Post by Rainbow Rosa on Jun 5, 2020 0:57:53 GMT -5
"Conduit" [1x04]
Written by Alex Gansa & Howard Gordon
Directed by Daniel Sackheim
This episode is not quite as focused as "Squeeze," but it does give us some creepy imagery and some "character development" for Mulder.
What Happened? A middle aged woman is rudely awoken by a lot of loud jangling in her RV. She touches the handle to get out, which she needs an oven mitt for because it's dummy hot, and he goes outside to find her son bawling. Why? Because he shit his pants!!! Just kidding, his sister is missing!!! Cue opening credits.
Scully is called into her office by her superior, who I'm just realizing now is the cop who's nice to Shaft in the movie Shaft (the good Shaft, not the Sam Jackson one or, god forbid, the Jessie Usher one). Anyway, he's mad because Mulder wants to investigate a story from a tabloid about an alleged alien abduction - possibly because the case bears some similarity to the disappearance of Mulder's sister. Scully calls Mulder out on it, and he says that the mother of the abducted girl also saw an alien abduction in the 60s as a girl scout.
So they travel to Iowa to meet the family, where Mulder caresses a photo of the missing daughter. He also tries talking to the mom's kid, whose name is Kevin (KEVIN! KEVIN!! KEVIN!!!) and whose hobby seems to be staring at television static and writing down numbers based on what's on the screen. Jeez, is this what kids did before Minecraft? Okay. The mom (whose name is Darlene, by the way) is convinced that aliens took her precious Ruby (which is her daughter's name, by the way), but Scully thinks that it might be her divorced husband (whose name is Aloysius, by the way - just kidding, it's probably like Todd or something). Spoilers: it's not the husband.
Mulder faxes his friend at the FBI Kevin's scribbles, and the two head to a dive bar full of bikers trying to find Ruby's boyfriend. Wait, uh, they get tipped off about the boyfriend by a mysterious girl who leaves a note on Mulder's windshield. Wait, uh, they stop by the sheriff's office first, and he says that Ruby is a bad, bad girl who probably ran away because she's a tramp, or whatever. This episode has a lot of plot in the first fifteen minutes, apparently. Okay, so they go to a dive and Mulder pretends to be a Scully and tells the bartender UFOs are all made up. The bartender, in a grisly/cool moment, parts his hair back to reveal that his ear's been burned off by radiation from the nearby lake. Woah.
Then, apparently, NSA agents burst into Scully's hotel room - ok, Scully's in bed now? Uh, sure. They're mad because apparently, baby Kevin has intercepted military satellite transmissions, and the NSA needs to know where the hell Mulder got it. Scully narcs, which Mulder says is a bad idea. They ransack Darlene's house and take Kevin in for questioning, which she is understandably extremely pissed about. Later, a lady at FBI headquarters helpfully explains to Mulder and Scully what binary code is, and that Kevin has somehow written down DNA info, an mp3 of the Brandenburg concertos, and Koranic scriptures, all transcribed into binary. (As kids do.) Darlene is still fucking pissed, so Mulder and Scully go to the lake where the abduction happened, and chase a wolf (!?!?) over to a freshly dug grave, which Mulder attempts to undig himself, out of some compulsion. Scully's like "nooooo Mulder don't disturb the evidence!"
So the body turns out to be of Ruby's boyfriend, and he had a note in his pocket or something which, via some not particularly interesting plot shenanigans, turns out to belong to the sneaky girl from the library. By which I mean after the girl left the note on Mulder's windshield he followed her into a library and told her about the boyfriend. But, gasp, we find out that she got an abortion and the dead guy was the father, who she killed or something, but she didn't kill Ruby because she wasn't there. Okay. They go back to the house and find no one's there, and that Kevin has somehow covered the floor in his scribbles - which, in a cool shot, turn out to not be numbers at all but a picture of his sister!! Wow!! So they chase Kevin and Darlene back into the forest by the lake where a bunch of bikers shine their lights really brightly and, hey, Ruby is there now.
In the hospital room, Kevin and Ruby debate whether to let Mulder and Scully in on the truth - but then, Darlene tells the two of them to leave, because she doesn't want her children to be ostracized for telling the truth about the abduction, like she's been all her life. Scully listens to tapes of a hypnotized Mulder describing his sister's abduction; meanwhile, Mulder goes to church and cries.
