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| Herrenvolk |
Skinner comes even more into his own in the next episode, in which we learn that he's basically been trying to restart the X-Files by the back door. His 'This should have been an X-File!' is one of the most haunting lines of the entire show. (At least it was for me.) And when he does eventually reopen the X-Files in 'Ascension', because 'that's what they fear the most', it's something of a spine-tingling and/or punch-the-air moment. In fact all things considered 'The Host' is a really good reboot episode for the series as a whole. (On a personal note, it was the first full episode I ever watched, back in the day, on dear old Auntie's very much terrestrial second channel, and it immediately cemented the show in my family's weekly telly schedule.) Yes, the story is crap, but it's literally so - and that's a good thing! And yes, there's something glorious about the fact that Darin Morgan, who would go on to become something of a guru for those who like the "monster-of-the-week" episodes, started out playing an actual monster-of-the-week in that cheesy "fluke man" costume. Of course as yet there's still no real difference between the two types of episode, and in retrospect that's actually a very pleasing thing.
'X', like Deep Throat, is a spy from inside the military. This is all but confirmed later on in 'Fresh Bones'. (More specifically, he's probably ex-Marines.) Currently though, he's "at the FBI". (It's a normal enough career path, after all.) In 'One Breath' X has a little rant at Mulder in which interestingly he reasserts the conditions that Mulder and his "predecessor" worked under. 'You’re my tool, you understand? I come to you when I need you.' But it's quite a different relationship. 'I don't want to be here.' he barks, in 'Sleepless'. Are we still supposed to believe that he, like Deep Throat, just wants to use Mulder for the same ends (i.e. to expose the fucked-up shit the Government is getting up to with aliens and alien spaceships and alien gene therapy and, er, getting loonies who've been interfered with by aliens to kidnap sexy FBI Agents and hand them over to the Navy for Japanese scientists to do, er, weird things to them)? Presumably! But we feel that X's motives are personal rather than political. He's loyal, albeit in a somewhat grudging way, to his "predecessor" Deep Throat and to Deep Throat's ideals. But we never really find out what the connexion was between them. Given their quite different characters one can theorise that the nature of X's "loyalty" is one of personal honour rather than shared sentiment. (Did Deep Throat save X's ass in 'Nam? It's possible. X looks old enough.) Whereas Deep Throat claimed he was trying to make amends for his sins, we feel that X has been hurt by the system and wants revenge on it. And whereas Deep Throat always came across as a patriotic patrician ashamed of what his country had become, who was seeking to expose a nefarious conspiracy even at the cost of his own life, X has more of an angry black radical vibe. (Even X's disdain for opera in 'End Game' hints at a man who fundamentally despises the Establishment and wants to survive long enough to dance on its grave.) In 'Soft Light', when X effectively manipulates Mulder into leading him to Dr Banton, we get our first, er, glimmer of how he might be using Mulder: just as the Smoking Man used Mulder and Scully to retrieve Ray Soames's tracking device and the alien foetus from Fort Marlene, so presumably Deep Throat could always claim as cover that he was running Mulder as his own double agent within the Bureau. But in truth this is almost certainly just X at the same stage as Deep Throat was at in 'E.B.E.' - abusing Mulder's trust (not to mention sacrificing various mostly innocent lives along the way) out of fear that his own credit with the Syndicate may be about to run out.
The real watershed episode is of course 'Duane Barry', in which we "learn" (for want of a better word) that "the Government" are "in on it"
DUANE BARRY: The government knows about it, you know. They're even in on it sometimes. Right there in the room when they come. They work together with a, uh, secret, uh, corporation. ... A man, the military. They're all in it together. ... The government knows why they're here, but they wouldn't dare let the truth out. So they cooperate.I have to say, personally, that I've always thought the new idea of the dear old, sinister old "Government" co-operating with extraterrestrials to be something of a lapse in tone for the series. Frankly, men in suits may be scary to crazy hipster libertarian types. But for me the vision of the men with the goofy tie-pins standing next to the creepy child-aliens just made the latter seem considerably less creepy. And fundamentally the whole idea of men dressed as bank managers nattering away to little green men is frankly just silly. It's a concept that gets somewhat salvaged later on, with the whole idea of the conspiracy within the world's governments working in secret to become the Vichy Government to the Alien Colonists' invaders, along with slogans like 'Resist or serve' and 'Survival is the ultimate ideology'. But at this point the revelation comes as something of a "now you're being silly" moment.
And then again, the whole idea that it's not really the government but a "government within the government", made up of men wearing stripey shirts and stripy ties, is itself somewhat disappointing - as indeed, for that matter, are the "politics" of The X-Files generally. But I digress.
