The Grand X-Periment Day 5

10/5/11

14) End Game- Season 2,Episode 17- This is the conclusion to the Colony story from last episode. Another packed one and another of my favorites in the early going. Lots of new info here,too. Scully gets captured and used by the Bounty Hunter as a bargaining chip. Mulder exchanges his sister for Scully and a botched sniper shot leaves Mulder sisterless once again. Mulder finds out from X that the Bounty Hunter is making his way back to his ship in the arctic and Mulder tries to beat him there. While the final showdown is all well and good, we find out that there are a bunch of Samantha clones and the bounty hunter says the original is still alive. We circle back around to Mulder almost dying since he is exposed to alien blood but being saved by Scully.

All that is nothing compared to one of my favorite action scenes in the series. Scully needs to know where Mulder is, so she goes to Skinner, who shuts her down. She then tricks X into showing up and when he tells her he can't reveal anything, Skinner and X engage in an epic ass beating contest with each other. This kind of cemented my love for Skinner as a character and also kicked X a notch above Deep Throat in my mind.

So, lots of excitement and lots more misinformation. Samantha's story about why all the clones exist is almost entirely BS if I remember correctly and the Bounty Hunter continues to lie, lie, lie every time he talks. Good, fun stuff with the series at the height of its creative powers.

15) Anasazi- Season 2, Episode 25- The second season closes out with another stellar episode. I had forgotten all that happens in this one. Mulder is acting really aggressive and bitchy. He yells at Scully, punches Skinner in the hallway of the FBI building for no good reason and generally just likes kicking people's asses. Shock after shock arrives in this one (SPOILERZ) as we see that Cancer Man is friends with Mulder's dad and they worked on the conspiracy together. The Thinker( a hacker referenced in the One Breath episode) has hacked all the government files on aliens and gives it to Mulder. Krycek comes back and murders Mulder's dad! He also takes a shot at Scully. Scully has to shoot Mulder to keep him from killing Krycek! Cancer Man decides no more screwing around, let's kill Mulder and leaves him in a hell of a death trap.

Really, this ep pushes the conspiracy storyline to a new level. No longer is Mulder just a nuisance to be tolerated and protected at the behest of his father, he is now an active enemy who must be silenced. They drug his water, murder his dad, cut off his contacts at the FBI and try to kill Scully. The whole thing is just well done even without the storyline about the boy in New Mexico finding a buried train car filled with alien (?) corpses. The Pilot, Red Museum, The Erlenmeyer Flask, Ascension and most of the other mythology episodes have been implying that humans are being infused with alien DNA. Mulder believes it is about a slow colonization. We finally get the answer to one of the mysteries in the pilot here. When they were on their first case, they dug up the body of a dead teenager and found it stunted and abnormal, now we know this is what happens to people who get purity control injected into them.

I don't recall at which point this show turns ponderous and overly complex but these first two seasons have been nothing but fun. I am remembering why I love this show so much.