1.08 - Ice

It’s hard to talk about this episode without confronting the obvious: it’s John Carpenter’s The Thing. The episode opens on a dog, and although The Thing opens on a spaceship crashing, the dog appears shortly thereafter.

You can’t fault them for loving Carpenter’s movie, it’s one of the best horror movies of all time. Since they’ve been making horror movies, right up until now when the genre is more lucrative and popular than it’s ever been, The Thing sits at the top of the Best Of for many reasons, Rob Bottin’s genius makeup and special effects work being one of the main ones.

Xander Berkeley (step-dad Todd from Terminator 2, for you nerds out there), Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives and college bribery scandals), and Steve Hytner (he was in the Walken The Prophecy) join Mulder and Scully at an arctic base experiencing some kind of crisis involving psychosis, death, and isolation. Their pilot Bear is played by Jeff Kober, who I’d never seen before, but is great here.

Director David Nutter and director of photography John S. Bartley deserve a lot of credit on this one. They help set the mood, along with set decorator Shirley Inget and art direction supplied by Graeme Murray. Wikipedia is generous and says the similarities to Carpenter’s movie are due to Graeme Murray also working on the art department for that film. Glen Morgan and James Wong wrote a script so clearly influenced by the movie it’s pretty ridiculous to say it was the production design that resulted in the similarities.

This is a good episode, truly. The whole cast gives great performances, the paranoia is vivid and unsettling, and the special effects generally hold up, with the exception of the CGI worm entering the ears à la Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Still, that effect isn’t great because it’s computer-generated and is now close to 30 years old, not because they failed somehow.

Scully gets a lot of opportunities to demonstrate her intelligence and capabilities. Mulder is kind of just business as usual which means he makes a dick joke.

I’d like to dive into this one deeper but The Thing looms much too large. Imagine someone made a fantastic film about a zoo housing massive lizards, all genetically engineered from DNA to make them docile, but something goes wrong and chaos reigns. No matter how good that movie turned out the fact would be that Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park first.

It is great to see Scully and Mulder at each others throats, but only because the series has so successfully paired them as partners and friends (and mooooore???) that to see them pointing guns at each others’ faces is thrilling. Mulders cry of “SCULLY! For God sakes it’s me!” hits hard, and why it does is very simple: belief is enough for Mulder, but proof rules Scully’s world.

Turns out there are an immeasurable amount of ways to use that theme.