Ostensibly at this point, the Smoking Man and indeed Alex Krycek are still just secret agents for the military, acting in secret for the sake of national security. (For all his pixie good looks, we can easily imagine that Krycek is ex-military as well. We later find out that he's a Russian secret agent, but hey, these things happen.) But the extreme possibility is dangled out for us not only that they look down on FBI dogsbodies like Skinner but also that they have no real loyalty either to the military, whose alien foetus they didn't return at the end of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' or, indeed, to any legitimate government. And if they're the ones behind Scully's abduction, and in other words if they're controlling Duane Barry, then they may as well be the "secret corporation" that's "cooperating" with "them".
We later find out, in 'Anasazi', that the Smoking Man's "day job" is as head of Garnet, and it's the nearest we ever come to discerning what his actual official position is in the whole US (and international) establishment. Indeed it's almost the only time we see him actually break sweat over a case. As the MJ-12's chief troubleshooter he's essential not just to the generals who are trying to keep the truth about UFOs out of the limelight but also to the Syndicate itself. More generally, it's given him carte blanche, in the name of national security, so glide around not just the J. Edgar Hoover Building and the Pentagon but pretty much everywhere, keeping an eye on government secrets and finally, apparently, building up literally a vast storeroom of his own. And he's been around for so long that in the upper echelons of the FBI they can no longer even remember his name.
In 'Ascension' he gives Krycek some blather about not killing Mulder for fear of 'turning one man's religion into a crusade'. It's a cute line, and indeed it's repeated again and again in later episodes. (He uses it to Bill Mulder in 'Ansazi' and to Strughold in the 1998 movie, and clearly he's used it so much by 'Talitha Cumi' that even X has heard it.) But it's not terribly satisfactory, and one cannot blame the writers for retconning later on that the real reason he doesn't want to kill him is that the Smoking Man actually admires Mulder. (A mere two episodes later he tells Mulder to his face that he likes him, and we later find out, of course, that he's Mulder's father. In 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', Mulder refers to Deep Throat as Obi Wan-Kenobi: perhaps it was inevitable that the CSM would turn out to be Darth Vader.) It's just possible that even in the early years the Smoking Man was grooming Mulder as a possible ally in case things went pear-shaped with the Conspiracy.
Mulder for some reason (though we later find out he was right) assumes that Scully was abducted by the Navy, presumably on the basis that he knows he didn't kill Duane Barry so the Navy must have covered up his cause of death. (And Mulder calls Krycek 'Alex'. Soooooo cute! Ahem!) Yes, this feels like another lapse of judgement. The Smoking Man can sit in on meetings at the FBI, and he's got a big private stash of alien gizmos at the Pentagon. And somehow he also has a hold over Krycek, Blevins and, to a lesser extent, Skinner. (And no, we never find out how, exactly! For some reason we're just supposed to picture him as some sort of school superintendent, who can make people sit up straight and look nervous whenever he's around. "SKIN-ner!") We're encouraged to imagine (from the final scene of 'The Erlenmeyer Flask') that he's from "the executive branch", but what does that mean exactly? That he plays golf with the President and can have anyone who works for any government agency immediately fired on a whim. (According to X, referring to Sen Matheson in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone.') Or are we supposed to accept that anyone who knows anything about him knows the deep dark gangster secret of state power, and that none of them wants to end up like Deep Throat? It's fine, on a level of immediate drama - tone and setting and so on. But given that just two episodes on from 'Ascension' we find out that he's just a lonely old man who lives in a dinghy apartment, as X-Files mysteries go it's even less satisfying than most.) The only, slightest hint of an explanation we ever get is that as head of Garnet he has the authority of some sort of permanent executive branch, inter-agency chief "fixer". But is it really feasible to imagine that he has the entire US Navy at his beck and call?
Well anyway, for some reason the Navy kidnap Scully, they access her medical records by using a weird genetic tracking device that was put in her arm when she had her smallpox jabs, they snaffle her ovaries to make baby alien hybrids (albeit still quite crap ones that don't last very long), they put a Japanese microchip in the back of her neck to stop her getting cancer (and possibly to read her mind, possibly even to call her back whenever they feel like it using some hokey alien mind-control device!), and then they dump her back at the Georgetown Medical Centre. It's not at all clear how this all came about, but we're invited to believe that this is all part of a long-standing secret tri-services alien hybridisation programme. (Still all sold to the military as being in order to breed super-soldiers? And covered up in the name of "national security"? Presumably!) So presumably the Smoking Man just got her name on the list. And got them to accept deliverance at a UFO abduction hot-spot! From a gibbering loony in drawstring pants called Duane Barry!