Is It Any Good? As this above plot description might imply, the plot here is sort of jumbled. There's a lot of cool imagery in the script here, from the binary picture (scroll up) to the burnt ear to Kevin sitting dumbfounded in front of the television; director Daniel Sackheim has a great knack for imagery (as demonstrated by his work on The Americans in particular, and also basically every prestige show of the past two decades), and he adds a lot of visual flair to scenes like the library confrontation, which is shot like a scene from an Alan Pakula thriller, or by dousing Mulder in blue during the final scene. I get the distinct impression, though, that this episode isn't a coherent plot so much as a bunch of cool visuals which Gansa and Gordon attempted to glue together with some Mulder background. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work, because the "subtext" that Mulder is projecting his guilt over his sister's abduction onto Kevin and Ruby is absurdly unsubtle - Shaft Guy literally exposits this in the first two minutes of the episode, and Mulder practically dry-humps a picture of Ruby minutes later. It doesn't help that Duchovny is not known for his great emotional range (which isn't to say he's bad here, or in the rest of the series, he's just not great at subtle). The final scene is fairly affecting, but that's largely because The X-Files is extremely good at these mood moments, which feel restrained in a way this episode isn't.
One bright spot, though, is the non-resolution of the plot: we're so used to cover-ups and government malfeasance in this sort of show, that it's a pleasant surprise when information is concealed not to protect the powerful, but out of maternal love. And Darlene is right to want to protect her kids - look how callously the NSA guys destroy her home. It's a good character moment that Scully is happy to comply with the government while Mulder isn't, knowing full well that this kid isn't going to get off easy - and it's also a good moment when the tables are turned when Mulder wants info that could destroy Kevin's life.
Why Doesn't Scully Believe in Aliens Yet? Good question: there's a lot of weird shit going on in this episode. Actually, too much weird shit, so much so that I think Scully should believe in five million different conspiracy theories.
Most Nineties Moment? I'm adding this category in honor of the wonderful scene where the FBI agent helpfully explains that all information can be stored in a series of ones and zeroes, which somehow results in Kevin writing down DNA samples and MP3s of the Western canon. If you're curious just how batshit this is: by the looks of it, Kevin writes down maybe 500 to 600 digits per sheet of paper - this means that each page has a whopping two bytes of data on it. A blank Microsoft Word document would take Kevin 10,000 pages to create. Oh, and PS, did you notice how when Mulder's looking at the document, it's extremely obvious that a crew member wrote most of the document and then handed it to the child actor to continue, and that the two have completely different handwriting? This gives me bad flashbacks to when I was prop mistress on a webseries and resorted to using my left hand to write stuff so that not all the characters would have identical handwriting.
Written by Alex Gansa & Howard Gordon
Directed by Daniel Sackheim
This episode is not quite as focused as "Squeeze," but it does give us some creepy imagery and some "character development" for Mulder.
What Happened? A middle aged woman is rudely awoken by a lot of loud jangling in her RV. She touches the handle to get out, which she needs an oven mitt for because it's dummy hot, and he goes outside to find her son bawling. Why? Because he shit his pants!!! Just kidding, his sister is missing!!! Cue opening credits.
Scully is called into her office by her superior, who I'm just realizing now is the cop who's nice to Shaft in the movie Shaft (the good Shaft, not the Sam Jackson one or, god forbid, the Jessie Usher one). Anyway, he's mad because Mulder wants to investigate a story from a tabloid about an alleged alien abduction - possibly because the case bears some similarity to the disappearance of Mulder's sister. Scully calls Mulder out on it, and he says that the mother of the abducted girl also saw an alien abduction in the 60s as a girl scout.
So they travel to Iowa to meet the family, where Mulder caresses a photo of the missing daughter. He also tries talking to the mom's kid, whose name is Kevin (KEVIN! KEVIN!! KEVIN!!!) and whose hobby seems to be staring at television static and writing down numbers based on what's on the screen. Jeez, is this what kids did before Minecraft? Okay. The mom (whose name is Darlene, by the way) is convinced that aliens took her precious Ruby (which is her daughter's name, by the way), but Scully thinks that it might be her divorced husband (whose name is Aloysius, by the way - just kidding, it's probably like Todd or something). Spoilers: it's not the husband.
Mulder faxes his friend at the FBI Kevin's scribbles, and the two head to a dive bar full of bikers trying to find Ruby's boyfriend. Wait, uh, they get tipped off about the boyfriend by a mysterious girl who leaves a note on Mulder's windshield. Wait, uh, they stop by the sheriff's office first, and he says that Ruby is a bad, bad girl who probably ran away because she's a tramp, or whatever. This episode has a lot of plot in the first fifteen minutes, apparently. Okay, so they go to a dive and Mulder pretends to be a Scully and tells the bartender UFOs are all made up. The bartender, in a grisly/cool moment, parts his hair back to reveal that his ear's been burned off by radiation from the nearby lake. Woah.
