The X-Files in Chronological Order: Disc. Goblins!

[AbsoluteKnave]

Welcome to a new and, I hope, very exciting venture for me! As anyone who’s talked to me at any kind of length will know, I still consider The X-Files to be one of the finest television programs ever created, if not the very finest. Its major themes, of life’s fragility, faith, the unknown, paranoia, distrust, emotional trauma, loss and fear, are among the greatest in all of art and the show often achieved the level of pure art.

And so with this thread, I want to start a journey through the universe of the X-Files; to my mind, this takes in three television series and their various spin off novels, adaptations, films and comic series. Those three series are, of course, The X-Files, Millennium and The Lone Gunmen, all created by Chris Carter and all crossing over with each other to sufficiently prove that they take place in the same universe, as it were.

In an effort to explode my thinking about this universe, I’ll be travelling through it in the order it happened, not the order of release. You’ll see what I mean by seeing it in action, so let’s get started. Thanks to Netflix and the library and the internet, these episodes, books, comics and films are more available now than ever, so hopefully you’ll choose to join me on this journey. Now, a few acknowledgements and then let’s get started.

*Number one, a big, big shout out to Joe Bongiorno who compiled the X-Files Chronology that got this idea burning in my brain. If you want to follow along or work ahead of me, I’ll essentially be using his chronology as it stands, until I get to Millennium. I’ve e-mailed him about this project and, if I can brag, one error I found on his timeline (he left off one of the novels, if you must know :p ) and found him to be an entirely affable, charming, likable fellow; he also had the error I had noted fixed by the very next morning! Click around his fascinating website; you’ll find the definitive SW timeline on the web, in my opinion, as well as timelines for things as diverse as Middle Earth, Oz and Swamp Thing.

*A secondary shout out to I. Mark Carlson, who compiled a less exhaustive and somewhat flawed timeline that includes episodes from Millennium, along with the dates when they take place. When I get to that point, I’ll be using the Millennium dates from Carlson’s timeline to mesh Millennium in with Bongiorno’s X-Files timeline.

*And now . . . let’s begin.

Unusual Suspects
5 X 03



It’s all true what Suzanne said about you people, isn’t it? About John F. Kennedy? Dallas?

I heard it was a lone gunman.

*All right, this episode was actually the first episode filmed for the fifth season of the X-Files; an episode with minimal involvement from Duchovny and Anderson was needed due to the completion of the X-Files movie. And so we have a flashback episode, to 1989, to tell about the origin of the Lone Gunmen.

*The timeline places this episode as taking place on Friday, 5/19/1989. This places it, ballparking, around a year and a half to two years before Mulder begins reopening the X-Files and just shy of four years before Scully is assigned to work with him.

*One of the things I hope to do with this journey is to contextualize the X-Files. Thus, I’ll be talking about historical and cultural events that surround the events at hand.

*This episode takes place entirely on Friday, 5/19/1989, beginning in the very early morning and ending sometime in the afternoon. It flashes back to the afternoon, evening and night of the previous day. On the 19th, Sue Ellen made her last appearance on Dallas; earlier in the month, Dynasty had folded up shop and went off the air. The week following the events of this episode, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would open in theaters across the country and the day after this episode takes place, Toonces the Cat would make his debut on SNL. President Bush, the former, had only a week or so before, ordered 2000 US troops to Panama to deal with the fallout after Noriega nullified the election results and took control of the country after he lost the Presidential elections by a margin of 3 to 1.

*Most fascinating of all, however, is that on Saturday, the 20th, the day after this episode, China would declare martial law in Beijing, responding at last to protests begun a little over a month before in Tiananman Square. This would all climax, of course, in one of the most indelible images of the eighties, a lone, anonymous individual facing down a tank.

*All that by the way side, let’s start the episode.

*I have, I should mention, seen this one before. It’s been a long time. I remember some things vividly.

*Man, that is one big ass “1989” they flash up at the beginning this episode.

*However, given that it’s one screen for less than five seconds, they still might have missed a few people. You know, the ones who are occasionally six seconds late flipping channels.

*A SWAT team storms a warehouse to introduce us to our hero, Fox Mulder, naked, in the fetal position under a cardboard box, weeping, shivering and screaming, “They’re here.” A fitting introduction; this is the mode he will operate in with only slight variation for the duration of the series.

*As Byers, Langley and Frohike languish in prison, Langley calls Frohike “doohickie.”

*Byers is called away to be grilled by, of all people, Detective John Munch of Baltimore Homicide. At the time this episode was filmed, Richard Belzer was portraying Munch on Homicide: Life on the Streets.

*He crossed over to Law & Order several times as Munch and when Homicide went off the air, he cropped up as Munch on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, explaining that he had retired from Baltimore Homicide and moved to New York to join SVU. He had a cameo appearance on The Wire. He also appeared in one episode of a cop show called The Beat and he crossed over, still as Munch, to the stillborn Law & Order: Trial by Jury. Throw in a cameo on Arrested Development and Belzer has portrayed John Munch on eight television shows and for over fifteen years. That’s quite astonishing, really.

*I was originally going to watch all the shows that were certifiably in the X-Files universe. Then I remembered Belzer’s cameo in this episode and decided to limit it to just Carter shows. Although, you have to admit, a chronological journey through Homicide: Life on the Streets, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The X-Files, The Beat, Arrested Development, The Wire, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, Millennium and The Lone Gunman would be a killer thread, wouldn’t it?

*Byers gives his name as John Fitzgerald Byers, born 11/22/63. This prompts about the response you’d expect from Munch.

*Byers is quite great in this episode; he really owns as the naïve FCC employee.

*We are introduced here to Susanne Modeski, though she gives her name initially as Holly. I really disliked Three of a Kind, the sequel to this episode with Scully and the Gunmen in Vegas.

*Personally, I love the logo for “Frohike Electronics Corp.”

*Most used word in this episode: “narc.” They must call Byers that at least ten times.

*I love the bit where Susanne identifies herself as Holly to Byers and Byers remarks, “Just like the sugar,” referring to a packet of sugar he’s just emptied into his coffee. That’s Byers in this episode in a nutshell: so brilliant he notices things others don’t, so naïve that he utterly fails to recognize the significance of the things he notices. Nine out of ten people wouldn’t notice the connection; Byers is the one who does, but though he has both two and two, he fails to put them together to come up with four. Yes, Byers, just like the sugar. Exactly like the sugar, in fact.

*The Arpanet? I’d forgotten about that.

*First legitimately brilliant line of the series: “Why would your three year old have an encrypted file in a secret Defense Department database?” Why indeed, doofus?

*I remember those printers; where you had to tear off those long strips of holes. I still use one almost that old at least twice a month at my current job.

*Second legitimately brilliant line, said by Frohike after Mulder refuses to buy his cable box: “Oh, a man of distinction. Punk ass.”

*Frohike’s reaction is brilliant. Suzanne enters his booth from the rear and begins pulling the curtains. “Oh, yeah,” Frohike moans.

*Rather than decoding the file as Suzanne wants, Frohike enlists Byers to go find her ex-boyfriend and get the information from him. Suzanne has told them that Mulder is her ex-boyfriend, by the way, and that he’s kidnapped her three year old daughter.

*There’s a booth in the background of the convention center that seems to be for something called “Abduction Incorporated.” Is that a joke?

*The scene with Mulder’s first meeting with Byers and Frohike is a hoot.

*My favorite part is that hysterically huge phone that Mulder pulls out of his jacket.

*Interestingly enough, when he answers the phone, he’s talking to someone named Reggie. This would be, I suppose, Reggie Purdue who we will finally meet late in the first season in Young at Heart.

*The moment when Byers’ co-worker is seen by Byers being escorted out in handcuffs by a group of military men is sort of the proto-X-Files moment. The idea that you could do something on your computer and then soldiers would literally show up to cart you away within ten minutes . . . that’s kind of a foundational X-Files idea.

*You remember how Windows used to have that pop up that would always say something like, “Your computer has committed an illegal action.” When I was first learning about computers that really freaked me out.

*I really don’t want to know why Langley’s D&D name is Lord Manhammer, do I?

*You know, seeing this again now, after I’ve seen most of Kevin Smith’s work, I realize that Langley is a real take off on Randall Graves. His intonations and everything are sort of borrowed from Randall in Clerks. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Randall’s pretty awesome.

*We get a nice lingering shot of Mulder’s FBI profile on the computer. His birthdate is, of course, 10/13/1963.

*It’s worth mentioning that his file very explicitly states that he is single, a fact that Frohike remarks on in the dialogue. This will be significant later, when we talk about Travelers.

*Modeski is on the run, framed for murders she did not commit because she has discovered that the government intends to test an anxiety and paranoia inducing gas on innocent people in Baltimore. She’s trying to discover where the gas is stored, so she can stop it.

*I kind of love the rant Suzanne goes on when she says that the government killed JFK and, by the way, the Gideon Bibles are actually electronic surveillance devices being placed by the government. That Gideon who spoke at my church a couple of years ago was apparently actually an alien bounty hunter or something, I guess, which makes that service more interesting in retrospect.

*There’s a great bit where the decrypted file indicates that Suzanne is under electronic surveillance thanks to Dr. Michael Killborn, Suzanne’s dentist. Her next move is to exit stage bathroom and yank out one of her molars with a pair of pliers.

*Jeez, our first shot of people from under those big magnifying glass things. We’ll see that a lot more.

*Particularly heinous, the paranoia gas is being disseminated in asthma inhalers. That’s pretty terrible.

*The first time two men in suits walk up to someone and say, “Would you come with us?” Not the last.

*In the warehouse fracas, Mulder gets sprayed with a copious dose of the paranoia gas.

*The entrance of X with a group of people coming to ‘sanitize’ the warehouse is pretty epic. Of course, at the beginning of the fifth season, X had been dead on the show for a little over a whole season. I remember seeing this one long time back and being so thrilled to see him come in, making an appearance after an entire season’s absence, thanks to the flashback nature of the show. Great to see Steven Williams again; he always elevates an episode.

