out that it is the aliens. It could be those human collaborators. I know we revisit this case in one of the late season episodes, but I had given up on the mytharc by then. Perhaps I’ll find a synopsis online one of these days. For now, just this post alone has driven me a bit batty.