scifi | retroperspect

Uncovering The X-Files Season 1 Ep. 7-9

Posted on February 9, 2016 by mcwardell

S1, E7 – “Ghost in the Machine”, dir. Jerrold Freedman, written by Alex Gansa & Howard Gordon, originally aired October 29, 1993
The CEO of software company ‘Eurisko’ is murdered by a strangely elaborate booby-trap.
The crime itself is not immediately strange enough to be X-filed; Mulder and Scully only get pulled into the investigation when Mulder’s old partner Jerry Lamana (Wayne Duvall) calls him in for a favour. We get an important new perspective on Mulder as a competent agent, as seen through Jerry’s jealousy. When Jerry is killed during the investigation, it’s interesting to see how Mulder, a man who usually acts on instinct, is able to restrain his emotions enough to see behind the ‘obvious evidence’.
Said evidence points towards Brad Wilczek (Rob LaBelle)—a disheveled computer whiz not unlike Steve Wozniak—as he was fired just before the murder of his boss. We, the audience, very quickly realize that it was Brad’s creation, the Control Operating System (COS) that is the true perp, but such a revelation evades everyone for most of the episode. It’s a sci-fi twist that borrows from “2001: A Space Odyssey”’s HAL-9000; an all-powerful artificial intelligence acts proactively for the sake of self-preservation. Besides a few dated hacking scenes, the episode thankfully steers clear of computer jargon. It’s also interesting to note that Deep Throat returns, though not to contribute to the mythology arc strangely enough.
By the time Mulder has realized COS is the killer, Brad has already turned himself in for the sake of protecting his creation… not from being destroyed, but from being weaponized by the government. There’s a funhouse-esque bit of Mulder and Scully making their way through the Eurisko building, but the kicker that really made the episode great for me was COS’ security guard being a double agent for the government. There was so much conflict and tension at every turn; they were able to turn a decades-old twist into something exciting.

S1 E8 – “Ice”, dir. David Nutter, written by Glen Morgan & James Wong
originally aired November 5, 1993
A video transmission from a remote research base in Alaska shows that all the scientists have gone insane and killed each other.
By far the most dark and tense episode in the series yet, but it has to be said that it lifts so, so heavily from John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), which itself is just one of many adaptions of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s “Who Goes There” (1938). Everything from the locale and atmosphere to the infected dog is directly taken. The only prominent difference between it and “The Thing” is that this bottle-episode can’t afford grotesque puppeteering, so those infected by the alien parasite simply become violently aggressive. The parasite itself is a pretty disgusting worm that runs along the nape of its host’s neck, flexing that TV-14 rating that the show so rarely reminds us it has. As just a monster-of-the-week episode, it’s interesting that it contributes to the alien mythology.
Mulder and Scully aren’t at it alone—we need a tight cast of unique characters to kill off in horror movie fashion. We have the uptight man, the innocent man, the nervous woman, the scruffy pilot; in the brief time we’re introduced to them we get pretty strong characterizations of them, making their eventual descent into paranoia that much more rewarding. The climax is deservingly frantic, but for me the tensest scene was Mulder and Scully standing off against each other. It tells a lot about their ability (and inability) to make difficult choices in an episode that otherwise doesn’t focus too much on their development.
It may be shamelessly ripped from a great horror story, but it’s still a great and thoroughly satisfying episode.

