The X-Files Newbie Recap: “Duane Barry,” “Ascension”
I’m totally fine, everyone. This was just another day in X-Files land.
Duane Barry
Kickstarting what appears to be an ongoing arc, the titular Duane breaks out of a psychiatric facility, takes his doctor hostage, and proceeds to mess stuff up for multiple episodes. Duane is mentally unstable and believes he’s been repeatedly kidnapped and probed by aliens. He wants to get to the spot where he was first kidnapped so that he can offer up the doc in his place, but he can’t remember where that is so he holds up a travel agency and starts a hostage crisis. Given that the case involves aliens, Mulder’s assigned to it. Along with [narrows eyes] Krycek. A bunch of you lovely commenters gave me a heads up about this scene, so I took a screencap for you – when Krycek meets Mulder to tell him about the assignment, Mulder’s at the swimming pool.
The only situation here is those Speedos.
Enjoy.
The two of them head down to Virginia and Mulder immediately begins to disobey all the instructions given to him by the hostage negotiating team. The leader of the team is CCH Pounder, which is cool, but unsurprisingly they’re not at all sympathetic to Mulder’s suggestion that Duane’s delusions may not actually be delusions at all. If the opening scenes are anything to go by, he is indeed a victim – there are lots of bright lights, totally-not-conspicuous-at-all spaceships, and humanoid creatures. Why do aliens always look humanoid? This seems as arrogant on the part of humanity as it is unrealistic.
Anyway, Duane, who evidently wasn’t a cool customer to begin with, becomes progressively more unstable. He keeps referring to himself in the third person, which is slightly unnerving. Mulder finds out from the case notes that he used to be an agent and calls Scully, asking her to do some background checks. In the meantime, Duane shoots one of the hostages. An unexplained power outage leads to a blackout and, thinking the UFOs are coming down for him, he loses it and discharges his weapon. Mulder poses as a paramedic and goes in with another agent to treat the wounded man. The team tell him to keep Duane talking and, if he can, to push him towards the doors so snipers can get a shot at him. Mulder manages to convince Duane to let the wounded man go. While this is happening, Scully calls looking to speak to him and reaches Krycek. She tells him Duane is not who Mulder thinks he is and that he’s in extreme danger.
Duane insists on Mulder staying as a replacement for the gunshot victim. Mulder, in direct contravention of the negotiating team’s instructions, gets him talking about his abductions. He’s been fitted with a wire and earpiece and the team look irritatedly on as he pushes for details. Shortly thereafter, Scully arrives to join the team. She’s patched into Mulder via his earpiece and tells him what she’s discovered. Duane was shot while on an assignment several years ago. The shot hit him in a particular part of his brain and effectively destroyed his moral centre, leaving him prone to severe delusions and aggression. Scully stops short of saying it, but the implication is that the aliens spiel may not be legit. Mulder hears all of this but doesn’t appear to be willing to accept it just yet. He continues to try and reason with Duane sympathetically, even pulling him out of the way when snipers manage to get a mark on him.
Mulder tells Duane about what happened to Samantha. Duane opens up a little, saying he sometimes saw kids while he was on board the UFO ships. The kids were frightened and being experimented on. He elaborates about what happened to him, saying the aliens laced him with implants to track him and once drilled holes into his teeth. He believes the government knows what’s going on and that they’re working with the aliens to keep everything covered up. Mulder uses this nascent trust to convince Duane to let the two remaining hostages go. This leaves just him, the psychiatrist, and Duane in the room. Now the risk to innocents has been lowered, Mulder starts asking if any of Duane’s claims are lies. This pisses him off and Mulder backtracks, reminding him he forgot to lock the door after the hostages left. Duane goes to see to it and is promptly shot (though not killed) by one of the snipers.
Then comes the tricky part. Duane is taken to hospital, where it’s revealed that implants are indeed littered throughout his body. One is pulled from his sinuses (flashback to the pilot, where the abductees all had nasal implants) and given to Mulder. Duane’s dental records confirm the presence of holes in his teeth but these don’t match any current dental technology. Mulder’s spooky senses – which are presumably already on high alert this season – hit maximum capacity. He gives the implant to Scully and asks her to have it examined. There’s some kind of bar code on it which can’t be readily identified. Later, while doing her shopping, Scully decides to play a hunch and scans the implant at the checkout. This causes some weird language to flash up on the scanner and freaks her out a little.
