The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 23, 'The Erlenmeyer Flask'

As far as first-season finales go, at least for me, this one ranks at the top. It just takes great, suspenseful TV to the nth degree—to that cinematic level. The plot is nothing short of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle–esque. And X-Files mastermind Chris Carter ties it all up at the end with a big red bow on this holiday gift of an episode (that's a bit of a misnomer, I realize; the finale originally aired in mid-May 1994).
  I'll break this episode down into its key moments, all of which point to future episodes, seasons, plots, themes and even the X-Files theatrical:
  1. Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) again contacts Mulder and leads him directly into that great government conspiracy plot line, which weaves its way in and out of the first season (and appears as early as the pilot). This sequence of events gets Mulder closer than he ever has been to the "truth," which he so desperately wants to learn. And by truth, I suppose it's greater than just new knowledge for Mulder at this point in his career. The seed, we know, was the abduction of his sister, Samantha, by what he believes were aliens.
  1a) I will not give away what happens in the last few minutes of the episode, but consider it epic and Deep Throat related.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 22, 'Roland'

In this second-to-last episode of the first season of the nascent X-Files series, we find Chris Carter working with an extremely sensitive topic that's been dealt with quite poorly over the years on the silver and small screens: developmental disability. When I think of how many times I've seen a terrible portrayal of a person with a developmental disability on TV, it makes me cringe. Riding the Bus With My Sister, I Am Sam … I mean, the list goes on and on. There's always this underlying feeling that these people aren't people at all; they're different, objects of shame and sorrow. Why else would Rosie O'Donnell or Sean Penn play these characters? To expose the world to the plight of the developmentally disabled? (Yeah, right. Actors are always thinking gold statue, no matter what they say about their moral ethic.) Developmentally disabled people get a bad rap.
  Not so, says Chris Carter, resoundingly, with this top-notch episode. Carter makes Roland, a developmentally disabled janitor at a rocket science laboratory, the unequivocal star of the show—a creepy, double-life-living savant who, like a puppeteer, orchestrates the arc of the plot from stunning beginning to climactic end.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 21, 'Born Again'

First, a few addenda to the "Tooms" recap: I forgot to mention that FBI Assistant Director Skinner, who will show up in a recurring role, makes his first appearance in the episode. And it is also the first time we hear the Smoking Man say a line.
  Now, to episode 21. Thank G-d this episode had nothing to do with proselytizing Southern crazies like "Miracle Man" did (it was 150 times better, too). Think of "Born Again" as Chris Carter's second chance with a tasty kernel morsel of an idea—the one from episode 14, "Lazarus," which, as you might remember, I gave a so-so rating to (as an episode) but thought had a creative premise (with a good lead actor).
  In terms of the rewatch, I didn't initially remember watching this episode; hell, it's been 16 years. But then, as if in a dream, there was a specific scene involving a tiny statue of a diver at the bottom of a saltwater fish tank, and voila! A flash came over me, and I was 14 years old again, sitting on the couch on a Friday night, goosebumps rising on my arms, completely freaked out.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season, 1, episode 20, 'Tooms'

I realized a couple of things while rewatching episode 20 of the first season of The X-Files:
  a) There are a whole lot of episodes in a full broadcast television season. Think about it: You have to be pretty interested in the plot arc of, say, a one-hour drama or sci-fi series to be a rapt audience to it for 22 hours (usually, a full-season run is 22 episodes, if you're keeping count). That's nearly an entire day of your life gone in a full TV season. That's a serious time commitment. Even with the ads stripped out later, it's an investment.
  b) And that gets you realizing why so many shows get canceled. (Shows bite the dust a lot faster these days than they used to—think about how fast Lonestar was pulled.) It's almost an impossible equation—like trying to make it in the music business. A good show that sticks around for several seasons is a total shot in the dark.
  Now, to "Tooms." This episode is greatly important to the series in one distinct way: It reprises the role of a great character who got a turn on the show in just its second episode (Eugene Victor Tooms starred in the freaky-as-shit "Squeeze"), foreshadowing similar "reappearances" of popular characters throughout the series (like a comic book's format, say). This would become one of The X-Files's franchises, so to speak.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 19, 'Darkness Falls'

