The X-Files Newbie Recap: “Born Again,” “Roland,” “The Erlenmeyer Flask”
[swallows wine]
The Erlenmeyer Flask
… BECAUSE WE’VE REACHED THE SEASON FINALE AND I LITERALLY CANNOT COMPREHEND THE AMOUNT OF STUFF THAT WENT DOWN IN THIS. HOLD ME.
Where do I even start?!
OK, well, the episode begins with a car chase. The driver eventually flees the vehicle, gets shot, tasered, and jumps into a river. His blood runs green. Might be a Vulcan. The police drag the riverbed for three days but never find a body, and it all starts kicking off.
Deep Throat tips off Mulder, who joins a pantheon of shifty agency types all sniffing around the crime scene. He and Scully look over the suspect’s car and discover the one that’s been impounded isn’t the same as the one shown in footage of the incident. Using an image captured from video feed, they trace the car involved in the chase to a Dr. Berube, who’s a scientist working in some kind of lab. He’s equally shifty and has a whole crew of caged animals, one of which leaps at Scully when she leans in to look at it. Unpleasant 28 Days Later flashbacks ensue.
Deep Throat re-enters the fray, a welcome appearance after several episodes of him being AWOL. However, Mulder and Scully have been arguing about him. Scully doesn’t trust him and says Mulder’s getting in too deep. She thinks he may be getting some weird kick out of the titbits of info Deep Throat feeds him and it’s not healthy. Mulder tackles Deep Throat on this when he sees him, but the informant urges him to keep digging because he’s “never been closer” to the infamous truth.
Things step up a notch when Berube kicks the bucket. A pasty blonde dude who appeared in photos of the crime scene, but who no one recognises, shows up and tells him his work is done. Next thing, the lab is trashed and Berube is found dead. In proper grandiose overkill style, the scene is staged to look like he wrapped a sheet around his neck and jumped out the window. Neither Mulder nor Scully are buying the suicide line, especially when they discover Berube was working on the human genome project. Mulder swipes a vial of brown liquid and despatches Scully to the university to get it analysed.
In the meanwhile, he does digging around Berube’s house. A dossier of phone records shows repeated calls from the same number. Mulder calls HQ and gets a trace going on the number. The phone rings again almost as soon as he puts it down—it’s the car chase guy from the opening scenes, looking for Berube. The pasty blonde guy pulls up in a van outside and listens in. Mulder pretends to be Berube and asks the man on the phone where he is, but he faints before he can answer. A passer-by calls an ambulance. The EMTs go to inject him with something but his blood releases some kind of gas which blinds them, makes them seize up and eventually kills them. Our green-blooded friend jumps out of the ambulance and does a runner.
Scully works with a biochemist at Georgetown University to get the brown liquid analysed. It turns out to contain traces of bacteria unlike anything either of them have seen. Breaking it down further, they discover that the bacteria’s DNA is made up of one too many nucleotides for it to be anything terrestrial. In other words, it has to be alien in origin. Scully’s mind is suitably blown. She looks utterly frazzled, and things are just getting started.
Mulder’s gotten a location on the number he found at Berube’s house. It leads him to a facility owned by Zeus Laboratories, which houses a bunch of living people in liquid tanks. It’s weird. It’s really weird. It looks like the end of The Prestige mixed with that human farm scene from The Matrix. When he leaves, the pasty blonde guy is hanging around with minions. They give chase but Mulder manages to escape. When he gets home, Scully calls with an update on the extra-terrestrial DNA. The next day, he brings her back to the Zeus Laboratories facility but it’s been cleaned out. Because obviously. Everyone’s feeling shifty now. It’s in the air. Scully has the heebie-jeebies.
Deep Throat arrives and gives them some info. Berube was experimenting using alien viruses recovered from a crash site (apparently there were dozens of these, of which Roswell is merely the most well-known). He discovered terminal illnesses could be reversed or effectively cured through gene therapy. Secare, the guy involved in the car chase, was a colleague of Berube’s and was cured of terminal melanoma after being treated with the alien virus. This also gave him superhuman strength and the ability to breathe underwater, explaining how he was able to hide in the river for three days. However, the higher-ups were only interested in the science, not the human/alien hybrids it spawned. The hybrids’ blood chemistry was alien and therefore toxic to anyone who came into contact with it. Evidence of the experiments is therefore being systematically destroyed. Berube was killed because he tried to warn Secare what was happening, and now the the storage facility has been cleaned out. Deep Throat urges them to find Secare before the others do. Mulder and Scully need evidence to bring an actionable case, and Secare may be the most important part.
Our heroes split up; Mulder goes looking for Secare, while Scully heads back to Georgetown to get their analyses of the liquid sample. As it happens, Secare finds Mulder in Berube’s house, but so do the shady higher-ups. They shoot him and in so doing incapacitate Mulder, as the toxic fumes cause his eyes to swell up. He’s bundled up and taken hostage while Secare’s body is disposed of. Scully finds out the biochemist she was working with has died in a car accident along with her whole family. This isn’t suspicious at all. She goes to Mulder’s house looking for him but he hasn’t come home. Deep Throat is also there and tells her he can’t find him. He says “they” may have taken Mulder as a bargaining tool, but they won’t kill him because he’s too high-profile and Scully has evidence that could expose them. He suggests smuggling her into one of the containment facilities so they can get their own bargaining chip to swap for Mulder – namely, one of the original extraterrestrial tissue samples. (FINALLY Scully gets to see something in the flesh!)
Her medical background means she gets into the facility without issue. The sample being held there looks like a withered alien foetus. Ew. But this is evidence, Dana! Cold hard, slightly grotesque evidence. Any lingering vestiges of rational thought are surely having a very bad day right now. She manages to sneak it out and, later that night, meets Deep Throat on a bridge to carry out the switch. Deep Throat insists on doing it and is shot for his troubles. Sad face. Mulder’s thrown out the back of a van and the shady types make off with the alien foetus. Deep Throat dies in Scully’s arms, his last words “trust no one”. Fade to black. Think of my nerves. (WINE.)
In the final scenes, Mulder calls Scully—he’s recovered, thankfully, but has been absent for a while. He breaks the bad news. Skinner’s just called to say the X-Files are being shut down and the two of them are being reassigned to other sections. It seems the order came down from the top of the executive branch. Scully urges him to lodge a protest and asks what he’s going to do. He says he can’t and won’t give up, “not as long as the truth is out there.” Whelp. (More wine.)
In the final shot of the season, the Cigarette-Smoking Man puts the alien foetus in the secret Pentagon warehouse with all the boxes in, as featured in the pilot. I take it this means… he and his cohorts were behind it all? They had Mulder kidnapped and Deep Throat killed? Everyone knew Mulder was on to something, after all. They’ve tried to shut him down on multiple occasions before and the only thing blocking them was Deep Throat. Now they’ve removed that obstacle and ostensibly gotten Mulder out of the line of trouble. But he’s definitely seen too much to let it go now, and more importantly, so has Scully—someone with less of a bonkers reputation and someone who’ll undoubtedly fight just as determinedly for what she thinks is right.
Thus season 1 draws to a close, and help me Jesus. How did I go so long without this show in my life? I feel like further analysis is beyond the scope of this already gargantuan piece so I’mma prepare a lot of frazzled thoughts (on this and the season in general) and report back later in the week. Watch your backs, people. THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.
Grace Duffy is a pop culture devotée and sometime film critic currently catching up on her classic sci-fi. You can read more on her blog, Tumblr, or catch her frequent TV liveblogs on Twitter.
—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—
Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
Pages: 1 2
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
