Netflix vs. Amazon: Two Comic-Book Takes on the Post-9/11 World

Adorable shorts are cool. (Change my mind.)

It turns out 2019 was quite the year for dramas based on comic books. On the big screen we saw Disney's MCU series finally come to a gorgeous, decades-long climax with Avengers' Happy Ending Avengers: Endgame. On the small screen meanwhile Netflix and Amazon found themselves going head-to-head (although head-to-knee might be more appropriate given the disparity between the two) with two surprisingly watchable adaptions of comics from the late 2000s...

The Umbrella Academy

Tweenage superheroes in goofy prep-school uniforms (including kinky eye-masks, Argyle sweaters, knee-length socks and adorable little shorts) ought to be a genuinely fun idea. X-Men go full Hogwarts? Why not? Mix in time-travelling men in black assassins from Doctor Who (or at least from the 1990s "wilderness years" novels and comics versions of the franchise) and you should almost by definition have a kick-ass (if not quite Kick-Ass) comic book and a very serviceably fun but fucked-up TV show.

So! Did it work?

Well I've never read the comic, so I can't possibly say whether the Netflix people did a good job of adapting the source material. As a show though it's... OK. As I said, the main gimmick is sound, being mostly tried and tested, and the back-up time travel gimmick has of course been tried and tested to destruction (even if I use the phrase advisedly).

Just as Stan Lee taught us that superheroes can have their human sides, and Watchmen taught us that if Batman were real he'd have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest (or at least Bernhard Goetz) than he would with Sherlock Holmes, now we're invited to imagine that not all super schools are quite so "enlightened" as Charles Xavier's. In fact there's nothing like being brought up with your fellow (alien) septuplets in a big house in New York, with an emotionally distant authoritarian Englishman (also an alien though!) for an adoptive father and an android Stepford housewife for a mother and, er, an augmented chimpanzee for a butler to leave you... an angry, embittered, emotionally needy, "dysfunctional", and generally just typically obnoxious millennial. Only with superpowers!

If the X-Men were written to appeal to teenagers not too cool for school but definitely too cool to fight in Vietnam, the Umbrella Academy were evidently supposed to be channeling the angst of a generation that couldn't quite cope with 9/11, Bush and Iraq. Now they've been repackaged in time for the Great Awokening, I'd suggest that updating them by the better part of two decades wasn't such a great idea.

For one thing, they don't really fit into the post-2008 era, let alone the world post-2016. It's hard to sympathise with the marital problems of a super-powered Hollywood celebrity (for example) if you're a 40-year-old man who can't afford to move out of his mother's spare room, and when teenagers are being sacked from university and having their lives ruined for expressing the "wrong" opinions on WhatsApp it's a bit much to suggest they should be angry at their 'rents for having been too strict. (Then again, the total failure of the entire media establishment to come to terms with either the Great Recession or the post-Obama revolutions of Brexit and Trump is an ongoing cultural problem. So perhaps one shouldn't judge Netflix too harshly for failing adequately to adapt a 2000s comic-book to a late 2010s zeitgeist.)

Thomas Hoepker's "most controversial photo" of 9/11

Rather more important is that The Umbrella Academy has a very distinct post-9/11 vibe to it. When Mohamed Atta and his chums brought down the World Trade Centre, they also challenged many of the Baby-Boomers' and Generation X's previously devoutly held beliefs (even if in the end they didn't quite manage to bury them). Thomas Hoeopker's infamous photograph in fact illustrated not so much the indifference of young Americans' to their fellow citizens' suffering but their complete inability to comprehend what was going on. "I don't get it, dude. Why would anyone want to attack us? We're cool, aren't we?" Because whereas previously multiculturalism had been seen only as a Good Thing and America's role on the world stage had only ever (or at least since 'Nam) been seen as "a force for good", suddenly young Americans were invited to re-imagine both America's relationship with the world beyond their borders and their own relationship(s) with the American government itself.

