After last season’s cliffhanger in which Mulder was trying to save a guy who could heal his mother from a shapeshifting alien, “Herrenvolk” (S4, E1) starts with a scene of creepy clone kids watching a guy get killed by bees. I seem to remember the Fox network had a documentary about killer bees around this time similar to their sensationalist alien autopsy video. Mulder meets clones of his sister who are at the age she was when she was abducted. Weird.

We get more anti-vax nonsense with Scully finding out the smallpox vaccine is really a way for the government to track us. Wasn’t this a reveal in an earlier episode? It occurs to me that The X Files sequel series should tackle their problematic contribution to the anti-vax movement head on and make the shadowy government conspiracy next time be trying to convince people not to be vaccinated. Also, instead of having a mysterious character named X secretly feeding information to our heroes, it should be a mysterious figured named Q because why not?

Since family members of Mulder and Scully tend to die during season finales/season premiers, the audience is expecting Mulder’s mom to die, but X dies instead because Cancer Man found out he was secretly feeding Mulder information. Cancer Man has the shapeshifting alien heal Mulder’s mom because Mulder would be more dangerous if he had nothing left to lose. (I guess Cancer Man forgot about Scully.) Why doesn’t Cancer Man just kill Mulder? Cancer Man mysteriously says Mulder is important to the equation, whatever that means. They keep on changing the reason Cancer Man keeps Mulder alive, as well as forgetting that he tried to kill Mulder earlier on. Oh well.

“Home” (S4, E2) is probably the most messed up episode of The X Files, and given the sheer number of gross-out episodes they have, that’s saying something. It opens with a baby being buried alive. The episode focuses on a family of inbred hicks who haven’t gotten over losing the Civil War and have children with their amputee mother who’s tied up under the bed. Yech. This episode seems to have been inspired somewhat by Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child. The family members don’t feel pain, so bullets don’t slow them down, making them very zombie-like.

It’s another one of those episodes that take place in a small town where everything used to be perfect until recently. The sheriff prides himself on never locking his door, although that comes back to bite him later. There are jokey references to The Andy Griffith Show and Babe, which feel out of place in such a bleak episode.

Mulder looks remarkably like Richard Gere in one scene. I think it’s because he’s squinting into the sun and that gives him a Richard Gere look. Mulder flirts a bit with Scully in this episode as well, something he’s never done before. Did the showrunners want to tease a potential relationship between the two of them? It makes a kind of sense since proximity is a major predictor of two people having a relationship. Scully and Mulder do spend a lot of time together. However, they’re also very different people and I prefer them being buddies rather than lovers.

I’ll admit, I didn’t remember most of the episodes from season 3. Many episodes going forward will probably be ones I’ve forgotten about. However, “Home” is an episode you don’t forget. This one stuck with me, for good or ill.

I don’t have much to say about “Teliko” (S4, E3). We’ve had episodes in the past featuring an old school blood vampire and one with a fat vampire. This one has a melanin vampire. A man from Africa who turns black men into albinos. Shrug.

“Unruhe” (S4, E4) features a serial killer with a big weakness: his thoughts get captured on film. However, at the end of the episode, the final photograph shows his future instead of what he imagines, which seems like a plot hole.

“The Field Where I Died” (S4, E5) features a suicide cult. One of the women in the cult knew Mulder in a past life. Mulder gets hypnotized and experiences a past life as a persecuted woman in Nazi Germany. Cancer Man was a Nazi back then because evil returns as evil. (If Cancer Man died in 1945 and got reincarnated the same year, that would make him about 18 years old in 1963 when JFK got assassinated. Something to keep in mind for an upcoming episode.)

Scully and Mulder were apparently both Confederates during the Civil War. If evil returns as evil, but Scully and Mulder are the good guys, does that mean the Confederates were the good guys in the Civil War? This doesn’t match with “Home” (S4, E2) in which the Confederates were presented as villains. I guess it just goes to show different episodes of this show were written by different people.