Then, apparently, NSA agents burst into Scully's hotel room - ok, Scully's in bed now? Uh, sure. They're mad because apparently, baby Kevin has intercepted military satellite transmissions, and the NSA needs to know where the hell Mulder got it. Scully narcs, which Mulder says is a bad idea. They ransack Darlene's house and take Kevin in for questioning, which she is understandably extremely pissed about. Later, a lady at FBI headquarters helpfully explains to Mulder and Scully what binary code is, and that Kevin has somehow written down DNA info, an mp3 of the Brandenburg concertos, and Koranic scriptures, all transcribed into binary. (As kids do.) Darlene is still fucking pissed, so Mulder and Scully go to the lake where the abduction happened, and chase a wolf (!?!?) over to a freshly dug grave, which Mulder attempts to undig himself, out of some compulsion. Scully's like "nooooo Mulder don't disturb the evidence!"
So the body turns out to be of Ruby's boyfriend, and he had a note in his pocket or something which, via some not particularly interesting plot shenanigans, turns out to belong to the sneaky girl from the library. By which I mean after the girl left the note on Mulder's windshield he followed her into a library and told her about the boyfriend. But, gasp, we find out that she got an abortion and the dead guy was the father, who she killed or something, but she didn't kill Ruby because she wasn't there. Okay. They go back to the house and find no one's there, and that Kevin has somehow covered the floor in his scribbles - which, in a cool shot, turn out to not be numbers at all but a picture of his sister!! Wow!! So they chase Kevin and Darlene back into the forest by the lake where a bunch of bikers shine their lights really brightly and, hey, Ruby is there now.
In the hospital room, Kevin and Ruby debate whether to let Mulder and Scully in on the truth - but then, Darlene tells the two of them to leave, because she doesn't want her children to be ostracized for telling the truth about the abduction, like she's been all her life. Scully listens to tapes of a hypnotized Mulder describing his sister's abduction; meanwhile, Mulder goes to church and cries.
Is It Any Good? As this above plot description might imply, the plot here is sort of jumbled. There's a lot of cool imagery in the script here, from the binary picture (scroll up) to the burnt ear to Kevin sitting dumbfounded in front of the television; director Daniel Sackheim has a great knack for imagery (as demonstrated by his work on The Americans in particular, and also basically every prestige show of the past two decades), and he adds a lot of visual flair to scenes like the library confrontation, which is shot like a scene from an Alan Pakula thriller, or by dousing Mulder in blue during the final scene. I get the distinct impression, though, that this episode isn't a coherent plot so much as a bunch of cool visuals which Gansa and Gordon attempted to glue together with some Mulder background. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work, because the "subtext" that Mulder is projecting his guilt over his sister's abduction onto Kevin and Ruby is absurdly unsubtle - Shaft Guy literally exposits this in the first two minutes of the episode, and Mulder practically dry-humps a picture of Ruby minutes later. It doesn't help that Duchovny is not known for his great emotional range (which isn't to say he's bad here, or in the rest of the series, he's just not great at subtle). The final scene is fairly affecting, but that's largely because The X-Files is extremely good at these mood moments, which feel restrained in a way this episode isn't.
One bright spot, though, is the non-resolution of the plot: we're so used to cover-ups and government malfeasance in this sort of show, that it's a pleasant surprise when information is concealed not to protect the powerful, but out of maternal love. And Darlene is right to want to protect her kids - look how callously the NSA guys destroy her home. It's a good character moment that Scully is happy to comply with the government while Mulder isn't, knowing full well that this kid isn't going to get off easy - and it's also a good moment when the tables are turned when Mulder wants info that could destroy Kevin's life.
Why Doesn't Scully Believe in Aliens Yet? Good question: there's a lot of weird shit going on in this episode. Actually, too much weird shit, so much so that I think Scully should believe in five million different conspiracy theories.
Most Nineties Moment? I'm adding this category in honor of the wonderful scene where the FBI agent helpfully explains that all information can be stored in a series of ones and zeroes, which somehow results in Kevin writing down DNA samples and MP3s of the Western canon. If you're curious just how batshit this is: by the looks of it, Kevin writes down maybe 500 to 600 digits per sheet of paper - this means that each page has a whopping two bytes of data on it. A blank Microsoft Word document would take Kevin 10,000 pages to create. Oh, and PS, did you notice how when Mulder's looking at the document, it's extremely obvious that a crew member wrote most of the document and then handed it to the child actor to continue, and that the two have completely different handwriting? This gives me bad flashbacks to when I was prop mistress on a webseries and resorted to using my left hand to write stuff so that not all the characters would have identical handwriting.
RATING
X X X - -
