The X-Files: Scully’s Journey (season two-part two)
It’s 1995 again! Frasier is halfway through its first season and a certain young girl with high-fallutin’ impulses will become its greatest fan. The grunge look is on the decline and miniskirts are back, thanks largely to Clueless. The power suit is also in — something Dana Scully will work with flawless perfection.
In a nutshell…
Last time, we left our duo getting back into the rhythm of X after our leading lady’s (surprise pregnancy!) abduction. Mulder has been super solicitous and Scully has been pretending she’s fine. Fine, fine, fine. It’s her new favorite word.
Our duo next travel to Aubrey (title drop!), Missouri, where a detective has mysteriously found the body of a long-dead FBI agent buried in the middle of nowhere. Something Mulder thinks is a “pretty extreme hunch.”
Scully: I seem to recall you having some pretty extreme hunches.
Mulder: I never have.
Long story short, she’s pregnant and her pregnancy is triggering genetic memory of a serial killer who, it turns out, is her grandfather.
She gets all possessed and tries to finish his work and then she hunts him down to finish him off… and poor Mulder.
There, there. Scully’s here.
She ends up in an asylum, riddled with guilt and trying to kill the possible future serial killer inside her. It’s all very depressing. This episode also features Terry O’Quinn, back when he was just the dad from The Cutting Edge to me. Of course, now he’s inescapably John Locke: healed paraplegic and crazed island worshiper. Hey, Terry, you think you can show up in season 9 and the movie, too?
That’s great. See you then!
Then our duo accepts a case on corpse desecration and meets the man who’s starred in quite a few of my nightmares.
Donnie Fucking Pfaster.
True story: one time I saw some indie romcom on TV where the lead guy was Donnie Pfaster and I could NOT get past it at all. I just don’t think that man will ever be able to play anything without me seeing his dead eyes, his soulless smile, hearing his creepy soft voice caress the words “color-treated hair” or “girly girl” or “forced air unit.” He terrifies me!
So, naturally, this is one of my favorites.
It’s also just a great Scully episode. She’s deeply disturbed by this one, seeing demons in his place, seeing herself in his victims, no matter how she tries to brush it off.
She has trouble opening up about it to Mulder, but she does see the staff counselor, where she speaks about herself in the second person and worries about letting Mulder see her vulnerability.
He’s been almost too solicitous since her abduction and she doesn’t want him to think she’s not up to the job.
Either way, Scully finds the needed evidence, but also inadvertently puts herself in Donnie’s sights.
GAH!
Throughout all this, Donnie has escalated from stealing hair and nails from corpses to fresh bodies (fingers optional. Agh!) and he’s fascinated with our heroine. Long story short, he stalks her, forces her rental car off the road, and takes her to his family estate in anticipation of cold baths, play funerals, and finger removal. Scully does fight resourcefully, but is a bit hampered by just how Goddamned much he creeps her out.
OMG, me too, Scully! When Mulder and the cops finally track her down, she tries mightily, but can’t help letting Mulder see her break down.
It’s beautiful and heartbreaking!
Some people have complained that Scully was rescued at the end, but I think she had this. I think, had Mulder and Co. showed up thirty seconds later, she’d have been standing over a dead Donnie Pfaster. Also, she’s saved Mulder’s ass way more than vice versa (I’m working on a tally). Her tears are not about failure. It’s about how hard it is to constantly separate herself from the horrors she sees. She’s kept it together for so long and this one finally got to her. She needed to finally let some of that out.
Fun fact: The corpse in the beginning is played by the second best Glinda, Megan Hilty (the first is Kristin Chenoweth, in case you were wondering).
Next, is another creepily enjoyable episode. It’s scary, but also cheesy in the best possible ways. I won’t even try to title drop (!?) because there’s no way to work “Die Hand Die Verletzt” (“the hand that hurts”) into a sentence in anything resembling a semi conversational way. Anyway, there’s this small town where frogs are raining from the sky, teens are dying, and the water is flowing counter-clockwise. Mulder’s convinced that this violation of the Coriolis effect equals supernatural forces. Uh, Scully? Want to step in?