“Sanguinarium” (S4, E6) is a gross out episode in which possessed cosmetic surgeons kill patients in yucky ways such as with liposuction to the head. A guy peels his face off at one point. If this episode was a modern-day movie, it would have gotten an R rating no question, but somehow, it got aired on broadcast TV back in the 90s. Were the censors asleep that week?

“Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” (S4, E7) reveals Cancer Man’s past without telling us his name. His father was executed for being a communist. He was originally in the army with Mulder’s dad. (Mulder’s first word was apparently “JFK”.) Cancer Man is then recruited by the government to assassinate JFK as punishment for how close he brought the world to nuclear war during the Bay of Pigs. This caused him to start smoking. He also assassinated MLK for being too approving of communism. We see him try, but fail, to give up smoking over the years.

In the present, he has the power to rig entertainment awards and sporting events. (He’s the one responsible for the Buffalo Bills losing the Superbowl four years in a row from 1991-1994.) He always wanted to be a writer, but his stories keep getting rejected. He finally gets an acceptance and is so excited, he prepares his resignation letter, but when his story is published, they changed the ending.

When I originally watched this episode back in 1996, I thought the government had changed the ending and this meant Cancer Man wasn’t really the one ultimately in charge of everything, that there’s an even more shadowy figure keeping tabs on him. Now, (can it really be thirty years later?) I think I misinterpreted it. I think the publisher changed the ending because Cancer Man agreed to let go of control of his story in exchange for getting it published. A warning to all writers out there. This was a pretty good episode giving us the story of a minor character.

“Tungusta” (S4, E8) opens with Mulder and Scully being part of a SWAT team. Krychek gave Mulder a tip regarding a militia bombing similar to the then-recent Oklahoma City Bombing. There’s a scene in which Skinner answers his door topless because having men topless for no reason is a thing on The X Files. (Mulder also ends up topless later in this episode.)

There’s a meteorite from Mars which contains leeches that infect people. (This was inspired by the news at the time that meteorites from Mars might have contained fossils of microscopic life.) At first, I thought this was the Black Oil that possesses people because it also turns people’s eyes black, but characters call it Black Cancer and it doesn’t seem to possess people, so I guess it’s a different thing. Confusing to make it so similar to the Black Oil.

Marita Covarrubias returns. She was Mulder’s informant in the first episode this season. She seems to have taken the place of Mr. X. Mulder and Krychek go to Tungusta in Russia and end up imprisoned. Mulder threatens to kill Krychek so often, it’s like a broken record. We end on a cliff hanger.

“Terma” (S4, E9) opens with a Doctor-Kevorkian-style assisted suicide in the back of a van. It somewhat ties in with the rest of the episode later, but I think it was mainly included because Dr. Kevorkian was in the news at the time. Mulder gets infected with the Black Cancer, but seems fine. Maybe this will come up in a later episode? It turns out Krychek is a Russian spy and the Cold War isn’t over yet! For an insufficiently-explained reason, a band of one-armed guys cuts Krychek’s arm off! (This makes it so Black Cancer experiments can’t be done on them, but I don’t know why missing an arm would stop the Black Cancer from infecting someone. Needs more explanation.)

We get another serial killer in the next episode, “Paper Hearts” (S4, E10). Mulder has a dream that leads him to discover a body of a little girl. Was Mulder’s sister killed by this guy instead of being abducted by aliens? The fact he’s met clones of his sister seems to rule this out, but who knows? Unlike the pedophile in “Red Museum” (S2, E10) which Mulder dismisses as harmless, this pedophile is a dangerous dude. I guess American culture decided pedophiles were dangerous by this time. Interestingly, the scene at the prison where Mulder makes a long shot on the basketball court was done in just one take because David Duchovny played basketball for Princeton and was pretty good at it.

Based on the title, it seems like “El Mundo Gira” (S4, E11) wanted to poke fun at Mexican soap operas (the title brings to mind the American soap opera As the World Turns). And it does, comparing the events of the episode to a Spanish soap opera in the dialogue. (Technically, telenovelas aren’t soap operas, but close enough). It’s also a Chupacabra episode. Since the first Chupacabra citing was in August 1995 and this episode aired in January 1997, they’re doing another ripped-from-the-headlines-style story like they’ve been doing all season.