And, er, then she got lost in the bureaucracy and ended up half-dead and half-alive at the hospital attached to her old uni in Washington. Because, er, these things happen! It is of course quite plausible that some sweet old navy doctor recognised Scully from some Christmas party when she was a kid and so quietly had her dropped her off at Georgetown. This would at least explain why the Syndicate, presumably smarting because they never got a sample of Scully's blood, dispense one of their thugs to pick one up from the hospital.
Of course, the Smoking Man claims that he was responsible for returning Scully because "he likes her", but it doesn't quite ring true - or at least not quite so true as his "I like you" to Mulder (because, er, I am your father, ahem!). His 'I'm in the game because I believe what I'm doing is right' though does have a glimmer of plausibility. It's possible that even at this point Carter was imagining the great project of the conspiracy - to resist colonisation or to serve the colonists, and to make sure their families (in C.G.B. Spender's case his wife Cassandra, and maybe one or other of his two sons Jeffrey and Fox) would survive. Certainly the 'If people were to know the things I know, it would all fall apart.' is a meme that's going to come up again and again before the conspiracy arc is exhausted. (And yes, the 'This'll be our secret.' is fabulously pedo.)
There's a sense in which 'Red Museum' is a sort of last hurrah for early-style X-Files. I starts out "monster of the week" and, after a fabulously overstocked* set-up (not just handsome teens being abducted at night and ending up in the woods in their underpants, but loads of paranoia - i.e. paranoia about eating meat, paranoia about vegetarian New Age cults, paranoia about teenage violence and rape, paranoia about modern farming methods, paranoia about peeping Toms and pedos, paranoia about family doctors, paediatric medicine and vaccinations, paranoia about, er, the government... and, of course, paranoia about paranoia) suddenly who should emerge out of nowhere but the Crew Cut Man (who killed Deep Throat)? Yes, by inference he's still working for the Smoking Man, so the experiment he's closing down here is either another hybrid operation (injecting children with alien DNA) or (just as likely!) the flip-side "Purity Control" experiment - "control" meaning probably not so much a 'control' as in an experiment as a means of fighting the spread of the alien virus by creating a vaccine for it. (And are we supposed to imagine that, like Michaud in the movie later on, he sacrifices his life for the project partly because he's been told that he'll come back as a super-soldier?) And of course it's all rounded off, once again, with Gillian Anderson's beautiful sexy vowel sounds and the beautiful chilling finale that the case is still open.
'Colony' of course introduces the theme of alien colonization. (Duh!) In the process, of course, we also get clones, alien viruses and, of course, the Alien Bounty Hunters (and, perhaps more importantly, their race) into the bargain. But Carter's original conception of his great arc seems to have been quite different. According to the original plan, apparently, the "aliens" actually doing the "colonizing" were themselves clones. That is to say (implicitly) that they reproduced asexually. They presumably had some rudimentary "shape-shifting" ability, so that they could look like humans (because by any stretch of the imagination it seems far fetched that an alien race would all look like humans with matching male pattern baldness), but at the same time, irrespective of external appearances, they could also always recognize other aliens. But they had no real individuality. (We learn later on that the Samantha clones have an "original", archetypal clone, who, if she survives, will somehow ensure the survival of her race as a whole. And the Alien Bounty Hunter's question "Where is he?" in retrospect sounds as if he was referring to an original Gregor archetype rather than simply to the next Gregor on his list.) The reason why the clones are interested in the "government"/military's hybridization experiments (which apparently go back to the 1940s) is 'to erase that aspect which has forced the community [i.e. the colony] to scatter... [i.e.] their identical natures'. If they don't all look the same then it won't look weird if they live together. But alas, they're now being closed down, and this time it's by their own people rather than by the US government. Though the extraterrestrial politics of The X-Files are never really explained, clearly there are nasty right-wingers out there just as there are down here. This at least seems to be the implication of the Samantha clone's explanation that 'The experiments weren't sanctioned. It was considered a dilution of their species, a pollution of their race. So a bounty hunter was dispatched to destroy them and terminate [Terminator-style] the colony.' The Bounty Hunters apparently are chauvinists who take the concept of "identity" very seriously. (One idea from this early stage that certainly didn't survive was that of the "impure" Gregor clones' wanting "to share the planet" with the "pure" Bounty Hunters. It's barely audible in the screened version of 'Colony', but just about detectable if you put on the subtitles.)
