The X-Files, S01 E00: Pilot

We begin, for the first and only time, with a disclaimer informing us that ‘the following story is inspired by actual documented accounts.’ Clearly by the time the show got picked up for a season, somebody in legal at Fox had got involved. Because suggesting that a storyline about a massive government conspiracy involving an alien plague carried by bees and a creepy oil alien that crawls under your skin is an ‘actual documented account’ is just making trouble for yourself. But I am getting ahead of things here. No creepy oil aliens in this one, kids! Just some really suspicious-looking mosquito bites and some terrifyingly-dated fashion. Let’s go!

In a dark forest, a girl in a nightgown runs through the woods. She falls and rolls to the ground, the wind picks up, and what’s that? A bright light! A figure walking towards her! Leaves! Flying everywhere! The light gets brighter and brighter, a bizarre scraping noise gets louder and louder, the figure looms over her and…fade to white.

Next thing we know, it’s morning. The handy screenwriting thing informs us we’re in Collum National Forest, Northwest Oregon. The girl is lying face down on the forest floor, surrounded by policemen. She’s dead, with two little red spots on the small of her back. We know this is terrifying and significant because the detective in charge does an excellent ‘this is terrifying and significant’ face when he sees them. Turns out he knows who the girl is too. She’s called Karen Swenson, and clearly something weird is going on in Collum National Forest, because the forensic photographer looks scared and says ‘It’s happening again.’ Ooooh, I’m hooked.

And now we’re in Washington DC, at the FBI Headquarters, and here’s Scully in a truly dreadful suit, in an office building that is so clearly NOT the FBI Headquarters building in Washington DC. But hey, it’s a pilot, I’ll give them a break. Scully walks through a bullpen and down corridors and past offices and gives us a really good chance to eyeball her horrific suit from all angles. She eventually ends up in the office of Section Chief Blevins. As she talks to Blevins, a man with a cigarette hovers in the background. (He is a man. A smoking man. The smoking man? You’re catching on.) Scully gives a long and highly expository response to one of Blevins’ questions. We learn that she rebelled against her parents to join the FBI, and she’s a medical doctor.

Another man asks Scully if she’s familiar with an agent named Fox Mulder, and Scully says she knows him by reputation – he’s an Oxford educated psychiatrist and a brilliant profiler, and his nickname is ‘Spooky Mulder.’ So, are we all caught up on everything we need to know about Mulder and Scully now? Why no! Blevins has more:

Mulder has developed an odd devotion to a side project, the ‘So-called X Files.’ Scully can barely keep the scorn out of her voice when she exposits further that the X-Files have to do with ‘unexplained phenomena.’ Too bad you find them so derisory, Scully, because guess where you’re being assigned? Blevins tells her she needs to bring her scientific expertise to bear on Mulder’s cases, observing the validity of the work. Scully asks if they want her to debunk the X-Files. Well, duh. Of course they do. But Blevins doesn’t come right out and say it. He trusts Scully will make the ‘proper scientific analysis.’

And now, the scene where it all begins. Down in the basement, Scully knocks on the office door, and we hear Mulder yell that there’s ‘nobody down here but the FBI’s most unwanted.’ She walks in, and there’s Mulder, looking at slides. He’s wearing his glasses! Whole websites are devoted to pictures of Mulder in his glasses. And why not? He looks damn good. It’s fair to say that the early 90s fashion is kinder to David Duchovny than it is to Gillian Anderson. Or possibly I am just incapable of not finding him hot.

Anyway, Mulder and Scully shake hands. Mulder is all arrogant and sneery, but Scully refuses to be cowed. He calls her a spy, and tries to intimidate her by showing her that he already knows everything about her (who’s the spy here, Mulder?). Scully, still, refuses to be cowed. Then he shows her slides (The inaugural Mulder slide show – first of many!) of Karen Swenson, the girl from the teaser, and the mysterious red spots on her lower back. He asks Scully if she can identify the marks, but she can’t. Then he shows her a chemical analysis of the substance found in the tissue surrounding the marks, and Scully can’t identify that either. It’s starting to look like Mulder’s won this round, and he’s all smug about it as well. But you really can’t hate him because he’s all young and cute and rumpled. Scully still manages to look unimpressed. She stands with her arms folded, waiting to hear Mulder’s theory.

