Season 3, Episode 12
Director: Kim Manners
Writer: Darin Morgan

With all due respect to Indiana Jones, but cockroaches… Why did it have to be cockroaches?

“War of the Coprophages” begins with an amusing entry into this marvel of eccentricity and absurdist humor. A man waxes poetic about a cockroach, about its place in the world, and promptly and unceremoniously kills it. The camera pulls back to reveal an exterminator dealing with a cockroach infestation in Dr. Jeff Eckerle’s basement. This being The X-Files, though, the man struggles to breathe and falls to the walls where hundreds of cockroaches begin pouring out of a crack in the foundation. As Eckerle reappears, he sees the exterminator’s dead body, covered in cockroaches.

If “War of the Coprophages” were a more traditional episode of X-Files, then it would be near-unbearable to watch, something like a low-rent TV version of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, perhaps. Instead, “War” has its tongue so firmly in cheek here that it may never again see the light of day. After you ease into it, the cockroach attacks don’t seem so terrible. In fact, various displays of human angst quickly become far more disgusting that the tiny insects themselves. As a stand-alone episode, “War of the Coprophages” will never win Emmys or even find its way to the top of series’ “best of” lists, but it isn’t without significant pleasures.

Mulder, taking a break from FBI work to do a little on-the-side UFO sighting in the town of Miller’s Grove, manages to find his way into this cockroach conundrum. One of the more amusing aspects of the show is the near-identical conversations he has on the phone with Scully. He calls to ask for her to join him. She asks why. He tells her of a death. She explains it away through science. He says OK and hangs up. End of story. This exchange occurs a few times becoming progressively funnier as it moves along. After multiple murders are uncovered, Mulder meets a sexy researcher, Dr. Bambi Berenbaum (Bobbie Phillips, Showgirls), who is as into bugs as she is into UFO conspiracies. Mulder is immediately entranced. Cue Scully packing to join his investigation.

When she arrives in town, Scully is confronted by mass hysteria. There is a fantastic scene in a gas station where society has completely crumbled, and people are grabbing anything they can to flee town, away from the killer cockroaches. The investigation ultimately leads to Eckerle’s own research facility where he explores alternative fuel sources, including animal dung. Thinking the cockroach infestation may be attributed to the dung, Mulder, Dr. Bambi, and Scully arrive at the facility where Eckerle has gone insane thanks to the constant presence of cockroaches. As Mulder tries to reason with him, Eckerle fires a gun that ricochets into a pipe containing methane gas. He and Scully race out of the building, making it out just as the facility erupts causing shit to fly into the air. We close with a cute scene involving Mulder studying a massive cockroach that sits and watches him file a report before smashing it with an x-file.

I can’t begin to tell you what “War of the Coprophages” is about, and I suspect it really is intended to be about nothing at all – just a purely amusing footnote in the series’ long history. There are countless chuckle-worthy moments – Mulder and Scully’s early interactions, the cockroach deaths, the bizarre characters that pop out of the woodwork – that really sell the episode. Plus, it’s just an imaginatively written episode, meandering all over the place but somehow remaining consistent in tone. At one point, Mulder hypothesizes that the cockroaches are actually tiny mechanical bugs sent here by aliens. Of course he does.

The direct associations between the widespread infestation of cockroaches and the seemingly random deaths in Miller’s Grove is never fully explored. And that’s OK. What remains outside of the central mystery is far stronger: a playful and engaging comic story about the budding romantic relationship between two colleagues who are iconically perfect for each other.

Season 3, Episode 11
Director: David Nutter
Writer: Kim Newton

Any episode of The X-Files that stars R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) as a preacher who may or may not have stigmata is alright by me. That said, it’s even better when it attempts to merge consistent theming with a deeper exploration of Mulder and Scully. So, naturally, I very much responded to “Revelations,” an episode that nearly eschews plot mechanics (it doesn’t, but it definitely takes a backseat) in favor of growing Mulder and Scully as characters.