This episode reminded me of “The Jersey Devil” (S1, E5). Just like that episode ignored the existing Jersey Devil mythology, this episode ignores the existing Chupacabra mythology. After being exposed to a mysterious yellow rain, a man gains the ability to make fungus grow faster, which kills people he comes in contact with. What does that have to do with the Chupacabra? At the end of the episode, illegal aliens are said to be invisible, just like homeless people were called invisible at the end of “The Jersey Devil”.

I didn’t find the attempts at humor in this episode funny. There was a huge plot hole in this one. The Chupacabra guy wants to go back to Mexico, so he’s in desperate need of money. He ends up acquiring a truck, but doesn’t think of using the truck to drive to Mexico. Instead, he keeps trying to get money!

“Leonard Betts” (S4, E12) is a gross-out episode featuring Paul McCrane (Dr. Romano from ER). His character survives decapitation because he’s so full of cancer he’s able to regenerate a new head. He eats tumors to survive, and if that isn’t gross enough, there’s a scene in which Mulder and Scully search through medical waste. There’s a moment in which Scully blows up a car by shooting at it! At the end of the episode, we learn Scully has cancer.

“Never Again” (S4, E13) features a man (one of the actors from Space: Above and Beyond which had the same writing and producing team as The X Files) who gets ergot poisoning from getting a tattoo. Jodie Foster does the voice of the tattoo making him kill! Scully decides to go on her first date in years with this guy and gets a tattoo of an ouroboros (the symbol used in The X Files spin-off Millennium). Will this tattoo ever be referenced again? Probably not. I’ve got to say the music they chose for this episode made it seem cheesy.

It’s confirmed that Scully has cancer in “Memento Mori” (S4, E14). All the other women in her abductee group are dying of brain cancer as well. Apparently, it was caused by removing the implant. Mulder works with the Lone Gunmen to learn Scully’s eggs were taken to make clones. It occurs to me that the Lone Gunmen all seem to have the same personality. Maybe they’ll each get their own personality in future episodes, but for now, the only thing distinguishing them from each other seems to be how they dress. Skinner seemingly makes a deal with Cancer Man to cure Scully. This will probably come up later.

“Kaddish” (S4, E15) is their Jewish golem episode, although it’s really more of a reanimated corpse than a true golem. A Jewish man is brought back from the dead to get revenge on the antisemitic men who killed him. During the course of the investigation, Mulder finally meets a conspiracy theorist he doesn’t like: a man who blames everything on the Jews instead of on the government.

“Unrequited” (S4, E16) opens with a general making a speech about how Vietnam veterans returning from the war were treated poorly by anti-war protestors. This is actually a myth. The anti-war movement was very welcoming to Vietnam vets, and in fact, 75% of Vietnam vets were opposed to the war upon their return. Only 3% of Vietnam vets say they were treated in an unfriendly way upon their return and much of that could be due to misremembering.

While it’s not possible to prove a negative, it’s worth noting that there’s no evidence of anti-war protestors spitting upon returning Vietnam veterans. However, there are several well-documented incidents of pro-war demonstrators spitting on vets. The most high-profile of which is veteran Ron Kovic (whose memoir Born of the Fourth of July was turned into a Tom Cruise movie) being spat upon at the 1972 Republican National Convention by a pro-war demonstrator. Unfortunately, The X Files repeats the myth of the anti-war protestor as if it were true.

Back to the episode, the monster of the week is a Vietnam vet left for dead by the US Government who somehow gained the ability to appear invisible to humans using their blind spot somehow. They learn he shows up on camera, but don’t use this knowledge to track him. The final scene in which no one can see him could have featured them tracking him down using video cameras. Instead, the vet makes the bone-headed decision to steal a car and an agent is able to shoot him because he now knows where he is. He could have easily gotten away by simply not stealing the car.

In “Tempus Fugit” (S4, E17), Mulder and Scully investigate a plane crash caused by a UFO. Max, a multiple abductee who has appeared previously, was on the plane. Also, Agent Pendrell, (Mulder and Scully’s tech guy) gets shot. It’s not a good week to be a minor recurring character on The X Files. This one ends on a cliff hanger.