“That’s impossible!”
Au contraire! Since Scully has not been given the lines to debunk you in this instance, I’ll step in (with some help from Mental Floss). Water in small quantities aren’t ruled by the Coriolis effect and drains based on the shape of the basin. But, you know, there are all these red candle chanters and shit, so you’re on track about the freaky nature of this place.
The PTA is populated by Satanists, one of whom is Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe from Frasier. Unfortunately for them, they are all lapsed Satanists and Satan doesn’t seem to tolerate dabblers or “cafeteria” satanists. Disguised as a substitute teacher, either the hooved one himself or one of his flunkies uses our agents as pawns to punish and wipe out (poor Bulldog is devoured by a python) those lapsed followers.
Also, the flashlights are extra beamy in this one!
And, when Mulder is pretty damned sure they’re about to be shot in sacrifice, he covers Scully’s body with his own.
Next, we’ve got another MOTW and… well, I can’t say the problem is that not much happens. Rather that too much happens. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some damned creepy moments. I mean, those fingers coming out of Scully’s cut, the maggots, the dog corpse. It’s all very picturesque in that special X-files way that makes you look at the world around you in anticipatory disgust (I had a mosquito bite on my knee that I couldn’t stop eyeballing afterwards, pretty convinced something was living in it).
See, there’s this camp full of Haitian immigrants being held for deportation and abused. There’s a point the episode seems to want to make about that, but it’s a bit lost in all the chaos. We got zombies. We got voodoo. We got an evil military type, making his men abuse the refugees. We got a government that’s being all shady about what’s going to happen to the refugees — according to X, who tells Mulder to investigate as hard as possible and definitely expose the terrible abuses in the camp. Just kidding! He tells him to stay away from this one, just like all the other ones. I didn’t remember much about this episode on rewatching except for it being “the one where Scully’s hand gives birth to a person!” I mean, it’s a hallucination, but it stayed with me.
Next, we have a mythos mini arc. And this is about when the mythos made its first stop at Convolution Junction. I try not to mix up too much of what I know is going to happen later while rewatching, but I can’t help going all “Hey! You don’t look enough like starlight to be Samantha” and “Hey! You don’t look enough like Old Smoky to be Mulder’s father!” I am trying to separate the continuity of season two from the retroactive continuity to come, but it’s difficult. Someone hold me.
He’ll do.
So… Mulder is pulled out of the ocean and the docs are trying to warm him up when Scully bursts in and owns the place, all badge flashing and “I’m a medical doctor!”
She tells them to stop the heat because it’s going to kill Mulder just before he flatlines. Then we get a flashback as to how we got to this unacceptable outcome.
Long story short (which is hard with a mythos episode, but I’ll try): There are clone doctors all over, a community or colony (title drop!), if you will. Like in Erlenmeyer flask, their blood is green and toxic. Here, they have the added attraction of melting into hissing puddles upon death. They are being picked off by the creepy and Schwarzenegger-esque Alien Bounty Hunter (ABH for short).
One of the clones is with what seems to be a grown-up Samantha! She escapes the ABH and tells Mulder what seems like a legit story about being raised by Doctor Clone after being returned from wherever with no memory. Scully ends up being followed and finally kidnapped by the ABH.
And who wouldn’t when she looks so adorable incognito?
ABH has been using our unwitting duo to find and exterminate the doctor clones and now he wants Samantha. Mulder trades her for Scully (you don’t even want to know how hard I shipped at this moment), thinking he’ll have a shot at killing the ABH with the help of Skinner and some snipers, but Samantha gets herself drowned in icy water. Mulder breaks it to his parents with some acting from Duchovny that’s not quite up to his ability, while Scully stays with the police, who find the drowned body. But when “Samantha” starts to thaw, she melts into green goo.