Of course, in a comparatively short period of time the fantasies of the past all bounced back in the shape of conspiracy theories about Bush, oil, evangelical Christianity and (of course) racism. But for a short while the kids who'd grown up watching John Hughes movies and listening to the sonic sewage of MTV felt vulnerable both physically and intellectually. Having finished the first season of The Umbrella Academy therefore, I was interested to discover that it was the brainchild of Gerard Way, who was of course (with My Chemical Romance and in particular 'The Black Parade') one of the very, very few creative talents to have tried in any way to come to terms with 9/11 artistically. And whereas 'The Black Parade' was an unusual and (at least in some ways) original reflection on how young people should think about death, the first Umbrella Academy story gives the dysfunctional early 2000s generation their own comic-book avatars, who are supposed to overcome their own dysfunctionality and bickering in order to stop the End of the World.*

Admittedly, it's hard to make dysfunctional people dramatically engaging, let alone sympathetic. There aren't many people in The Umbrella Academy that we can really be expected to root for. But then one presumes that's the point. Deep down, each one of them is a beautiful damaged human being, and in the end they all love each other, and we learn to love them as they reconnect and rediscover what they have in common. Or... something like that.

The only really good thing about the Netflix adaption is of course Aidan Gallagher. Robert Sheehan finishes comfortably but still distantly in second place, playing a gay character who hardly develops at all. (He goes to 'Nam - having travelled back through time to get there - and comes back not significantly affected by the experience beyond having had a boyfriend who then died. Which makes one wonder if that's really all the significance that war can have to a X-gen/millennial audience.) And unfortunately it also has one really, genuinely bad thing going on, and that of course is the abysmal Ellen Page. And it is unfortunate because she's really, really, really bad. She's clearly supposed to be an "interesting" baddy. But alas, she really, really isn't.

And on the subject of interesting baddies, that brings us neatly to...

The Boys

Should one feel disappointed that a TV streaming series called The Boys hardly has any actual boys in it?†

Only joking! The Boys is glorious, and so gloriously fucked-up it should be on one of Russell Brand's 12-point rehab programs.

Simon Pegg gives it a big daddy kiss of approval. In the original comic book he was actually the inspiration for the main character, and he even wrote a foreword to one of the trade paperbacks by way of a wink and a thank-you. Here he literally plays the daddy of the main character, albeit with a slightly ropy Noo Yawk accent. Karl Urban sports an if anything even ropier London accent, though he goes on more or less to save the series on a character level just by projecting sheer scary bear charisma. Less successful is the actual main character, played tolerably but almost entirely without charisma or insight by Jack Quaid, as is his similarly one-dimensional super-powered girlfriend played by Erin Moriarty. (I just had to google their names, so trust me they're forgettable.)

In fact the series titular heroes - a slightly screwy squad of CIA gunslingers who are dedicated to "bringing down" (politically, legally and literally) the world's superheroes (who in general terms are asshole versions of DC's Justice League) - are surprisingly dull. There's a token black man (of course), who believes in Jesus and lies to his wife. There's a comedy token Frenchman (for some reason), who tortures people to death and then fusses about his baguettes and so on. And then there's Karl Urban's character Butcher, who's out for revenge, and we definitely feel his pain, but then he flies into a homicidal rage and murders Haley Joel Osment (whose guest appearance as a psychic washed-up former child prodigy is quite fabulously dark) in a public lavatory.

And that's sort of it for the goodies. Yes, obviously the series was trying to go down the now well trodden GoT route of not really having goodies and baddies. But there's a sense in which that wasn't quite what was wanted. It's clearly supposed to be "challenging", but if one really wanted to challenge modern norms one could easily have flagged up (for example) why a man and a woman who aren't married to each other should think it's OK to fornicate. Quaid's nerd and Moriarty's feisty blonde are supposed to be the goodies, but they're only goodies in that they both have utterly cliched story-arcs. Her "rebel without a clue" arc is even lamp-shaded by the Wonder Woman character. His arc looks as if he might be a new Breaking Bad-type character in the making, but as of the end of the first seasons he's nowhere near there yet. (In the last episode he shouts "Sorry!" whilst murdering private security guards. Is that supposed to be darkly funny? I'm not even sure that it was.)