*Terrible moment as he stands impassively watching as two of his men bodybag someone who’s very obviously still alive.

*That’s why I loved X. He was so much more than just a cardboard copy of Deep Throat; where Deep Throat was mysterious, X was downright malevolent; where Deep Throat was backhandedly paternal, X was explicitly threatening. I loved Deep Throat too, but X was a much darker character, much more of a villain than Deep Throat ever was. Deep Throat was apparently conflicted; that X never was.

*In Mulder’s hysteria, he sees the men in black cleaning up the crime scene as aliens. “They’re here,” he says.

*A nice foreshadowing moment when X tells one of his subordinates to leave Mulder where he is. “No one touches this man.”

*X actually pulls the trigger on Byers, but the gun is empty. X: “Behave yourselves.”

*The climactic moment as Byers asks X angrily if he was behind Kennedy’s assassination. X unwittingly starts the ballgame: “I heard it was a lone gunman.”

*After hearing this story, Munch stares at Byers for a long moment and then says, “Do I look like Geraldo? Don’t lie to me like I’m Geraldo.”

*Suzanne is snatched off the street, the Lone Gunmen seem to form a group at last and Agent Mulder from Violent Crimes has some weird ideas he can’t seem to shake. The episode ends as Mulder and the Lone Gunmen, definitely a unit now, talk in the now empty convention center. Byers begins: “Secret elements within the United States government seek to surveil us and control our lives.” Mulder responds: “Whaaaat?!”

*The end. And also the beginning.

*I think this episode isn’t bad. Neither is it particularly great. It can’t seem to decide if it’s trying to be a comedy episode or a drama. The episode is essentially a farce, albeit a subdued one, until X arrives. He brings with him, the glare of klieg lights, some heavy lifting equipment, billowing fog and the distinct whiff of brimstone.

*One realizes what a romp the episode could have been if they’d gone as straight funny as, say, Jose Chung. Likewise, it could have been powerful and mythic if they’d wanted it to be. But they couldn’t seem to decide which they wanted.

*The two modes of the episode don’t really cohere. You can feel something deep and powerful stir, when X unwittingly gives the Gunmen their name. And Mulder’s awful helmet hair and his massive cell phone are hilarious even on repeated viewing. But how do those two things fit in one episode?

*Three of a Kind was even worse, frankly. Gillian Anderson’s performance in that was so ludicrously insane that one couldn’t exactly hook up with the idea that Byers and Modeski were some kind of fated star crossed lovers or something.

*This episode also sort of tones down the entire premise of the show if you ask me. Essentially, these three schlubs listened to a beautiful woman make insane rants and then saw her get snatched by the same people who cleaned up a crime scene. And this begins a lifelong crusade of paranoia? It seems that our three erstwhile heroes move far too easily from thinking Suzanne is a loon, which she certainly seems to be, to believing that she is entirely right about everything she says.

*Likewise, this seems to argue that Mulder’s quest, the quest at the heart of the series, is basically born out of a drug induced hallucination.

*Of course, at the end of the fourth season into the beginning of the fifth, with the Gethsemene/Redux/Redux II trilogy, the series tried to essentially debunk its entire mythology and turn Mulder into more of a cynic/skeptic. This didn’t entirely scan to me at the time and it still doesn’t, great as that trilogy is as a work of art. But this episode seems to fit perfectly with that effort to cast doubt on everything Mulder has seen over the years; which I don’t particularly like. I prefer Mulder as a tortured, obsessive character because of his sister’s abduction, not because he got a big dose of a powerful drug.

*That all sounds pretty negative; but the episode is fun, I suppose. Belzer’s cameo is fun and it’s downright fantastic to see Steven Williams again, after assuming he was gone for good. And there are some great moments and funny lines. But it could have been better.

** ½ out of **** stars.

*Okay, next time, we’re going to jump from May of 89 up to a couple of days in November of 1990. We’ll see Mulder again, moving slowly closer to opening the X-Files, we’ll get the first hint of the role Bill Mulder will fill on the show and we’ll get . . . yet another flashback episode. Join us next time as we talk about Travelers, a surprisingly controversial episode from the second half of the fifth season.

So, what do you guys think? Anybody interested in this? This forum seems kind of slow, so I hope you guys see this thread!

[JeSouhaite]

In an effort to explode my thinking about this universe, I’ll be travelling through it in the order it happened, not the order of release. You’ll see what I mean by seeing it in action, so let’s get started. ... so hopefully you’ll choose to join me on this journey.

Great idea!! Bring it on!

*One of the things I hope to do with this journey is to contextualize the X-Files. Thus, I’ll be talking about historical and cultural events that surround the events at hand.

Excellent, very cool idea. I'm loving it.

*I really don’t want to know why Langley’s D&D name is Lord Manhammer, do I?

LOL, Umm... Well.... ROTFL... Do I? I am trying not to say "Yes". LOL!!

*I kind of love the rant Suzanne goes on when she says that the government killed JFK and, by the way, the Gideon Bibles are actually electronic surveillance devices being placed by the government. That Gideon who spoke at my church a couple of years ago was apparently actually an alien bounty hunter or something, I guess, which makes that service more interesting in retrospect.

ROTFL!!! I love your commentary!! LOL. Look fondly upon that service.

*That’s why I loved X. He was so much more than just a cardboard copy of Deep Throat; where Deep Throat was mysterious, X was downright malevolent; where Deep Throat was backhandedly paternal, X was explicitly threatening. I loved Deep Throat too, but X was a much darker character, much more of a villain than Deep Throat ever was. Deep Throat was apparently conflicted; that X never was.

I'm more of an X fan than a Deep Throat fan.

*Okay, next time, we’re going to jump from May of 89 up to a couple of days in November of 1990. We’ll see Mulder again, moving slowly closer to opening the X-Files, we’ll get the first hint of the role Bill Mulder will fill on the show and we’ll get . . . yet another flashback episode. Join us next time as we talk about Travelers, a surprisingly controversial episode from the second half of the fifth season.

So, what do you guys think? Anybody interested in this? This forum seems kind of slow, so I hope you guys see this thread!

Yes, there is interest. I very much enjoyed your thoughts on the episode!! I agree, I couldn't tell if the ep was supposed to be funny or not. It's not really one of my favorites. I never thought about thought of this ep as the foundations for the LGM (which makes me obtuse on these sorts of things), but hey, I think you're right. This might be the "foundation for a lifelong crusade of paranoia". Perhaps the trio got the chance to explore other conspiracies that we didn't get to see. (I never saw the LGM series, so I don't know if there were any flashback eps.)

Good show, AbsoluteKnave!! Please share with us your other chronological rantings!!

(I agree with 2-1/2 stars.)

[SpecialAgent88]

Such an interesting thread and I really enjoyed reading your "Random Musings.", please keep them coming, it's so entertaining to read.

[AbsoluteKnave]

As you can see, I am not exactly the fastest poster in the west! But here's another one!



Travelers
5 X 15



It’s an X-File.

An X-File?

Yes, unsolved cases. I file them under X.

Why don’t you solve them under U for Unsolved?

That’s what I did until I ran out of room. Plenty of room in the X’s.

*This episode, like Unusual Suspects, takes place before the official reopening of the X-Files by Mulder and, therefore, prior to the first season of the show. Also, like Unusual Suspects, it was also filmed and aired as part of the fifth season. I wonder if there’s some kind of psychology there with the fifth season producing, not one, but two flashback episodes.

*Okay, since we last saw Agent Mulder, chatting up the Lone Gunmen, newly formed, two days over a year and a half has passed, from May 19 of 1989 to November 21 of 1990.

*In the interim, much has happened; Tiananmen Square has devolved into a massacre, Bush the Former has appeared on television with his bag of cocaine, both Seinfeld and The Simpsons have premiered on television, the Hubble telescope has been launched, Gorbachov has been elected the first president of the Soviet Union as the Cold War slowly closes, the IRA has stepped up its violence in Britain, the trials of those involved in the Exxon Valdez oil spill are underway.

*Just two months before this episode, Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting the stage for the first Persian Gulf War. I remember hearing this news at Sonic.

*Also, since Mulder states in the body of the episode that the events of the teaser took place ‘last week’ and the 21st and 22nd of November are a Tuesday and Wednesday, this episode actually could actually start as early as Sunday, November 11th or as late as Saturday, November 17th.

*So, important events that either just barely predate these events or else take place concurrently: Milli Vanilli is confirmed as a hoax by their producer and the World Wide Web is christened as such.

*Okay, on to the episode proper.

*Okay, once again, that is a big ass “1990” that they throw up on the screen.

*The teaser isn’t bad. One might argue (I haven’t decided entirely if I will yet, but I’m pretty sure) that’s it’s the best part of the episode.

*A sheriff shows up to evict an “Edward Skur” from a tumble down house only to discover something unspeakable in the bathtub, a horribly mutilated human corpse. He is attacked and shoots his attacker. As Edward Skur dies, an odd green liquid around his mouth, he is able to say one word: “Mulder.”

*I remember watching this the first time on FX with a friend. As Skur repeated, “Mul . . . Mul . . . Mul . . .” my friend and I tumbled. We shouted Mulder’s name in unison with Skur and then started applauding. We were kind of . . . strange, I guess.

*Then again, it’s a good thing I applauded at the beginning of this episode, since I didn’t exactly get any more chances. Am I giving away too early that I really hate this episode?

*November 21, 1990, a slightly more stylish Mulder than we saw in Unusual Suspects, at least in the haircut department, goes to visit one Arthur Dales, retired Special Agent from the Bureau. He is played, wonderfully, by Darren McGavin. McGavin, of course, was the title character on the short lived Kolchak, Night Stalker, the television series that Carter has always claimed as the main inspiration for The X-Files.