In the follow-up episode, “Max” (S4, E18), Scully decides not to put pressure on Agent Pendrell’s wound or to tell anyone else in the crowd to do so. She instead runs after the guy that shot him. She loses the suspect, talks to the cops who instantly appeared after the shooting (they must have been on their way there already when they got the call), finally returns to Pendrell, and only then applies pressure to the wound. Those few moments he was bleeding out most likely cost him his life, but Scully doesn’t seem to realize it.

A fun thing about this episode is it features the Soul Coughing song “Unmarked Helicopters” from the Songs in the Key of X album released the previous year. A friend of mine had this album back then. This album even had a track 0. For those who don’t remember the CD format, CDs often contained hidden tracks. Usually, you found the hidden track by waiting until the last song was over and continuing to listen. Some CDs would have silence for less than a minutes before the hidden track started and some would have over ten minutes of silence. You could fast forward if you got impatient.

However, a track 0 was different from the usual hidden track. This was harder to find. To hear a track 0, you played the first song on the CD, then rewound. If you rewound too far, you’d have to start over again, so if you wanted to hear the entire bonus song, you had to rewind to an exact certain point. Songs in the Key of X explicitly stated that it had a track 0, so finding it wasn’t an amazing discovery. However, I am proud of myself for finding the track 0 on Sister Machine Gun’s Burn album. They didn’t tell you that one was there, you just had to accidentally find it.

Songs in the Key of X had tracks from a lot of bands that were popular at the time. My favorite band at the time, The Meat Puppets, made an appearance. The Foo Fighter’s cover of the Gary Numan song “Down in the Park” is excellent and the previously mentioned Soul Coughing track is quite good as well. Much of the album is admittedly average and many of the songs didn’t appear on The X Files, but I appreciated being reminded of it.

I don’t have much to say about “Synchrony” (S4, E19). It’s about a guy from the future who kills people by flash freezing them in order to stop time traveling from being invented. But if he stops time travel from being invented, how can he travel back in time to stop it from being invented? The whole episode is one big paradox and doesn’t seem to realize it.

Back when The X Files was on the air, you didn’t necessarily know what TV show you were watching when it first started. You’d finish watching the previous show. There’d be commercials. Then a new show would start and you’d sometimes wonder what it was before the opening credits told you. I was reminded of this watching “Small Potatoes” (S4, E20) which at first seems to be a medical drama, until the woman gives birth to a baby with a tail. It turns out this town has an unusual number of babies born with tails and they all have the same father. At first, the doctor at the fertility clinic is suspected. This is a nod to the real-life Cecil Jacobson, a fertility doctor who impregnanted at least 75 women at a fertility clinic using his own sperm.

This is one of their funny episodes. It involves a man who can change shape, but they point out he’s not one of the shape-changing aliens, just a mutant human. (I don’t know why he couldn’t be an alien/human hybrid since those have been established to exist in this universe, but whatever.) There’s a funny scene in which Mulder accidentally breaks the tail off a corpse and tries to reattach it without Scully seeing. It’s funny when the shape-changing man pretends to be Mulder. He actually succeeds in seducing Scully and almost kisses her when the real Mulder breaks into the apartment. This is our first hint that Scully has romantic feelings for Mulder. A lot of fans at the time wanted the two of them to become a couple, but I don’t see what’s wrong with a man and woman just being friends.

While there were funny moments in this episode, it’s not one of their best. The main problem is the shape-changing man impregnates women by posing as their husbands, making him a rapist. An episode about a rapist generally doesn’t make for good comedy.

“Zero Sum” (S4, E21) is one of the few episodes in which Scully doesn’t appear. Skinner is the main focus. A few episodes back, he agreed to work for Cancer Man in exchange for curing Scully’s cancer. So Skinner covers up the death of a postal worker killed by bees carrying small pox. Because objectifying men is a thing on The X Files, there’s a scene of Skinner wearing nothing but his tidy whities.