"Post-modern? Moi?"

What saves the series rather than the Boys themselves is the baddies, who are of course the not-so-super superheroes. And boy, what wonderful baddies they are! If the X-Men comics humanised heroes and Watchmen and its followers meditated on the dehumanizing effects of having great power and great responsibility, The Boys takes the latter concept one stage further and asks what sort of people superheroes would be in the "real" world of rolling news channels, Hollywood blockbusters and media-savvy politicians.

Obviously the whole world at some point is going to have to come to terms with why we're currently spending the same sort of money at the cinema to see Iron Man thump Thanos as we used to spend on Gone with the Wind (or at any rate on a pseudo-sci-fi Gesamtkunstwerk like Star Wars - or even an American homemade neo-Marxist mythological masterpiece like Titanic). Personally I think there are perfectly legitimate economic reasons why we do. (Patriotic epics are all very well, but by definition they have limited international appeal. And yes, that includes Bondage.) And it's possible that even kiddie wizards and neo-mediaevalism may simply have had their day (especially now that China is opening up to Hollywood). But there's also a clear sense in which the 21st century world has both forgotten the past (the historical epic is currently beyond resuscitation) and lost faith in the future (because sci-fi as a genre isn't much better off), and so it contents itself with a fantastical version of the world of the present day. The question is, does it dare from such a vantage point to say anything about (let alone to) that present-day world. And does it have anything to say?

Like The Umbrella Academy, The Boys does indeed "deal" with 9/11, but having been written by a Brit rather than an actual resident of New York it does so far less obliquely, far more cynically and (arguably) more observantly.†† In fact it has an actual 9/11 calque in the shape of a 'plane hijacking that the heroes then make a hundred times worse when they intervene. And the character who fails to save the day but who then goes on to save virtually the entire show is of course Anthony Starr's Homelander. In the current golden age of television, when writers write to character rather than plot and then write their characters to the actors playing them (even when it means they end up with character-arcs that make no sense in the context of the plot - witness Jaime Lannister and Daenerys for a couple of good examples!) it was perhaps inevitable that having cast somebody really good as their main baddie they would end up whether intentionally or not making him the most "interesting" character of all. Because Anthony Starr, to employ a phrase, absolutely kills it.

Homelander on screen is cleverer, more charming, more three-dimensional, more devious and more ruthless, and altogether more interesting than he was in the comics. Is this just a problem with writing to a genuinely good actor? (And the Great Awokening has certainly sorted the men from, er, the boys in that regard. With fewer white heterosexual roles out there, even a thorough-going scary villain like Homelander, much like Smith in MitHC, will end up becoming a deeply compelling antihero.) He's cynical enough to bring a baby into a room with a bomb just because he wants to know if it will survive the blast - because he wants to know whether it's his or not. And the scene when he finally gets the measure of evil domineering single-mother lipstick-feminist nympho Hillary-clone Madelyn Stillwell and lasers her brain out of her head must have raised a cheer from every God-fearing toxic masculinist throughout the English-speaking world.†††

Umbrella Academy went to town on the idea of superheroes being emotionally immature adults, but The Boys goes all the way to the big city on it. And in doing so it doesn't just dip into a somewhat hackneyed critique of what a liberal American might consider to be a cold-showers boarding school-style of education. Perhaps inadvertently The Boys holds up what a leftist Ulsterman might consider a mirror to America itself. Yes, it turns out that Homelander was brought up in a laboratory. But then "real-life" modern America is itself just as much an artificial being. After all, what other sort of country could ever be satisfied with such an utterly banal version of protestant "Christianity", in which religion is reduced to pop music, scriptural slogans and foreign aid campaigns? (Give me dogmas and incense any day!) In what other sort of country is it considered sexually mainstream for teenage boys to lust over women's mammary glands. (Over here, even straight men prefer their hindquarters.) If America were a superhero it would be Superman, and if Superman were real he'd a smug but neurotic evangelical obsessed with tits.