*I should just ask at this point if anyone here has allowed their X-Files obsession to actually take them to this proto-X-Files series? Anyone here actually watched The Night Stalker? I tried to watch it. I watched one episode and found it absolutely awful. McGavin is a charming lead, but the production values were just incredibly low.

*In the year and a half since Unusual Suspects, Mulder has moved from Violent Crimes to Behavioral Sciences.

*Mulder produces an X-File on Edward Skur, the very first X-File of the series. Dales fills him in on what the X-Files really are.

*Mulder does the first of countless hair flips, dedicated mostly to flashing a wedding ring in front of our faces. This episode, a completely negligible and inferior one, in my opinion, especially given its premise and the fact that it immediately follows Patient X/The Red and the Black, a great myth arc two parter, managed to garner way more controversy than it actually deserved, in my opinion, solely due to this ring.

*Previously, of course, there had not been (and still has not been, if memory serves) any indication whatsoever that Mulder’s character had ever been married. Dropping it in here like this seemed, apparently, to come off like a real character betrayal to many people on the net, especially, it seemed to me at the time, the Shippers, since they obviously believed that M&S were supposed to be soul mates written from time immemorial or whatever.

*An example of the hoops people jumped through to get this to not be about Mulder being married; I recall someone stating that they figured that Mulder had previously had a partner that had been married who had been murdered and Mulder was wearing his dead partner’s wedding ring in order to remind himself that he needs to get vengeance on his killer.

*Occam’s razor being temporarily suspended apparently.

*Only on the X-Files would a person wearing a wedding ring definitely NOT mean that he was married.

*Duchovny later stated, after the big flap started, that wearing the ring had been a joke on his part and that he had simply slipped it in. That is patently untrue, however; Duchovny’s hair flips are idiotic by the very in your face nature of them; this tic I don’t recall Mulder ever exhibiting before and he is forced, because he has to do it with the wedding ring hand, to do this brushback with a very unnatural gesture with the wrong hand, bringing it up across his face instead of just using the natural hand. It’s completely clear that he was being directed to do this and his comments that it was just his joke was an effort by the show, I think, to try to walk back from it, after they saw just how mad some people got about it.

*Frankly, I don’t see the big deal. So Mulder was married at some point. A lot of people get married; a lot of people that you wouldn’t maybe expect to get married get married. My bet is this wasn’t a very long marriage; Mulder’s FBI file, that we saw in Unusual Suspects, definitively states that he is single in mid-89 and this is late 90. Given Mulder’s odd character, his inability to accept anyone else’s theories while clinging to his own with bulldog tenacity, his tendency to ditch people and his incommunicativeness, I can see a wife leaving him after a very, very short marriage. And I can see Mulder just deciding to never, ever talk about it again. This makes perfect sense to me. I don’t particularly see how it negatively impacts the Mulder-Scully relationship to have this chapter of Mulder’s pre-Scully life revealed. Others, of course, differ.

*And, believe me, I am, in no way, trying to get that fight started again. It was pretty brutal, so hopefully we’ve all moved on enough to just agree to disagree. I think we can surely all agree it was a pretty lame decision by the show to shoehorn it in like this in this episode with no prior groundwork laid and that it’s best just consigned to obscurity, which is basically what the show decided to do with it (again, to the best of my memory) by never referencing said marriage again. I may not see why exactly some people got so upset about it, but I agree it’s pointless and stupid the way it’s done here and a bad idea poorly executed.

*You know what would be hilarious? If they did a “Special Edition” DVD release of this episode, like Lucas with Star Wars, and edited the ring off Duchovny’s hand. Or just edited out those annoying hair-flips altogether. That would be a riot.

*McGavin decides to answer Mulder’s question about how Edward Skur knew his name by ranting about HUAC and finishing up with, “They found . . .practically nothing. Do you think they would have found nothing unless nothing was what they wanted to find?”

*Hair flip 2!

*Mulder flees to his apartment to watch old newsreel footage of the McCarthy hearings.

*The announcer refers to Communists in America as “fellow travelers,” thus giving us our title phrase. I’ll talk about this at the end.

*Mulder wears glasses in this sequence and they’re totally different from the ones that he wears in the bulk of the series.

*Mulder catches sight of his dad sitting behind McCarthy, which sends him back to Arthur Dales early next morning with coffee and Hair Flip #3 for good measure.

*”My father and I don’t really speak,” Mulder says to get Dales to tell him about Skur.

*McGavin doesn’t quite make this stuff sing; no one could, this stuff. But he is affable.

*Anyway, as Dales narrates his dealings with Skur and Bill Mulder back during the McCarthy days, we get a nice long flashback.

*Mulder smokes in this episode. Does he do that anywhere else? I don’t recall.

*Best thing about this episode? Production values, easily. The fifties sequences are beautifully soft focus. A sort of golden haze seems to float through everything and all the lights are surrounded by glowing halos.

*And you know, all the X-Files has really been missing is the hats, so we finally get those.

*A little period dialogue: “You planted that.” “I’ll plant one in your kiester, Bolshevik.”

*Big, big problem with this episode? David Moreland, the actor who plays Roy Cohn. Cohn was, of course, a homosexual; to say he was a closeted homosexual is to be completely redundant, given the period; to be homosexual was basically to be closeted, unless you were very, very lucky and completely uninterested in politics or a career. The ironies of a closeted homosexual, in a period when being homosexual was enough to end your career, spending his career ending other people’s careers for being Communist . . . well . . . you get the ironies.

*But Moreland plays Cohn as incredibly campy. I kept thinking of Billy Crystal, if you want me to be honest, so Cohn is not quite so menacing as he might have been, if you get my drift.

*I love the file on Edward Skur; there are seven places on the page that haven’t been redacted. “Communist Sympathizer.” *12 lines of black marker* “Edward Skur.” *nine lines of black marker* That’s just always funny.

*More period dialogue: “I got six pounds of German shrapnel in my can and this Kraut gets to shake hands with the President?” Charming man, your partner.

*It is kind of ironic that the original informant on this show is Bill Mulder. He contacts Arthur Dales and sets up a meeting in an isolated booth at a bar, Deep Throat style.

*Dean Aylesworth, who will also play young Bill Mulder in two other episodes, is just trying too hard though. Dude, you look creepy enough, okay, just stop.

*You know, the attack footage of Skur is the same every damn time. That one eye rolls up and his jaw sort of unhinges and he makes that weird noise, like he’s hocking up a spider or something.

*There is one great bit where the medical examiner tells Dales he’ll have the forensic reports in six to eight weeks. Man.

*A nice scene between Dales and the secretary or whatever. They have a nice discussion about the origin of the X-Files that doesn’t quite contradict what Mulder says in Shapes. Or does it? I dunno, I could see both being true.

*Apparently, when kicking around ideas for a spin-off series, which eventually became The Lone Gunmen, one of the ideas considered was to have a show focusing on Dales and this secretary.

*Actually, that could have rocked hard, if they’d had better stories than this. I like the idea of “X-Files through the years.” You know, can you picture a pair of cool, afro-dudes investigating UFO stuff in the seventies? I love the idea.

*Our first autopsy scene!

*I confess that I actually kind of find this scene deeply hilarious. The reactions are not quite as horrified as you’d expect if you were doing an autopsy and a crustacean the size of a pie plate crawled out of the esophagus.

*David Fredericks who plays J. Edgar Hoover isn’t much better than Moreland as Cohn. He hits all the classic bloviating evangelist marks. Thankfully, at least he doesn’t do the homosexual schtick. I’m actually kind of surprised.

*Hoover does some classic ranting about how he’s trying to defeat the Soviet Menace.

*Mr. Director, your plan to defeat the Communists is to . . . graft crab spiders into the esophagus of some soldiers and send those soldiers against the Communists to pin them to the ground one at a time and vomit that spider into their mouths to devour all their internal organs and then crawl back into the soldier?

*This seems . . . I don’t think . . . this plan of yours . . . it . . . well . . . I mean . . . are we sure this is the BEST way to beat the Communists? I mean, maybe you could start with some pamphlets or something.

*Skur says the government did it to him to make him a killing machine, but I just question the efficacy of this entire plane. I mean, what if there are two people in the room? Your spider can only get one of them at a time. And what does the dude do while his spider is out devouring a dude from the inside out? Sit there twiddling his thumbs? And how long does that take anyway? Half an hour easy, I’d think, right, to devour every bit of soft tissue inside the human body? I mean, this is a pretty idiotic idea from the get-go and I just don’t see it being workable at all.

*Also, I don’t understand Skur’s dilemma. While the spider is outside of him and eating somebody else from the inside out, why doesn’t he just leave? Or wait until the spider comes out and then smash it with something? I mean, does he like go totally comatose or something, while the spider is outside of him? I mean, that would have to be the case for him to be as helpless as he seems to be, but how brilliant is that? I mean, you don’t want to put your own agent out of commission for forty-five minutes every damn time he has to kill somebody, do you? I mean, this whole plan is just dunderheaded. I mean, I’ve heard some bad plans in my day, but this is just awful.

*Cut back to Mulder, his head in his hands. Or rather, hand. The one with the wedding ring on it.

*Hair flips 4 & 5 during the same line of dialogue!

*Why the hell does Mulder even believe this story? That seems a pertinent question at this point. I mean, if you were in his place, wouldn’t you have pulled your service weapon about halfway through this story and told Dales that you’d blow his head off if he didn’t stop with the fairy tales? I would have certainly. Even by the standards of the X-Files, this episode stretches credulity. And Mulder hasn’t even started looking at the X-Files yet; his worldview at this point must be incredibly naïve; and yet he instantly believes that the FBI put murderous spiders inside people in order to stop Communism? I mean, that just seems stupid to me. I mean, Mulder is, I admit, somewhat credulous, but just because he believes in aliens, he’s not going to believe any ridiculous story that gets handed to him. And you would just have to be incredibly credulous to even begin to buy this story that Dales is telling. I mean, Mulder would have to either be incredibly more versed in conspiracy lore that he should be at this point in his personal history or else completely mentally incompetent to believe this story.

