Post by Rainbow Rosa on Sept 27, 2017 1:39:38 GMT -5
"Pilot" [1X01]
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Robert Mandel
In their rush to establish the status quo, pilot episodes can often feel redundant in hindsight, belaboring points that the episodes immediately afterwards will take for granted. Watching The X-Files's pilot, with its endless streams of exposition, I got that feeling within the first five minutes.
It's unfair to hold this against the show, of course. "Are you familiar with the so-called X-Files?" we are asked. Of course I am familiar with the so-called X-Files; anyone even vaguely aware of pop-culture post-1990 is familiar with the so-called X-Files. But when Scully's superior asks her, "Do you know Fox Mulder?" she can't exactly say, "Well duh, he's the one who believes in aliens, and I'm the one who doesn't." No, instead she tells us in painstaking detail where Fox Mulder went to college, what he does at the bureau, why he's such a pariah among the FBI... Much of the dialogue in the first ten minutes of the show isn't "dialogue" so much as it is "characters reading one another's resumes back at one another."
I could dismiss this stilted exposition as first episode jitters; most people do. But I think it's more productive to view The X-Files's X-tremely useless X-position dumps not as a bug, but as a feature. Consider the episode's opening disclaimer, which claims that the pilot is inspired by true events, before immediately cutting to an alien abduction. Maybe you honestly believe in alien abductions, in which case, uh, good for you. But for most of the audience, the dissonance between the documentary disclaimer and the fantastical events immediately afterwards should send you a message: we are going to lie to you.
You paid attention to all that trivia we're given about Mulder's history with the bureau? Joke's on you, sheeple: you should have been paying attention to that guy smoking a cigarette lurking in the corner of the frame. (And lit by Venetian blinds, which as any cineaste will tell you, means he's a shady and morally ambiguous character.) (And by cineaste, of course, I mean "pleb who read the Wikipedia article on film noir once.) The plot of the pilot is a throwaway. This isn't Law and Order, where the show races from scene to scene, rapidly chung-chunging its way towards a conclusion. Mulder and Scully are struggling to find out what's happening in Bumfuck, Idaho, certainly, but there's no forward momentum here. They find evidence... but it's nonsensical, or it gets torched, or it's put in Warehouse 13 by the Marlboro Man. The real innovation The X-Files brings to the police procedural isn't the sci-fi trappings (Kolchak got there first, by CC's own admission) or the mistrust of the federal government (plenty of shows tap into that). It's the weird scenes that are never fully explained-- the random airplane turbulence, lost time, freaky nose tubes. If a good procedural is a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle, then The X-Files is a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with five extra pieces and only two corners. Its shit doesn't fit.
Of course, as anyone who's watched a good procedural shows, it's the cast dynamics that make or break the genre. And thankfully, Duchovny and Anderson have great chemistry and nail their characters right off the bat. Duchovny is a little wooden and his quips don't quite land, but he's wooden in a way that's off-kilter and charming. In real life, conspiracy theorists are deeply introverted and a little creepy; Duchovny has the single-minded obsession down pat, but he makes Mulder gregarious enough that you actually enjoy spending time with him.
Anderson is by far the better actor of the two, though. She provides the episode with its best moment: in act four, when the inanity of the whole case makes her break into delirious laughter in the howling rain. Is Scully laughing at Mulder or with Mulder? Based on Anderson's performance, I'd say a bit of both. Less convincing is the scene where she asks Mulder to scan the mosquito bites on her ass, which mostly seems contrived to get Gillian Anderson in a bathrobe. (You might be able to tell what I think about "shipping" as a phenomenon.)
It's not a perfect episode by any means, mainly because it dedicates so much of its extended runtime to the dumb plot with boring characters. The abductions were carried out by... the kid in a coma? I mean... okay. The show will eventually work out how to yank the characters back to square one in a way that isn't so anticlimactic... but we'll get to that later.
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Robert Mandel
"What the hell was that about?"
"Aw, y'know -- probably nothing..."
In their rush to establish the status quo, pilot episodes can often feel redundant in hindsight, belaboring points that the episodes immediately afterwards will take for granted. Watching The X-Files's pilot, with its endless streams of exposition, I got that feeling within the first five minutes.
It's unfair to hold this against the show, of course. "Are you familiar with the so-called X-Files?" we are asked. Of course I am familiar with the so-called X-Files; anyone even vaguely aware of pop-culture post-1990 is familiar with the so-called X-Files. But when Scully's superior asks her, "Do you know Fox Mulder?" she can't exactly say, "Well duh, he's the one who believes in aliens, and I'm the one who doesn't." No, instead she tells us in painstaking detail where Fox Mulder went to college, what he does at the bureau, why he's such a pariah among the FBI... Much of the dialogue in the first ten minutes of the show isn't "dialogue" so much as it is "characters reading one another's resumes back at one another."
I could dismiss this stilted exposition as first episode jitters; most people do. But I think it's more productive to view The X-Files's X-tremely useless X-position dumps not as a bug, but as a feature. Consider the episode's opening disclaimer, which claims that the pilot is inspired by true events, before immediately cutting to an alien abduction. Maybe you honestly believe in alien abductions, in which case, uh, good for you. But for most of the audience, the dissonance between the documentary disclaimer and the fantastical events immediately afterwards should send you a message: we are going to lie to you.
You paid attention to all that trivia we're given about Mulder's history with the bureau? Joke's on you, sheeple: you should have been paying attention to that guy smoking a cigarette lurking in the corner of the frame. (And lit by Venetian blinds, which as any cineaste will tell you, means he's a shady and morally ambiguous character.) (And by cineaste, of course, I mean "pleb who read the Wikipedia article on film noir once.) The plot of the pilot is a throwaway. This isn't Law and Order, where the show races from scene to scene, rapidly chung-chunging its way towards a conclusion. Mulder and Scully are struggling to find out what's happening in Bumfuck, Idaho, certainly, but there's no forward momentum here. They find evidence... but it's nonsensical, or it gets torched, or it's put in Warehouse 13 by the Marlboro Man. The real innovation The X-Files brings to the police procedural isn't the sci-fi trappings (Kolchak got there first, by CC's own admission) or the mistrust of the federal government (plenty of shows tap into that). It's the weird scenes that are never fully explained-- the random airplane turbulence, lost time, freaky nose tubes. If a good procedural is a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle, then The X-Files is a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with five extra pieces and only two corners. Its shit doesn't fit.
Of course, as anyone who's watched a good procedural shows, it's the cast dynamics that make or break the genre. And thankfully, Duchovny and Anderson have great chemistry and nail their characters right off the bat. Duchovny is a little wooden and his quips don't quite land, but he's wooden in a way that's off-kilter and charming. In real life, conspiracy theorists are deeply introverted and a little creepy; Duchovny has the single-minded obsession down pat, but he makes Mulder gregarious enough that you actually enjoy spending time with him.
Anderson is by far the better actor of the two, though. She provides the episode with its best moment: in act four, when the inanity of the whole case makes her break into delirious laughter in the howling rain. Is Scully laughing at Mulder or with Mulder? Based on Anderson's performance, I'd say a bit of both. Less convincing is the scene where she asks Mulder to scan the mosquito bites on her ass, which mostly seems contrived to get Gillian Anderson in a bathrobe. (You might be able to tell what I think about "shipping" as a phenomenon.)
It's not a perfect episode by any means, mainly because it dedicates so much of its extended runtime to the dumb plot with boring characters. The abductions were carried out by... the kid in a coma? I mean... okay. The show will eventually work out how to yank the characters back to square one in a way that isn't so anticlimactic... but we'll get to that later.
RATING:
X X X - -