One final thing that The Umbrella Academy and The Boys have in common is that each breaks with its comic book source by giving its first season a cliffhanger ending, and one indeed that holds out a glimpse of a possible "nostalgic" resolution. The Umbrella Academy's is fairly simple. Even if is about to "get messy", we're still invited to imagine the characters are on the verge of going back through time and having a Quantum Leap-type second chance, with childhood innocence, order and beauty restored. The Boys on the other hand ends with a humdinger of a twist, when we find out that both Butcher's wife and Homelander's son are alive and well and living in a leafy suburb somewhere - though not how any of them will really react to their discovery.

So, have we seen the last of Ellen Page? Will the Umbrella Academy now be able to move on from that quirky, slightly convoluted time-travel story and continue having new wacky adventures for years to come? Will Butcher be able to come to terms with the probability that he was legitimately cuckolded by Homelander and certainly not widowed? Will Homelander give his long-lost son the chance to become the emotionally developed human being he could never be? (Because even being brought up by a single mom beats growing up as a super-powered lab rat.)

With second seasons in the pipeline for both shows, each has plenty to play for.

"No! I am Darth Vader."

*Interestingly there are several musical choices in The Umbrella Academy that tonally feel quite out of place. Generally speaking if I recognize a song in a show's soundtrack the chances are that it's too mainstream for the drama. So 'Run Boy Run' may have briefly fitted the mood for the opening of the second episode. But 'Don't Stop Me Now', though in many ways excellent, certainly didn't. The idea of having any Black Parade songs in there may sound in and of itself incestuous, but given that a Black Parade atmosphere pervades The Umbrella Academy the fact that it wouldn't have fit the tone of the drama rather makes one wonder what tone exactly the show-makers were aiming for.
†There is one, as it happens, and he's mouth-watering.
††Having been brought up on legends about Dunkirk, Brits are perhaps more familiar with the ability government spin-doctors have to turn a monumental establishment fuck-up into first a national tragedy, then a national parable, and finally into a foundational myth for whatever the Government wanted to do in the first place. (As a WWII nerd, one suspects Garth Ennis would appreciate the parallel.)
†††They did repeat Brightburn's goof though - i.e. when Superman's heat vision blasts straight through the back of your skull it's unlikely you'll have time to wince and say "ouch".

Theories about The Prisoner: Drama vs. Allegory

Why did No 6 resign?

• He found out about the Village, or at least that he was working for the sorts of people who ran the Village. He perceived either that the British secret state - perhaps even the entire British Establishment itself - had become so morally decadent (or had been so subverted) that it was no longer behaving constitutionally. It may even have been infiltrated by a malign agency or agencies unknown. In any event, No 6 felt in conscience he could no longer work for these despotic and amoral "new masters" (quite possibly some sort of X-Files-type shadowy one-world government sort of conspiracy!), so he resigned.
• He did not necessarily know about the Village, but he knew what sorts of things were going on there.
• It's possible that he did already know about the Village in principle, possibly even because he helped to devise it, only late finding out how his plan was actually being implemented - or perhaps, rather, abused.
• He found out that he was No 1 - or at least that his superiors were doing what they were doing at least partly in his name as Britain's number one spy. He no longer wanted to be a leading light in such operations.
• He may even have resigned in the hope of avoiding being sent to the Village (or somewhere like it) himself - though he would probably have been aware of what a vain hope this was. During the scene of his actual abduction, there is more than a hint of Stoic resignation in those blue eyes as he realises he's being gassed. Besides, his "beach holiday" doesn't seem like the sort of holiday he would really have enjoyed (being more of a skiing man), so it's possible that he didn't actually expect to get that far - though it's also possible that the beach holiday really was just an old professional cover he intended to use. (He doesn't actually deny the possibility in A.B.C., merely that he did not intend to "sell out".)
• Patrick McGoohan resigned - from Danger Man. Lew Grade asked him why. Though McGoohan never seems to have said so in so many words, clearly Danger Man was for him too idealised a version of the morally questionable reality of covert surveillance, subversion and guerrilla warfare that all modern governments perpetrate, both internationally and domestically!

