For the cliffhanger last season, Scully testified that Mulder had killed himself. In “Redux” (S5, E1), we learn the body wasn’t Mulder’s. He’s still very much alive. An informant tells him that at the end of World War 2, the government started faking UFOs for some reason. I guess to distract people from something else? (This is a return to the idea that the Air Force fakes alien abductions in “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (S3, E20).) Surprisingly, Mulder believes this informant and stops believing in UFOs for the rest of the season.
In a nod to Indiana Jones, Mulder visits the warehouse in the Pentagon where the US government keeps all its secrets. It would have been fun if they’d put the Ark of the Covenant on one of the shelves. Extended monologues from both Mulder and Scully in this episode makes it seem like the episode ran short and they needed to fill some time. Surprisingly, Cancer Man helps Mulder escape from the Pentagon. The tube that Mulder thought would be the cure to Scully’s cancer turns out to be filled with deionized water.
“Redux II” (S5, E2) continues the story. On TV, we see scenes of Congress debating human cloning in response to Dolly the Sheep being the first cloned mammal the year before. Cancer Man tells Mulder the tube he got from the pentagon will cure Scully. Mulder examines it closer and discovers a microchip in the water. Removing the chip is what gave Scully cancer, putting it back in will save her. (Although, per “Nisei” (S3, E9), Scully’s implant makes it so the Japanese pretending to be aliens can read her mind.)
We find out Cancer Man has been raising Mulder’s sister Samantha all this time! Is this really her or another fake? Mulder has already met several younger clones of her, after all. We find out Cancer Man has been being nice to Mulder lately because he wants Mulder to work for him. Another member of the Syndicate tells a hitman to kill Cancer Man and he does shoot him, but his body disappears. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of him. Scully’s cancer goes into remission, giving her more faith in Catholicism, although it could have been the chip that cured her.
“Unusual Suspects” (S5, E3) is a fun one. This is the 100th episode of The X Files. We get the origin of the Lone Gunmen. They met at an electronics expo. Byers was working for the FCC while Frohike and Langly were both selling devises to get free cable. A mysterious woman askes Byers to hack the government to help her. He does so, but needs the help of Frohike who’s a better hacker. Frohike, in turn, needs the help of Langly who’s an even better hacker.
They uncover a government plot to test paranoia gas on people. Mulder is exposed and it makes him take off his shirt for some reason. So this is why he’s so paranoid. On the other hand, if he’s always right, is he really being paranoid? Scully doesn’t appear in this episode and Mulder barely appears due to them filming The X Files movie at the same time. X, who’s still alive because this is a flashback, gives the Lone Gunmen their name by telling them JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman.
In the framing story, Detective Munch interviews them. Detective Munch first appeared in the serious cop show Homicide: Life on the Street (and later in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), so his appearance in a supernatural show like The X Files is a bit incongruous, but Munch is a conspiracy theorist, so it also kind of fits. Detective Munch has appeared in numerous other shows across several different networks including Arrested Development, American Dad, 30 Rock, and The Wire, among others.
There are creatures who can blend in with their environment in “Detour” (S5, E4). Their camouflage is so good, they’re basically invisible, except when they open their glowing red eyes. The opening scene in which a surveyor looks down at the forest floor and sees a face was pretty freaky. The special effects could use a touch up, of course, but they were pretty good for the time. There’s a scene where we get their point of view. To me, it was a bit reminiscent of Predator. Mulder and Scully end up in a tunnel at one point, but uncharacteristically, neither of them has a flashlight on them. They bring flashlights with them everywhere they go, but the one time they decide not to bring a flashlight is when they’re exploring the woods near dark?
There’s a Weimaraner in this episode and I used to have a Weimaraner, so I enjoyed that. I also like stories that take place in the woods in general. Scully and Mulder wind up alone and have another philosophical discussion like they did in their lake monster episode. Anthony Rapp (best known for playing Stamets in Star Trek: Discovery) is one of the guest stars and I always like to see him. Scully sings “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog” at one point! There’s a lot I liked about this one.