S1 E9 – “Space”, dir. William Graham, written by Chris Carter
originally aired November 12, 1993
A strange force is sabotaging NASA’s attempts to launch a shuttle.
Mulder and Scully are called in by communications commander Michelle Generoo (Susanna Thompson) to investigate NASA’s Mission Control. It’s already a strange case for the X-Files specialists to take, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. Mulder meets his childhood hero, former astronaut Colonel Marcus Belt (Ed Lauter), who acts very strangely and harshly, disillusioning Mulder. In a series of poorly rendered and non-scary nightmare sequences, we learn that Belt is haunted by some kind of Alien spirit he encountered years ago in his space-faring days. The CGI-heavy ghost bits are pretty terrible, as is the cheap Mission Control set. Mulder and Scully have little-to-no affect on the plot, instead just standing around while Belt and Generoo act out rocket science mumbo jumbo. Even if the production side of the episode would have come together, it’s still the worst episode yet.
There’s a few poignant scenes, particularly between Mulder and Belt. The one that stood out was Belt turning on the agent and criticizing sensationalist media coverage and general disinterest in the space program; “They only know your name if you blow up”, a biting comment no doubt referring to NASA’s shuttle Challenger tragically exploding in 1986. It’s fascinating to see Mulder’s faith turn on him for once, as his admiration for Belt blinds him to the Colonel’s strange actions.
Overall it’s a boring, inconsequential episode that does little to engage the series’ main characters, thus losing the audience’s attention.

You can find my thoughts on Episodes 4-6 here

Uncovering the X-Files Season 1 Ep. 4-6

Posted on February 4, 2016 by mcwardell

S1, E4 – “Conduit”, dir. Daniel Sackheim, written by Alex Gansa & Howard Gordon, originally aired October 1, 1993
At a campground in Iowa, A teenaged girl vanishes in a flash of light before her little brothers eyes.
When Mulder and Scully show up to investigate, the story quickly branches off into two closely connected plots: the first, in very “Twin Peaks” fashion, is the agents peeling back the supposed innocence of the victim, Ruby, and finding out about her seemingly dark history. She’s ‘not exactly prom queen’, as the local sheriff tells them. The side plot (which ends up taking precedence) has to do with how Ruby’s disappearance affected her little brother, Kevin—a boy Mulder immediately identifies with. When Mulder finds Kevin writing binary messages he’s hearing from TV static, it becomes clear there’s something very wrong with Kevin. But rather than go along with the horror trope of creepy children (think ‘Return of the Repressed’), Kevin is depicted more as a metaphor for innocent belief. One of the scenes that stood out to me was the NSA tearing through Kevin’s bedroom for evidence—symbolic of how Mulder’s own investigations are constantly torn down by authority figures.
The Kevin plot ends with Mulder realizing his own obsessions, followed rather abruptly by Ruby being suddenly returned to her family. There’re gaps in her memory, and her captors apparently forbid her from talking. I took this part as an allegory for sexual abuse, especially with Ruby’s mother encouraging Ruby’s silence, saying she doesn’t want their family shamed.
Though not exactly an episode that contributes to the “Mythology” arc, the episode does remind us about Mulder’s personal quest to find his long-lost sister, Samantha. The episode ends with Scully listening to Mulder’s hypno-therapy sessions about the night his sister vanished, as Mulder sits alone in a church, crying. Suddenly, “I want to believe” carries a little more meaning.

S1, E5 – “The Jersey Devil”, dir. Joe Napolitano, written by Chris Carter,
originally aired October 8, 1993
In the outskirts of Atlantic City, a man is brutally murdered by a local urban legend.
Much like Episode 3, “Squeeze”, here we have a ‘Monster-of-the-Week’ episode. Mulder and Scully show up to find Atlantic City—and it’s casino—abuzz with news of the ‘Jersey Devil’. Despite the local law enforcement appearing capable (rare), they seem hesitant to investigate the murders because of the tourists they bring. The week’s mystery was handled pretty offhandedly here, with the episode seeming to focus more on the buds of romance between Mulder and Scully. Here for the first time we see Scully’s personal life: dates, birthday parties, and so on, while Mulder seems too absorbed by his work. There’s something of a milestone developed between the two agents when Scully decides to skip out on her date with a very promising man in favor of helping Mulder dig deeper into a case.
The resolution of the mystery comes pretty anticlimactically: Mulder is jumped by the Jersey Devil who spares him and runs into the woods to be gunned down by the local sheriff. What’s more interesting is the implications the monster brings—she ends up being a beautiful though primitive woman, a missing link of sorts, leading Mulder to philosophize “Maybe we’re just beasts with big brains.” The Jersey Devil was just trying to protect her young the whole time, leaving the viewer with the question of ‘who’s the real monster this week?’