This, of course, involves aliens. Naturally, Scully doesn’t believe in that alien crap. Mulder looks exasperated. Scully attempts to come up with some plausible explanations for Karen’s death. Mulder looks amused. ‘The answers are there,’ she tells Mulder. ‘You just have to know where to look.’ Mulder leers at her in a manner I would find quite overwhelming, and says, ‘That’s why they put the I in FBI.’ Scully continues to look unimpressed. She does smile when Mulder tells her they’re flying to Oregon the next morning though. Oh Scully, if you only knew what you’d let yourself in for.

On the plane, Mulder is asleep and Scully is looking at the case file. She is wearing glasses! Oh those guys and their eyewear. Suddenly the plane lurches. Scully looks terrified but Mulder just calmly tells her, ‘This must be the place.’ Arrogant bastard.

Next thing we know our fearless agents are in the car driving from the airport (without seatbelts – this always bothers me). Mulder is munching on sunflower seeds as he drives, a habit which will lead many hundreds of fanfic writers to speculate in graphic detail about his ‘oral fixation.’ They discuss details of the case, and it turns out Mulder is planning on exhuming the body of another victim for Scully to do an autopsy. Lucky Scully.

Suddenly the car radio goes all weird and crackly. Mulder stops the car, gets out, opens the trunk, moves somebody’s heinously-ugly blue plastic suitcase, and gets out a can of spray paint. Scully stands and stares, clearly wondering if Mulder has lost his mind. Mulder walks back a few paces and sprays an X on the road. Creepy incidental music starts up. Scully looks deeply, deeply unimpressed. Guess what? This will be significant later.

As the agents drive into a small town, the handy superimposed writing tells us that this is March 7th 1992. For the sake of your own sanity you should ignore this entirely, because the rest of the series utterly dispenses with this timeline and it will make your head hurt. Trust me on this.

We arrive at the scene of the exhumation. There is a digger already in place at the grave, but before the digging can begin a car pulls up and a man gets out, gesticulating wildly. He introduces himself as Dr Nemmen, the county medical examiner, and he tells Mulder that the exhumation can’t go ahead. There follows a pissy exchange in which Dr Nemmen acts all weird and paranoid and Mulder acts all calm and rational (which, let me tell you, is not the normal way of things) but before Dr Nemmen can provide a compelling reason to halt the exhumation, his daughter leaps out of the car where she has been waiting, and begs him to stop. She wants to go home. Reluctantly Dr Nemmen goes back to the car. So what was all that about then?

Mulder and Scully watch as the coffin of Ray Soames is exhumed. Scully exposits that he was the third victim, and he spent time in a mental institution after high school. Mulder takes the exposition baton and continues that Soames confessed to the first two murders and pleaded to be locked up, but he couldn’t produce any evidence. His cause of death is listed as exposure, which even the sceptical Agent Scully has to admit is an unlikely way to die for a 22-year-old man in July.

As the coffin is lifted from the ground one of the ropes holding it snaps, and it tumbles down the hillside in an inappropriately-comical manner, with Mulder and Scully racing after it. As it comes to a stop against a tombstone it is partially open, and Mulder lifts the lid to reveal a distinctly… alien-like corpse.

In the autopsy bay Scully is examining the body while Mulder excitedly snaps photos and dances around like he’s had too much sugar. Scully ignores him and gets on with her work, pissily telling Mulder not to point the flash at her. She then tells Mulder that the corpse is not, in fact, an alien, but a chimpanzee, or possibly an orangutan. Mulder looks unconvinced, and asks her why an ape would be buried in Ray Soames’ grave. He demands tissue samples and x-rays. Scully wants to know if he’s kidding, saying that this is clearly just a sick joke. Mulder is his usual insistent self.