The episode begins with Ermey standing in front of his rapt congregation giving an intense sermon. At its conclusion, he casts his hands skyward, squeezing his fists until blood trickles through his fingers which elicits understandable gasps from the audience. One man watches intently and approaches Ermey backstage after the service completes. He grabs the preacher around the throat and steam begins to pour from his neck. Ermey screams as blood trickles to his feat. Good stuff.

The stigmatic condition, of course, was faked as Mulder and Scully discover when they investigate. Mulder was tracking similar cases across the world – this marked the twelfth such incident. Later, a young boy begins to legimately bleed from his palms when called in front of the class. Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate as the boy is sent to a children’s home when his family life is questioned. There, he is kidnapped by a massive and vaguely deformed man (Michael Berryman, The Hills Have Eyes) who claims to have been called by God to protect him. Mulder and Scully track down the boy and barely rescue him from the man who killed the preacher earlier in the episode. The man, apparently an agent of Satan, does manage to eventually kidnap the boy with the intention of sacrificing him to bring about a dark age (i.e. – all that stuff in Revelations). As the man plunges into trash shredder, the boy manages to cling to a railing, allowing Scully to save him. The entire experience stirs Scully’s faith, sending her to confessional for the first time in six years. There, she wonders if God is out there and if he’s listening at all.

The basic events of the episode aren’t a revelation on their own. It’s a fairly straightforward cat-and-mouse game with a tinge of the supernatural. What truly sets it apart is the exploration of faith and belief throughout the episode. The opening shows a church audience begging to believe in their preacher and in a higher power, yet their faith is misplaced and betrayed – the preacher is a fake. When the real thing comes along (the boy with stigmata), Scully is drawn to him having always expressed a degree of father in a higher being. She ultimately takes the position of the protector of the young boy, of her religious faith, and goes to great lengths to save it. Ironically, given Scully’s persistent belief in the intangible aspects of religious faith, Mulder is skeptic through the episode. He doesn’t believe in the Biblical signs, in the boy’s stigmata, and slightly ridicules Scully for her faith. It is a nice way to turn the tables on the relationship and view the series through the eyes of someone who wants to believe – just not in aliens.

Is “Revelations” heavy-handed? Maybe a little. Scully and Mulder argue at the end about the very topics they’ve previously discussed in a much more subtle manner. Still, whether it be subtext or up-front text, the presence of a conversation and a theme in which you can sink your teeth into is greatly appreciated. “Revelations” isn’t a great episode of The X-Files, but it is a very good one if only because it takes the time to deepen the two characters in which we must believe and follow as central points of the show.

Season 3, Episode 10
Director: Rob Bownman
Writer: Frank Spotnitz

The X-Files‘s “731” picks up roughly where we left off as the second part of an unfortunate mythology 2-parter. The beginning is the more compelling component of the episode as we continue to explore recent themes of human experimentation and mass genocide. It’s not long, though, before we’re back ridin’ that train with Fox Mulder and we’re further degrading the character of Dana Scully.

The opening shows the aforementioned human experiments loaded onto a truck and carried out in the middle of nowhere. A few manage to escape, and one hideously deformed individual watches from the woods as the remaining subjects are lined up in front of a massive pit and machined gunned to death, Nazi style. This scene plays into Scully’s investigations as she is ultimately led to the same warehouse a short while later. There, she finds surviving members who tell her the site was a quarantine area for those suffering from high communicable diseases – or so they’ve been told. One slightly disfigured person shows her the pit full of dead bodies that, from my vantage point, look more like Communion-level aliens than lepers. But that’s just me. Soon, a helicopter approaches, and Scully is kidnapped by armed men. Her companion is presumably killed, and she receives an explanation from an unknown man roughly stating the same thing – it’s a leper colony. Uh huh.