*The final idiocy comes with the revelation that a conscience stricken and guilt ridden Bill Mulder released Skur rather than return him to the government’s purview.

*Striking as that final image is, of young Bill Mulder walking down that back country road, this is even stupider than . . . well, the rest of the episode.

*Young Bill Mulder wants to atone for his sins. He does so by . . . RELEASING A MASS MURDERER?! Even more, a murderer who literally must kill, judging from the scene in the bomb shelter where he struggles to keep the crab down but can’t and ends up killing his own wife. And this after he has already killed two people in as many days. And he hasn’t stopped his activities; when he’s shot by the cop at the start of this episode, there’s a brand new body in the bathtub.

*So, for thirty-eight years, Edward Skur has been murdering indiscriminately, at a rate of three to four people a week, all so Bill Mulder can salve his conscience. Next time, buddy, just try living with the guilt.

*In the closing voice over, Dales says he thinks Bill Mulder probably thought that if he freed him, Skur would expose the men who had done it to him. Still, after a decade or so had gone by and he hadn’t, wouldn’t you go and tell him to get in gear or something?

*I think this is an absolute desecration of Bill Mulder’s character. Bill Mulder wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t without moral convictions; that he could live his whole life knowing that Edward Skur was out there somewhere murdering people randomly because of a decision he made would have made his life a living hell. And he long ago would have tracked him down and popped him in the head. Which is, frankly, what he should have done at the beginning. The Bill Mulder of the show, as we will come to know him, was capable of doing bad things and of living with those things. But this? I honestly think he would not be able to live with what this episode posits that he has done. And I think this episode gets his character totally wrong in an infuriating way.

*No wonder Skur was thinking about Bill Mulder as he died; they were practically Leopold and Loeb.

*Well, thus ends one of the dumbest episodes of the entire series, undercut only by episodes as mind numbingly horrendous as The Jersey Devil and Fight Club. I mean, the wedding ring is the least of its frigging problems.

*What makes this so bad is that it’s a great premise. As stated, I love the idea of seeing other agents work X-Files down through the years. A couple of seventies hipster agents, chasing a werewolf through Harlem. A sixties era bureaucrat discovering that Fidel Castro is in league with the literal Devil. An FBI agent in the 1930s discovering that Nazi Germany is trying to obtain alien technology. I mean these could be some great episodes and some nice lo-tech nods, like the tox report taking two months could really add some flavor.

*It’s to this conceit, I think, that we owe the title. I think the implication is of Mulder and Dales being ‘fellow travelers’ themselves, both on the same road, just at very different moments in history. The myth doesn’t come across, however.

*Plus, I like the idea of weaving actual historical figures into the narrative. Sadly, this time, the narrative was a complete disaster that made no sense at all and the historical characters were all played by folks from summer stock.

*No one makes any sense in this episode; Hoover’s grand plot to foil the Communists is idiotic; Bill Mulder acts in a completely illogical and uncharacteristic fashion; Edward Skur doesn’t seem to take time to actually think through his options; and young Fox Mulder doesn’t seem to balk at swallowing the whole story, brainless as it all is.

*Darren McGavin deserved a better guest shot than this. Did he get one? We’ll wait and see. I don’t remember a damn thing about Agua Mala.

*1 out of 4 stars.

*Next time, we’ll jump into the world of the X-Files comic series published by Topps during the heyday of the series. And after getting to know The Lone Gunmen, X, Fox Mulder and his mysterious father, Bill, we’ll finally get a glimpse of Scully pre-X-Files assignment when we check out a couple of flashbacks found in X-Files, Issue #35, N.D.E. Part. 1.

EDIT: Also, I meant to say that I'm hoping someone will show up who really loves this episode and will give a good defense as a counter to my negative review. Fostering discussion is a good thing!

[JeSouhaite]

STANDING OVATION!!

BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT!!

Personally, I have removed all traces of this particular episode from my memory, and now you remind me of why I have done so. LOL!! "Hair flip!" ROTFL!!

Excellent work, Absolute Knave!! I must have more.

[JeSouhaite]

And, no, I've never attempted to watch Night Stalkers. It wasn't good, eh? Was it a short lived show? From the way CC has referred to it, I thought it might have been some sort of classic. This is not the case?

[Agent Skulder]

The original or classic "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" ran one season (20 eps) in the mid 70's. That's the show that inspired Carter and starred Darren McGavin as Kolchak.

Because TXF did so well, and Carter often said TXF was inspired by The Night Stalker, a new version was produced by Spotnitz in 2005. That's the one that didn't do very well - only 10 eps aired - possibly because it was so different from the original and viewers expected too much...

[TruthIsOutThere]

These are wonderful, Knave. Thanks so much for sharing them with us!

[SpecialAgent88]

AbsoluteKnave
*Then again, it’s a good thing I applauded at the beginning of this episode, since I didn’t exactly get any more chances. Am I giving away too early that I really hate this episode?

You have me on the floor LMAO, good one. I really enjoyed reading your review, especially the Mulder wedding ring thing, what creative writing and thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.
I don't enjoy this episode and will skip it.

[AbsoluteKnave]

Thanks so much, all of you! It makes me very that you enjoy my reviews! I enjoy writing them too!

I really kind of hate to give Night Stalker a complete write-off. I only saw one episode. I thought it was pretty bad, but sometime I'll have to give the original movie a try.

N.D.E., Part One (flashbacks)
The X-Files, #35 (November, 1997)



If you want to talk about paranoid, you should see the guy I’m assigned to work with.

*So, anyway, Topps started an ongoing X-Files comic series round about the second season of the show and it ran, more or less smoothly, until around the fifth season. One of the editors behind the comics would later lament 1013’s degree of involvement; their desire to “go over everything with a fine tooth comb” led to the comic generally running behind schedule and the letter column being mostly entirely fabricated. Which, actually, the fact that the letter column was mostly fabricated is actually entirely perfect for a comic series about paranoia, right?

*Besides the monthly series, there were a couple of miniseries, one adaptation of a Kevin J. Anderson novel and a brief Season One series that focused on adapting Season One episodes to comic format. We’ll be getting to those shortly.

*Upon starting this journey through the X-Files, I have read none of the X-Files comics. I look forward to getting involved in this stuff. Hopefully, it’ll be good. Even if it isn’t, it should be at least kind of interesting. That was the main reason I chose this particular timeline, instead of some others out there, actually. The timeline I’m using integrates he comics and the novels into the episode timeline, which nobody else really does. Anybody out there who’s really into the comics?

*This comic comes late in the series run; it is issue 35 out of a final tally of 41 and it has, to my knowledge, not been released in any trade paperbacks. The main story, and by the way, N.D.E. stands for Near Death Experience, takes place very early in season five and we’ll talk about it when the time comes.

*This comic contains two flashback sequences, both in black and white and both taking up two pages of space. It’s these that fall at this point on the timeline. In the first we see Scully at lunch with three friends on the day before her fateful meeting with Section Chief Blevins; in the second we see her on the evening of the next day, after her first meeting with Mulder, but before they leave for Oregon.

*We have thus taken the longest jump we will be taking, I think, at least until the series proper ends. We have leapt from late November of 1990 to early March of 1993, a jump of nearly two and a half years.

*It should be noted, for those detail-oriented among us, that the on-screen dates in the Pilot indicate dates in early March of 1992 and, using those dates, so does this comic. However, as the following episodes don’t take place until July and August of 1993, we are lead to believe that either the agents worked together for over a year between the Pilot and Squeeze (with, apparently, not much of interest happening) or else that the Pilot dates are erroneous (or that the Pilot is correct and the entire series is erroneous, if you want to get really creative). Joe Bongiorno, the author of the timeline I’m using goes with the latter theory.

*I just rewatched Redux and Redux II and it is stated a couple of times in the course of those episodes that M&S have worked together for four years and not for five. I think, given this, that it is very reasonable to assume that the Pilot dates are off by a year, as the author of this timeline has done. It makes sense that the Pilot, made much earlier than the other episodes of the series, by the very nature of how pilots are done, would have a date that would need to be accepted as erroneous and corrected in any attempt to make a realistic timeline.

*In the intervening years since Travelers, the Gulf War has come and gone, Jeffrey Dahmer and Rodney King have become household names, the Soviet Union has collapsed at long last and Jay Leno has replaced Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show.

*In the two weeks prior to these events, the first World Trade Center bombing took place and the FBI raided David Koresh’s Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, TX. It is a scary world into which our heroes are about to start moving.

*As the first flashback opens, Scully and three other FBI agents are sharing a lunch. As the scene opens, they’re talking about someone named Willis and giving Scully a hard time for having dated him for a while.

*This is, of course, Jack Willis from Lazarus, one of a seemingly endless stream of “from beyond the grave” episodes that showed up in the second half of the first season.

*It’s also worth mentioning that one of the agents eating with Scully here is Tom Colton from Squeeze.

*Now, I realize that Squeeze is and always has been Doug Hutchison’s episode (though Tooms is actually the far superior episode, in my opinion), but one of the large pleasures of Squeeze for me has always been Donal Logue’s slimy performance as Colton.

*In fact, I remember wishing, after seeing Squeeze for the first time, that they would make him something of a recurring character. The idea of a young, ambitious agent, a sort of yuppie really, with a tie to Scully’s character and a deep antipathy for Mulder is a good one and would have been a great recurring character.

*But then the first season wasn’t really interested in recurring characters. It wasn’t until second season that we started building the really exquisite supporting cast. Even the Lone Gunmen and Skinner only appear once in Season One, making them not quite recurring characters until the second season.