Why do the No 2s keep asking No 6 why he resigned?

The original purpose of the Village was simply to protect the data of retired secret agents. If they just wanted to prevent No 6's information from falling into the wrong hands though, the No 2s would simply have killed him, but they didn't. They want to extract the information he has first. In order to do this they will destroy his individuality if necessary (or perhaps even if it's not necessary). In the "allegory" of The Prisoner, according to McGoohan, this was the actual point of the Village - to destroy the individual.

• At first the No 2s think No 6 resigned because he discovered something valuable and they want to know what that was. 
• Later on it becomes clear (e.g. in 'The Chimes of Big Ben') that they hope that if he answers just one simple question (i.e. about his resignation) he'll crack and tell them everything else he knows as well.
• It's also possible that they suspect and fear that he has discovered too much about their own operations - perhaps even the identity of No 1 himself.
• The No 2s themselves almost certainly don't know who No 1 is. This can perhaps be inferred from the evasive answers that many No 2s give about No 1. It is also stated implicitly in 'Hammer into Anvil' and explicitly in 'Fall Out'. In 'Free For All', when No 6 and No 2 are discussing the consequences of being elected No 2, the older man states, 'Number One will no longer be a mystery to you, if you know what I mean.' This sounds like an implicit admission that he doesn't believe there really is a No 1, except in a philosophical sense (e.g. No 1 is some sort of version of God in the Village's quasi-Masonic cult of "government power" - perhaps even Rover himself, which is not impossible, given that Rover is in one sense the supreme symbol of power in the Village. Indeed, at one point at that story's climax No 2's toughs actually seem to be worshipping Rover in some sort of inner sanctum within the Green Dome). For some of the No 2s then, No 1 is a "noble myth", though it's possible that there are others who know that the idea that No 1 is a noble myth is itself a lie. Some of the No 2s may indeed want to know more, so for some of them breaking No 6 to discover whether he knows who No 1 is - or at least whether he knows more about the Village and the powers behind it than they do - is a matter of personal concern to them, as well as of personal honour.
• It's even possible that some of them know (or suspect) that he is No 1 and wish to break him in order to replace him. (This may actually have happened by the time of 'Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling' and apparently has happened by the time of 'Fall Out', in which No 1 seems to be No 6's doppelgänger Curtis.)

Who is No 1?

• The original answer (and the only acceptable answer) to 'Who is No 1?' is of course that No 1 is No 6. He is the most important person in the Village, after all, and certainly its most important prisoner. It's not necessarily clear though whether or not he knows that he is No 1.
• The question is of course No 6's equivalent of 'Why did you resign?', the implication being that if he can get them to answer one of his questions then he will have turned the tables on them decisively. 
• He probably either knows the answer or suspects it even as he's asking the question. The difference though is that the No 2s themselves don't know who No 1 is. Whatever they may suspect, they only know that No 6 is important, not that he is No 1.
• It would be most satisfying to imagine that 'Who is No 1?' and 'Why did you resign?' actually have the same answer. Originally the idea was that No 6 had devised the idea of the Village but then resigned when he discovered how/that his idea had been realised. The Prisoner therefore is No 1 and he resigned because he is No 1 and had a change of heart about the Village and what was being done there - or at least he had a change of heart about his job once he realised the sorts of things that were being done by the people he was working for (i.e. the sorts of things that were going on in the Village). Having been the best agent in the service he became its most implacable opponent.
• If he knows that he is No 1 but knows that they don't know, then the question is really little more than a taunt.
• If he knows that he is No 1 and doesn't know that they don't know, then the question is presumably a genuine attempt to discover if any of them knows that he is.
• It's just possible that despite having resigned he, or rather someone posing as him, is still recognised as No 1; and so, in a classic game of bluff and double bluff, whereas the No 2s' objective is to discover whether he realises this, his intention is to discover how it is that the Village continues to function even though he himself is now a prisoner.
• It's just possible that the impostor who has replaced him as No 1 - the figure unmasked by No 6 in 'Fall Out' - is No 6's doppelgänger Curtis, who was not killed by Rover in 'The Schizoid Man' but only stunned. (Does Rover ever actually kill anyone?) It's also possible that Curtis was revived after 'The Schizoid Man' in much the same way as No 2 is in 'Fall Out'. Despite being brain-damaged by his trauma, he was given No 6/the true No 1's place at the "controls" of the Village.
• Implicitly there's not just a No 1. Above and beyond (or, indeed, below) the Village, there's also a No 0 - who is quite possibly the Butler, who still controls No 6 (but more subtly) even after he has left the Village.
• Another good candidate for No 0 is of course Rover - not just the supreme symbol of power in the Village but also the "reset", who returns escapees and thus returns everything to the status quo ante each time they attempt to escape.