In practice, even Mulder doesn't quite believe this shtick from Samantha about racial purity. But at the same time there's a certain thematic elegance to all this, so it's something of a pity that so much of it was later implicitly jettisoned and retconned out of existence. The only thing that doesn't quite sound right, oddly enough, is the Samantha clone's claim that there were two clones who originally came to Earth in the 1940s and pretended to be her parents. If they really had arrived in the 1940s, presumably they would have been so old that they could only have posed as her grandparents. And since the only clones we see who are old enough to have been born in the 1940s are the Gregor clones we must, alas, admit that the story about the two original parent clones was probably a fib. After all, since when did clones need more than one parent, especially if we're supposed to imagine that like the hybrids in their vats in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', clones can be grown to term in giant fish tanks?†
One of The X-Files's great strengths of course has always been that, unlike every other show on American TV (though not unlike older British shows such as Doctor Who, of course!) it never had a "bible": scriptural authority was never an issue, and sometimes even the show's fundamental doctrines could evolve and change from one season to the next. In the case of the hybridization and cloning experiments, it's not long before the show is using the two words interchangeably. (In 'Memento Mori' Mulder addresses the Kurt Crawford clones with a cheery 'You're hybrids!' and they don't disillusion him. And in the movie the Well-Manicured Man says 'Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it - human alien clones.') And yes, unlike the Jeremiah Smiths (who work for the Social Security Administration rather than in abortion clinics, albeit arguably no less improbably) and (we later learn) the Bounty Hunters, the Gregors never "shape-shift", so with a bit of retconning we might just about be able to shoehorn the Gregors into being not alien clones but human clones whose genes have been spliced with alien DNA. And arguably we can legitimately speculate about the nature of the Gregors' attempt to erase their identical natures, and about the individuality (or "freedom") that they were hoping to achieve for themselves: the only reason the extraterrestrial colonists would have engaged the services of a bounty hunter must have been that the Gregors, via their hybridization, had discovered a way to resist the Black Oil. We learn later on in 'The Red and the Black' that the Alien Bounty Hunters' race have started their own resistance movement against the Colonists, but these clones are evidently the original "rebel colonists". (Their goal of subverting "the Project" is shared by the Kurt Crawford clones in 'Memento Mori', and indeed we are probably supposed to imagine them sharing a similar grisly, bubbly green fate.) But then how things changed from season to season! In 'Colony' the Alien Bounty Hunter arrives from outer space in a UFO. In 'Talitha Cumi' he's apparently just bumming around New England waiting for a call. And by 'Memento Mori' these things can apparently be left to the Grey-Haired Man - who, despite not being very nice, is apparently quite human.
The Gregors' relationship with the later X-Files mythology (not to mention the later X-Files clones) does of course raise the whole question of timelines. We can legitimately deduce that there have been three periods when batches of the clones that appear in The X-Files have been produced: the original Gregor clones were apparently "born" in the 1940s, the first batch of Adam and Eve clones and the Samantha clones that appear in 'End Game' (and presumably the Kurt Crawford clones that appear in 'Memento Mori') were cloned in the 1960s, and the cute little Samantha and Kurt Crawford "drone" clones were products of the 1980s. (And finally, is William a clone as well? Was there one final batch of millennial-baby clones? It seems we'll never know, but the final shot of 'My Struggle IV' would seem to suggest that William has the standard "hybrid" abilities of surviving gunshot wounds and breathing underwater that were established in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask'.)
So was Samantha cloned when she was born? If she was, we might imagine it was her father's doing. Was the original Samantha a test-tube baby? Was Bill Mulder himself unable to get children naturally? It would certainly cast both his relationship with his divorced wife and his wife's affair with the Smoking Man in a different light. And did he put Samantha forward for the cloning programme because, you never know, a spare favourite child might just come in handy one day - not that such a plan would have worked, of course, because presumably the aliens would have "just known". But having his own daughter cloned, before later getting in touch with the Gregor clones from Russia, could well have been an early gesture of defiance, showing faith in the cloning programme and a personal commitment to the survival of his genetic inheritance. It also seems possible, if Samantha was that important, that that was why the Smoking Man was keen to hold on to her, as we later learn he did in 'Closure'.
The question then of course is why? What was the point of making all these clones? We learn from Chris Carter's "secret track" that the "Purity Control" project began as a series of cloning operations in the 1940s, 'its original conception the brainchild of German scientists given immunity themselves for war crimes, and allowed to continue the eugenic experiments that were Hitler's dark legacy.' It's perfectly possible that Carter was thinking of The Boys from Brazil at this point, and we know from 'Eve' that the US military were initially interested in clones for their super-soldier project, so it's quite possible that that's how the conspiracy started, well before the start of the hybridisation experiments and long before the great betrayal of 1973. (Of course it's also possible that by this stage Carter is confusing 'clones' and 'hybrids' willy-nilly.) And even when said "Nazi scientists" started splicing human DNA with alien it's perfectly plausible that the "control" in 'Purity Control' meant just that - because what better control group could one ask for than one made up of clones?