Unfortunately, when Scully jokes that it might not be appropriate for her and Mulder to be alone in a hotel room together, Mulder says, “If you Tailhook me, I’ll kick your ass.” He was also joking, but I don’t think the Tailhook scandal of 1991 is something to joke about. Mulder is implying the drunken Navy and Marine Corps officers accused of stripping and assaulted dozens of women at the Tailhook convention in Las Vegas were falsely accused. Mulder didn’t believe a rape victim in a previous episode, so this is consistent with his character, but it’s one of the ways in which The X Files doesn’t hold up today. At another point, Mulder suggests he and Scully get naked and huddle together for warmth. Why would getting naked make them warmer than leaving their clothes on? Maybe Scully should Tailhook him.
In this episode, Mulder claims that both he and his father were Indian Guides. I thought at first he was claiming to have Native American ancestry, but maybe Indian Guides are meant to be a Boy-Scouts-type organization? It’s unclear. Mulder mentions the Mothman and the monsters this week do have red eyes. Is this supposed to be their Mothman episode? If so, it’s like their Jersey Devil and Chupacabra episodes in that it doesn’t bother to be consistent with the existing mythology. Mulder also suggests the monster is Ponce de León and he’s still alive because he found The Fountain of Youth. Mulder often gives wild suggestions based on little to no evidence that end up being true, so maybe that’s what’s happening?
The next episode is a funny one. “The Post-Modern Prometheus” (S5, E5) is a black-and-white episode and lightning is constantly striking. The mad scientist in this episode is played by John O’Hurley (best known for playing J. Peterman in the sitcom Seinfeld.) It’s obviously meant to invoke the classic Universal Monster movies, particularly Frankenstein. There’s even a scene featuring a mob carrying torches. Mulder mentions that he’s not sure he believes in UFOs anymore, a nod to his informant telling him all UFO sightings were faked by the government. However, he still believes in other supernatural stuff.
There’s a scene from The Jerry Springer Show featuring a woman who gave birth to a wolf boy. There’s a man with two faces who is a big fan of Cher because she’s nice to the man with a deformed face in the movie Mask. Unfortunately, like “Small Potatoes” last season, the humor is ruined by all the off-screen rape taking place. The man with the deformed face has a habit of impregnating unconscious women and it’s played for laughs. After examining residue in a frying pan, Mulder even jokes about the frying pan being violated. Why were rape jokes considered okay for a hugely popular mainstream show in the 1990s?
At the end of the episode, Mulder gets a bit meta. He’s unsatisfied with the story and asks to speak to the writer. He and Scully then take the man with two faces to a Cher concert. Mulder and Scully dance together, once again hinting at a budding romance between the two long-time friends.
Next, we get a two-part episode. In “Christmas Carol” (S5, E6), Scully gets a call from her dead sister while spending Christmas with her family. It’s nice that we get to see Scully’s mother and brother again. Scully’s also got a pregnant sister-in-law to give her a reason to grieve the fact she’s infertile. She meets a little girl who she suspects is her dead sister’s daughter. This is the first episode of The X Files in which Mulder barely appears, probably because they were working on the The X Files movie at the same time. There was a cool dream image in which Scully goes to a funeral and looks in the casket. It’s filled with water submerging the body within.
The next episode “Emily” (S5, E7) picks up after last episode’s cliff hanger in which we learned that the little girl isn’t the daughter of Scully’s sister. She’s Scully’s daughter! We did see Scully get impregnated way back in “Ascension” (S2, E6), so her having a three-year-old daughter works with that timeline. Scully had all her eggs stolen and people were experimenting with them. However, Emily has a green cyst on her neck and her regular doctor refuses to share her medical file. The shape-changing aliens are involved. At the end, Scully says the child was not meant to be. She cradles Emily in her hospital bed, then the scene shifts to a stained glass window of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus. Since Scully is infertile and didn’t get pregnant in the usual way, that does make for a good Virgin Mary comparison. Since Jesus came back from the dead, does this mean Emily will come back from the dead as well?
“Kitsunegari” (S5, E8) features the return of the serial killer previously seen in “Pusher” (S3, E17). He’s less murderous this time around, allowing his victims to live. It’s an okay episode. I don’t really have anything to say about this one.
“Schizogeny” (S5, E9) is the one with killer trees. At one point Mulder asks Scully if him climbing a tree turns her on. What happened? He didn’t use to hit on his partner, but now he does it constantly. The kid has what appears to be a Pop Will Eat Itself poster in his room that Mulder comments on. I was delighted to see this as I’d thought they were a more obscure band.