Not!Samantha has left Mulder a clue, however, and he finds a lab full of other not!samanthas. They’ve been manipulating him into protecting them and they want him to at least protect the first clone. He’s pretty pissed off and barely gets to process it before ABH shows up to knock him out, kill the clones, and burn the lab down. Mulder’s rescued by firefighters.
While Scully investigates a dead agent killed by clone goo inhalation, Mulder tries to get some info out of X, which always goes well.
“Blah, blah, stay out of this, stop bothering me, you can’t win, blahddy blah.”
But he does give Mulder intel on a submarine that found the ship ABH came in on. Mulder goes off all by himself (of course!) and puts himself in the state we saw earlier by getting exposed to ABH’s green goo.
That brings us to the end game (title drop!), where Scully saves his ass by figuring out how to contact X and bringing Skinner, who pretends not to care, then gets himself beat up by X (like the best daddy ever!) in exchange for Mulder’s whereabouts, taking us back to the beginning. She uses her powers of SCIENCE to get Mulder iced up and de-virused, then voice-overs about paranormal phenomena and unanswered questions only reaffirming her need to use science and reason to investigate these strange doings.
Then they have an adorable moment together!
Scully: Did you find what you were looking for?
Mulder: No. No. But I found something I thought I’d lost: Faith to keep looking.
Next, we have “Fearful Symmetry,” a MOTW that is kind of mythos-adjacent. Apparently, zoo animals are being abducted, impregnated, returned (being made briefly invisible), and abducted again for baby delivery. I think it would be much less work if the aliens/men in labcoats just kept them till they delivered, especially since they keep landing in random places and getting people killed. Lazy aliens!
Truth be told, I forgot completely about this episode except for the annoyingly fake gorilla suit and it heavily borrowing that fake gorilla’s life story from everyone’s favorite real gorilla, Koko. The episode does have something to say about animal rights, but it doesn’t seem to be sure exactly what, presenting both the Animal Liberation Front type and the Koko’s owner type in sympathetic lights. I mean, it does seem to be against putting them in chains or too-small enclosures and Mulder has a theory the aliens are conservationists, saving the animals we’re destroying, so that’s something, I guess. It’s just not that engaging. There’s not much in the way of character development for our duo, but there are some gazey, bantery, touchy moments to be had…
Then there’s another stand-alone I barely remembered in “Dod Calm.” It’s not a bad plot (Mulder, Scully, and some rando are stranded on a ship where the clean water makes you age rapidly and that rando hogs all the reclaimed sewage water to save himself and leave our duo to die), but ugh, that aging makeup looks stupid. It’s like someone dipped their faces in latex, had them scrunch a little, then said “good ‘nuff!”
Witness…
When you overlook that and the muddy science, it’s a good enough episode with some nice tension, great bonding between our duo, and extra beamy flashlights.
They each try to put the other’s life above their own and Scully is especially heroic. She doctors everyone, logs every moment for the sake of science, rushes around draining all the liquid she can from canned food and snowglobes to present to Mulder, and they comfort each other when their demise seems inevitable. Scully actually talks about her abduction — not all the answery stuff we want, but about the coma and her little boat trip and conversation with Ahab. Also, this wonderful shippy site informs me Mulder is extra touchy in this episode, clocking in at seven touches in three minutes.
Then we have one of my favorite kind of episodes: a Darin Morgan episode! Sadly, there are only four Darin Morgan episodes, but I treasure each one. Everything’s both dark and hilarious, everyone we meet is extra weird, and our duo stumble around in a confused state suspecting everyone. I love it!
I just don’t even know what to say about this one except that it’s perfect! Bonus: it also features HITG extraordinaire Vincent Schiavelli, he of the saddest eyes outside of puppies.
In “Humbug,” our duo investigate a string of murders in a town populated by retired sideshow acts, freaks and geeks (not the angsty high school type). Turns out Schiavelli’s conjoined twin has been breaking free, trying to borrow into everyone and find himself another brother. It’s disgusting and heartbreaking all at once. Also, he gets eaten. Ew.