*Plus, I suppose Spender was basically a rejiggered Colton.

*Regardless, I thought it cool to see Colton here, sort of retroactively turned into a recurring character.

*These flashbacks are essentially to set up another agent, Tony, who is preparing to be shipped off to work undercover in the mob. He figures, as a plot point, in the body of N.D.E. Suffice it to say now that he is a friend of Scully’s who predates the X-Files and he is undercover in the mob.

*The first flashback ends with the agents asking if Scully knows any more about why Blevins wants to see her in the morning; she says no.

*The second flashback is Scully and Tony sharing a beer the night of March 6th. In the morning, their ways will part; Tony will ship off to New York to be introduced into the Family and Scully will leave for the very plausible state of Oregon. The flashback ends with Scully encouraging Tony that he’ll do fine.

*Anyway, this is sort of negligible, I suppose, and mainly just a tie in to the main story of this comic, which is also pretty slight. But they threw a couple of nice bones to the fans by putting in Colton and mentioning Willis. And it was kind of nice to see Scully, back in the days when she actually had a personal life.

** out of **** stars

*Next time, you know the one. The one that started it all, the meeting of the minds, the real beginning, the one that this chronological journey has only put off for a brief period. Next time, the Pilot.

[AbsoluteKnave]

Pilot
1 X 79

3/6/1993 – 3/22/1993



Mulder, what happened? There was a light!

*Well, I’m glad they lost that corny “The Following Story is Inspired by Actual Documented Accounts.” I think that would have gotten real old by the time they got to Two Fathers.

*Surely, there is no need for me to even attempt any kind of a summary for this episode. I’m trying not to really summarize anyway, for the sake of space. But with this episode surely there is even less need than usual. Surely, we’ve all seen this one. I’ve seen it probably . . . let me think . . . seven times?

*The ‘teaser’ is pretty nice. I like the climax: “Karen Swenson.” “Is that a positive ID, Detective?” “She graduated with my son.” “Would that be the class of 89, Detective? It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

*That last question is just never a good sign.

*No title sequence, just a straight fade to FBI headquarters.

*Introduction of Charles Cioffi as Section Chief Scott Blevins; ie, the character you were supposed to forget because we didn’t like him except we’re bringing him back now four years later just to die.

*William B. Davis in the background!

*Scully looks so sad after her joke about “Spooky” Mulder fails to land.

*The first look at that office. That’s just a great frigging set. It looks lived in.

*God, Duchovny looks like Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume with those glasses.

*The first meeting between Mulder and Scully and it’s full of absolute gems.

*My favorite is the conclusion: “That’s why they put the I in F B I.”

*Duchovny’s delivery of that line about the “very PLAUSIBLE state of Oregon” is just brilliant. He even gets a smile out of Scully on that one, though she doesn’t let him see it.

*You ever wonder what they mean when they talk about “chemistry” and they’re not talking about the hard science? They mean this scene.

*The scene on the plane is one of the only times I recall ever seeing the agents in transit to a case. It’s certainly the only time I’ve ever actually seen them on an airplane.

*Mulder’s already snacking on those sunflower seeds.

*Mulder asks Scully if she’s squeamish about doing an autopsy on the exhumed body. She says she isn’t sure as she’s never had the pleasure. This from the woman who would, in around two years, be standing in the chest cavity of an elephant and shouldering out organs.

*That scene where Mulder paints that orange X on the road is just classic. I used to have a little blue suitcase like the one he sets out of the trunk.

*The aftermath is brilliant. “What the hell was that about?” “Oh, you know, probably nothing.” I laugh at that every time. Anderson’s reaction shot is priceless.

*I find it hilarious that during the scene where they’re exhuming Ray Soames’ body Duchovny is just pulling sunflower seeds out of his pockets, looking them and throwing them on the ground. I guess he’d been eating them for a lot of takes.

*So this is Scully’s first autopsy. I love her deadpan, “Could you point that flash away from me please?”

*M&S in a nutshell: “You don’t honestly believe this is some kind of an extraterrestrial? This is someone’s sick joke.” “We can do those X-rays here, can’t we? Is there any reason we can’t do them right now?”

*Scully’s first typing shot!

*First nasal implant shot!

*Scully smiles again. She smiles more in this episode than in the entire fourth season, I promise you.

*Man, Scully looks so short, walking between Mulder and the psychiatrist.

*An early glimpse of compassionate Mulder as he talks to Peggy O’Dell.

*Instantly followed by our first nosebleed. Not going to be the last.

*I can’t believe I’ve watched two episodes and not one comment about the music. Mark Snow was, at the time, the best composer working in television. His music still stands up. The repeating piano figure during this scene is particularly great. He stays out of the way, a lot of the time, but still delivers something very close to a wall to wall score of low key ambient sound. Brilliant.

*When Scully says, “What were those kids doing out there in the forest?” there’s a quick reaction shot of Mulder and you see he’s thinking, “Damn, no sleep tonight.”

*M&S have those dinky little flashlights. I don’t think they get those monster huge ones until the second season.

*I used to know a guy who had one of those monster light bars on top of his truck like Detective Miles. I think they’re both compensating, frankly.

*I love the shot of the dead car slowly gliding to a stop in that pouring rain.

*Mulder’s a little over the top here. Later, he barely flickers his eyelids over stuff like six bodies floating in green tanks in a storage house, but here, after he loses nine minutes, he dances around in the rain like a teenager.

*TXF in a nutshell: “Time can’t just disappear. It’s a universal invariant!” *car starts on its own*

*That scene in the rain after the nine minutes disappear is sort of the moment when I tumbled to the fact that this wasn’t going to just be a very good show, but a great one.

*The scene where Scully strips down to her underwear is a little odd. The X-Files generally didn’t go in for that kind of stuff and it seems pretty gratuitous, frankly. A first episode bid for the 14 year old demographic?

*Mulder’s expression is priceless when Scully enters his room, says, “I want you to look at something” and then starts taking her robe off.

*Great music in this scene as well. And beautiful lighting; this is the show setting a template for itself and doing it well.

*Mulder narrates the story of his sister’s disappearance, his discovery of the X-Files and mentions that he has supporters in Congress. We’ll meet one of those supporters in season two.

*That shot of Mulder, leaning his back against the bed, with his head craned up and back to look at Scully on the bed . . . looks really uncomfortable.

*Duchovny’s acting is a bit over the top in this scene too. When he says, “Listen to me, Scully. This thing is out there,” he plays it a bit too hard. Anderson has Scully down perfectly already, but I think Duchovny had to tamp Mulder down a bit more after this. He's still getting the character’s implacability down.

*Sarah Koskoff, who plays Theresa Nemmen, is a really bad actress. She’s got some kind of weird Shatner thing going on with her pauses.

*That’s why I need you . . . to protect me . . . I’m . . . scared I might . . . die . . . like the others like . . . Peggy . . . did tonight.

*That is a killer nosebleed she does though. Like the definitive nosebleed, much more than Peggy O’Dell’s, this one really kills.

*The cemetery scene is a winner too. Of course, I love the way they sort of schlep around in the rain all through this episode and then later carry umbrellas through the lightest drizzle.

*Scully calls Billy Miles a ‘vegetable.’ Is that the proper medical term, Doctor?

*This is a great scene. Mulder’s “You think I’m crazy?” is brilliant, sort of chagrined and accepting. Then Scully’s slow realization that Mulder’s theory may be correct is even better. And then it’s all for the moment when they finally just break up laughing. Stunner. I love this bit.

*I love Billy’s nurse. “Not my aisle of the produce section” indeed.

*Scully gets a nice whack on the temple from Detective Miles. She’ll be getting a lot more on that spot over the years.

*I love Scully’s low powered entrance. “There was a light,” she says and it feels like a revelation from on high. Scully will end up unable to substantiate the time loss, the corpse in Ray Soames’ coffin has vanished, the X-Rays and pictures have been burned, the bodies are gone. But there was a light. Anderson’s delivery of the line is just astonishingly great. Oddly enough, I’d never noticed this line before, in all the times I’d seen the episode. But it felt like the pivotal moment of the episode this time as I was watching. It’s the moment when Scully has to give that tiniest bit of affirmation. And she’s already proving that she’s not going to be the stooge for Blevins. When there is a light, she will say “There was a light.”

*Wow! That’s actually Heitz Werber questioning Billy Miles at the end. You see his face for less than three seconds in a rotating shot, but that’s him, the same actor who shows up in Patient X/The Red and the Black in season FIVE. That’s actually really incredible. That’s continuity, right there.

*That moment when Mulder and Scully appear to lock eyes through the one way mirror is just mythic.

*BLEVINS: I see no evidence that justifies the legitimacy of these investigations. SCULLY: There were, of course, crimes committed.

*BURN! Scully gets even better at those one liners as the series progresses. She really knows how to twist the screws.

*The infamous closing scene of CSM depositing the nasal implant in a box with several others and then leaving, closing the door for that iconic shot of the Pentagon floor plan is, of course, wonderful.

*For the credits, they don’t have the theme music, so it’s that very quiet, triplet piano bit from before. It’s very unsettling, really, this incredibly slow and moody music over the quick credits. I actually kind of like it.

*Well, the die is truly cast now; the Rubicon is crossed.

*Carter would later remark on his insane crackpot theory that this was basically an anthology show just with recurring leads. He would also state in later seasons that the series could continue for decades just switching out actors. All this, I think, goes to prove that Carter fundamentally misunderstood the success of the show.

*Great scripting, yes, and, yes, great music and great direction. But you can instantly see what separates this show from the also rans: the incredible chemistry of its two leads. Seeing them at loggerheads every week was what kept most of us coming back, I think. And that chemistry is evident from the very first episode. Their first scene together in this episode still throws sparks.

