1.24 - The Erlenmeyer Flask

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HOLY SHIT there is a car that ramps in the street high enough that it seems dangerous and like they didn’t do the geometry of the stunt right hahaha. It’s literally the first thing you see in this episode, proving by episode 24 someone (probably Chris Carter) was like “Okay, we need a real firecracker-in-the-ass of an opening sometimes too,” and here it is for you. By all measurements this is a great cold open.

A new slogan appears at the end of the credits where it normally says “The Truth Is Out There”. It’s a sign of things to come for sure, quickly paying off thematically when Deep Throat shows up and says fuck caution, just calls Mulder on a landline. Scully is then the first person to say the name Deep Throat in an episode. After Deep Throat lied to them in the E.B.E. it’s all up in the air whether he’s on their side or not, something Scully isn’t afraid to bring up. Mulder should be right there with her, and in fact he does push back a little at the bullshit from Deep Throat, but not enough, certainly not for Scully’s liking. There’s a tense exchange between Mulder and Scully about who gets off on the whole secrecy thing more, Deep Throat or Mulder. Not really revelatory to say it’s both of them. Boys with their little games.

All of the effects are top-notch, starting with the tanks Mulder finds at Zeus Storage (located at 1616 Pandora Street) and continuing on to the very end, when Scully picks up a little friend. Her journey into the uncharted lands starts when the doctor she’s asking to synthesize the amber liquid in the Erlenmeyer flask tells her this bacteria is, “by definition extraterrestrial.”

“I just want to say that I was wrong,” Scully says. “If you’d have listened to me we wouldn’t be here right now. I should know by now to trust your instincts.”

“Why? Nobody else does,” Mulder says.

“You know I’ve always held science as sacred, I’ve always put my trust in the accepted facts. And what I saw last night…for the first time in my life I don’t know what to believe.”

“Whatever it is you do believe Scully, when you walk into that room, nothing sacred will hold.”

That’s riiiiight, no better way to set up a completely empty room than saying some shit like that. Instead of the tanks they find Deep Throat.

A metric ass load of alien mythology — both referencing real world events (alleged or otherwise) and in-universe events — rounds out the action and espionage that push this episode along at a nice pace. Deep Throat talks about the human/alien hybrid project that was going on at Los Alamos, and how they’ve had the alien material since 1947.

“Roswell?” Surprisingly, when Mulder asks this he isn’t weeping and holding up an I WANT TO BELIEVE poster.

Deep Throat could easily make Mulder’s entire life right here, give a simple “Yep” and the decades of searching, of wondering, all the struggling to find the truth would be worth it!

“Roswell was a smoke screen,” Deep Throat says. Mulder barfs.

Not really, but can you imagine? The question you always wanted answered not only gets answered but it gets SO fucking answered that you’ve got even more questions suddenly. Deep Throat says they’ve “had a half a dozen better salvage operations.” Somehow Mulder continues not barfing. More interesting, in my opinion, is how Scully is handling all of this, because she is getting the uncut, high-grade truth now. Too bad it’s coming from someone who so factually lied to them previously, which I know affects her more dramatically than it does Mulder because she doesn’t want this so. goddamn. much. I think her reaction in this episode is attributable to how bad she feels about doubting Mulder. If they are standing in the room where the first alien/human hybrid gene splicing finally succeeded — and that’s what Mulder believes, since Deep Throat just told them — then she has to as well.

Puffy faced Mulder gets some comedy in while he’s duct taped on the floor of an attic. He took a face full of alien blood gas that will play a large role in later episodes.

Deep Throat tells Scully he’s going to get her into where they are keeping the original material, a High Containment Facility in Fort Marlene, Maryland (the High Containment Facility from Darkness Falls is in Richmond). Scully has to know this means aliens, but she seems fairly calm about it all. She somehow forgets all of this in the second season, however, which is maybe due to what happens to her at the beginning of that season, maybe not.

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My jaw literally dropped when Scully pulled that frozen alien out of the canister. Fade to Scully sitting in her car, thousand-yard stare on her face.

They don’t skimp on the reveals in this season finale. Deep Throat tells Scully some kids were injected with cloned DNA from the alien she’s currently holding (in a box), after she told him she didn’t fucking trust him.

“That’s the kind of people you’re dealing with” Deep Throat says, people who will very literally experiment on children. Whether that does more to actually convince her or she just decides the danger of holding onto the alien is too high, it’s hard to say at this point.

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Drop of jaw number two: Deep Throat takes a bullet to the chest, then croaks out the slogan from the intro. Scully’s world is freakin’ topsy turvy now, shit has gotten intensely real. Thirteen days later Mulder has recovered from the alien blood gas exposure, and that’s not even a joke, really. He calls her up to say the X-Files are getting shut down, word came from “top of the Executive branch” — that’d be POTUS, for anyone who didn’t pass high school government.

The X-Files are either always just about to get shut down or have been just shut down. The Smoking Man makes an appearance again, this time with the alien Scully brought out in a box after “sneaking” into the government facility. Cigarette Hombre stores the alien in an aisle very reminiscent to the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lucky for us they labeled the door he walks out of super accurately, so we know it’s all housed inside the Pentagon.

Are all those boxes aliens? Is Deep Throat really dead? I can’t remember almost any of Season 02, so I’m actually not sure.

Way more truth out there to be found!