God, I love you, Darin Morgan, you weird and wonderful man!
Next, is an episode that I should have loved, with it featuring a creepy kid. I do love myself a good creepy kid, but it was… I don’t know. It was just too depressing, considering it starts off with a toddler killed by a miniature train and it only got more devoid of all hope from there. It does have some creepy imagery, though.
Basically, this kid (played by repeat offender from “Conduit,” Joel Palmer) had a twin who died at birth and that twin is going around killing off his family with trains, garage doors, even chickens!
Cluck, cluck, you’re dead!
Also, he’s half Romanian and this group of holy men called the Calusari (title drop!) exorcise the living twin at the hospital with Mulder before the evil twin offs the mother and Scully at the house. In a moment of character consistency, Scully is nearly killed by the evil twin and doesn’t even bother to fight back, just covers her face and waits for it because… kid.
In a moment of character inconsistency, Scully witnesses ceiling-level levitation, windows imploding, and floaty shadows and it is never addressed in the end or mentioned again later that Scully could now be a believer in Romanian-specific demonic possession.
We do get another kooky expert helping our duo with that photo guy. It’s a shame the show doesn’t remember to bring these quirky types back as I hate thinking of Mulder and Scully, always stuck at the FBI lunchroom with no one to sit with. Poor kids!
Next, we have an episode to put you right off your meals for a good week or so in “F. Emasculata.” I mean, there are these bugs and these pustules and… Look, I only just started eating again, so I don’t want to talk about it.
It’s a pretty solid episode, though. Our poor duo are separated the whole time, with Scully quarantined in the prison, but doggedly getting to work studying the icky nasties and Mulder out with the cops trying to bring in some escaped prisoners before they spread the icky nasties.
They even tie in Old Smoky being in bed with big pharma (Tom Cruise and Kirstie Alley LOVED this episode) and covering up the epidemic. It’s nice to know he has hobbies.
But all that smoking and never one good ring?
Next, we have another stand-alone with mythos elements, in that X plays a disturbing part. Antonio from Wings stars. Yes, I know Tony Shalhoub is better known and laden with all the awards from Monk, but he was Antonio first and Wings was really underrated and I don’t care what anyone says!
Imagine a perfect gif of Antonio being a sad sack here because the world is cruel and there are no Wings gifs anywhere.
Anyway, Antonio is a scientist who did some science stuff in a science lab (please take my not pretending to understand things as refreshingly honest instead of lazy) that resulted in him having a shadow that disintegrates people down to a shocky, silvery puddle unintentionally, but with mildly hilarious results that I suspect are also unintentional.
He’s been hiding out, hanging only in places with soft light (title drop!). Our duo are brought in by a little protege of Scully’s, one she’s apparently told “a lot” about Mulder.
“We’ll talk later.” No, you won’t. You will be too busy making out all over each other’s faces!
As you can see from the above gifset, Protege doesn’t make it because our duo is not allowed to have friends. Sigh.
Our duo do figure out Antonio’s issue, but they end up taking him to a mental hospital because… well, he’s been driven a little nuts even if it is true. Mulder consults X, who pretends this shit bores him only to show up later and try to kidnap Antonio.
Antonio escapes, leaving more silvery puddles in his wake, and tries to go back to the lab to kill himself and stop the carnage. But it turns out his scientist buddy is in with The Department of Mysteries and wants him alive for creepy experiments. X shows up and I think it’s to help Antonio, but it’s just to kill his buddy and steal Antonio for some other shady outfit. It’s all a bit sad.
Mulder doesn’t know the exact details, but he knows X lied to him and he throws away with roll of X-summoning duct tape forever and rips up all their photo booth pics and declares them dunzo… till next season.