I clearly remember watching this episode at the age of 14—and probably due to my high angst levels, regular intake of Danzig and hatred of pretty much everything, I panned it. A swarm of prehistoric, mutant fireflies wreaking havoc on a bunch of loggers? Men in cotton-candy cocoons (à la B-horror movie Killer Clowns)? Mulder and Scully getting bitten to near death but surviving? "Lame," the 14-year-old me surely said.
  Sixteen years later, I actually thought this was a decent episode. It didn't knock my socks off with its fright levels (see: "Squeeze") or with a great big dosage of wit and banter between Mulder and Scully (there is little in the episode). But it brought up two seemingly unrelated themes and wove them together in a cool way: a) environmental protection, and b) the fear of being isolated in the woods. 
  Oh, and there was also an unexpected nod to my current TV geekness, which made this episode rewatch all the more fun: A much younger and mustachioed Titus Welliver, aka Lost's Man in Black, aka the Smoke Monster, co-starred as an "eco-terrorist." His death scene is extremely hokey—a swarm of mutant bugs eats him alive—but it was great to hear his laid-back delivery and see his menacing face once again.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 18, 'Shapes'

As soon as the opening sequence began, I had one of those déjà vu moments—I'd been somewhere as a 14-year-old kid (remember, it's now 1994), watching this with the old faithful crew. I'd like to say it was Dan's house. Possibly popcorn was served. 
  This is a much, much, much stronger episode than the previous one (see "Miracle Man") and takes on two subjects that have always fascinated me: a) Native Americans, and b) werewolves. I took a great Native American literature class during my senior year of college with a Lakota Sioux professor, Delphine Red Shirt, who I think is still teaching and writing somewhere out there (if you're wondering, I got an A). The cultural and social toll us white folk have taken on the Native American populations across the U.S. and Canada has been devastating, to say the least. Alcoholism, murder and poor education have run rampant on reservations for years—and it's basically all our fucking fault. I still remember what Ms. Red Shirt said when asked what the most important thing was to a Native American: "A good team of lawyers," she said stolidly. 
  So, in this episode, you get a helping of this Great Divide between the white man and the Native Americans, and you really feel bad for them. The reservation sheriff, played well by Michael Horse, has a few moments with Mulder and Scully about the cultural divide, which really gets you where it counts. Additionally, the nature of ritual takes center stage in the burial ceremony performed for recently dead Joseph Goodensnake, who is the focus of the X-file: Goodensnake was gunned down on a farm late at night, and the shooter claims before cutting him down that he was in the form of a hairy beast.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 17, 'Miracle Man'

OK, folks, we're getting close to the end of the first season, coming into Thanksgiving weekend. Up to bat is episode 17.1, "Mircale Man," which follows the story of an adopted son of an evangelical preacher in Tennessee who appears to have the power to heal—with his stigmata-ed hands. Is the boy the Second Coming, or is he just the Second Come-on? That is the question Agents Mulder and Scully must answer. Oh, and of course, as soon as they show up, the kid appears to start killing people, instead of healing them, with his touch.
  Now, as far as the rewatch goes, this was a bit of a clunker—though there were some good, solid, tense moments throughout and a decent performance by young Scott Bairstow as the son-healer Samuel Hartley. (I immediately recognized him and realized, after trolling through imdb.com, that he was on a real clunker of a show, Party of Five, with that godawful intro by that godawful '90s band the Bodeans. I want to say his turn on that show was as an abusive boyfriend to Neve Campbell's character, but I'm probably totally off base. On a side note: I used to watch Party of Five in high school, so as to talk to girls who were undoubtedly watching it for then-hot actors Scott Wolf and Matthew Fox, the latter of whom would go on to star in one of my favorite shows of all time, Lost. (Wolf had a decent role in movie Go.) I would sit through these awful episodes, memorize lines and then talk shop with the hot, popular girls in school. It never helped. I never got a date, but I did gain a crush on Jennifer Love "Your Body Is a Wonderland" Hewitt.) Anyhow, Bairstow says his lines with a maturity that you don't often see in young actors these days, and it's a shame the rest of the episode is so low grade, because it could've been his tour de force. 

