At the end of Season 1, the X Files had been discontinued and Mulder and Scully have been assigned to other duties. Season 2 kicks off with “Little Green Men” (S2, E1) in which Mulder investigates an alien signal picked up by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This episode feels very cinematic. There’s a lot of location shooting, a car chase, and Mulder and Scully are separate for much of the episode each doing their own thing. We also get a flashback to Mulder’s sister being abducted. It’s like a mini movie. I had forgotten about how much Mulder likes sunflower seeds until the opening scene depicts him with his feet buried in shells.

The next episode “The Host” (S2, E2) features a mutant creature living in the sewers and has some really good jump scares. The episode drags a bit though, continuing past the point where it seems like everything should have been wrapped up. It’s like they finished early and had to tack on a few extra scenes to fill the remaining run time.

X replaces Deep Throat as the government guy secretly feeding the duo information. In the first few episodes, we don’t see his face, we just hear his voice. I actually don’t remember X very well from back when I originally watched this. I think he’s more forgettable than Deep Throat was. His occasional phone calls to Mulder aren’t very helpful either, at least at the beginning of this season.

The opening scene of “Blood” (S2, E3) hits a little close to home for me since I too used to be a postal worker who typed addresses all day long. It’s a monotonous job, but I was good at it. The killer in “Blood” uses a combination of pesticide and subliminal messages to turn people who have phobias into killers. Seems like a needlessly complicated way to kill random people to me. The Lone Gunmen return in this episode. I thought they were cool when I first watched this, but they just come off like a bunch of incels nowadays, especially Frohike who does nothing but creepily hit on Scully. Even when she isn’t there!

This episode didn’t age well in other ways. The local sheriff claims people in his small town don’t have substance abuse problems or even drink very much. This contradicts the real world in which people living in small towns have much higher rates of opioid and alcohol abuse than city-dwellers. The local sheriff also claims murder only happens in big cities. This reminds me of a recent study that found gun deaths are more likely in small towns than big cities due to the fact suicide is much more common in small towns.

Mulder gets a new partner named Alex Krycek in “Sleepless” (S2, E4). In this episode, Tony Todd (best known for the Candyman and the Final Destination movies) plays a guy who doesn’t sleep. This gives him the power to make people hallucinate until they die. Unlike Scully, Mulder’s new partner Krycek is a fellow believer and he also acts like more of a rookie. It’s an interesting new dynamic. It also turns out Krycek is secretly working for the Smoking Man. The members of the conspiracy act like stopping Mulder and Scully is hard when all they have to do is kill them. They don’t do this to avoid turning Mulder into a martyr, but Mulder isn’t well-known enough to become a martyr. He’s presented as largely keeping to himself. Is the Smoking Man worried he’ll have to deal with the Lone Gunmen if he kills Mulder? They’d be even easier to handle than Mulder was!

I used to think the Smoking Man was a cool villain, but he doesn’t really do anything and hardly even talks. I think the reason I thought he was cool is the Boba Fett Effect. Mysterious characters you know little about are cool because they have the potential to be anyone, but the more you see them, the less mysterious they are, which makes them less cool.

The aliens in “Duane Barry” (S2, E5) are scary at first because we only get glimpses of them. As we get a better look at them as the episode progresses, they become less terrifying. The scene in which the aliens drill holes in his teeth is painful to watch because it reminds me of the dentist. The dog in the opening of this episode was pretty impressive as an actor. Mulder is wearing a very skimpy swimsuit when we first see him. I hadn’t noticed how much the show objectifies him until I started rewatching this. (The show will find reasons for him to take his shirt off in a few more episodes this season.) There’s a scene in which Scully is buying groceries and she writes a check. Little things like this make you realize how old the show is. I think this is the first episode to end with To Be Continued after we see Scully attacked.

In the follow-up episode, “Ascension” (S2, E6), Mulder is so desperate to get the kidnapped Scully back, he threatens to kill a park ranger who’s reluctant to let him use a dangerous gondola. He also refuses to let Krycek drive after falling asleep at the wheel and almost killing them. Reckless behavior is supposed to be cool, I guess. Mulder doesn’t rescue Scully, but we see her get impregnated, presumably by aliens.