Meanwhile, Mulder gains access into the train on which he jumped and manages to locate the Japanese scientist thought to be heavily involved in all the experiments Mulder and Scully have been tracking since the discovery of the alien autopsy tape. However, before Mulder can corner him, the scientist is brutally murdered by a mysterious agent on board the train. Over a very slow course of events, Mulder manages to gain entry into the mysterious train car and sees a humanoid or alien locked in a secret room. Just before opening the door, the murdering agent sneaks up on him and tries to kill Mulder. Thanks to the train conductor’s assistance, Mulder gets the upper hand but discovers the car is a giant bomb, triggered by their entry. Calling through a mutual acquaintance (don’t ask), Scully warns Mulder of the bomb just a little too late but reveals to him she knows the truth – the evil Japanese doctor has been conducting unauthorized experiments on people and, somehow, that explains her “abduction.” Mulder eventually gets out of the train car thanks to the convenient assistance of X, and the whole thing blows sky high. At the end, Mulder and Scully share a tense moment as they clearly stand on opposite sides of belief.

I’ve clearly stated my objections to these mythology 2-parters, and they still stand here. The vast conspiracies and unwieldy plot twists are too much to follow or even believe. The chief sin that “731” commits is the dumbing down of Dana Scully. After the first season finale where she comes face to face with an alien fetus and near irrefutable proof that the government has been working on human / alien hybrids, she is now easily assuaged that the whole affair was just the machinations of the Japanese doctor. Yes, let’s just forget everything you’ve seen and witnessed first hand. Let’s just forget that Scully is a medical doctor who would clearly be able to tell the difference between people suffering from leprosy and alien bodies. Let’s ignore the fact that the government shouldn’t just fills pits full of people suffering from random diseases. Let’s just believe what yet another white man in a trench coat who you’ve never met before and have zero reason to trust says. Yeah, that’s Dana Scully of Season Three X-Files – dumbed down by Chris Carter.

That’s the biggest crime of all.

Season 3, Episode 9
Director: David Nutter
Writer: Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, Howard Gordon

You can feel it coming on like a migraine… You know the sensation: the four-door sedans, the faceless men in dark clothes and trench coats packing heat, and the casual alien references. Yes, it’s time for a mythology episode. Despite all the good will of the past few episodes – the amazing cinematography, the taut scares, and even the unexpected gore – The X-Files returns to mythology blandness in “Nisei,” an episode that wraps around and around itself, nearly choking on its mythological misdirection.

The catalyst for the return is a videotape that Mulder buys in a magazine on a whim. On the videotape is what appears to be an autopsy of an actual alien. Scully is, of course, skeptical, but Mulder believes that its ordinariness is a sign of truth behind it. He’s right. In the prologue, we see the autopsy and the aftermath as a collection of men in black open fire on the operating doctors. Mulder and Scully’s investigation of the tape eventually lead them into two separate directions. She meets a group of women, some of whom “recognize” Scully from her supposed alien abduction. One thing is for sure: they all share the mysterious chip implanted in their neck that Scully found and removed a few episodes ago. Bewildered and unwilling to dig deeper, Scully is told that they all suffer from Stage 4 cancer, an unfortunate side effect of the alien experimentation. Mulder’s story takes him to a naval shipyard where he is almost killed by men in black while he explores a docked ship. Returning at night, he sees what appears to be a giant UFO in a hanger. Eventually stumbling on the train car in which the autopsy was originally filmed, he drops from a bridge onto the train to gain entry despite warnings from Scully (via X) that his life is in danger. Earlier, Mulder glimpsed what appeared to be an alien, alive and walking, in a hazmat suit, and he is driven to investigate. To be continued…

While mythology episodes certainly are not my strong suit with the series, “Nisei” ultimately feels flat and uninspired when compared to some of the more mature and creatively staged episodes we’ve recently seen. Chris Carter had a hand in writing this one, and he writes with big ideas and big sequences whether they make sense or not. Mulder’s escape from the men in black involved him jumping into the water some five seconds after a soldier passed by him is ridiculous – like they wouldn’t hear him immediately. Aside from gaps in logic, the plot line meanders in all kinds of weird directions, starting from the videotape to the Japanese government official to the shipyard to the cluster of alien abducted women to the alien autopsy train. The story is meant to dazzle and deliberately confuse us with its elaborate conspiracies into all reaches of local, national, and international government. Yet, the elaborate conspiracy chokes the life out of the episode – we’re so damned determined to move to the Next Cool Thing that we can’t rest and enjoy some of the eccentricities that have grown to color the show in interesting ways.

