2.01 - Little Green Men
It’s season 02! We open on space, the great unknown. A CGI rendering of Voyager 1 flies by the camera and we’re treated to the contents of the Golden Record included on that satellite. Mulder’s voiceover talks about how humans wanted to reach out, to be heard, and in order to be heard we had to listen. Cut to the Arecibo Observatory, that famous and massive radio telescope where Sean Bean died and Ellie Arroway began her tenure with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
While Mulder talks about the search for that specific brand of life and how a senator killed the search, equipment inside Arecibo begins playing the content of the Golden Record, but to an empty room, from under plastic sheets. No one cares anymore.
Mulder’s nickname could easily be changed in this season to Manic, rather than Spooky, although the latter is evoked while Scully is about to do an autopsy and waxes philosophical about the hopes and dreams of the cadaver. One of the students tells her she seemed a “little Spooky.”
The X-Files have indeed been shut down, slicing our two leads apart and relegating them to passing in the hallway. Scully says hi, Mulder ignores her. They have to meet up in the parking lot of the Watergate hotel, because Chris Carter wants to really spike that football.
Gillian Anderson isn’t necessarily super obviously pregnant in her scenes, but they almost only shoot her in bust or from behind while she has on massive, baggy trench coats. It is only worth mentioning because her absence from the show leads to a storyline very early on in this season.
Essentially this meeting between them is so Mulder can throw a fit about how he’s on electronic surveillance of stupid-ass crimes that mean nothing to him. He needs to be back in it, man, out there slicing away the bullshit and revealing all the truth under the surface! Scully tells him not to fret, and not to give up. She brings up that Mulder has seen so much in the X-Files.
“Seeing is not enough” Mulder says. He needs solid evidence. “I learned that from you.”
A nightmare sequence shows us Mulder’s sister being taken, with strong Close Encounters of the Third Kind vibes and some pretty good effects, honestly.
We’re finally shown what connection Mulder has within Congress, which he mentions very early on in season 01. In the Pilot he says: “The only reason I’ve been allowed to continue with my work is because I’ve made connections in Congress.” Pretty awesome that line was in the Pilot episode and we’re getting a payoff in the first episode of Season 02 — that doesn’t seem to be the modus operandi for the overarching storylines in the series but it worked out here.
Serialized fiction allows for some amazing moments that can almost feel like time travel when done right. It can also seem like a total fucking mess if not planned out right hahaha.
Senator Matheson plays some Bach, specifically the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 which was the first song included on the Golden Record. Senator Matheson isn’t some fly-by-night UFO also-ran. This dude ain’t fucking about.
Chris Carter talked on the Blu-ray special features about how the senator is named after Richard Matheson, who wrote the Night Stalker and the Night Strangler, both Kolchak movies that so influenced the creation of this show (though Carter plays that down to some extent in X-Files Confidential by Ted Edwards, which has an intro by Kolchak creator Jeff Rice).
This episode uses the “Wow! Signal” as a plot point, placed right into the ‘90s, and in fact the very signal we heard at the beginning. Except, real fuckin’ confusingly, they reference the REAL “Wow! signal” later on in the episode. Kind of like when books that are obviously Harry Potter pastiches/re-imaginings mention Harry Potter — it ain’t the end of the world, but it sure does take me out of the story’s imagined reality.
Senator Matheson says some cool shit to Mulder, with my favorite being “After that I can no longer hold off the Blue Beret UFO retrieval team.” Plus, guess what Mulder, “…they have been authorized to display terminal force.” What’s all this mean?
Road trip!
Mulder heads to Arecibo, we see him hitching a ride in a flatbed truck carting some boxes. Since frame one Mulder has had a Five O’clock Shadow, a little visual cue that he’s off the beaten path of suits and regular hygiene, fully committed to The Pursuit.
He arrives at Arecibo and immediately starts recording little voice memos in a handheld recorder, observations about the state of the place. It’s clearly an investigation, his FBI mind unable to shut off.
Cut to Scully in Mulder’s apartment trying to find where the hell he could’ve gotten off to. She’d been questioned by Assistant Director Skinner since Mulder is supposed to be on a short leash but somehow disappeared. Skinner then tells the Smoking Man she doesn’t know where he is, because she’s obviously worried.
Scully is a goddamn password cracking champion. Gets into Mulder’s computer within a minute or two. She gets caught by two agents who are surveilling his apartment. She pulls some other slick shit, ‘cause she’s the best, and ends up taking a print out of the “Wow! signal” with her.
Mulder keeps investigating, keeps taking down audio notes, even after he finds Jorge hiding in the bathroom. And Jorge is, just, real fucking scared. He details, in Spanish, lights in the sky, and men showing up. Then he draws a picture on the wall with a Sharpie since Mulder doesn’t speak Spanish. Later, the equipment turns on and Jorge sprints out into the jungle of Puerto Rico.
Meanwhile, Scully is being tailed by two of the worst FBI agents to ever carry the badge. Might as well have put three kids on each others’ shoulders, hiding in a trench coat on the job. She ditches them with a strategic phone call to Mulder’s answering machine and fake flight details. Back to Manic Mulder…
Sweating in his sleeveless shirt, barely able to get a sentence out without huffing through it, he’s checking out Jorge’s dead body and recording it all in his neat little handheld recorder.
“My god Scully it’s as if he’s been frightened to death.” And then it becomes obvious he’s been recording these messages for her, always talking to her.
“Again Scully nothing but evidence, and again, no evidence at all” he says. The doubts they are a’looming. He’s pissed off at no hard evidence, no fucking proof!
“Before, I could only trust myself. Now I can only trust you. And they’ve taken you away from me.”
Mulder DOES get to see some shit, but these missives to Scully are the emotional meat of the episode. He talks about wanting to see his sister, about wanting to see “them,” but his admission that he could literally trust no one other than himself until he met Scully is practically him saying his life lacked purpose until they met. It was always about seeing Samantha and proving aliens took her, that they were out there and the government knew, except now he has a partner.
All of that is kind of shoved to the side since less than a second after his seemingly rhetorical question about what he’d actually do if aliens show up, an alien fucking shows up. It’s in the doorway to the observatory, surrounded by blinding white light. The same alien from his nightmare. He passes out. Wakes up to Scully.
“Is that them?” Scully asks when she hears some nondescript rumbling. She’s seemingly fully on board that aliens had been there. Except it’s not the aliens, it’s the Blue Beret retrieval team, as promised, displaying terminal force by shooting immediately.
Back home, shaved, suited up and getting his ass spanked by Skinner while the Smoking Man looks on, his little smecking cigarette sounds reminding everyone he’s got a mouth and then…he gets in Mulder’s face, pulling some real high school bully bullshit.
Our first sign AD Skinner isn’t a total boot licker is when he kicks the Smoking Man out and sends Mulder back to his punishment: stupid-ass surveillance of boring shit.
We get the payoff of the “Chekhov’s gun” from when Mulder lamented more evidence but more of nothing, too. Scully sort of pokes Mulder in the eye when they listen to the tape he stole from the Arecibo Observatory of the transmissions, and it’s blank.
“You still have nothing,” she says.
“I may not have the X-Files Scully, but I still have my work.” He pauses. “And I still have you. And I still have myself.”
What’s that mean? What’s NOT being said here?
I STILL HAVE US.
There’s some good setup here for what happens with Scully, but unfortunately, it won’t matter, because they fuck it all up by not following through in any sort of timely manner. This episode, however, is good!