“Chinga” (S5, E10) is the one written by Stephen King so, of course, it takes place in Maine. It’s about a doll that makes people kill themselves. It felt a bit sloppy to me. It’s not clear if the little girl who owns the doll knows what’s going on or not. Her mother can see into the future and knows who’s going to die next, but does nothing to stop it until she sees herself dying. I get the impression the daughter was a regular girl until she got the doll which turned her into a spoiled brat. Why would people hurting themselves and dying around her make her start acting entitled instead of traumatized?
Scully is in Maine on vacation while Mulder is bored back at the office. At one point, she calls him up while he’s watching porn. She hears the moans and asks what he’s watching. He quickly changes the channel and says it’s World’s Deadliest Swarms. There’s sure a lot of killer bee references in The X Files. I guess they were in the news a lot back then. Scully displays her knowledge of the occult and Mulder is so impressed, he says, “Marry me.” I guess he won’t stop hitting on her any time soon.
“Kill Switch” (S5, E11) is written by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson. I quite like this one. Gibson will come back to write another episode in season 7. This one is about a killer AI lose on the internet that kills its creator by calling up a bunch of criminals and some cops and getting them to come to the diner where its creator is about to delete it. He dies in the resulting crossfire. The AI can also kill people by hacking Department of Defense satellites armed with lasers. We saw a killer AI previously in season one’s “Ghost in the Machine” (S1, E7), but this AI is much more dangerous because it’s on the internet and not limited to a single building.
There’s a hot hacker chick named Invisigoth who wants to leave her body behind and upload herself to the internet. The Lone Gunmen all have a crush on her. The AI can scan people’s fingerprints when they ring a doorbell and look up who they are. There’s a cool image at one point of a corpse wired up to a computer. Mulder has a VR nightmare involving sexy nurses and his limbs getting amputated. The AI just seems to be trying to protect itself, but it’s not completely clear what its motives are, which makes it scary.
“Bad Blood” (S5, E12) is another one with vampires. They aren’t movie vampires that have to avoid the sun or crosses, but they do have OCD and have to do things like untie knots and pick up spilled seeds. Mulder’s sunflower seed habit ends up saving his life in this one! In the opening scene, Mulder chases down a kid played by Patrick Renna (the kid from The Sandlot) and drives a wooden stake through his heart, only to discover that his fangs are fake. Mulder starts to say, “Oh shit!” but gets interrupted by the opening credits. (As an aside, my friend was an actor and came close to getting the role Patrick Renna played in The Sandlot, so it amuses me to picture him in this role.)
Luke Wilson also guest stars this week as the sheriff. This is a funny episode in which Mulder and Scully’s version of events contradict each other. In Mulder’s version, Luke Wilson’s character has a bucktooth, while in Scully’s version, he’s sexy. Mulder acts over-the-top obnoxious in Scully’s retelling, while Scully acts over-the-top hostile in Mulder’s version.
At one point, Scully gets a phone call but the person on the other end only breathes heavily, so she assumes it’s an obscene phone call and hangs up. (Obscene phone calls like this were more common back before phones had caller ID.) Mulder was the one doing the breathing, but he’s not sexually harassing his partner this time. He can only manage to make the sounds he does because he’d been drugged. In Scully’s version, Mulder quotes the lyrics to “Shaft” while drugged, but he’s hilariously indignant at the very idea.
In “Patient X” (S5, E13), alien abductees with probes implanted in their necks are being summoned to remote areas where they get burned alive along with their cars. (I guess aliens were the ones who implanted these devices after all, and not the Japanese as season 3 led us to believe.) Krycek and Marita investigate an incident in the former Soviet Republic. Meanwhile, Mulder appears at a UFO convention to tell everyone aliens aren’t real, it’s just the military pretending to be aliens to trick people. Scully is the believer this time, so we get yet another episode in which their roles of believer and skeptic are reversed.
Krycek tortures a boy who witnessed the fire, then infects him with Black Cancer. (They call it Black Oil in this episode, so I guess Black Cancer and Black Oil are the same thing after all. However, in season 3, Black Oil possessed people and gave them the ability to blast others with radiation, but now it only seems to make people sick. They’re not being very consistent.) Krycek then sews the boy’s mouth and eyes shut so anyone who takes the stitches out to find out what he knows will be infected themselves. Creepy. Meanwhile, we learn the Syndicate are working on a vaccine against Black Oil. Scully meets Agent Spender who’s played by the same actor who played a young Smoking Man. Spender’s mom Cassandra is an alien abductee with a probe in her neck just like Scully.