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 16, 'E.B.E.'

The opening sequence of "E.B.E." reminded me how eerily similar things are these days—at least government/war-wise—to the early '90s. That was the era of the first Gulf war—1990-91—the first time America really thought it was facing the threat of weapons of mass destruction since the Cold War (and subsequently, global terrorism, which came to a head two years later, when the World Trade Center was bombed the first time). I distinctly remember the nightly pictures of oil fields burning in the desert on the news—the Tom Brokaw broadcasts (love that guy) and the "Scud Stud," Arthur Kent, reporting from behind enemy lines. Of course, there was also the government led by Bush I, reassuring the public of our role as ally to the Middle East and the lofty goals for toppling Saddam Hussein (emphasis on the first syllable, of course, to make it sound like "Sodom"). And then, a bit after the hype had died down, the rumors of sick veterans and Gulf War Syndrome—and the subsequent coverup (well, that might be my X-Files-geek-conspiracy-theorist self speaking). Certainly, a lot to take in as a teenager.
  The "teaser" for the episode: An Iraqi fighter pilot radios in an unidentified flying object, experiences a blinding flash of white light, but is able to recover his systems and shoot the craft out of the sky. It lands near an American base. In rolls the X-Files theme. It struck me how ahead-of-the-times this tiny sequence was—how it felt like something the producers of 24 or Lost might have ginned up more than a decade later. This is "cinematic" television at its finest—before shows like Mad Men and The Walking Dead had even been glimmers of ideas.

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 15, 'Young at Heart'

First off, forgive the long absence of the GXFR. I moved and had no Internet for a while. But I'm back on track, so I can stream the full X-Files series once again via Netflix!
  Episode 15 of the first season of The X-Files series is called "Young at Heart"—somewhat erroneously, maybe. The "fountain of youth" theme really doesn't kick in until the end of episode. And it feels like a bit of a letdown when it does.
  It's another story stripped from Mulder's past (remember, "Fire" brought in a short-haired British chanteuse whom he'd been bedding in college). This one hits a little closer to home for Mulder, though. Having a clear shot at a murder suspect early in his career, a young Agent Mulder "plays it by the book" and doesn't off the suspect because there's a hostage involved. (Apparently, in the FBI handbook, you can't put a hostage's life in danger, if he/she is at gunpoint.) The suspect, John Barnett, then shoots the hostage and one of Mulder's fellow agents before being taken into custody—something for which Mulder has never forgiven himself.
  Barnett avoids the death penalty and is thrown in jail for life—and supposedly dies there of heart failure. But given the opening "teaser" sequence of the episode, the audience knows Barnett is still alive in some way (this isn't revealed until much later). We see him on a gurney, missing an arm, with a doctor above him, his cataract-covered eyes still blinking. Creepy shit.  

The Great 'X-Files' Rewatch: season 1, episode 14, 'Lazarus'

The 14th episode of the first season of The X-Files is only loosely based on the Lazarus story from the Bible—the one about the fellow who got a second chance at life after four days gone (sounds like a bad Crosby, Stills & Nash song).
  The story follows a bank robber and an FBI agent who die at the same moment on separate hospital gurneys. One is revived (the agent), while the other dies (the perp). But the twist is that the bad guy comes back to life inside the good guy's body. (This reminds me of the "Man in Black inhabiting John Locke's body" plot line from Lost.) Of course, Mulder believes this "near-death experience" concept from the beginning, while Scully looks for a scientific explanation (sort of the X-Files version of Jack vs. Locke). I took this with a grain of salt, because this story has been remade so many times (in movies, books, etc.), it's amazing that it actually worked as well as it did in this episode. As a side note, the revived agent was a onetime lover of Scully's, which complements the plot twist of the shorthaired British ex-lover of Mulder's in the episode "Fire." As usual, the X-Files creators need the sexual tension cranked up to 11.