S1, E6 – “Shadows”, dir. Michael Katleman, written by Glen Morgan & James Wong, originally aired Oct. 22, 1993
A woman, mourning the suicide of her boss, is protected from assailants by an otherworldly force.
Though pretty predictable from the cold opening alone, the plot of this episode was really interesting. Finally, the monster-of-the-week being the focus of the episode! And yet… parts of the plot are very problematic in relation to the characters and canon the show has thus far established. More on that later.
Lauren, a young secretary, seems aware of the fact that the ghostly presence of her dead boss, Howard Graves, is watching over her like a guardian angel. The evidence of his ghost are there right from the beginning—Mulder and Scully see the autopsy reports of the two men who seemed to be psycho-kinetically shocked and killed from the inside out—yet this pretty undeniable evidence gets swept under the rug. Even Mulder, defender of the faith, goes along with Scully’s idea that Howard Graves is alive and hiding somewhere.
There’s an intense but nonsensical scene where Mulder witnesses Graves’ ghost save Lauren by choking another assailant…while Scully is of course out of the room. It’s just strange for the show to so blatantly admit the existence of ghosts to Mulder—how can you not believe?! It’s clearly not the first thing Mulder and the audience have seen, but at least the moments that came before were packaged with the possibility of doubt, dreams, mental instability and such.
The focus on the ghost, however, is lost when the investigation shifts from ‘the pursuit of paranormal possibilities’ to a tangible case, namely Graves murder at the hand of his business partner. It’s frustratingly out of character for Mulder to give up on proving the ghost’s existence and instead accept its help in solving the more earthbound case. It was one of the most intriguing episodes so far, but it was resolved so strangely.

You can find my thoughts on Episodes 1-3 here

You can find my thoughts on Episodes 7-9 here

Digging Deeper – Planet of the Apes (1968)

Posted on February 3, 2016 by mcwardell

The screenplay for “Planet of the Apes” (1968), adapted loosely from the 1963 novel “La Planête des Singes” by Pierre Boulle, was written by Michael Wilson & Rod Sterling. Considering the latter’s previous work of creating and hosting “The Twilight Zone” (1959), Planet of the Apes is a cautionary tale, more intent on asking the tough questions than leaving its audience with that warm fuzzy feeling. The timing of the movie was so perfect: it was the peak of the Cold War and the American Space Age, and just a year before the Moon Landing in ’69. And while it’s most remembered for it’s iconic closing shot (we’ll get to that), the entire film works great as a sort of thrilling, dark political satire, not unlike George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945), which Charlton Heston’s character Taylor even paraphrases: “All apes are equal… but some are more equal than others.”

The film opens with Taylor and his American astronauts returning to Earth after a deep-space mission sometime in the undisclosed future. His shipmates already in stasis, Heston delivers a very philosophical final status log: “From out here, everything seems different. Time bends, space is… boundless. It squashes a man’s ego.” He sets the high-concept setting for the audience, before leaving he and his crew in the hands of machines to auto-pilot their ship home. (Humans leaving their lives to technology? Hmm…) The ship crash lands on a seemingly deserted yet hospitable planet; Taylor and crewmates Dodge (Jeff Burton) and Landon (Robert Gunner) find the only female member has suffered a rupture in her stasis chamber, seemingly dead for centuries. Taylor explains the concept of time diffraction—how their relatively short mission has lasted around two thousand years of Earth, ‘give or take a decade’.