*As well, the writing is already up to par. The episode’s story spools out nicely, if not quite as artistically as the stories later would spool out. But the witty lines are there and the opposing characters of Mulder and Scully are already very clearly defined and interesting. Their slow journey towards intimacy, though not of the romantic sort, is nicely begun here until, by the end, you already know that Scully’s allegiance has subtly shifted to Mulder.

*The look of the show is also already set. The dark rainy nights, the blinding lights in the forest, the shadowy world of Mulder’s darkened hotel room . . . these things are all as much a part of the X-Files as anything else.

*This is a rare example of a pilot that is almost completely indistinguishable from the show as it came to be. This was a show that knew what it wanted to do and did it from the very beginning. This is a remarkably assured pilot episode; the show has the courage of its convictions.

*And after all these years the Pilot still holds up. I think the last time I watched through the series I wasn’t quite prepared to give the Pilot a perfect score. Something about it still seemed sketchy at that point. Now, I’m wondering what on earth was sketchy about it. It seems as near perfect as any pilot could ever be on this viewing. There’s simply too much brilliance on display to niggle over something like a half a star. The show’s first episode and also its first perfect episode.

**** out of **** stars.

*Next time, we leap into the young adult episode adaptations with the first of them, an adaptation of the Pilot that goes by the name of X Marks the Spot. X Marks the Spot? You know, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a worse title than “Pilot,” but I think they just did it. We’ll see if the book is any better than the title next time.

[AbsoluteKnave]

X Marks the Spot

3/6/1993 - 3/22/1993



He’ll know exactly what you’re up to.

I’m not up to anything, sir. I’m just following orders.

*Okay, this is the first in a series of Young Adult novels that adapt various episodes of the X-Files into book format. I’ve read a couple of them, way back when I was actually a young adult and not the world-weary, cynical old geezer I am today.

*I’ll basically be noting the differences between the television episode and the adaptation and sort of filling you in on that and whether or not the adaptation works as an adaptation.

*Okay, let’s get started.

*Well, the book is very careful to establish right off the bat that the prose will be, par for the Young Adult Novel course, terrible.

*The coroner says that Karen Swenson shows no sign of “beating or physical assault,” instead of “rape or sexual assault” as he says in the television show.

*Chapter two begins with a scene not in the episode of Scully teaching a class at Quantico; she’s demonstrating, on a cadaver, the various signs of electrocution, which seems to contradict her statement that she has limited experience with dead bodies in the episode. Perhaps she’s only talking about autopsies, but whatever.

*She gets a note, requiring her to meet with an “Agent Jones” at FBI Headquarters at 1600. This contradicts N.D.E., which indicates that she is in Washington and already aware of the meeting the day before the meeting actually takes place.

*Well, it certainly didn’t take long to start getting continuity errors. You open the door to these kinds of media tie-ins and they start piling up. I’ve read one comic book and one novelization and they’ve already contradicted each other. Brilliant work.

*Scully arrives and Agent Jones, a man in his fifties, leads her back to see Section Chief Blevins who is never named. It only refers to him as the oldest man in the room, probably in his sixties.

*After Scully makes her joke about “Spooky” Mulder, it’s Agent Jones that speaks up to talk about his profile on serial killers and the occult and his other qualifications, rather than Scully as in the episode. That’s odd.

*The men are much more candid here than in the episode; they tell Scully that her career at the Bureau will flourish “once you’ve put the X-Files behind you.” Another tells her to “call a spade a spade – and a nut a nut.”

*Also, there’s no mention of the Smoking Man in this scene. I wonder if Agent Jones is some kind of stand in. If he is, however, he’s being pretty chatty and pretty chummy. I wonder if, being a Young Adult novel, the book wasn’t able to have a character that smoked. Nah, that would just be a little too stupid.

*Agent Jones, practically a supporting character here, actually takes Scully down to Mulder’s basement office and stays in the room for Mulder and Scully’s first scene together, though he doesn’t say much.

*Scully is introduced as Mulder’s new ‘assistant,’ which hardly seems politically correct. Is she going to be getting him coffee? Then again, she does seem to do most of the typing . . .

*Mulder’s best line in this scene is different: “Hey, that’s what the I in the FBI stands for. Investigation is our job.” Oh, brother . . . that’s sort of the way the script has been dumbed down in general.

*In the airplane scene, Scully is listening to “folk rock” on her walkman.

*Aha! Ethan Minette also shows up here. Ethan was originally Scully’s boyfriend; two scenes with him were actually filmed and can be seen on the X-Files First Season DVD set. In the scene as filmed, Scully meets Ethan at his job as he prepares to do a television interview of a congressman. Here, the book reveals that he’s a lobbyist.

*We don’t actually get the scene, just Scully thinking about Ethan on the plane ride. Her conclusion: “They were spare time sweethearts. The most that Scully could say was that it was better than nothing.”

*Also on the plane, Scully recalls her last words with Agent Jones. He tells her that he is the one who chose her for the assignment and he did so because he knew she would be “fair.”

*Mulder lets Scully drive, telling her that she won’t like the way he drives.

*So, YA novel or not, Scully actually says, “What the hell was that about?” after Mulder spray paints the X.

*In another scene not in the episode, when Mulder and Scully arrive in Bellefleur, they are met by an angry crowd that has heard about their plans to exhume the bodies. And two of the families have signed court orders preventing the exhumation. Ray Soames’ family, however, has left town. This, I suppose, explains, why they only exhumed the one body.

*Scully asks Mulder, “Do you always blow into town like the Prince of Darkness?”

*The confrontation with Dr. Nemman takes place the courthouse, not at the cemetary. And Coronor Truit is much more antagonistic in this version of the story.

*Mulder and Scully head for the cemetery: “Coming to the cemetery, Scully?” “Yeah, I want to make sure we’re not digging our own graves.”

*And in this version of the story, there’s someone named Danny Doty that is actually in prison for committing the first three murders. He confessed, apparently.

*Much of what’s weird about this version is that the characterizations and emotions are off, sometimes wildly. This book says that Mulder is overjoyed at what he finds in Ray Soames’ coffin. In the show, he’s pretty evidently disgusted and angered. When he tells them to seal the coffin back up, the book indicates that he’s smiling and almost laughing; in the episode, of course, he’s not doing either of those things.

*In the autopsy scene, Scully says she has no problem as she’s examined cadavers before. So, definitely a continuity error with the episode.

*Mulder asks her if she’s ever seen a corpse like this one. She responds, “A corpse is a corpse.”

*Of course of course unless of course that corpse is the corpse of Raymond Soames.

*The next morning, Mulder gives Scully a message from the hotel desk. It’s from Ethan. Scully calls him and they have a brief, not very interesting conversation. Except Ethan does reveal that somebody just pranked him, calling and hanging up and Scully realizes that Mulder must have done it to check up on her, which I find kind of hilarious.

*Mulder and Scully go visit Danny Doty in prison. He is also a member of the class of 89; apparently, he’s gone loopy from all the alien abductions. He still claims credit for the killings; Mulder theorizes that he wants to be locked up because it feels safe.

*Also, it’s Danny Doty that steers them toward Billy Miles and tells them that he’s in a psychiatric hospital.

*Scully has a brown belt in karate, we find out in this scene!

*It’s also heavily implied in this scene that Ray Soames’ entire family has been abducted.

*Peggy O’Dell does not have a nosebleed in the hospital scene. She does tell Mulder that she and Billy are joined forever because they have both seen the light.

*When she says this, Billy tries to speak. That’s not in the episode either and a good thing, I think.

*In the adaptation, Mulder and Scully only lose three minutes, not nine. Which is kind of lame. I mean three minutes, you can lose pretty easy, really.

*Just in time for a handy cliffhanger, Scully discovers the bumps on her back and she actually screams!

*Peggy O’Dell is hit by a train, not a truck, in this version.

*Detective Miles accosts Mulder at the scene of Peggy’s death and the two actually get into a shoving match. Detective Miles then places Mulder and Scully under arrest, even having an officer draw his weapon on Scully, and confiscates their weapons, while refusing to look at their IDs. Truit shows up to inform them about the theft of Soames’ corpse and vouches for them, so Detective Miles has to release them.

*Scully is saddened by the fire in the hotel because it destroys her laptop which was the latest model. She felt, the book tells us, like she had just lost her best friend.

*Easy, girl, Ghost in the Machine is later.

*In the diner scene, Theresa says that Peggy O’Dell was impregnated with an alien fetus and Theresa’s father disposed of it when it was born.

*After Mulder and Scully verify that Billy Miles was in the forest, they high five each other.

*Scully is a Redskins fan. She thinks Mulder would make a good blocker.

*The sound it makes when Detective Miles takes out Scully is, apparently, “BLATT.”

*In this version, Scully arrives just behind Mulder to the clearing. She is in time to see Billy with Theresa, see Mulder tackle Detective Miles and see the light come.

*In this version, Billy is debriefed by his own doctor back at the psychiatric hospital and doesn’t go to Washington.

*In the episode, Mulder is disturbed to discover that the reports they filed on Billy Miles have vanished from the Oregon Police Department. In this version, Mulder asks that a report not be filed, since Billy was obviously in some sort of a waking coma state when he committed his crimes. Dr. Nemman and Detective Miles lose their jobs, however.

*Blevins gives Agent Jones the reports Scully has filed and he burns them in an incinerator. He then takes an agency car to an estate in the Virginia hills and deposits the implant in a room similar to the Pentagon room in the episode. As he leaves, he pauses to think about Mulder and Scully and the X-Files; he then tells the guard, as he leaves, “Be seeing you.”

*No scene of Mulder calling Scully late at night; no scene of Scully and Ethan in bed together. And no smoking man, only Agent Jones.

*I found this kind of intriguing. You could see a lot of other plot threads, probably dropped from the episode for time. The Danny Doty thread would have worked quite well in the episode and the part about the angry crowd and the court orders actually goes to explain why it’s only Ray Soames that the agents exhume.