Later that night Scully is in her hotel room typing up her notes. She has an x-ray taped to her lampshade, showing an implant in the nasal cavity of the body found in the grave. She picks up the implant, now in a sample jar, and looks perplexed. Suddenly Mulder knocks on her door, wanting to know if she wants to go for a run. He is looking adorable in a backwards baseball cap, but somehow Scully manages to resist and tells him goodnight.

The next day we’re at the mental institution where Ray Soames was treated. His doctor tells Mulder and Scully that some of Ray Soames’ classmates are still at the institution, and Scully asks to see them. The doctor takes them to the bedside of Billy Miles, a young man in a waking coma, with no sign of brain activity. Peggy O’Dell is with him, and the doctor tells Mulder and Scully that the two of them were in the car accident which caused Ray’s coma. Peggy is sitting in a wheel-chair, reading aloud to Billy. Mulder asks the doctor if they can do a cursory medical exam on Peggy, and Peggy throws her book down in anger and starts knocking things over. Suddenly she falls to the floor, blood pouring from her nose. In the confusion Mulder lifts Peggy’s pyjama top slightly, and reveals two little red spots on the small of her back. Scully sees them too. She and Mulder share a significant look.

Outside the building Scully is furious, asking Mulder what the heck is going on and what the spots are. Mulder says something patronising about Scully not being ready for what he thinks, but Scully tells him she wants the truth. So, Mulder tells her he thinks the kids have been abducted. ‘By who?’ Scully asks. ‘By what,’ he corrects. Scully laughs, but Mulder points out that she doesn’t have a better explanation. Scully yells some more but basically Mulder’s right. So they decide to go have a look at the place where Karen Swenson was found to see if they can figure out what the forest has to do with all this.

Of course, because this is The X-Files, they decide that night time is the perfect time for forest investigation. Armed with flashlights, the agents tramp into the forest, past the crime-scene tape. Scully looks about twelve-years old with her hair in a ponytail. She finds some strange dust on the ground and puts it in her pocket. Suddenly there is a strange grinding sound and a bright light through the trees. Scully starts yelling for Mulder, but he has disappeared. A figure emerges from the light and Scully draws her gun. Turns out it’s just a policeman though, and he’s there to tell them they’re trespassing. Mulder comes running up and protests that they’re FBI agents, but the policeman doesn’t care. After a brief amount of posturing, Mulder and Scully emerge from the woods and walk towards their car.

Driving back to their motel, in torrential rain, Scully shows Mulder the strange dust she found. She’s just in the process of putting together a conspiracy theory involving cults when there is a flash of bright light and some fairly risible special effects, and the car stops. Mulder looks at his watch, and announces that they’ve lost nine minutes. He leaps from the car into the rain and starts shrieking. Scully follows him out into the downpour, wondering what the hell he’s talking about, and Mulder points to the road, where we see the X he painted the other day. He starts leaping around in excitement while Scully just stares at him. Mulder is gushing about time loss and abductee experiences and Scully yells that time is a universal invariant. They both look really cute and little, all soaked-to-the-skin and shouty.

Back in her motel room Scully is typing her notes, which basically say ‘Mulder is a crazy person,’ only she uses bigger words. There’s a power cut, and she takes a candle with her to the shower. We are treated to a shot of Scully undressing in the bathroom, but as she slips her robe off, she finds something on her back. She runs next door to Mulder’s room looking all scared, and then to everybody’s surprise she takes off her robe in front of him and points to the small red spots on her lower back. Mulder goes in with his candle for a closer look, and tells Scully they’re just mosquito bites. She shrugs her robe back on, gasping with relief, and throws herself into his arms. Mulder looks mildly astonished. Cue late-night heart-to-heart.