We can take it for granted that the Samantha clones tell Mulder that his sister is alive because they are manipulating him. (Somewhat cruelly, it has to be said - but, then again, survival!) But why does the Bounty Hunter then confirm it? Quite honestly, that's a tough one. It is just possible that he knows about the "walk-ins" who took her in 'Closure' - though again, in The X-Files we're not really supposed to know what happens "off-world". (As it happens, Cassandra Spender confirms in 'Two Fathers' that Samantha is 'Out there, with them. The aliens' - though admittedly this was more than a year before 'Closure'.) It's also possible that there are now so many Samantha clones knocking around that no one can remember which one is the real one - except the original one presumably, which could have been a neat Twilight Zone-type story to tease out, if anyone could have been bothered. Finally, in all probability the Bounty Hunter has just got it wrong. He was privy to the original abduction (because according to 'Within', abductions is one the services the Bounty Hunters offer) but not to the decision to return her just a couple of years later. If this is the case, it casts an interesting light on the whole galactic economy. The Bounty Hunters aren't controlled by the Black Oil. They do what they do because (by definition!) they're paid to by the Colonists. But how? With what? One possibility that springs to mind is that the Bounty Hunters really love their whole sweet, sweet shape-shifting gig and basically are just junkies for the DNA of different species, so the Colonists supply them with the means to travel between planets on condition that some of their best soldiers and assassins do a few jobs for them in return. (It's not so far-fetched when you consider that one of Carter's main inspirations for the clone/hybrid episodes is the old 1960s TV-show The Invaders.) The Colonists themselves, it later transpires, are actually quite slight, gentle creatures - albeit amoral, and with little more than disdain for humanity.
We might even speculate, given that we later learn that it was not the Syndicate but the Russians who eventually managed to develop an antidote to the Black Oil, that the Gregors really are from Russia and that their operation was the true beginning of "the resistance". And if the cloning of Samantha really was part of a plan by her father then it might well explain why he's oddly quiet in the 'Colony'/'End Game' story. If he's in on the Gregors' and Samanthas' resistance plans, his sitting outside smoking when Fox arrives at the Vineyard is lest any interaction between him and the clone give the game away to his estranged wife. It's also possible that his claim that Fox's mother wanted him to come is a fib. (Actually it was he.) And it would explain his reaction - frustration and anger, and an oddly faux concern for his estranged wife's feelings rather than personal grief - when he learns that Mulder has "lost her" again. Certainly we later learn that he's on the Syndicate's "resistance" wing. (Indeed, in 1973 he was the lone dissenter in the vote to cooperate with the Colonists.) And so of course the reason the Bounty Hunter is there to terminate the Gregors and Samanthas is because (so far) they're the most dangerous potential resistance to the project that the colonists have yet come across.
And of course all this means nothing to the military - the best reason yet to think the the Syndicate's deal with the aliens (handing over their children as hostages in return for baby aliens to do experiments on, on condition that they produce a hybridization process that will allow them and their children to survive the Black Oil's colonization process so that they can act as a "Vichy Government" for the colonists, etc. etc.) is unknown to the wider US "government".
Alas, that would change quite drastically as the whole politics of The X-Files became re-imagined at the beginning of the Season Three.
*No pun intended!
†Incidentally, there's a weird sort of superstition amongst fans either that the alien foetus in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' cannot be a true alien (because of the first movie) or that the aliens can reproduce sexually (despite the movie). In reality, there's no reason to imagine that the aliens gestate in any way other than as we see on screen: the Syndicate's bees are intended to infect the human population with the Black Oil, who will then be impregnated with alien foetuses that will come to term as violent, heavily clawed and armoured monsters. Presumably the hybridized members of the Syndicate would then have the job of taming them and helping them to mutate into their final "Grey" forms. (Again, this isn't just from Alien(s): it's also largely inspired by The Invaders. Alas, it's an idea that was ultimately missing from Prometheus/Alien: Covenant that the human race was in fact originally engineered to act as a host race for the xenomorphs, the Engineers' plan being first to "seed" Earth with their own DNA, and then to "seed" the human race with their X Files-style black goo in order to produce a new third race of purest malevolence. Indeed, The X-Files started as a clone of Twin Peaks, but it soon became a hybrid of every science-fiction film and TV-show you can think of. A bit of reverse genetic engineering was only a matter of time.)
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