*Wikipedia tells me that the scene with Scully teaching the class at Quantico was actually filmed, but then cut for time.

*It also tells me that the original screenplay for the episode had an FBI Agent named Lake who, more or less, follows along the lines Agent Jones does here. Agent Lake then sort of morphed into the Smoking Man. So we have, in Agent Jones, an acknowledged precursor to CSM. He’s like the Smoking Man in that he disposes of all the evidence, but he’s an FBI agent, which, of course, CSM isn’t and his attitude toward Mulder seems more sympathetic than CSM’s, even CSM’s as we come to eventually understand it.

*Jones seems to want the truth whatever it might be, to come to light, based on his comments to Scully about why he chose her for this assignment. And then, he’s much less of an enigma than CSM; he carries out an extended conversation with Scully, speaks in her meeting with Blevins and even talks briefly with Mulder who seems to know him, at least, in passing. And Mulder doesn’t seem at all afraid to give Scully a briefing on the Oregon case with Jones still in the room which seems to indicate at least a passing level of trust.

*On the whole, then, was this worth reading? I think actually that it was. Now that I’ve given you all the pertinent differences, you may not want to read it, but I enjoyed seeing some new scenes and, in particular, seeing Agent Jones and noting how he was definitely a step down the road toward CSM and also how he was different from the final product.

*Will the other YA novels have as much extra material? Hopefully; they might actually be of some interest if they do. The prose is pretty terrible; Les Martin, by the by, authored this one, but this is pretty well committee writing. But, it was fun to kind of get a different version of the story.

** out of **** stars.

*Next time, it’s another adaptation of the Pilot, but a more graphic one. It’s the X-Files comics’ inauguration with Issue 0, the Pilot adaptation.

[AbsoluteKnave]

I hope some of you are still reading this and enjoying it! I'm going to keep posting anyway, because I enjoy it! But I would enjoy it more if I knew you guys were enjoying it too!



Pilot

3/6/1993 - 3/22/1993



When convention and science offers us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?

*This was the issue that started the X-Files comic series from Topps. There would be, eventually, 42 issues total in this series, not counting two annuals, two graphic novels, one miniseries adaptation of Kevin J. Anderson’s novel, Ground Zero, and three digests, all of which we’ll be looking at when the time comes. Of this main series, this is the only issue that is an adaptation of a television episode. The rest of the stories published in the series were original stories, with the majority of them happening in Seasons 2 – 5.

*However, following the success of this issue, it was decided to launch a parallel series of episode adaptations. Nine first season episodes were eventually adapted, including this one; two others were planned, but never completed. We’ll be looking at those nine adaptations as we come to the episodes in question.

*It should be noted that this has been reprinted in a TP called, creatively, The X-Files, Vol. 1 It’s one of the few of the first season adaptations that is readily available in a trade. A lot of the others are pretty hard to find, still existing only in their initial printings.

*Hilariously, this opens with a teeny, tiny “The Following is Inspired by Actual Eyewitness Accounts.” I almost missed it.

*I think the thing to say here is that the art is spectacular. It isn’t that it does anything as pedestrian as replicate the actors (though it does replicate several shots, with some small changes, which I’ll mention later). It also doesn’t look at all like the art on the cover.

*The art is stark, and has the look of a Braque painting, sharp angles, a sort of cubist/impressionist look at the X-Files. Dark shadows fill in spaces all over the pictures and it looks more like a hasty painting than any kind of actual drawing. In some sense, the art could be called sloppy, but it comes across as very moody, very atmospheric and, above all, very interesting.

*As I said before, I’ve seen the Pilot six times; I wasn’t really looking forward to reading a comic adaptation, to be honest, especially after finishing that poorly written, if occasionally interesting, young adult adaptation. But I was absolutely swept up in the experience of these wonderful panels. It’s a deeply idiosyncratic reading of the episode, but it’s quite brilliant actually.

*Mulder and Scully don’t exactly look like Duchovny and Anderson; their look even changes from panel to panel. But somehow, this has captured their spirits more so than some of the more detailed and exact artwork in other issues of this comic.

*There’s a great bit of Peggy O’Dell in motion in her wheelchair that is just a great panel of art. It has real energy.

*The two pages that deal with the loss of the nine minutes are just brilliant. The shot of the car, completely still and dead, in the rain is great. And the comic replicates beautifully the shot I posted as the main image for my review of the Pilot, of Mulder with his arms raised in exaltation, Scully behind looking uncertain.

*One misstep; the car starting happens off screen, represented by only a sound effect. I would have liked to have seen those lights fire up.

*The hotel room scene is just as beautiful here as it is in the episode.

*They frigging nail the cemetery scene too. In particular the panel where Mulder reveals that he believes Billy Miles is the culprit, Scully’s reaction shot and then the shot of Scully breaking into laughter . . . those panels are just . . . they have the expressions down perfectly.

*One of the moments where I think this comic actually improves on the episode. Rather than having two separate shots of Mulder and Detective Miles reacting to the light, it puts them together in a widescreen two shot that looks fantastic, both of them looking up into the light through a maelstrom of debris.

*Heitz Werber gets a full face shot in this version, sharing a three shot, Billy Miles in profile in foreground, extreme left; Werber, midground slight right, facing the viewer; Mulder, background, slightly off-center left, looking straight out. And it’s definitely the same guy from Patient X/The Red and the Black.

*They don’t totally get the “through the mirror” look, but I don’t blame them. That’s hard.

*CSM is smoking when Scully meets him in the hall and then again as he deposits the implant; I don’t think he was smoking either of those times in the actual episode.

*Bottom line: exceeded my expectations in almost every way. Doesn’t have anything new in the way of plot or dialogue, but the art is stunning. I’d recommend you track this one down if you’re a fan at all; perhaps the art is a bit divisive . . . I can certainly see some people hating it. But, personally, I think it’s magnificent.

*I wasn’t really looking forward to all the ep adaptations. After this one though, I’m about to change my tune. If they were to allow deeply idiosyncratic artists to bring their own deeply personal style to these things . . . that could be brilliant. A sort of completely unique visual approach to the episodes. I can only hope the other adaptation comics will be even half this good.

*** ½ out of **** stars.

*Next time, we’ll jump into the world of the adult novels with the first of two novels penned by Charles Grant. I’ve read Whirlwind before, but next time, we’ll be looking at the Grant novel that I hadn’t read before I started this project, Goblins. Show up, won’t you?

[AbsoluteKnave]

Goblins



God Almighty, Scully, I didn’t see you there. Why the hell didn’t you say something?

You didn’t see me.

5/5/1993 – 5/9/1993

*This book is dated on the timeline I’m using as taking place from 5/5/1993 to 5/9/1993. This means that it opens about a month and a half after the Pilot episode wrapped. Mulder and Scully have been working together for something like two months now. What happened in the month and a half since that late night phone call at the end of the Pilot, we do not know.

*It should be noted that this book is out of print, but fairly easy to find in used bookstores, libraries and on the web for sale.

*It starts in Fort Dix; two men, one an ex-soldier and alcoholic, and the other, an injured soldier on restriction, are killed by something that they can’t see. The first traps someone he thinks is following him in a dead end alley, but then can’t see anyone there; the other, going AWOL for a night on the town, touches something that looks like a tree, but is far, far too soft, in the middle of the woods and then gets his throat slashed.

*Meanwhile, Mulder is hanging around the Jefferson Memorial, trying to come down from the case he has just helped successfully bring to a close, a non-paranormal kidnapping case that he helped out on as a favor to Hank Webber, a new junior agent.

*During his interior monologue, Mulder recalls that the X-Files had previously been shut down and have only recently been reopened. This has led some people to place this book sometime in the second season. But that doesn’t fly; Mulder explicitly states that it’s May 5th and the X-Files weren’t closed at the end of Erlenmeyer Flask until May 28th. Likewise, they weren’t opened until November of that year. Meaning it has to be at this point or else well into the third season, which I don’t think works.

*He could just as easily be recalling, I think, the fact that they had been closed for some decades, but he only recently reopened them himself, right?

*At the Jefferson Memorial, Mulder is accosted by a fellow who grabs his shoulder from behind and speaks a few words of warning. When Mulder tries to turn to see who it is, the guy does some kind of Vulcan Nerve Pinch and sends Mulder toppling into the steps. By the time he recovers, the man is gone.

*I think we just got something mythic here! This would, I think, have to be Mulder’s first encounter with Deep Throat. Granted, the whole neck attack thing doesn’t seem quite in character with Deep Throat. Maybe it’s X making an extremely early appearance. Either way, I think it’s got to be one of them. So that’s pretty cool. Mulder won’t actually meet Deep Throat for a couple of months yet; I think this is their first brush. Or X, who he first bumped into about four years ago in Unusual Suspect, though he probably doesn’t remember that.

*A journalist named Carl Barelli visits Mulder in his office. Barelli, it is stated, has been trying to pick up Scully for a year. This also seems to rather screw up placing the book here since at this point, Mulder and Scully had only been partners for a little over a month, but I think it’s still open for debate. The book isn’t specific; Barelli is a friend of both Mulder and Scully, but it is quite possible that he met them both separately, before they were partnered.

*Mulder’s immediate superior in this novel is an “Arlen Douglas,” someone new to the job. That makes me think that this book has to take place at this point; by the end of the first season, Skinner has been introduced.

*It’s kind of shocking, actually, the first time someone says “shit.”

*Mulder visits a local bar and we find out he’s been dating one of the waitresses there.

*We then find out that she has an autographed poster for Thing From Another World. Which is probably the only reason Mulder’s dating her.

*So, Barelli, the journalist, knows the second soldier who got killed and so he calls in a favor with his brother in law, Joseph Tonero, stationed at Fort Dix and gets him to call in a favor with a congressman and next thing you know, ol’ Jed’s a. . . no, wait, Mulder and Scully, accompanied by Webber and his new partner, a buxom blonde goes by Licia Andrews, are off to Fort Dix to investigate the slayings.

