1.14 - Gender Bender
A little bit of everything thrown into this one. It kind of works until it doesn’t, the great failure being it stops working right when you’d want it the strongest.
The 1990s are pulsing and drum-machining along nicely. Theme and intent are on display nearly immediately, not only because dance club = rhythmic back and forth motion as an obvious sex substitute, but because we see an H.R Giger image on one of the club walls. It’s right behind the first victim who shows up freshly dead after sex with a stranger.
In X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ted Edwards, the AIDS epidemic is not listed as an influence by the writers or producers or director, or even mentioned at all. In Blu-ray featurettes Chris Carter makes several references to studio fears over other episodes, which leads me to believe they were cagey about referencing the very real crisis, the other option being they were still too close to it to really understand and thus utilize it thematically. Although I guess the possibility does exist they in fact did use it without commenting publicly or overtly referencing it within the episode itself. If the suits at Fox were afraid, they got braver (somewhat) by season 02, where Mulder brings it up to a vampire. Yep.
Scully says “Hard to imagine this day and age someone having sex with a perfect stranger.” That’s the closest we get to an AIDS reference. It’s surprising the gender politics of the ’90s don’t jam their foot in the episode’s proverbial mouth. Trans rights and issues weren’t mainstream enough for a Fox TV show at the time, but this episode manages to not be wildly offensive (though I speak as a cis-gendered male, so please someone correct me if I’m wrong).
Might in fact be wildly offensive to the Amish, however.
The setting is unique for the show and getting that visual variation is welcome. There are no extended scenes in cars or beige government buildings, and the lighting in the second half is memorable and some of the best in the season.
Really the need to discuss this one is torpedoed by the ending, that’s what I meant in the first sentence up there. Some excellent set decoration and production design gives us gross, glistening caves (just about as vaginal as a metaphor can get; the white clay even looks vaguely like amniotic fluid/afterbirth), and the premise starts out interesting.
That ending though. It obliterates any good will the episode built with viewers. Making someone say “What?!” doesn’t hold the power or purpose when that question is asked in response to your story whipping into a left turn that’s not been set up properly. It’s kind of similar to finding out the whole story was actually inside a snow globe, or it was all a dream, that kind of thing. Those are patently more ridiculous than what is done here, but the result is the same: the episode is building to something and it becomes very obvious it was building to something other than where they ended up.