There’s a fun easter egg in this one. While Skinner is going through some files, one of them is labeled Foo Fighters, reminding us once again of the Songs in the Key of X soundtrack. In a surprise twist that probably didn’t surprise anyone, we find out that Mulder’s new informant Marita, just like Deep Throat and Mr. X before her, is secretly working for Cancer Man. Also, Cancer Man doesn’t end up healing Scully.

An autistic man is a serial killer suspect in “Elegy” (S4, E22). I wonder if this was partly inspired by the movie Rain Man since the autistic man is also a savant, able to memorize thousands of bowling scores. We find out he can see spirits because he’s about to die, which scares Scully that her cancer is getting worse because she also sees one of the spirits. After all she’s seen, she really shouldn’t still be a skeptic, should she?

In “Demons” (S4, E23), Mulder wakes up covered in someone else’s blood and he has amnesia. Mulder seems to recover some childhood memories while hallucinating. Mulder suspects Cancer Man is his real father, although his mother denies it. He also believes Cancer Man was involved in his sister’s abduction, but he can’t be sure if this is a real recovered memory or just a hallucination.

“Gethsemane” (S4, E24) is our season finale. It opens with Scully identifying Mulder’s body and testifying before a panel that everything Mulder believed is lies. He apparently killed himself after finding out his lifework was a sham. We then jump back to Mulder investigating a 200-year-old alien frozen in Canada. We get yet another alien autopsy. The alien has four fingers, three toes, and is of undetermined gender. A man working for the Department of Defense tells Mulder and Scully all alien evidence is faked. Seems like an awful lot of effort just to distract people. He also says Scully was given cancer to make Mulder believe in aliens, but didn’t he already believe in them before?

Scully’s brother Bill appears for the first time. He’s in the military like their father was. Being in the military keeps him busy since we haven’t seen him before, not even for their sister’s or father’s funerals. We did see Scully having two brothers when she was a child, so I guess there’s at least one more brother left to meet. Of course, members of Scully and Mulder’s family are often killed off in two-part episodes, so Bill better watch out.

Plot points this season often seem to pull from the news of the time. We have references to killer bees, Dr. Kevorkian, the Oklahoma City Bombing, possible microscopic fossils from Mars, the Chupacabra, etc. The X Files was very much a show of its time. Watching it when it originally aired was a different experience from watching it now. Now that we know killer bees didn’t turn out to be that big of a threat, the scene of the guy being killed by bees isn’t as frightening as it would have been back then.

Some issues brought up by the show like assisted suicide are less controversial now. The fear of right-wing militia bombings like Oklahoma City were replaced by fear of terrorist attacks after 9/11. The possibility that meteorites from Mars contained fossils of alien life was a game-changing idea back then. Now, we’re not so sure they contained fossils after all.

I don’t really have a favorite episode this season. The monster-of-the-week episodes were either gross-out episodes or meh episodes. The mythos episodes (the ones contributing to the continuing storyline) kept my interest, but also felt like they were spinning their wheels. I guess if I had to pick, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” (S4, E7) was my favorite. The funny episode, “Small Potatoes” (S4, E20) , was pretty good, but all the off-screen rape lowers its rating.

I like that The X Files has episodes focused on different cultures: African immigrants in “Teliko” (S4, E3), Mexican immigrants in “El Mundo Gira” (S4, E11), the Jewish community in “Kaddish” (S4, E15), etc. I don’t think the episodes were especially good, but I like that they’re attempting to be multicultural. It’s better than not trying at all. Since so many X Files episodes have foreign-language titles, you can tell someone on the creative team loves the idea of a multicultural world.

I was struck by a random thought connecting two episodes from previous seasons together. It seemed strange to me way back in season one that Mulder instantly falls in love with a feral raised-by-wolves type woman in “The Jersey Devil” (S1, E5). However, we later see him pleasure himself to a Bigfoot video at the end of “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (S3, E20), so he’s obviously got a thing for Bigfeet. That was a funny episode and not everything in it was meant to have really happened. However, early on in “The Jersey Devil”, there was a scene in which he’s fascinated by a crude drawing of a female Bigfoot, so I think the scene at the end of “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” was meant to be canonical. Anyway, see you next time for season 5.