Mulder finds out Krycek is working for the Smoking Man, which leads to Skinner deciding to reopen the X Files. (This doesn’t entirely make sense, since Skinner works with the Smoking Man, plus Mulder was still investigating supernatural cases even with the X Files closed, but whatever.) I didn’t notice exactly when Skinner went from being antagonistic towards Mulder to being on his side, but he’s firmly on his side by this point. It’s not entirely clear why. I guess Skinner just woke up one morning and thought, “You know what? Instead of standing in Mulder’s way, from now on, I’m going to start helping him for no particular reason.”

I think “3” (S2, E7) is the first episode of The X Files without Scully in it. (Actor Gillian Anderson was having a baby at the time.) She’s still missing, so Mulder investigates a sexy vampire on his own. Mulder is totally out-of-place showing up to an S&M club in his suit and tie. There’s even a scene in which he’s shaving at the sexy vampire’s house for some reason so he can cut himself shaving and she can be tempted by the blood. There was an earlier episode of The X Files, I think it was “Eve”, in which a victim is found drained of blood with puncture wounds on the neck and nobody even mentions vampires. This episode doesn’t really fit the overall feel of The X Files. It feels like a completely different show took over the time slot for the week. It was sexy, though.

Scully suddenly reappears in a hospital in “One Breath” (S2, E8) in a coma. We learn Scully has a couple brothers (who we only see as kids in a flashback) and a sister who we see in the present day. Her sister agrees with the doctor that they shouldn’t just keep Scully alive in a vegetative state and Mulder angrily accuses her of being “politically correct” which was confusing. Back in the 1990s, I thought “politically correct” or “PC” referred to speaking in a way to avoid offending anyone. If you were being politically correct, it meant you didn’t use racial slurs or derogatory language to refer to women or people with disabilities. But I guess conservatives like Mulder use the term to describe anything they don’t like, just like conservatives today use the word “woke” without knowing what it actually means.

In the first season, I think it was “Ghost in the Machine”, Mulder calls the elevator “politically correct” for announcing which floor they were on. Apparently, in his mind, blind people knowing what floor they are on was a bad thing. I didn’t notice this sort of thing when I originally watched the show because I was conservative myself back then, but it makes Mulder look bad nowadays. It must be hard to be a conservative if you get mad about elevators announcing what floor you’re on. Who cares? How does an elevator being accessible to blind people hurt you, Mulder?

I guess it makes sense for Fox Mulder to be conservative. He is named after a conservative network, after all. Back in the 90s, I thought of Fox Television as the liberal network since they pushed the boundaries of what could be shown on broadcast TV. I considered sex, violence, and swearing to be liberal things with religious conservatives like me avoiding R-rated material as much as possible. After Fox News made the conservative agenda of Rupert Murdock obvious, Fox Mulder using “politically correct” as an insult makes a lot more sense.

Getting back to the episode, “One Breath” has Scully laying unconscious in the hospital bed for most of the episode since actor Gillian Anderson had just given birth. It’s hard not to notice that her breasts are much larger than normal. When I first saw this, I thought the show runners had her wear a padded bra or something, but looking it up now, her breasts really were that big because of her recent pregnancy. I had no idea.

“Firewalker” (S2, E9) is another episode like “Ice” and “Darkness Falls” from the first season in which a small group of people cut off from the outside world have to deal with an alien infection. This time, instead of being in the arctic or in the woods, they’re at a volcano. It’s OK, but it’s not as compelling as its first season counterparts.

“Red Museum” (S2, E10) takes place in a small farm town where everything used to be good and wholesome until recently. There’s a vegetarian cult that’s presented as being crazy because they think it’s wrong to eat meat. There’s a creepy pedophile who video tapes little boys, but Mulder casually dismisses him as a “poor soul” or something like that. It’s surprising that TV shows like The X Files used to treat pedophiles as harmless weirdos rather than serious threats. It was definitely a different time back then.

This episode is actually a pretty cool horror story. Teens go missing only to reappear wearing nothing but their underwear with “He is one” or “She is one” written on their backs. A nice creepy setup. There’s also a hallucination scene in which a tree full of crows turns into one giant crow. The special effect is dated, but it startled me because I wasn’t expecting it. Unfortunately, like most X Files episodes, the explanation for what’s happening is overly complicated and the story meanders into yet another unresolved ending.

