12) Red Museum- Season 2, Episode 10- If you are keeping track at home, half of the first ten episodes of Season 2 are vital to the mythology arc of the show. That is a pretty high concentration. Red Museum is particularly tricky because it is a stealth mythology ep. When a teen vanishes in a small Wisconsin town only to stumble half naked out of the woods with "He Is One" written on his back, Mulder and Scully go check it out. Immediately, we meet the Church of the Red Museum, a group of Vegetarians who have set up their house of worship in the middle of cattle country. They suffer from religious persecution and seem like the obvious culprits. Before the end, we get a mysterious plane crash, a pervert who likes to video tape children in their bathrooms and a mysterious hormone being injected into both cows and people.
In the overall mythology, this kind of just acts as a refresher that the government testing is more insidious and widespread than originally thought. Up to now, we have gotten little nibbles at the big enchilada. Some folks get abducted and tested but that is really a ponderous system when you can just bribe the local pediatrician to inject all the kids in a town. Between the pilot and Duane Berry and this, we have people all over the country being used as guinea pigs to see if salvaged alien DNA can be used to alter humans. To what end? We still don't know, really. It just seems like the Tuskegee experiments writ large at this point. Testing for the sake of testing. It won't be until much later we figure out the why behind it all.
13) Colony- Season 2, Episode 16- The cold open is Mulder all puffy (like he was at the end of Erlenmeyer Flask) and being submerged in water to bring up his body temp. Scully busts in and says that warming him will kill him and he flatlines. Nice way to come into the action.
SPOILERS AHOY- I remember a lot about the overall conspiracy and it is actually better to keep what I know in mind rather than try to look at it all fresh because, otherwise, this is a super confusing episode. We find out later that the shape shifters are at war with the main group of aliens who are part of the conspiracy. Mulder already hints at colonization in these episodes since alien DNA is being introduced to the populace. The abortion doctors are all clones (although not considered an essential episode, Eve from Season 1 is all about clones) and Samantha Mulder is one of a set of clones, too. So, really, the bounty hunter is actually not a bad guy in all this under the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. At this early stage, it is easy to believe that Chris Carter and his writers had the masterplan worked out. Unfortunately, they end up throwing out not one but two almost completely false back stories in this script that live up to Deep Throat's assertion that a lie is best delivered between two truths.
Great Mulderism of the night: Scully asks him why he trusts a CIA agent that popped out of nowhere claiming to believe in his cause, "Whatever happened to trust no one, Mulder?"
He says, "Oh, I changed it to trust everyone. Didn't I tell you?"
Duchovny's deadpan delivery sells it. When we get to some of the later non-myth episodes, I will write more about how funny this show can be.
Tomorrow, a showdown on a submarine and a visit to an Indian reservation.
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