*There’s a nice bit where Andrews asks Scully about Mulder and Scully wonders if she’s getting a crush on Mulder. Andrews then says that, whatever, he’d just better not screw her first case all to hell, which kind of puts a period on that.

*The scene where the agents talk to the local police chief, Todd Hawks, is a pretty good one. Hawks pushes their buttons pretty well; the scene reaches a point where he says that he’s so up on local events that he could actually tell them what they all had for breakfast. Webber calls his bluff and the chief shocks them all by actually telling them what they had for breakfast and getting it right. I kind of loved that bit.

*Neither Mulder nor Scully seem quite right here. Scully, in particular, doesn’t act like herself during the crime scene investigation scene. She uses an ink pen like a knife and acts out the murder, which is just . . . not right for her.

*So, Mulder and Scully meet the local nutcase, an elderly woman named Elly who saw the first murder. She says the victim was killed by a goblin; the police chief fills them in: Elly’s been chasing goblins for years. She goes around with a can of orange spray paint and sprays people that she thinks are goblins and then tells Chief Hawks to lock them up. She’s a little frustrated that one of the goblins has committed murder; if Hawks had listened to her, she says, this never would have happened.

*I was kind of praying for Mulder to whip out his own can of orange spray paint, from the Pilot, at this point. But no.

*This is a sort of cool bit, like from the show:

“Ms. Lang, what did the goblin look like?”

“It was black, child,” Elly said.

“You mean –“

“No, not a Negro, that’s not what I mean. I mean just what I said. It was black. All black. It had no color at all.”

*I could see a commercial break fading in after that.

*We find out that Major Joseph Tonero, who called in the favor with the congressman, is involved in something odd that’s going on in the basement of one of the buildings on the army post. There’s a pair of scientists, Rosemary Elkhart and Leonard Tymon, who are also involved.

*Tymons, who is getting jumpy about the ‘project,’ visits someone in the basement. Their conversation is fragmented and we get no details about the person Tymons is talking too. As Tymon leaves, he realizes that he still can’t think of ‘it’ as human.

*Mulder, Scully and Webber investigate the scene of the forest slaying and a figure all in black opens fire on them with a semi-automatic weapon. During the fracas, Mulder is assaulted by the goblin, hit over the head, kicked in the ribs and told, “Watch your back, Mulder” in a voice “hoarse and inhuman.” The goblin also giggles, for those looking for cheap chills.

*Tonero, Tymons and Elkhart arrive at the scene of the shooting and meet our agents. In a private moment, they discuss the fact that they had nothing to do with the attempt to kill the agents. In another private moment, Mulder confides in Scully that he saw the goblin, that he didn’t see it till it was right on him and only an arm did he see then . . . an arm that looked like bark.

*Andrews starts talking about the ‘goblin’ and Scully snaps at her not to call it that. Andrews asks if she should call it ‘Bill.’

*Elkhart and Tonero decide to move the operation after they get a call from someone up the chain of command. Tymons meanwhile kills himself.

*There’s a very creepy elevator scene where Elkhart and the goblin have a conversation. Elkhart flees from a gun waving Tymons (just before he shoots himself) onto the elevator and only after the doors are closed does she realize the goblin is there with her.

*There’s a nice bit where Scully takes a shower and then becomes paranoid and spends about ten pages freaking out all over her hotel room. This scene actually did kind of call to mind some of the great paranoid fugue states of the show, like in E.B.E. when Mulder disassembles his apartment one piece at a time because he thinks he’s being bugged or Wetwired when Scully dismantles a hotel room to find a hidden camera.

*And then! She figures it out!

*That’s right, Scully deduces it all! You go, girl! She’s always been the smart one.

*Barelli has showed up in town early in the book and been investigating; he finds himself messily murdered by a “shadow” that tells him, “It doesn’t make any difference” after Barelli asks who it is.

*Solution, so if you intend actually reading this book, don’t read any further.

*Answer: chameleon. A human chameleon, created by a government program overseen by Tonero and his two scientist friends.

*The agents visit Tonero and Elkhart; they share a conversation where no one is honest and then Mulder steals Tonero’s keys. Webber and Andrews leave and Mulder and Scully find their way into the basement. No one’s there, but the agents discover a room where every wall is a different color, a practice room, if you will, where the goblin learned how to control his color changes.

*Mulder figures out who the goblin is; it’s the police dispatcher, a character who’s had something like two lines. He hears her tell someone over the radio to watch his back and tumbles to it.

*Looking back through the book, I noted that when she was introduced the book made sure to mention that she was wearing too much makeup. And Mulder has a brief conversation with her about poison ivy after he sees her rubbing calamine lotion on her hands.

*So, that’s kind of clever, I suppose. The book establishes that she’s having skin problems, which should be a tip-off, but isn’t, it’s done so quickly.

*Elkhart kills Tonero with a quick shot to the head; this is off screen, but she’s the one who did it. She’s cutting her losses and getting out of town; the goblin is slowly losing her mind under the stress and she’s started leaving threatening letters for Elkhart. Elkhart’s going to start over, far away and under a different name.

*Scully reveals the big twist, which shocked no one, least of all me, which is that Andrews is the one who shot at them in the woods. She’s working for Arlen Douglas and under orders to make sure that Mulder doesn’t come back alive.

*I suppose this fits continuity; some member of the Consortium acting on their own wants Mulder out of the way and goes behind CSM’s back. Obviously, Grant wasn’t aware that Mulder had a protector in CSM, when he wrote this, but it works anyway, with a little tweaking.

*Mulder and Scully race to Elly Lang’s house; Barelli is dead, Tonero is dead, Tymons is dead, the computers are shot to hell; the goblin is cleaning house, going a little mad. They’re afraid the goblin will go after Elly.

*They arrive to find no one there. Webber arrives and Andrews immediately after. Ensuing fracas: Webber pops Andrews through the right eye, but not before she reveals that it is, indeed, Douglas she’s working for.

*In the pelting rain that’s been building for the whole book, Mulder and Scully confront the goblin in the town’s public park. Everything is revealed, except why she killed the first guy; he was just a random drunk and if she’d stayed still, doubtless he would have strolled away. Second guy she killed because he was having an affair with her and she saw him, while drifting around town in color change mode, with another woman.

*So, yeah, if your girlfriend is a chameleon, don't cheat on her. Cause she COULD SERIOUSLY BE RIGHT THERE THE WHOLE TIME!

*Ironically, the whole reason Mulder and Scully were called in was because this guy was about to marry Barelli’s sister, which means he was screwing around with at least three women. So, let’s shed no tears for this guy.

*She does the whole “nude psycho woman” routine; you know the one, licking her lips, bouncing on her rump, tapping the knife against her bare thigh, making her hands change color. But her skin is breaking down; she's losing control of the ability to control her color changes. She’s dying and she’s also gone completely out of her mind.

*Long story short, she stabs Mulder, but Mulder gets off a shot and she expires on the grass. Mulder and Scully stand over her, waiting for her to return to normal, but she never does.

*As the agents prepare to head back to Washington, Mulder and Webber talk; Webber will be reassigned when they return to Washington, but he had fun. Douglas is gone; someone new will be taking his place. Mulder and Scully will return and the X-Files will continue. But Elkhart has escaped free and clear; and in her head still burns the knowledge yada yada yada and through the night could an army be slipping an army that you would never see because blah blah blah, you know the drill.

*So, good book? Yeah, I guess so. I enjoyed it in a cheap pulpy way. Having also read Whirlwind, I can certainly attest that Grant’s books are far, far better than Anderson’s, which are pretty awful really. In Whirlwind, Grant’s second and final X-Files novel, which takes place in season three or four, I think Grant has Mulder and Scully down better, but this book moves and it has atmosphere; it also has a few legitimately creepy scenes, like the elevator bit and the race to get back to Elly Lang’s house.

*WHOA! Where the hell IS Elly Lang? She’s not in the house when the agents get there and the goblin attests that when she arrived Elly wasn’t there either. So . . . where the hell did she go, this feeble seventy year old woman in the middle of the biggest storm in years? And why didn’t Grant ever tell us? Weird; I guess he forgot.

*I think the test for all this EU stuff is basically, “would it make a good episode?” Essentially, this one did; it’s called Detour and it’s also about chameleon people and it's one of the best Monster of the Week episodes of the series and maybe the very scariest post fourth season episode. It’s a much better episode than this is a book, so no crime ripping the book off.

*This book isn’t that bad really. I skimmed a lot and skipped a lot to keep this review manageable, but also told you enough so that you wouldn’t have to read the book if you didn’t want too.

*But bottom line, you could do worse; the book is about 250 pages and a quick read. Grant really doesn’t have either Mulder or Scully right in the way they talk or, in my opinion, in the way they think. But it’s a good story with quick pacing and a great, suspenseful climax. There’s some jarring stuff (Barelli and Webber are both stock characters and feel very out of place), but other things, like the police chief’s character, the scenes with the goblin talking and various other moments, fit pretty well in the show’s universe.

*Up to you. Read it if you want to kill a couple of hours pretty painlessly; otherwise, don’t.

*This is a pretty heavy case, really, for our agents right off the bat. The body count is off the charts and Mulder actually shoots and kills someone, something that didn’t happen until well into the second half of the first season on the TV show. It’s a violent book; the first few episodes of the series weren’t terrifically violent, but this one certainly is. That makes it feel a little out of place too.

Charles Grant

** ½ out of **** stars.

*Next time, at last, another episode of the TV series, and one of the most iconic of the entire series. Next time, it’s back to Baltimore, but without Detective Munch to help out this time, to investigate a series of murders involving locked doors, removed livers and Eugene Victor Tooms. Bring your A-Game next time, guys and gals; we’ll be talking about Squeeze and I know you have a thought or two about that one!