"The Truth Is Out There" Re-Watch: "Fearful Symmetry" & "Død Kalm"

 The X-Files

The great thing about "The X-Files" and other genre fiction is that due to the nature of the show, each episode can tell a completely different story. You can take big swings. These two episodes take big swings and while neither really hits a home run, at least one kind of connects. And that's about the only sports metaphor you'll ever get from me.

"Fearful Symmetry"

Fox Mulder: "Where's Langly?"

Byers: "He has a philosophical aversion to having his image bounced off a satellite."

Notable Guest Star: Jayne Atkinson as Willa Ambrose

Mythology or Monster of the Week: MotW

X-File of the Week: In Fairfield, OH, a federal construction worker is trampled to death and the downtown experiences a lot of property damage. No one knows how it happened but Fox Mulder is convinced that it is connected to an elephant that escaped from the local zoo and was found dead in the middle of the highway not far from Fairfield. The agents head to the Fairfield Zoo to investigate other strange happenings and find themselves entangled with a shifty animal rights organization and a signing gorilla.

Why are we in a zoo?

If you talk to any "X-Files" fan and ask them what their least favorite episode is, you will most likely hear about the one withe elephant. If you're embarking on a watch of "The X-Files" for the first time, you've no doubt been warned about the one wiht the elephant and now we have reached that infamous episode. 

Here's the thing. The cold open makes it seem like this episode might be kind of cool or at least semi interesting. It's really neither of those things.  I will say that the opening of the episode with the invisible pachyderm rampaging through downtown Fairfield is really cool. The slamming into cars. The windows being blown out. I would be seriously interested in figuring out how they did all this in 1995. Sadly, that's kind of where anything interesting in this episode ends. 

I feel like around this time there were a lot of episodes of television that had messages about animal cruelty etc. I can totally understand "The X-Files" contributing to that. It's pretty clear that Chris Carter in particular has an interest in bringing this kind of storytelling to the show. The issue here is that it is so disjointed. It would be one thing if this was just an animal rights episode with a supernatural bent. That could be really cool and engaging. But it's also a UFO abduction story. A story about how extreme animal rights groups have their hearts in the right place but are bad... or something. A story about a signing gorilla. It's all over the place and nothing really hits the way that I think they intended.

Let's take a look at the Wild Again Organization. It reminds me of that anti-deforestation group from "Darkness Falls." And much like the eco-terror group from that episode, I'm not sure what message writer Steven De Jarnatt is trying to get across. On the whole, I think putting wild animals back in the wild is a good idea, but the episode paints the organizations leader, Kyle Lang, as a real dickbag. He doesn't care when one of his people is mauled to death. A man he sent into the zoo. He refuses to help Willa, a woman he apparently used to love. He's clearly painted to be as much of a villain as Ed Meecham, who is literally shown torturing these animals. Plus, he ends up crushed to death and Meecham lives. It's wild.

The whole UFO thing is so crazy and really kind of dumb. It was early enough in the show's run that it feels like if they painted themselves into a corner writing wise they decided they would just work alien abduction into it. I groaned when I heard Byers and Frohike mention Fairfield being close to a UFO hotspot. And the reveal that aliens were kidnapping the animals, impregnating them and then bring them back made zero sense. Why would they do it? Was it about preserving species? And if it was, why would they care about that. Why do they come back invisible? It's just really, really stupid. I don't even want to talk about Sophie the signing gorilla.

We've spent way too much time on this. It's bad. It's real bad. Let's move on.

Grade: D

"Død Kalm"

Dana Scully: [writing in her journal] "I found a children's book of Norse legends. From what I can tell, the pictures show the end of the world, not in a sudden firestorm of damnation as the Bible teaches us, but in a slow covering blanket of snow. First the moon and the stars will be lost in a dense white fog. Then the rivers and the lakes and the sea will freeze over. And finally, a wolf named Skoll will open his jaws and eat the sun , sending the world into an everlasting night. I think I hear the wolf at the door."

Mythology or Monster of the Week: MotW

X-File of the Week: The USS Ardent goes missing in the Norwegian Sea along the 65th Parallel. It is missing for 42 hours. Eventually a Canadian fishing barge picks up 18 survivors who have inexplicably aged almost to death in the time they've been floating at sea. Agent Fox Mulder has tracked multiple X-Files to that location and believes it is a wrinkle in time and somehow connected to the Philadelphia Experiment from World War II. He and Scully head to Norway to investigate.

It's been 84... hours.

Let's just get this out of the way right up front. The old age make up and effects in this episode are laughably bad. Literally laughably bad. The first time that they reveal that the agents have started to age, I had to pause the episode so I could have a hearty laugh. I'm not sure why they were so bad. Had old age make up just not advanced to the level that it needed to be at in 1995? "The X-Files" has had really stellar make up applications in it's short life so far, so I'm surprised that these effects were so terrible. Remember the Flukeman? That was earlier this season! I just don't get it. Someone needs to redo these effects with modern de-aging technology. I'd love to see that. Seriously, someone get on this.

We have talked about this but it bears repeating. A lot of these early standalone "X-Files" episodes followed a formula. The show really enjoyed bottle episodes. Throw Mulder and Scully in some sort of inhospitable climate with some randoms and try to survive. There are twists and turns and then there is a last minute save when everything seems it's bleakest. We've seen it in episodes like "Ice" and the aforementioned "Darkness Falls" and we see it here. 

The impetus for the writing of this episode was the navy destroyer they had rented for the "Colony" and "End Game." They really wanted to get their monies worth so Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa wrote this episode. When I was reading up on this episode, I learned that this episode was actually supposed to give the crew a bit of a break after a couple of taxing episodes, but this episode turned out to be one of the most stressful episodes to shoot. 

It makes sense why the show keeps going back to the bottle episode well. It usually works out well. And this ship is great for an episode like this. There's the fog. It's super atmospheric. As soon as the enter it, there is a palpable tension. Not everything works. I'm not sure we needed the mystery of who killed Halvorsen. Olaffson is clearly just an exposition device. He's an evil whaler that murders for seemingly no reason so why should we feel bad once Trondheim does the same to him. Trondheim turns out to be a real asshole too and we give a perfunctory shrug when he ends up drowning in the room he's holed up in with the potable water.

There is a lot that works here. I enjoyed that the explanation for the rapid aging wasn't supernatural. It was a mysterious oxidant that got into the water and caused everything it came into contact with to degrade including human bodies. I'm sure that the "science" here doesn't stand up at all, but it's better than it actually being some wrinkle in time or an alien thing. I'd rather a crazy science explanation than falling back on the old UFO stuff. 

Where the episode excels is the quieter moments between Mulder and Scully. I feel like the show sometimes forgets, especially in these early goings, that they have this treasure trove of chemistry with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. When they are chatting and joking, indulging in some gallows humor, it's the most engaging portions of the episode. I love that Scully is the last one left standing here and her journal is instrumental in curing Mulder in the end. She gets her revenge on that naval doctor that threw her out of the room at the beginning of the episode. I love unexpected pettiness.

Grade: B

Next up, the agents head to a freak show and get involved with a Romani curse.

What do you all think of these episodes? Does anyone really love "Fearful Symmetry?" Am I being too. hard on these make up effects? Let me know in the comments.