That’s not to say “Nisei” is a total failure of an episode. Scully’s scenes with the abducted women are fantastically eerie in a Stepford Wives kind of way. They’re so serene and calm about their past, present, and future that Scully (and the audience) are overwhelmed by the events. Scully’s abduction is most likely the key to evolving the series further because it serves as the proof she (and we) need of Mulder’s broader, more fantastical theories. Exposing Scully to the mythology in this manner works on many levels, and I wanted to spend more time with it.

Instead, we get action star David Duchovny, leaping from boats and onto trains like he was Tom Cruise. But that’s a different set of aliens altogether…

Season 3, Episode 8
Director: Kim Manners
Writer: Charles Grant Craig

The X-Files hits Mulder where it hurts in “Oubliette,” an episode dedicated to the real-life horrors of child abduction and its brutal aftermath. With only a small supernatural connection, the episode has to sink or swim based on its human element, and it acquits itself nicely. Plus, David Duchovny succeeds in his bid to demonstrate some acting range that many felt, up until this point, he hadn’t really displayed. Okay, let’s be nice and say hadn’t had the opportunity to display…

An “oubliette” is defined as a dungeon that opens only at the top, which fits with the story line as it deals with the abduction and subsequent imprisonment of a young girl. We open with the actual abduction of Amy Jacobs (Jewel Staite), but, this being The X-Files, we are also introduced to Lucy Householder (Tracey Ellis) who experiences everything Amy experiences through some sort of psychic connection. When Amy’s nose starts bleeding, Lucy’s nose finishes. When Amy’s face is scratched, Lucy’s bears the scars. When Amy is cold and wet, water drips from Lucy. You get the picture. Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate, and nearly everyone suspects Lucy was directly involved in the kidnapping, particularly since the blood that stains Lucy’s clothing is effectively Amy’s blood. Mulder, however, believes in Lucy and tries to explore her connection with Amy because Lucy was once herself the victim of a similar kidnapping at the same man’s hands. At the end of the episode, the kidnapper is discovered by the FBI but flees to the river to drown Amy. As he does so, Lucy begins to gasp for air on dry land. After killing the kidnapper, Mulder uses CPR to resuscitate Amy but is not able to save Lucy, who dies from drowning.

“Oubliette” isn’t an effective “monster of the week” show, but that’s OK. It gets thrown into the category because it doesn’t truly deal with the overall mythology of the series (thankfully). Instead, it forces the supernatural element to the side and pulls forward the human story as the central drama. Mulder’s obsession with saving Amy/Lucy clearly ties into his unresolved feelings for saving his own sister, Samantha, who was abducted by aliens. Amy is even kidnapped through an open bedroom window, much like Samantha was years ago. The whole kidnaping storyline is truthfully rendered and feels eerily similar to too many real-life cases of missing and murdered young women. It’s hard to call this episode an entertainment given that fact and given Duchovny’s full-on dive into the emotional truth of the situation – the damaged authoritarian figure who tries to save the damaged women in his life.

By focusing more on the reality of child abduction and those damaged by it, The X-Files takes a huge risk in turning off viewers anticipating a classic science-fiction storyline. But there are rewards to be had here if you’re willing to invest in real human emotion over the shock value frequently offered in regular X-Files outings. “Oubliette” may at times appear one-note and predictable, but it doesn’t diminish the power of real fear and of true-life salvation.