The other crewmates serve more to explain Taylor’s character, with Landon accusing his cynical, realist attitude a symptom of misanthropy. There’s a very on the nose scene where Landon plants a tiny American flag, claiming the beach they landed on, to which Taylor simply laughs. The three men explore this strange new world, finding trace signs of life before coming across primitive, human-like creatures. Taylor quickly settles into a colonialist attitude, quipping “in six months we’ll be running this planet.” Cue the howling of apes. Gorillas suddenly ride in with technology matching humanity’s own industrial era, capturing Taylor and killing his crewmates. Taylor, whose neck was wounded in the kerfuffle, can’t speak in his own defence, and he spends several humiliating days caged up like an animal, prodded by Chimpanzee scientists Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter). Any results to display his intelligence through gestures is met with table-turning phrases like “human see, human do”. Remembering all that talk about squashing the human ego?

The Ape society is not without it’s own flaws however. A sort of racial caste system becomes clear: Gorillas are the enforcers and laborers, Chimps the intellectuals, and Orangutans the political and religious leaders. Just as Zira begins sympathizing with Taylor, we’re introduced to the physical antagonist of the film, the orangutan Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), ‘Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith.’ It’s Dr. Zaius who suppresses knowledge and keeps Ape society as being dictated by ‘ancient taboos’. Alongside satirizing the false self-righteousness of humanity, the orangutans in particular represent an outdated older generation, to which a disillusioned young chimp asks, “Why must knowledge stand still?”

When Taylor’s speech comes back to him, Heston comes out swinging at his most Shakespearean acting: “Take your stinking paws off me you damn, dirty ape!” By this point we learn more about Taylor’s motives: he left Earth so long ago because “There was lots of lovemaking, but no love.” His humanity is then put on trial before a court of orangutan judges, yet it’s his humanity that is the crime. The idea that the pathetic human race once surpassed Apes seems so ridiculous, Zaius poses the golden question: “If man was superior, why didn’t he survive?” By now, the mystery is piecing itself together… not where, but when? Amidst this upside-down civilization, Zaius criticizes Taylor as only seeing it that way because ‘he exists on its lowest level’. Like much of the Golden / Silver Age of science fiction around the mid-20^th century, “Apes” takes a ridiculous yet intriguing idea and uses it to hold a mirror up to the audience so they can see their own twisted follies.

And if the mirror wasn’t clear enough, we’re left with a very grim note to think on. As Taylor rides away from his captors into the great unknown, he comes across a sight so powerful it brings him to his knees, cursing the human race. Buried amidst the sandy beach… a rusted Statue of Liberty. The planet of the Apes was Earth’s future all along! “You finally made a monkey out of me!” cries Troy McClure in “The Simpson”’s Planet of the Apes Musical. Decades of parodies have somewhat robbed the scene of it’s shock-factor, but it fits in well with the darkly comedic tone of the rest of the film. You may laugh, not because the film is hammed up, but because this ridiculous, inverted world is so close to our own.

The assumption (which would be elaborated in the sequels) is that humans destroyed themselves with nuclear warfare, and the film’s been rubbing your nose in the possibility the whole time without you knowing it. I’d say that’s why the original Planet of the Apes has always stood out, and why subsequent entries in the franchise have lacked that certain flair. The beauty of it is that “Apes” poses all of these questions, these ‘What If?’s, and just leaves them for the viewer to mull over.

