Case 06, File 01: The Beginning

AKA: No That Was Like Six Seasons Ag-Oh I Get It You're Doing A Thing

Every good series that goes beyond a handful of seasons (I'd say 3 or 4 max) must have a Golden Age, and every Golden Age must inevitably come to an end. And I must say, it's nice of The X-Files to have such a clear line between its Golden Age and its end. I mean, the movie took place between them. The look of the show is different (they moved production to LA to keep Duchovny, who would spend the rest of his time on the original run with one foot out the door, happy). The Myth arc started to get more complex and hard to follow. And the episodes? Well I guess we'll see.

After a Previously On that covers both the last episode of Season 5 and the movie, we open with a group of scientists who work out in the Arizona desert...carpooling home. Okay, that's not super exciting, but one of them arrives home and discovers he's got the disease from the movie. That's neat right? He gets a brand new alien to burst out of his chest and one of his friends who shows up to pick him up the next morning gets case of face-ripped-off.

So we then check in with Mulder, who is busy trying to rebuild the papers from the fire at the end of last season (he's got a thing that can restore moisture to burnt paper? I dunno, roll with it) but is called in front of a panel who tell him that his story from Antarctica is, and this is a technical term, fucking crazy and that he's not gonna the agent on the X-Files. Meanwhile, the Cigarette Smoking Man assures the Conspiracy he can track down the runaway alien.

Skinner tells Mulder that he can't help him but sends him to check out a file on the desk in his old office and he does, finding out that the new Agents in charge of the X-Files are Spender and Fowley, causing Mulder to storm off, but he takes the file. As all this is happening the Cigarette Smoking Man pulls Gibson, the psychic kid from the end of last season, out of surgery to go find the alien with psychic powers. Mulder and Scully head on down to Arizona to check it out and find evidence that the alien was there, while Gibson and co. breeze on past and go looking for the alien elsewhere.

"Okay, this might be worse than a simple flu."

While all this is happening, the alien sneaks into a nuclear power plant and kills a worker, eventually getting both Mulder and Scully and Spender and Fowley (I might need to start using an ampersand there) to show up. Spender keeps Mulder out, but he's not too bothered as he and Scully immediately find Gibson in their backseat. They take him to the hospital and but Fowley meets them there and she and Mulder decide to go back to the nuclear power plant, realizing the alien wants heat.

Scully promptly loses Gibson to the Cigarette Smoking Man's henchman, who takes Gibson back to the nuclear plant. Mulder and Fowley track it down but Gibson and the henchmen end up locked in with the alien, with Mulder trying to get in. But he gets arrested while the alien kills the henchmen and dragged back to DC. Back in DC he gets told not to have anything to do with the X-Files while he and Scully will be reporting to AD Kersh. And our episode ends with Gibson back in the nuclear power plant while the alien sheds its skin and becomes the more familiar grey alien.

The Beginning is an aptly named episode, as it's less a continuation of what came before and more of a brand new status quo, which is both a good and a bad thing. As I said, the Golden Age is over, but that doesn't mean the series will immediately become bad (seasons 6 and 7 are still tattooed on my brain) but it does mean the general baseline of quality of the episode is gonna slip down a little bit.

"Mulder, why is there a small child in the back seat of our car?"
"This is how like, 60% of fanfics with us start Scully, just roll with it."

One of the big issues with this season and the seasons going forward is, as the Myth arc gets more solid, it needs to try and reconcile all the various stuff that went before, which is where we get stuff like the alien chestburster (can I just call it a xenomorph yet) turning into a more traditional grey alien or the fact that the virus is in all human DNA and usually just turned off. The series has stopped messing around making us question whether aliens are real and has started trying to hammer its various plot threads into something more coherent and some jagged edges are to be expected.

Another element from the previous seasons that's getting played up here is Jeffery Spender who, along with Kersh, forms out new symbol of the wider FBI and let me totally honest: I hate these two characters. Skinner got to be a morally complex character, with shifting uncertain loyalties. He also got to get believably fed up with Mulder sometimes. Spender is just a massive tool and Kersh is just an asshole to Mulder for no reason. Neither of them got enough characterization for me to ever grow to care about them (unless they got a lot in Season 9 I'm forgetting? I forget a lot of Season 9), so they just end up as irritations.

Honestly, I think the episode goes a little too far trying to force the new status quo on us, to the point where it strains believability. How can the FBI bring Mulder back if it doesn't believe him about what happened in Antarctica? Honestly, if they genuinely believed he went to Antarctica for no reason, they should probably just fire him, the kind of person who'd wander across two contents for 40+ hours and god knows how much money for no reason is not the kind of person you want working for the FBI.

