2.07 - 3
A little over 2 minutes and 40 seconds, this cold open focuses a lot on quick cuts and close-ups with pretty standard vampire imagery. It’s effective overall though, especially the scene of men rushing in to beat the victim while he lounges and bleeds in the hot tub after some TV-appropriate sex/writhing. Then they stab him with syringes.
It’s actually pretty surprising this episode deals with Scully’s disappearance at all because that’s not standard operating procedure for Chris Carter. After the credits we’re shown Mulder getting back to the basement office which is now covered in dusty plastic. He puts a new file away, Scully’s, including her agency credentials. We see her crucifix necklace briefly in Mulder’s gentle palm.
All of that happens in about 40 seconds. By the time we hit the six minute mark in the episode we’re already past it all and Mulder is about three paragraphs into an info dump with the LAPD about the vampire murderers. Fires are blazing in the canyons outside of L.A. while the murderers work. It’s a great setup for the mystery and leads to some memorable visuals.
Mulder gives a fake name when he makes a call to follow a lead. His brilliant FBI mind comes up with “Marty Mulder.” It works though, which leads to him arresting the first vampire suspect who is known as The Son. He’s played by a guy named Frank Military who does a great job.
“You are really upsetting me,” a doctor says to Mulder after listening to conjecture over vampires, and he fucking slam dunks on it by ending with, “on several levels.” It’s a guy who is basically Scully’s stand-in for communicating actual science to explain the bizarre, but he says these two phrases almost like Mulder is bullying him. It’s really weird and unintentionally funny. I wonder if this is because Scully won’t take Mulder’s shit and everyone else can only stare at him wide-eyed and say shit like this. Something to think about.
At 22 minutes in, a sexy lady (played by Duchovny’s then real-world girlfriend Perrey Reeves) is about to put a bloody fingertip to Mulder’s lips, he stops her and says, “AIDS. Aren’t you afraid?” Obviously things had progressed enough with the AIDS epidemic for it to enter pop culture, but I did find myself wondering what stage the public discourse was in, not to mention the timeline of how many people had died, so I looked it up and found this New York Times archive. This episode aired in November of 1994.
Most noteworthy in this episode, from a performance/writing standpoint, is Mulder’s demeanor. He truly does seem distraught and as if he’s not even diving into work, but descending. You can see it in his five-o’clock-shadow and hear it in his slow, flat dialogue. But it works. The whole episode balances on that darkness in him. He has Scully’s necklace on, mentions it’s from someone he lost, but obviously Mulder has to fill this gap in him somehow and he does so by sleeping with the sexy lady.
Along with Mulder’s sadness, Frank Military as The Son is why this is worth watching. It all kind of goes too fast at the end, capped off by an explosion to mirror the wildfires, an almost off-screen deus ex machina leading to the death of literally everyone but Mulder. Not super elegant but nothing horrible either.