The X-Files

_***½

A young FBI agent is paired with a supposed conspiracy theorist and finds herself drawn into the fantastical investigations of paranormal activity for which her new partner is known to obsess over.

The X-Files is a series that people knew about, even if they never watched it; I was too young at the time the series started to be too interested in it, and the series was far too old by the time I would've grown to love it, so I missed out on what is now a big cultural phenomenon. I know that my parents watched the show during it's first few seasons, and I think that there might have been a scene that I happened to witness that scared me beyond belief, unable to watch the show beyond that point. I look forward to facing that fear and discovering what it was that frightened me so much as a child.

Scully's (Gillian Anderson) reluctance to accept the fantastic theories presented to her by Mulder (David Duchovny) despite the evidence gathered could have been written in a way that made her seem like a moron, but the script fortunately focuses instead on her determination to prove the mundane through critical thinking and plausible explanation. She never outright proves Mulder wrong, but her scepticism keeps both of them from appearing foolish and neither is placed into the sidekick role.

The nine minutes lost on the highway eventually leads to Scully's discovery of the marks on her back. While she had remained sceptic up until this point, even though she was unable to explain the flash of light, she panicked and, in that moment, came to believe. Her relief when Mulder informed her that they were mosquito bites, and her embarrassment over her moment of belief, is very telling of both her mindset and her mission, and it's very well-written.

As Mulder is celebrating the flash of light on the highway, he states that they lost nine minutes of time; when questioned about this, he states that, in the moment before the flash occurred, he had looked at his watch. It stretches the limits of believability that he would just happen to check the time at that exact moment, and even if we were to assume that he suspected strange phenomena to occur on this highway, it's unlikely that he would have known where on the road this might happen considering he was largely unfamiliar with the area and it was during a rainstorm at night.

The music used in this episode is, at times, far louder than the dialogue, and it's more of a distraction to the story than an enhancement. The incidentals are good, taken on their own, but are, perhaps, somewhat jauntier than what they were intended to work in conjunction with.

Anderson and Duchovny have a great chemistry with one another, playing the transition between their initial suspicions of one another to the bond that they come to share very believably. While these two characters haven't known one another very long, it's very natural how much they come to care for each other. Sarah Koskoff appears in the episode as possible abductee Theresa, and she manages to take the audience out of the action; not only is her enunciation bad, and her intonation questionable, but her acting here is just not on par with the rest of the cast.

Robert Mandel's direction in this episode is passable; there's nothing outstanding about it, good or bad, but it did feel both natural and cohesive, which is always a good trait to have in story telling.

Chris Carter's script is largely solid, with a great dynamic between the two leads, but the one big fault that took me out of the story was how cheaply Scully was written out of the climax in order to maintain her skepticism of the situation. It's understandable, in order to keep the premise of the series, that Scully would not be witness to the unexplainable phenomenon at the close, but to have her simply hit on the back of the head and not get back up is disrespectful to the character. It would have been disrespectful enough had she been knocked unconscious, but she was merely bruised and knocked down, fully aware of what had happened and who had done it, so the fact that she couldn't manage to catch up to her partner and the man that struck her is questionable.

This series is entertaining, exciting, and, at times, scary, and it's likely to be a really fun experience.

The X-Files is in the running to become the feature for Thursdays. The series ran from 1993 to 2002 on FOX with a total of 202 episodes.