With Scully on his bed, Mulder sits on the floor telling the story of his sister’s abduction when she was 8 and he was 12. As he’s talking, a shadowy figure moves in the bushes outside. Mulder continues, telling Scully that someone is blocking his access to files at a higher level, but he doesn’t know who. He accuses Scully of being a part of this agenda, but Scully insists she’s not a spy. Mulder gets all in her face, insisting that he’s had regression hypnosis, that aliens exist, and that the government knows about it. Nothing else matters to him but finding evidence of this conspiracy. Before Scully has a chance to respond, the phone rings. An anonymous woman tells Mulder that Peggy O’Dell, the girl who collapsed in the hospital, is dead.

Later that night Mulder and Scully arrive at the stretch of road where Peggy O’Dell died. A trucker is telling a sheriff’s deputy that Peggy just ran out in front of him. ‘She ran?’ Mulder asks in disbelief, ‘on foot?’ Scully examines Peggy’s body, and checks the watch. It is stopped at the exact minute she and Mulder experienced missing time earlier that evening. As Scully goes to tell Mulder this, though, she finds him yelling that they have to go back to the motel, because somebody has trashed the autopsy bay and stolen the body they found in Ray Soames’ coffin. And then, of course, they get back to the motel and it’s on fire. Mulder has a serious strop about all their evidence being lost. A girl approaches them from the crowd, saying her name is Teresa Nemmen, and that she needs help.

In a diner, Teresa tells Mulder and Scully her abduction experiences. It has been happening since the summer she and her friends graduated from high school, and now they’re all dying. She’s terrified she’ll be next. Mulder puts two and two together and realises Teresa is the daughter of the medical examiner, the one who wanted to stop the exhumation. Scully asks what her father knows about the abductions, but Teresa says he has sworn her to secrecy. Mulder asks if she has the marks, and Teresa says she does.

Suddenly Teresa gets a dramatic nosebleed, and everybody scrambles for napkins, but just then Dr Nemmen and another man, the guy who accused Mulder and Scully of trespassing in the forest (man, this is a small town) come storming into the diner to take Teresa away. Nemmen refers to the man he is with as Detective Miles, and Mulder and Scully look shocked. ‘You’re Billy Miles’ father?’ Mulder asks. Detective Miles says that he is, and he tells Mulder to stay away from Billy.

After the men have left with Teresa, Mulder and Scully decide to find out what is in the graves of the other two victims, and head off back to the graveyard. Where, of course, there is again torrential rain. And, as our fearless agents quickly discover, somebody’s beaten them to it. Both graves are empty. This leads Mulder to come up with an apparently crazy theory (which is always a sure sign that he’s probably right) that Billy Miles, the boy in a coma in the hospital, is the murderer and the kids are summoned to the forest by alien impulses. At this, Scully bursts into gales of laughter. Mulder starts laughing too, and the two of them stand over an open grave in the pouring rain, in hysterics. It’s kind of a lovely moment.

Back at the hospital, Billy is still in a coma in his bed. The nurse assures Mulder and Scully he hasn’t moved, but Scully checks Billy’s feet and they’re all dirty. She takes a sample while Mulder tries to hold off the curious nurse, and they leave. Outside the ward, Scully is yelling about how crazy all this is, that it does indeed seem possible that Billy was outside last night. Mulder asks if she’s sure, because she’s going to have to put it in her report. Scully realises he’s right, and that they need more evidence. They go back to the forest, again, for a sample to compare to what they found on Billy’s feet.

And look! It’s night time again. How unusual. Mulder and Scully pull up in the forest by Detective Miles’ car. Suddenly they hear a shriek, and run off into the trees towards the noise. They get separated, and Scully runs into Detective Miles, who hits her in the head with his gun and walks off. Then Mulder runs into Detective Miles, who points a gun at him and makes him get down on his knees. In the distance, a girl is still shrieking. ‘He’s going to kill her,’ Mulder says, and Miles run towards the sound, yelling, ‘Billy! No!’