Next, we have a MOTW in a small, friendly town with a dark underside, something this show always does pretty well and “Our Town” is not exactly an exception, but it’s a bit underdone, in my opinion. Our agents are brought in because a neighboring town reported strange lights, so you know Mulder’s hoping for some green glow action, but they find a man has disappeared instead, something everyone, including the sheriff (HITG all-star Gary Grubbs) seems super unconcerned about. It raises our duo’s hackles and they stick around.
Turns out several people are dying of a rare brain disorder, also most of the people in town should be using canes and walkers, but they don’t look it. Well, that’s because they’re cannibals and soylent stew is people!!!
When they ate that first dead guy’s brains, they all got infected and they’re ticked off at their leader. They kill him, then decide to eat Scully’s brains next because… I don’t know. I mean, these people have a lake full of bones and act like it’s no big deal. They don’t even care enough to hide their shenanigans so maybe they’re just stupid enough to think they can make brain soup out of government agents with impunity. Hell, the sheriff is the one wielding the axe.
Anyway, our duo were separated — something that’s happening a lot this season. Mulder’s looking for the leader, Scully’s helping a local lady who’s ratting everyone out. Scully is captured and Mulder rescues her. I actually stopped and did a rescue tally because I am very invested in things being fair and it turns out Scully has rescued Mulder 11 times to his 8.5 (I’m counting “One Breath” as a half-rescue because it wasn’t physical and he only had that coma talk because Melissa Scully is awesome), so he is still a slouch in the rescue department.
But he’s definitely no slouch in the strangely erotic tape removal department.
Finally, we’ve got a hell of a season finale. On a Navajo reservation, a dirt-biking kid finds this:
There’s a whole train full of them. His tribe elder, Albert Hosteen, is all “Meh. I knew this was coming.” Meanwhile in DC, a hacker they call The Thinker is breaking into the Defense Department and putting files on a digital tape (I don’t remember these being a thing. Why not an A disk?). Old Smoky learns of it and is super pissed. Meanwhile (I’m going to be abusing that word in this episode), The Lone Gunmen wake up a crabby Mulder and tell him The Thinker’s been asking for him. They’re all distracted by a super random spousal murder in Mulder’s building.
Mulder meets The Thinker, who gives him the tape, but when he pops it in back in the basement, it just looks like gobbledy-gook. He gets super angry…
… and Scully kind of wonders who pissed in his cornflakes before she recognizes it as Navajo code. That doesn’t calm him down much. When he goes to see Skinner, who asks him if he received any sensitive material lately, Mulder attacks him.
You are so grounded, Mister!
Scully is questioned by a panel that includes Special Agent in Charge of Convolution, Chris Carter.
They act like they want to know about Mulder’s mood swings, but Scully quickly figures out it’s about the tape and says nothing, despite them threatening to fire them both. Meanwhile, Old Smoky visits Bill Mulder and informs him that Mulder has the tape and they bemoan the fact that modern technology (like those super popular digital tapes) are bringing their old work to light.
Scully lets herself into Mulder’s place to tell him they may be fired and asks him why he’s acting like Alec Baldwin on a voicemail binge, but Mulder doesn’t know why. He breaks out the duct tape for X, but his dad calls before X comes and Scully ends up taking that meeting… which is not so much a meeting as a bullet fired through Mulder’s window.
Some asshole shot her beautiful hair!
Mulder shows up at his father’s place. Bill drunkenly tells him he admires his search for truth without throwing in with those Department of Mysteries jerks and it looks like Bill is going to tell him all the truths, but that not-yet-one-armed bastard, Krycek, shows up to kill him.
RIP, Bill Mulder.
Mulder calls Scully and she fears they’re going to try to use this to implicate him further and tells him to flee the scene and come to her place for some doctoring.
He wakes up like this…
Thank you, Show!
Meanwhile, Scully swipes Mulder’s gun to have it tested against that bullet that grazed her. Mulder misunderstands and goes off on her. Then she ends up checking his apartment building’s water supply and finds it tainted. When Mulder goes back to his place, he finds Krycek, takes his gun, and is ready to shoot him up when Scully stops him like so…
Great, Scully! Now Mulder can make you feel guilty any time he wants just by touching his shoulder and groaning a little. You did this to yourself.