She hurries home and immediately calls Mulder but only gets his answering machine. Quickly, she relays what happened at the shop, saying it’s almost like someone was using the implant to catalogue Duane. Then there’s a noise outside. ALARM BELLS. It’s Duane! He’s escaped from hospital and breaks into her apartment, kidnapping Scully as she calls frantically to Mulder for help. Sweet baby Jesus. Help me.
Ascension
AND IT GETS WORSE.
(There’s a lot in this, so bear with me.)
Mulder gets the answering machine message and hightails it over to Scully’s place, which is already on lockdown as a crime scene. There are signs of forced entry, everything’s smashed up and there’s blood on the ground. Scully’s mum shows up and Mulder takes her to one side. She says she had a dream about Scully being taken by someone. She’d wanted to call her but didn’t want to scare her, and reckons Scully would probably have laughed about it anyway. Oh, she wouldn’t have though. She wouldn’t have. :(
There’s a meeting at FBI HQ to plan an action. The Cigarette-Smoking Man is in attendance and sits in the back being his usually shady self. Skinner notes that Scully had described Duane as dangerous, delusional and possibly psychotic. Mulder’s suggestion that Duane’s allegations of alien abduction may not be so outlandish are not warmly received. They can’t figure out where Duane may have taken Scully because Duane himself didn’t know where he was supposed to be going. Skinner refuses to let Mulder spearhead the chase because he’s too close to it. He’s sent home home to sleep, which of course he doesn’t, and early the next day he’s already on the trail.
Duane has Scully tied up in his boot. He kills a traffic cop who pulls him over for speeding, but the cop’s dash cam picks up Scully hiding in the boot. It’s not much but at least they know she’s alive. Mulder listens back to a tape of his conversation with Duane during the hostage situation. When asked about the spot the aliens kidnapped him from, Duane said something about “ascending to the stars”. Working with Krycek, he twigs the road the cop was killed on leads to a park with a cable car viewing platform. It’s advertised in the local paper as an “ascent to the stars”. The two of them head off on the trail without informing Skinner, though Krycek calls it in to the Cigarette-Smoking Man when Mulder’s not looking.
They get to the park and find out that the cable car line is closed for summer. The operator recognises Duane but says he sent him up the mountain by road as the cable car’s out of action. Mulder insists on using it, against the operator’s advice. He tells Krycek to stay on the ground and ensure the operator doesn’t stop the car. No worries, because Krycek himself does that for free. He knocks out the operator and jams the car so that Mulder’s left hanging in mid-air. He then calls the Cigarette-Smoking Man for instructions. Mulder tries to get out of the car and climb down, but Krycek starts it moving again and he narrowly avoids falling off. Oy. Krycek is such a skeezy bastard. Notice how his hair is always oiled and combed and looks like it’d feel really gross if you touched it.
At the top, Mulder finds Duane’s car. Scully and Duane are gone but her necklace – a cross – is in the boot. An unmarked helicopter flies overhead. Mulder follows it and finds Duane alone. Scully is nowhere in sight. Duane is elated, saying “they” took her. Another helicopter flies overhead, sending Duane into a momentary panic as he thinks the aliens have come back for him. It’s mountain search and rescue – they bring Mulder and Duane down and send no fewer than five further patrols to look for Scully.
Mulder interrogates Duane and demands to know where Scully is. Duane insists he didn’t harm her. Mulder half-strangles him with anger and frustration. This is upsetting to watch. Hang in there, boo, we’ll find her. I know we will because we’ve seven seasons left. But I do understand your pain. He leaves the room and tells Krycek not to let anyone in. When he comes back, Krycek himself is in chatting to Duane. He claims Duane was gagging and couldn’t breathe. Skinner, the badass, rolls up at this precise moment in a sick, sick overcoat.