“Excelsis Dei” (S2, E11) is another episode like the first season’s “Beyond the Sea” in which Mulder and Scully trade roles. Scully believes the woman who claims to have been raped by an invisible man while Mulder is skeptical. Mulder not believing a rape victim hasn’t aged well, but unfortunately many people in the 90s were like him. There’s also a reference to Mulder being a porn addict in this episode. He tells Scully the video tape she found wasn’t his and she says she put it away with all the other tapes that aren’t his. I missed all the references to Mulder being a porn addict when I first watched this, but if you look for them, you’ll find them all over.

“Die Hand Die Verletzt” (S2, E14) is The X Files‘ Satanic Panic episode. Science nerds will have a hard time with this one. Mulder gets the Coriolis Effect wrong, claiming it applies to sinks when it only applies to large bodies of water. (Coincidentally, The Simpsons also got the Coriolis Effect wrong in their “Bart vs. Australia” episode which aired a couple weeks after “Die Hand Die Verletzt”.)

Continuing the bad science, one character dies instantly after slitting her wrists when in reality, dying from blood loss takes at least a few minutes. A snake impossibly swallows an adult man whole. And, of course, the episode highlights the largely discredited idea of “recovered” memory (although the surprise twist mitigates this somewhat). At one point, Mulder acknowledges a suspect didn’t actually break the law, but then he handcuffs the guy anyway!

I was surprised how often rape came up this season. I feel like most sci-fi shows these days avoid the topic entirely, which I think is the right call. If you’re not going to treat the topic with due gravity (like Law and Order: SVU does), it’s probably best to avoid the topic altogether.

“Colony” (S2, E16) and “End Game” (S2, E17) is a two-parter. The two episodes together feel like a movie. A shape-shifting alien is killing abortion doctors who are all clones of each other and a woman claiming to be Mulder’s long-lost sister has appeared. There’s plenty of flashlight scenes as we’ve come to expect and a cool set design when Mulder discovers a submarine stuck in the ice. There’s an extraneous gross-out moment when a man steps on a fetus, then Scully examines it and discovers it’s still moving. The episode isn’t explicitly pro-life or pro-choice, it just wants to gross us out.

The shape-changing alien could easily kill Mulder several times throughout these episodes, but doesn’t for some reason. Also, Skinner and X get into a bloody fist fight with each other. I can see how this would have been a really cool two-part episode at the time, but it didn’t entirely hold my interest watching it all these years later. The X Files was cool back when I thought everything would eventually make sense as part of a larger narrative. Now that I know they were just making stuff up as they went along, it’s harder to get into episodes like this.

“Fearful Symmetry” (S2, E18) starts with an invisible elephant causing havoc in an Idaho town. The special effects showing something invisible smashing cars was pretty cool. Mulder has a video conference with two of the Lone Gunmen and they act like it’s expensive technology, which it probably was at the time. Frohike once again hits on Scully even though she isn’t there. Scully does an autopsy on the elephant, physically climbing inside it, which is something you don’t see every day. There are other invisible zoo animals and a possible alien connection. I like that it’s not an overly-complicated episode plotwise and that it’s something different than we usually get. It’s not amazing, but I haven’t been impressed with many episodes this season, so it’s one of my favorites so far.

“Død Kalm” (S2, E19) is another episode in which Scully and Mulder are alone with a small group of people in a far off location. This time, they’re on a ghost ship in the middle of the ocean with a water supply that causes them to rapidly age. It’s an interesting set-up, but the aging makeup isn’t very convincing and the aging doesn’t effect their hair or voices, so it’s hard to take this episode seriously. The man they find on the ship really should have been played by someone who was eighty or ninety instead of a young person with fake-looking aging makeup.