He wakes up with Albert Hosteen, who happens to be the code talker Scully tracked down. Scully explains that she shot him to prevent him from digging himself into a deeper hole by shooting with Krycek’s gun. She also explains that his water supply was tainted, explaining his mood swings and the random murder in his building. God, Scully is awesome!
Me and Albert are shipping them so hard right now!
And she’s rescued him again in a very real way, putting the tally at 12/8.5 in Scully’s favor.
Scully has to go back as she’s already in trouble for missing a meeting with Skinner, but she tells him to find her some answers out there. They go over the coded files so far and Scully tells him her name and Duane Barry’s were in there along with something about a test. Hosteen takes Mulder to the desert and tells him about the Anasazi (title drop!) tribe, meaning “ancient aliens.” I don’t know, Albert, Google tells me the translation is “ancestors of our enemies.” But sure, Carter, let’s bring ancient Native Americans into this, too, because we certainly need more STUFF in this mythology. It’s only season 2, y’all!
Anyway, Mulder goes off to the desert to look at that train of bodies, but is interrupted by a call from Old Smoky on his cell, who wants know what his father told him. “Expose anything and you only expose your father.” Mulder hangs up, but Old Smoky’s already traced his cell. He jumps down into the buried train car, calls Scully, and starts to tell her about the bodies — that they look alien, but have smallpox vaccination scars. He’s cut off when that teen from earlier shuts it to hide him from Old Smoky and pals, who’ve just landed in a helicopter. But they look into the car and find he’s not in there. Either way, they blow that shit up and leave us hanging till next season.
Scully’s Journey
“Many of the things I have seen have challenged my belief in an ordered universe. But this uncertainty has only strengthened my need to know, to understand, to apply reason to those things that seem to defy it.”
I think Scully’s mindset at this time can be best summed up by the above voice-over from “End Game.” One frustrating thing at this point is that she has not applied any reason or any investigation into her own disappearance, but if I recall correctly, that’s because it scares the crap out of her, as we’ll find out later.
I suppose my favorite lady from this half of the season has to be Detective B.J. Morrow from Aubrey for the strong performance from Deborah Strang and for the raw deal the character gets, considering she didn’t ask to be the granddaughter of a serial killer.
My least favorite lady or ladies are the Not!Samanthas. They could have gone to Mulder and told their story straight-up instead of manipulating him and his parents into believing Samantha was home. Not cool!
Hair Check-in…
We have still not arrived at The Scully. Not that the curled ends don’t look lovely on occasion, but the bangs tend to get in the way.
Ship Check-in…
Their eyes and hands say what their lips dare not! My God, you two! I’m not one of those shippers who thinks they were secretly making out all along, but they certainly look like they think about it a lot! I think Scully has nearly caught up to Mulder by now in the unspoken crush department, but neither is ready to say anything about it. They both readily put their careers and lives on line for the other at this point, but they haven’t stopped to think about what that means when they are not in certain danger.
Other Notes…
Duchovny’s acting is not quite on a level with Anderson’s in this season. He’s great with the comic bits, his monotone is perfect for moody voice-overs, and he does well with silent misery during Scully’s abduction, but I found myself cringing during his more dramatic scenes. I know he’ll improve in the coming seasons (and even more so in future roles), but there’s something not quite genuine in scenes where he has to portray sadness or anger with dialogue in these early seasons.
Even though the mythology convolution started here, something I’m mostly annoyed with in retrospect as it didn’t bother me back when I was sure they knew where they were going, season 2 is actually a great building season, with the show trying different genres on, making interesting stylistic choices, and changing up the energy with dark comedic fare in ways most shows weren’t doing at the time. I can see why it won a Golden Globe and was nominated for seven Emmies and it’s about to get better! I really love season three, you guys!
Next up: Season Three
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