He is not best impressed with Mulder but before he can go on a rant proper, Duane kicks the bucket. The autopsy suggests asphyxiation as the cause of death but Mulder decides he was poisoned. He points out that the records are incomplete and alleges that, given a military pathologist did the autopsy, they must have swept the toxicology results under the rug. They know what happened to Scully and they’re trying to cover it up. The room emits a general scoff. Another agent asks Mulder why he’s so paranoid, and he replies that it’s because he finds it hard to trust anyone. But he trusted Scully. :(
Meanwhile, Krycek is secretly meeting the Cigarette-Smoking Man. He’s told to support Mulder’s contentions about Duane being poisoned so as to preserve the trust he’s earned. Krycek wants to know whether they’ll kill Mulder. The Cigarette-Smoking Man says he won’t be “eliminated” because it’s not policy, but Scully has been “taken care of”. Excuse you, you arsehole. Krycek seems taken aback that there’s no plan to remove Mulder from the equation, especially after what they had him do (this is presumably an implicit admission that he killed Duane). He is sternly informed that he has no right to know more and all he has to do is follow orders.
After his stormy meeting with Skinner and other agents, Mulder tries to see Senator Matheson. He finds Deep Throat 2.0 in a stairwell and is told it’s too politically dangerous for Matheson to help him out. “They” know what happened to Scully but their policy is simply to deny everything. Defeated, Mulder gets back in the car, which happens to be Krycek’s. He finds cigarette butts in the ashtray. Krycek doesn’t smoke. The penny drops noisily into place. He immediately goes to see Skinner with a report claiming Krycek murdered Duane. Skinner, who I totally had pegged as a good egg, is curt but receptive and asks him what he’s got. Mulder tells him about the cigarettes, dropping one recovered from the car in Skinner’s ashtray (which is littered with cigs, presumably from the Cigarette-Smoking Man).
Secondly, Krycek was the last person to see Duane before he died, and third, he was the last person to see the poor cable car operator who has MYSTERIOUSLY disappeared. Mulder also brings up the unmarked helicopter which flew over the scene before he got to Duane. He thinks Krycek could be working for the military or some covert organisation in government (I love this stuff), and they had Scully removed either because she had potentially damning evidence against them in the form of the implant or to prevent her from being further involved with Mulder’s work. He’s a wreck at this stage. He’s sad and tired and unshaven and feels so completely responsible for the entire mess. Thankfully, Skinner is willing to help him. He says this will make waves in the Bureau and that he can’t protect Mulder, but goes ahead and tells his assistant to call Krycek in. A short while later, the assistant calls back to tell him Krycek’s house phone has been disconnected and he never showed up for work today. Uh-oh.
Mulder begins to rage so Skinner tells him he’ll do the only thing he can do in the circumstances – reopen the X-Files. It’s the “one thing they’re afraid of”, he says. Pints for Skinner please! I love him. <3
Mulder leaves and meets Scully’s mum. He tells her he doesn’t have any more info yet, sadly. She’s still having the dream where someone takes Scully and it’s frightening her. Mulder comforts her by saying it’d be scarier if she stopped having it. Remember his theory about psychic links being stronger between family members? Maybe it runs in Scully’s family. He gives her the necklace he found in Duane’s car. It’s a cross, which is interesting because one wouldn’t expect a hardened skeptic to have religious faith. I thought this might have been signposted by some of her observations in “Beyond the Sea”. The necklace was a gift from her mum but the latter gives it back to Mulder, telling him to give it to Scully when he finds her. To revel in his sadness in the most utterly soul-destroying way possible, he completes the episode by climbing the mountain Duane took her to earlier and staring at the stars.
Fucking hell, lads.
This was a rollercoaster.
Some thoughts: I ASSUME the Cigarette-Smoking Man left his used cigs in Krycek’s car on purpose so that he’d be found out. Right? There’s a shot of him earlier in the episode where he’s sitting in (presumably) his own car watching Mulder and Krycek head off and he tips the cigarette butt out the window. This was before Krycek started asking questions, mind, but I wouldn’t put it past him to just bump the guy off to ensure the whole conspiracy is kept concealed. But who’s Mulder going to work the rejuvenated X-Files with? I’d love to see Skinner on the other end of the phone, rolling his eyes in exasperation as Mulder fires off one of his outlandish theories. Doubt that’ll happen somehow. But he evidently wants to help in what limited way he can, and I wonder how long it’ll take them to find Scully. Maybe Mulder will grow a sadness beard in the meantime. We all have our coping mechanisms.
Also, how the eff did Krycek explain away the missing cable car operator? Did he say he went for the world’s longest bathroom trip, or just clocked out of the office, never to return? Oy to the proverbial. These are the innocents caught in the fray.
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.
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