In a surprise twist, Krycek and Marita, who were acting hostile to each other, suddenly start making out! However, Marita is doing this just so she can kidnap the boy with his mouth sewed shut. Scully and Spender’s mom are drawn to a bridge along with other alien abductees. A spacecraft lands and faceless men with their eyes and mouths covered over start burning them. To be continued.
“The Red and the Black” (S5, E14) picks up where we left off. Scully survives being burned up with the rest of the abductees due to her plot armor, but she doesn’t remember anything. Cassandra Spender is missing. The boy with the sewn up face infects Marita with the Black Oil, but Krycek has a vaccine.
It turns out there are alien colonists who want to take over Earth using Black Oil. The Syndicate have been collaborating with them because they don’t have a way to fight back. Now that the Russians have developed a vaccine, resistance is possible. The faceless men are alien rebels fighting against the alien colonists. They are burning up alien abductees to foil their plans. I think The X Files ongoing storyline is finally starting to make sense, although I don’t think it necessarily fits in with all the Mythos episodes up to this point.
Using hypnosis, Scully recovers her memories. After the faceless men started burning the abductees, the alien colonists showed up and killed them. Then, the colonists abduct Cassandra Spender. Both Mulder and Agent Spender are unconvinced and explain to Scully that hypnosis causes false memories, which is true in the real world, but not in the world of The X Files.
At one point Krycek points a gun at Mulder and tells him he’s on his side. Mulder replies, “Krycek, you’re a murderer, a liar, and a coward. Just because you stick a gun in my chest, I’m supposed to believe you’re my friend?” This line gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. This must be one of the episodes I’d seen before. I must have been amused by the line and quoted it a few times.
The shape-changing alien shows up and tries to kill one of the faceless men that the Syndicate captured. Mulder fires on him, but the aliens both disappear in a flash of light. We end with the not-so-surprise reveal that the Smoking Man is still alive. He’s holed up in a snowy cabin in Canada. He wrote a letter to his son, and in another not-so-surprise reveal (given the actor who’s playing him), it turns out Agent Spender is the Smoking Man’s son.
“Travelers” (S5, E15) takes place in 1990 when Mulder was just starting out. He’s investigating the death of a man named Skur (played by Garret Dillahunt who played Cromartie in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). Mulder interviews the FBI agent who worked the case (played by Darren McGavin, the father in A Christmas Story) who knew Mulder’s father back in 1952.
Skur was experimented on by the government. Some kind of spider thing is implanted in him that needs to kill people. When it kills a person, all it leaves behind is their skin. with their bones and internal organs missing. To cover it up, the government plants evidence that he’s a communist. Mulder’s dad helps Skur escape so the truth will eventually come out, never mind all the innocent people he ends up killing over the decades. Also, we get a villain monologue from J. Edgar Hoover.
A sarcastic blind woman with the ability to remote view is a murder suspect in “Mind’s Eye” (S5, E16). She’s a fun character. It’s a pretty good story. They find a bloody glove at one point and get several O. J. Simpson jokes out of it, referring to the famous murder trial of three years before.
“All Souls” (S5, E17) leans into Scully’s Catholicism in a way we haven’t really seen up to this point. The framing story shows her in confession, feeling guilty about the death of a little girl. She also sees the ghost of her daughter in this one. We learn that quadruplets with special needs who were adopted to four separate families are being killed by something that leaves their eyes smoking.
At one point, Mulder talks to Scully on the phone and claims he’s busy tailing a suspect before ducking into an adult movie theatre. We meet a priest who wears an upside-down cross, and reads apocryphal scriptures like the Gnostic Gospels and The Book of Enoch, so Mulder thinks he’s a Satanist, but instead he’s actually a priest who revers Saint Peter who was crucified upside-down according to Christian tradition. It was a great fake out.
The episode features Nephilim (the half-human, half-angel beings referred to in Genesis 6:4), although they aren’t giants as they’re often depicted in extra-Biblical literature. We also see an angel with four faces (the way cherubim are described in Ezekiel 1), however, instead of calling it a cherub, they refer to it as a seraph (which aren’t described in the Bible as having four faces, but rather having six wings per Isaiah 6:2).