Patrick McGoohan, who plays No 6, came up with the idea of the Village based around Portmeirion, which had been one of the locations for Danger Man. According to McGoohan though, No 1 is No 6's self. By implication then, No 1 = No 6, '1' is 'I' and '6' is 'me': one is the self as seen by oneself (the Prisoner himself) and the other is the self as seen by society (the Village). The Prisoner is his own worst enemy because he constantly "looks out for number one". McGoohan also made the point that you can't rebel against society all the time, otherwise you'd go crazy. So No 6 wants to escape from the Village because he rejects society. (He may even deny that there is such a thing as society.) But, as a member of society (i.e. as a number), he cannot escape it, even if he appears to have escaped and,for a time, to have shrugged off its label.

To a certain extent it's necessary to "retroject" this fable's moral onto some episodes, but it works remarkably well. The Prisoner cannot escape the Village because one cannot escape society, and even if one can escape society one cannot truly achieve the individuality of pure subjectivity without either going mad or accepting, to some extent, that one must also be an object of others' actions, observations and labels. One will always be numbered by other people, and even as oneself one must have a number - even if that number is, indeed, 'One'.

It follows though that in all probability each and every individual is No 1, and that anyone else who pulled off No 1's ape mask would see his own face. In as far as he has objective reality, No 1 is a faceless, protean being who represents the dark, utterly selfish, animal side of each man's nature. He can be unmasked and confronted, but he cannot be caught or restrained, let alone imprioned. It's quite likely that he is in charge not only of the Village but also of the world itself: the Village has its nukes, just as the outside world does. As such it it quite likely that he is the Lord of This World that Christ warns of in the Gospels - the Antichrist, Satan himself.

McGoohan: 'I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself.' 

...  

Audience member: 'Do you think there's going a strong popular reaction against "progress" in the future?' 

McGoohan: 'No!'

Morning Routine - American Psycho (1/12) Movie CLIP (2000) HD

The X-Files: The Shape of the Conspiracy - Part One: Sceptics and Secret Smokers

Carl Busch and Ronald Pakula - the assassin and the liar?

The "shape" of the conspiracy in the early episodes of The X-Files is actually remarkably simple. Mulder and Scully go out to investigate UFOs, and Mulder repeatedly stubs his toe against the US military, who are responsible (a) for recovering crashed alien spaceships and harvesting their technology and (b) for keeping this secret from the public - which explicitly is all for the sake of national security. Governments have the right to keep their military secrets under lock and key, after all, and the inference is left dangling that if the public were to find out that "we are not alone" there would be mass panic. And if that also means covering up that the aliens are abducting human children and doing obscene experiments on them then that's just too bad! (We later find out that the abductions in the first episode were actually all about turning humans into super-soldiers, so we can perhaps legitimately infer some background military interest there as well. But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves!)

All this is more or less confirmed later on. We find out in 'Redux' that in 1947 the Majestic 12 (MJ12) organisation was set up by the US Government to investigate the Roswell crash, and by inference we can connect the dots with other "military" episodes such as 'Deep Throat', 'Fallen Angel' (and its sequels 'Tempus Fugit' and 'Max'), 'E.B.E.', 'Little Green Men' and of course the 'Dreamland' episodes, in which we actually meet named MJ12 agent Morris Fletcher (not to mention his wife and children).