Uncovering The X-Files Season 1 Ep. 1-3

Posted on February 2, 2016 by mcwardell

S1, E1 – “Pilot”,dir. Robert Mandel, written by Chris Carter,
originally aired September 10, 1993
A small town in Oregon has a series of kids from the same graduating class of ’89 disappear into the forest to be killed in a flash of light.
As the pilot of the series, the episode focuses less on the weekly mystery and more on establishing the main characters, F.B.I. Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), and their relationship to their superiors. We first see Scully, but before we know much about her we have her describe Mulder’s reputation, notably his being obsessed with the paranormal. Scully’s role as dictated by her commanding officers is to debunk Mulder’s attempted solutions to the X-Files, a series of unsolved cases relating to the unexplainable. When we first see Mulder, he introduces Scully as the scientifically-driven straight arrow, clearly there as his foil. It’s this tug-of-war between the two, Fact versus Gut Feeling, Science versus Faith, that underlies much of the show.
One deceptively minor scene that tells so much about both characters is when their plane to Oregon experiences major turbulence; Scully clutches her armrest in panic while Mulder lays back nonchalantly, accepting his fate.
It’s the first episode to kick off the ‘Mythology’ arc that the whole series falls back upon—are aliens real?—and many other side plots are subtly set into motion throughout the episode, notably Mulder’s missing sister. The main theme of the episode (and the Mythology arc as a whole) is the idea that you can trust no one. It’s a conspiracy-driven show that aired in the perfect time: America wasn’t involved in many major conflicts and the events of 9/11 were still years away. The idea that everyone, from the small-town paraplegic to the U.S. government is working in the shadows—it’s a scary and captivating concept. Most important to the series though, is we as the audience see the scientifically unexplainable, yet the evidence for it always disappears, leaving us caught between Mulder’s insistence and Scully’s skepticism.

S1, E2 – “Deep Throat”, dir. Daniel Sackheim, written by Christ Carter,
originally aired September 17, 1993
A military test pilot in Idaho goes missing amidst a series of unexplained phenomena.
The beginning of the episode introduces Mulder to a mysterious ally, the titular Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin), another seeker of the truth. It quickly becomes clear to Mulder and Scully that the Idaho military base is the source of strange goings-on in the town nearby, from mentally crippled pilots to UFO-like lights flying by at night. What’s interesting about this episode is that while it’s inferred the government is suppressing the agents in the first episode, here the military takes on an active, oppressive role against Mulder and Scully’s investigation. There’s even a scene of Mulder’s capture by the military, which plays out eerily similar to what one would think an alien abduction would be like.
In an especially chilling scene, the wife of a former pilot calls the agents to her house, screaming “That man’s not my husband!” The husband, meanwhile, seems confused by the sudden outburst—he shows very little sign of change to those besides his wife. It’s unnerving, and as Mulder says, ‘deliberate and insidious’, while also upping the tension behind the recurring ‘evidence versus word’ debate.
The central idea of the episode is the government possessing advanced alien technology and the ethical question of progression weighed with the human cost. When their investigation leads to an intense reaction from the military, we’re left with the disturbing reality that it’s Mulder and Scully who acted inappropriately; the military were following a cold protocol.
It’s much darker and bolder than the first episode, and the central mystery is fleshed out through a much more creative plot. Also, there’s Seth Green as a stoned, teenaged witness.

S1, E3 – “Squeeze”, dir. Harry Longstreet, writers Glen Morgan & James Wong
originally aired September 24, 1993
A series of gruesome murders take place in locations where no physical entry or exit for the murderer seems possible.
Distinct from the story set in the ‘Mythology” episodes, we have our first “monster-of-the week” episode—stand-alone stories similar in style to a show like “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. It’s these episodes where the writers really have to flex their creativity, sometimes to great effect. This is a fine episode, but for me it was the interactions between Mulder and Scully that outshone the actual mystery, which unfolded somewhat weakly.
When Scully is approached by Agent Tom Colton, a friend from her academy-years, she learns she’s become a laughingstock for taking part in Mulder’s paranoid theories. It’s an important episode for her partnership with Mulder, as she’s forced to put aside her own doubts (and workplace politics) to support him. Another interesting aspect of this episode is that while Mulder’s theories are typically the focal point of the plot, Scully’s own medical and scientific investigations seem to win out. The suspected monster, Toom, is played so creepily by Doug Hutchison, it’s a shame more of the episode didn’t focus on him—he goes down in an intense but admittedly lazily written showdown… Using fist-flying action to solve any mystery is usually the least-interesting climax you could think of.
Luckily for us, this isn’t the last we’ll see of Toom, as we leave him in a very “Psycho”-esque shot of him sitting in a jail cell, unperturbed by his defeat.

Read my thoughts on Episodes 4-6 here