1.17 - E.B.E.

Imagining how a younger version of yourself would react to current events is exciting and fun, but sad. It’s not exactly nostalgia, although that particular feeling usually has a nice icing of sadness. Does for me, anyway. I find myself being a little sad because the current events could have had such an incredible impact on a younger version of me, then I daydream about how I could’ve arrived at who I am maybe just a liiiitle bit earlier, the idea being, somewhere in all those shifted experiences I manage to save time, become me quicker.

Of course it’s all hypothetical bullshit because those younger versions of me, were…me. Human experience isn’t as simple as knowing the destination and finding the quickest way to arrive. You fuck up, you manage when it seems impossible and you know you’re lost. You’re always you.

This episode is like that for me. I’m fairly sure I never saw it before this marathon and that makes me a little sad. I know I would have loved it when it first aired. There weren’t a lot of people I could talk to about UFOs or aliens. None of my friends. I could talk to my parents about them, for a little. I’d make mom tell me the story of the orb in the cemetery (I’ll write it up on here some day, but I’ve told it on an episode of Hideous Energy, I think) and would ask my dad if he’d ever seen a UFO. He claimed he had, that one night a bright light had flashed onto him, straight down from the sky while he was in his driveway about to go inside after a date. I’m about 99% sure he was lying, not out of malice but because he knew I was a kid who desperately wanted some connection to aliens.

There’s a car ride I vaguely remember, we were in the country, leaving a gas station, possibly driving back from North Carolina. I would’ve been close to 10 years old, ironically right around the age when this episode originally aired. I was wishing, focusing on the sky, praying to no god but the emptiness itself that I would see a UFO. It’s one of the reasons I get Mulder.

Except that bastard gets to actually see them.

That 10-year-old iteration of me would be fucking thrilled to watch E.B.E and especially thrilled to have the opening seem as if it were ripped from the headlines, and from a major newspaper no less. This episode opens on a scene the world is getting more and more comfortable with: a military pilot encountering a UFO. Plenty of things happen between the pilot shooting it down and Mulder and Scully heading off to investigate why a truck driver might’ve ended up with radioactive debris near his truck. Mulder makes a fart joke.

“Mulder the military isn’t going to talk about classified aircraft,” Scully says.

Oh, but what if it’s not the military they’re going to consult? Enter the sweaty yet lovable misfits over at The Lone Gunmen, their very special intro, and yet one more float in this nostalgia parade — 10-year-old Austin would’ve been obsessed with them.

“I think it’s remotely plausible that someone might think you’re hot,” Mulder says after Scully talks about how bonkers-ass nuts those dudes are. I know Chris Carter said multiple times the goal was never to seed the show with Mulder and Scully’s unrequited love, no Sam and Diane marathon of sublimation. Makes it a little more exciting to think the chemistry was too much to ignore.

Crashed UFO; surprise surveillance; classified information in thick envelopes clandestinely handed off; this episode is full of the purest X-Files ingredients.

“In our line nothing is just what it seems,” Deep Throat says, almost writing “LIAR” on a Post-It note and slapping it to his own forehead.

“It’s so intense that sometimes it’s blinding,” Scully says right after Mulder throws a fit over the UFO photo Deep Throat passed him. This is the part where I see myself more than any other moment in the episode. That same passion was in me, blind and so ready to believe, for a while I did think my dad stood in his driveway as a UFO flashed its headlights onto him. Not because he hurt me with the good-natured lie, but because I would take any UFO story I could get, any connection to the thing I wanted most.

Why I truly love Mulder, and why I love this show so much, is evident in the next scene. He storms off with the photo leaving you to wonder if he’s pissed and going to stare at his “I Want to Believe” poster while cradling the photograph. Instead, he went and had the photo analyzed, just like his partner suggested.

“You were right Scully, it’s a fake. He tried to deceive us.” Not an easy sentence for Mulder to say. It has to be real for him because it would justify his whole life. But nope, the guy he previously defended for never having lied to him, that guy is a big fuckin’ liar.

Mulder chats with Deep Throat while sharks swim along in the background, visual metaphors too strong to go unmentioned by Mr. Throat. [Used with permission of the artist; click image for source]

After the lover’s spat between Mulder and his source (including a Watergate reference), Mulder gets back home and pulls a Hackman on his apartment, looking for bugs and a shred of sanity. Actually finds both!

Mulder’s wild-ass sprint toward the truth is rewarded by Deep Throat admitting all the countries to meet up after the Roswell incident in 1947, and specifically how they agreed if any Extraterrestrial Biological Entity managed to survive a crash the attendant government would kill the motherfucker. Deep Throat claims to be one of three men who’s had that distinction, is haunted by it in fact, and hence his disclosures to Mulder are an attempt to atone for what he’s done.

“I’m wondering which lie to believe,” Mulder says before Deep Throat waltzes away into the fog. It’s always a hard choice.