“Humbug” (S2, E20) takes place at a freak show and I think it counts as the first funny X Files episode. The X Files would do episodes where they’re obviously making fun of themselves later and this isn’t quite that, but it does have laughs throughout. It’s one of the few episodes where Mulder and Scully don’t bring their flashlights to a dark building (in this case, a spook house) where flashlights would have come in handy. Scully appears to eat a cricket at one point. It’s fun to see her let loose instead of being serious all the time. There’s a moment where Scully stares at a man’s deformity while he’s wearing a loose robe and at the same time, he’s staring at her cleavage! A funny moment in which they objectify each other. Apparently some more comedic moments were cut from the show to keep it from being too funny, which is too bad. The episode featured real-life circus sideshow performers Jim Rose and The Enigma. I enjoyed Jim Rose’s rants in this episode and liked that the episode ends on a punchline. This is the best episode this season.

“The Calusari” (S2, E21) opens with the death of a two-year-old. Most shows today would shy away from depicting a child dying a violent death, but the 1990s was a different time. This episode features a Romanian exorcism which was interesting, however it ends with the swastika saving the day. It was a reverse swastika which is actually a good luck symbol in many cultures, but still, the showrunners had to know most of their audience would view the swastika as a symbol of terror.

In “F. Emasculata” (S2, E22), a prisoner has a deadly contagious disease and Mulder agrees to help cover it up to avoid panic. It’s a great conflict to see Mulder going against everything he believes in and hiding the truth from the public like this. The disease causes blisters which burst, causing goo to splash into people’s faces. The gross-out level is high in this one. They showed us so many scenes of people leaning in real close to get a good look at a pulsating blister which then burst in their face, that it became funny by the end. You can’t overdo this sort of thing.

“Soft Light” (S2, E23) is the one where guest star Tony Shalhoub (best known for playing the title character in Monk) messes around with dark matter and his shadow turns into a black hole. X, who usually doesn’t do much, is actually a pretty big part of this episode which was refreshing for a change. The episode overall is meh.

“Our Town” (S2, E24) features a town full of cannibals. It hasn’t aged very well since the town is mostly made up of white people but they cosplay Africans by wearing tribal masks, which isn’t too far off from black face. Scully needs to be rescued by Mulder yet again. I hadn’t realized what a damsel in distress she was until rewatching this.

“Anasazi” (S2, E25) has a title which hasn’t aged well (today, Anasazi is considered a disrespectful term for the ancient Pueblo people), but the episode itself is pretty good. Unlike most episodes of The X Files which are filmed in British Columbia no matter where they’re actually supposed to take place, the parts of this episode that take place in New Mexico look like they were actually filmed in New Mexico. (Scratch that. Looking it up now, they actually painted a quarry in Vancouver with red paint, but it looked real enough to fool me.) Unlike most episodes which feature a predominantly white cast, actual Native Americans appear in this episode.

In an opening scene, a hacker gets access to secret government files, but the men making panicked calls about it are speaking a variety of international languages, including Japanese. I’d thought the Conspiracy was made up of people in the US government, but this scene makes it look like it’s an international coverup. The files are from the 1940s and were written in the Navajo language because this was the one code the Japanese couldn’t crack. I wonder why the Japanese are part of the modern day coverup. Warning: the next paragraph gets into spoiler territory, so skip it if you don’t want to know what happens.

Mulder is acting more erratic than usual and even punches Skinner at one point. It was pretty surprising when we learned Mulder’s dad is part of the government coverup. We finally get a good reason for the Conspiracy not killing Mulder: the Smoking Man has been protecting him due to his friendship with his dad. Mulder’s dad secretly trying to cover things up while Mulder tries to reveal the truth would have been a fun dynamic to explore further. Instead, Krycek shows up and kills Mulder’s dad, apparently at the behest of the Smoking Man. Why does the Smoking Man suddenly decide to kill his friend but not his friend’s son who’s the real problem? The things he does do not make sense. Mulder almost kills Krycek, but Scully shoots Mulder first because it will be harder to prove his innocence if Krycek is dead. Also, Mulder discovers a big pile of alien bodies in a boxcar buried in the desert (kind of a call back to the submarine buried in ice earlier this season), but appears to die for our cliffhanger. A lot of stuff happens in this one.

The only episode I loved this season was the funny episode, “Humbug” (S2, E20). Other episodes were ok, but not amazing. Some episodes have aged so poorly, it was hard to watch them all the way through. Well, on to next season.