Billy Miles is in a clearing, still in his hospital pyjamas, and he is holding a comatose Teresa Nemmen. Detective Miles raises his gun to shoot at his son, but Mulder grabs him and throws him to the floor. The gun fires, and Scully, stumbling through the woods, hears it and starts running towards the sound. The wind picks up and, as Mulder and Detective Miles watch, Billy picks up Teresa and holds her as a bright light descends and leaves begin swirling and…fade to white. Again.

Suddenly, the wind dies and the light goes out. Billy is standing in the forest, and he turns to his father and says, ‘Dad?’ On the ground, Teresa Nemmen blinks and sits up. Detective Miles embraces his son. Mulder stares, and sees that the marks on Billy’s back have gone. Suddenly remembering that he has a partner now, Mulder dashes off into the forest yelling for Scully. He finds her, and she asks what happened, because in typical Scully fashion she has missed all the paranormal action. Mulder can only tell her, ‘It was incredible.’

Back in FBI headquarters, Billy is being interviewed under hypnosis about his abduction experiences. Mulder stands in the room as the interview proceeds, and Scully watches behind mirrored glass. Blevins is standing with Scully watching the interview, and so is the mysterious smoking man. As the interview draws to a close, Mulder and Scully share a significant and physically impossible glance through the one-way window.

Back in Blevins’ office, Scully is forced to admit that there is no scientific element to her report, and that she has no legitimate evidence. Blevins is not impressed, but Scully pulls out the implant she found in the exhumed body. She had kept it in her pocket so it didn’t get destroyed in the motel fire. She places the sample jar on Blevins’ desk, and tells him the material could not be identified in the lab. As Scully leaves the office, the smoking man walks past her and goes in. Cue spooky incidental music.

Later that night Scully is lying awake when her phone rings. It’s Mulder, and he’s calling to say that all the paperwork they filed on Billy Miles has disappeared. We cut to the Pentagon, in an underground storage facility, where the Cigarette Smoking Man carries the implant Scully gave to Blevins, and files it in a box with several other identical implants. And so, the conspiracy begins, one which will not be fully explained over the next nine seasons and one feature film. Think the second movie might actually clear things up?

[That was a rhetorical question. Anyone who spoils Plattie for the film before it premieres in the UK might actually find themselves the victim of their own alien abduction. Just so you know. --ed.]

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Now, I am an unabashed Buffy fan. While it was still airing, some might have even said obsessive (I would have to disagree – what do you call the level between buying action figures and traveling to attend the conventions?). I watched every single episode as it aired – no delayed Tivo gratification for me – with the phone unplugged and the blinds drawn. This remained true throughout the frustrating later seasons as well. Even erratic, dark Buffy was better than no Buffy at all.

Still, if the show suffered from one major flaw, it is that it peaked too soon. The sheer brilliance of seasons 2 and 3 was hard to match, and many viewers quickly became disappointed in the show. There were enough excellent one-off episodes (“Hush,” “The Body,” “Once More With Feeling”) to convince me that the show still had a lot of life left, but they often were placed between forced drug metaphors and annoying little sisters. Even when it was good, it wasn’t as good as earlier seasons, and each week I watched the show, wondering if this was the week it returned to top form. It never really did.

And yet, watching it again without such impossibly high expectations, I can only remember why I loved it. I’m no longer horrified by unexpected and unwanted plot twists (seriously – a little sister?) and can appreciate everything the show did right. Sure, it was inconsistent, but so were earlier seasons, as anyone who remembers the swim team monsters or the magical Christmas snow of redemption can attest. The show was still witty and interesting and, although it can be painful to watch our strong heroine behave like a self-destructive college student, I can’t say that depiction is entirely inaccurate. I have entire parts of my brain dedicated to humiliating university incidents that I would happily lobotomize.

It’s a pleasure rediscovering this old show without the weight of its earlier excellence pulling it down. I’m not sure if I’ll be quite so generous when I get to the bimbo god or the crayon that saved the world, but I’m certainly going to try.