"There's some sticky, translucent goo on the-"
"Mulder, I thought we were supposed to be moving away from the Xenomorph comparisons."

Whatever, I'm criticizing the FBI in The X-Files, any reasonable government organization would have fired Mulder years ago. There is a lot of stuff I like about this episode, even while my broader assessment is pretty meh. Duchovny may be eyeing the exit, but he's not phoning it in at all, I really like the scene where he's trying to bust into the room with Gibson and the alien. And while the look of the show may be kind of off for the rest of it, due to the move to LA, I do really like the parts of the episode that take place in the nuclear power plant, it's a good creepy location.

The Beginning is an episode faced with a somewhat impossible task. It has to bring us back up to speed both from The End and Fight the Future, it's got to set up our new status quo and it has to find time in there somewhere to actually tell an interesting story, all that in just about 40 minutes. And it mostly gets through all of that, mostly. I like the new alien stuff in this episode (from the movie, so it's not THAT new) even if the plot just kinda peters out without a lot of resolution. Which I guess is appropriate for an episode entitled The Beginning. It doesn't really have an end so much as a "To Be Continued". Like this review.

Case Notes:

• Is the scientists fighting about them needing to stop to pee supposed to tell us anything? Like, that they work far from home or something?
• Guy turns up the heat in his house to 80, but dude, you're in Phoenix, Arizona, I PROMISE you it is hotter outside than that.
• The effect on the translucent hand is pretty good frankly. As is the guy with the ruptured chest cavity.
• Mulder is gonna use a long and tedious process to try and recover all the lost files from the fire. Never change Mulder, never change.
• The meeting at the beginning is at least partially to make sure the audience is up to speed on what happened in the movie. Yes it's also about whether Mulder and Scully are gonna be on the reopened X-Files, but also exposition.
• Scully doesn't believe the virus is alien anymore because uh, we gotta still have some conflict.
• As we check in with the Conspiracy, is it me or do they seem less uh, in control than they normally do?
• Hey, it's Fowley. She is alive.
• Spender and Fowley as the two agents on the X-Files is a series I would...not watch in a million years, I hate Spender.
• I know that the kid they're doing the surgery on is Gibson, the kid from The End, but if I didn't I dunno if I'd be able to recognize him, between the top of his head being off and his face being partially covered.
• Scully tells Mulder that they're violating state law and then says "Why do I bother?" Good to see she's learning.
• I get that in the degisis of the show, the cover story that a Native American did the attack (and the fact that people bought it) is super racist, but it still makes me uncomfortable.
• I like Gibson covering for Mulder and Scully in the house, it's a small touch but a good one.
• Scully makes a call back to their conversation in the hallway and I curse the bee once again.
• A guy named Homer who is lazy and works at a nuclear power plant. Ha. Ha.
• God Spender is such a fucking tool. Like, he goes out of his way to be a tool at all times.
• I'd forgotten that Gibson just appears in Mulder and Scully's backseat.
• I love Scully trying to lie to Gibson while he just straight up reads her mind to tell her she's lying.
• Gibson calling out Scully for wanting to run more tests on him is great, I wish he was a more permanent member of the cast.
• What exactly is Mulder's plan for when he finds the alien? It's not like you can go firing a gun randomly in a nuclear power plant.
• Scully had Gibson for like 20 minutes before losing him. Goddammit Scully.
• I still kind of don't totally get what happens at the end there. Fowley betrayed Mulder I take it? Like, to keep them from figuring out that she helped him?
• I like the conclusion that Mulder and Scully come to at the end (that everyone has some alien DNA in them) but the ending series of conversations are mostly just kinda eh.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out if you want to give me an excuse to do more of them.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Kersh is played James Pickens Jr. who Wikipedia informs me plays a major character named Richard Webber on Grey's Anatomy. I haven't watched a single episode of Grey's Anatomy and probably never will so y'all will have to tell me if he's important.

Also the lady at the hearing is played by Wendie Malick, who has appeared in a lot of stuff but is probably best known for her lead role as Victoria Chase in Hot in Cleveland, a show that managed to get 6 seasons and over 120 episodes while I wasn't looking. She is, in my heart, still Wendy from the Seinfeld episode The Kiss Hello though. And if you're wondering, no I didn't recognize which episode she was from off the top of my head, but I was looking for a Seinfeld credit on her IMDB.

Audio Observations:

Put on a Happy Face from Bye Bye Birdie plays briefly in the nuclear plant, but it stops before the alien even attacks the guy. Come on series, you're better than that.