In “The Pine Bluff Variant” (S5, E18), a man played by Daniel von Bargen (the actor who played George’s boss Mr. Kruger on Seinfeld) spreads a flesh-eating bacteria. Mulder goes undercover, pretending to be on his side, in order to stop him. People in the movie theatre watching Die Hard, unfortunately die in a hard way. This episode feels a bit sloppy. During a bank robbery, Mulder is ordered to kill a teller, seems like he’s going to do it for a very long time, then, the bank robbers decide someone else should kill the bank teller instead.
Scully knows Mulder is undercover, but blows his cover by talking to him a room she should have known would be bugged. Scully tells Skinner she needs to talk to him privately and he does take her off speaker phone, but the suspicious person in the room with him can tell what Scully is telling him based on his too transparent responses. It’s like Skinner and Scully both forgot all their FBI training in order to make the plot work. I was confused by the ending. The leader of the terrorists first outs Mulder as a mole, then saves his life because he’s secretly working for the government. Why out him in the first place? It turns out the government killed lots of random people in order to test the flesh-eating bacteria. Huh?
“Folie à Deux” (S5, E19) begins with a telemarketer seeing a human-sized insect. As you’d guess from the title of the episode, he’s not the only one to see it. Mulder sees it too. A fly man is turning people into zombies, but most people see them as normal people. I liked the stop-motion look of the creature. A pretty good episode.
That brings us to “The End” (S5, E20). It was titled “The End” because it was initially intended to be the last episode. They were planning on leaving TV and transitioning The X Files into a film franchise, but the TV series was too profitable to let go, so we’ll be back for more seasons.
A child chess prodigy who can read minds (due to having DNA from ancient aliens) is targeted by a sniper. Krycek brings the Smoking Man back from his exile. (I thought Krycek was working for the Russians, but in this episode, he’s working for the Syndicate again.) Gibson, the kid who can read minds, watches other Fox Network shows like The Simpsons and King of the Hill. When Baywatch is mentioned, the kid remarks on Mulder’s dirty mind. When you think about it, a kid who can read minds is going to constantly come across age-inappropriate material just going through the world.
Mulder’s previous partner, Diana Fowley, is helping with the investigation, which makes Scully jealous. If you don’t count the episode when she almost kissed a shape-shifter posing as Mulder, this is the first time we get a hint that Scully has romantic feelings for her partner. Agent Spender is in charge of the investigation and is annoyed at Mulder because Mulder’s wild guesses always end up being right.
Gibson lures Fowley to the window and she’s shot by the Smoking Man. Since Gibson can read minds and knew this would happen, he had to have done this on purpose, but the show acts like it was an accident. The Smoking Man burns Mulder’s office. Too bad Mulder didn’t make digital backups of his files. The X Files movie comes next, but since that was designed to be stand-alone, we don’t resolve this cliffhanger until season 6.
Because they were working on The X Files movie at the same time, several episodes this season are light on Mulder and Scully. I actually think this works well as it gives us more time with minor characters and allows us to explore things going on in the world that don’t directly relate to the FBI duo. We also get episodes focusing more on Mulder, and some episodes focusing mostly on Scully, showing us who they are when they aren’t with their partner.
“Unusual Suspects” (S5, E3) is a good one. I liked “Detour” (S5, E4), but Mulder’s sexual harassment ruined it a bit for me. I enjoyed the two-parter about Scully’s daughter “Christmas Carol” (S5, E6) and “Emily” (S5, E7). I enjoyed the cyberpunk “Kill Switch” (S5, E11). “Bad Blood” (S5, E12) was hilarious. It’s not problematic like the other humorous episode “The Post-Modern Prometheus” (S5, E5). I guess The X Files have realized at this point they should be doing more than one funny episode a season.
I really liked the two-parter in which we learn about the alien colonists versus alien rebels: “Patient X” (S5, E13) and “The Red and the Black” (S5, E14). I also quite enjoyed “Mind’s Eye” (S5, E16) with the sarcastic blind woman and “All Souls” (S5, E17) which delved into the weirder aspects of Christian mythology. “Folie à Deux” (S5, E19) with the stop motion fly creature was fun as well and I also liked “The End” (S5, E20).
After season 4, which was a bit of a chore to get through, season 5 has really turned things around. There is a higher rate of good episodes and the Mythos storyline actually progresses and makes more sense than it did previously. Next up, I’ll be reviewing the movie.