What about you? What shows improved upon a second viewing, and why?

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For someone who rarely watches televised sports that aren’t the Olympics, I watch an awful lot of sports TV. Long before Friday Night Lights started making its case to be my one true love, there was Sports Night.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when Aaron Sorkin was better known for his talent than his drug dependency or his ego. Back in the distant days of the late 90s, he created the mold for the critically-loved-if-ratings-deficient-sports-show years before the cast of FNL had even hit puberty. Sports Night was adored by basically everyone who ever wrote a television review and roundly ignored by viewers. When the show was canceled after two seasons, Sorkin quickly moved on to success with The West Wing, but the rabid fans were not so quick to forget. Some of them, I suspect, are still hoping for a reunion.

Sorkin’s recent public crash-and-burn with Studio 60 suggests that he isn’t actually the man with the Midas touch, at least when it comes to quality. While some people loved the show, many more found it pretentious, smug, and far more pleased with itself than it had any right to be. Now that viewers are familiar with Sorkin’s faults, can Sports Night still hold up as a brilliant show canceled before its time?

Since the show is not currently available in the UK, I picked up the box set of the complete series on my last trip home to the US. With extremely fond memories of the series, I ripped off the plastic wrap and stuck the first disc in the player, ready to be whisked back into the world of whiplash dialogue and intelligent, sensitive characters.

I didn’t get there on the first disc. All the future Sorkin trademarks were present, from the walk-and-talk tracking shots to the political overtones to the clever and utterly implausible dialogue that can only be defined as “Sorkinese.” No one in real life could talk like a Sorkin show, at least not without two tongues and an extra cranial lobe. And, in the first season, the network-imposed laugh track only highlighted that artifice and the more self-conscious exchanges simply felt awkward:

Dan: I need a favor.
Jeremy: Is this about Rebecca?
Dan: Rebecca?
Jeremy: Yes.
Dan: No.
Jeremy: I’m rooting for you, Dan, but I really can’t get involved in things like this.
Dan: It’s not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: Bad things happen to people when they get involved in other people’s business, a lesson I’m trying to teach Natalie. I’d like to set a good example.
Dan: It’s not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: What’s the favor?
Dan: It’s about Rebecca.

Laughing yet? But, even in the midst of this dialogue so forced that you could still see Sorkin’s pen marks all over it, there were gems of understatement:

Natalie: On page 66, halfway down in the NFL injury report, it says “Collins is expected to miss practice this week, the result of a bulging disk.”
Dan: Yeah?
Natalie: There’s a typo on the TelePrompter. They left out the ’s.’
Casey: Collins is expected to be sidelined a week to 10 days with a bulging di–Uh Oh!
Dan: Whoa! That’s a big 10-4.
Casey: My next line in the script was “Let’s go the videotape.”
Natalie: We might have gotten some phone calls.

These were the lines that nearly snuck past the laugh track, that weren’t clearly marked as Comedy, and they gave the show its spark. Despite being 30 minutes long, Sports Night isn’t actually a comedy, and the marketers never figured that out. It was a show about a bunch of friends and colleagues who were frequently funny. In truth, the overall tone of the show was very similar to The West Wing, a show that would never be mistaken for a comedy. Sports Night just replaced foreign policy with NBA draft coverage.

By the second season, when the vile laugh track was removed, the show really came into its own. The stories and the characters took front and center. Unlike his later shows, when Sorkin used the framework of politics or television to shove his personal views down the audience’s throat, Sports Night very quietly used the sports setting as a gentle parallel for characters striving to succeed and earn respect in spite of obstacles. It worked, too. The writing was strong, the cast was charming, and the pacing was damn near flawless. It was a very good show.

Does the show deserve all the nostalgia? Sometimes, it really does. It may not have been as perfect as the rabid fans would have you believe, but it was good, with occasional forays into brilliance. I had to fly to the US to pick up my copy, but all you need to do is add it to your Netflix queue. Trust me, it’s worth it.

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