So far, so simple! No hybrids or clones, no Alien Bounty Hunters or Black Oil, no Syndicate or Rebel Colonists!

So, what then of the X-Files?

We're invited to imagine at the end of the pilot episode that Mulder's superiors at the FBI want to shut him down partly because they view him as an embarrassing crank who'll give the Bureau a bad name and partly because they see the X-Files themselves as a waste of money. It's only right at the end, with the appearance of the Smoking Man (the latterly named Carl Gerhard Busch, aka C.G.B. Spender) and his Spielbergian government warehouse in the bowels of the Pentagon, that we first get a suggestion that beyond the sceptics in the FBI there are other government agents out there who are actually rather interested in Mulder's work. The CSM clearly works for the Pentagon, who are apparently content for the time being to allow Mulder to investigate alien and/or "paranormal" activity on earth provided (a) it can all be kept under wraps and (b) they get to keep any physical evidence he discovers. (We see the Smoking Man filing away Ray Soames's tracking device, and in the first season's final episode he does the same with the alien foetus from Fort Marlene. And in the second season a not dissimilar fate awaits Dr Banton himself in 'Soft Light', thanks to Mulder's connexion with X - who is supposedly Mulder's contact at the Pentagon, not to mention his friend in the FBI, even though it's not always clear which of them is working for the other.)

In the second episode, the military situation is fleshed out, and we discover not only that the air force are flying their own UFOs but also that they're well up to date with the old government mind-control experiments. Indeed, they can pinch your most recent memories right out of your head if they want to. And we're introduced to another military secret agent who is also interested in Mulder's work and who, like the CSM, is also (we later learn) free to come and go at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

In fact Deep Throat is even more interested in Mulder than the Smoking Man is. In fact he's willing to provide Mulder with inside information, the implication being that Ronald Pakula fancies himself as a latter day Mark Felt and that Mulder and (presumably) Scully are going to be his Woodward and Bernstein. He wants to expose the government conspiracy that he's been involved in "for a long, long time", but he'll need their credibility in order to do so. And he's well aware what will happen to him if he's caught.

For a few episodes at least, this arrangement holds. Deep Throat gives Mulder some scraps of background on a couple of military projects that people weren't supposed to know about (a mad computer, a creepy kiddy cloning programme, etc.*) He also winds him up something rotten by helping him land a couple of really big extraterrestrial fish (in 'Fallen Angel' and 'E.B.E.'). And he gets back... what exactly? It's worth bearing in mind that he initially approaches Mulder not to give him inside knowledge but to warn him off investigating Ellens Air Force Base. The quid pro quo may as well be that Mulder will get inside information provided he's prepared at times not to dig too deeply. So, is Deep Throat's job to control Mulder as much as it is to encourage him? (To be fair, that's often how UFO researchers have been treated by government agents in real life.) All we can say for certain is that he's testing and training Mulder and gaining both his trust (in a world where one should trust no one) and his personal loyalty (which, in a world of conspiracies within conspiracies, is an important thing).

We find out at the end of 'Fallen Angel' though that Pakula isn't just helping Mulder in secret. He's also protecting him from on high. When Section Chief McGrath asks him why he's protecting Mulder, he replies enigmatically

I appreciate your frustration, but you and I both know Mulder's work is a singular passion - poses a most unique dilemma. But his occasional insubordination is in the end, far less dangerous ... [t]han having him exposed to the wrong people. What he knows...what he thinks he knows... Always keep your friends close, Mr. McGrath... but keep your enemies closer.

By implication then, Pakula is telling Mulder that he's helping him to get at the truth whilst at the same time reassuring the FBI that it's better to keep Mulder on a short leash (or at the very least to have him inside the tent pissing out) - working under the supervision of a section chief (not to mention people like the Smoking Man), writing up X-Files that can then be safely buried away, and, of course, having Scully "spying" on him the whole time. Who are "the wrong people"? Again by implication (and it's a daring double bluff by Deep Throat) they're probably people like Deep Throat himself. (Of course, also by implication, Pakula is also admitting to McGrath that the military does indeed have secrets that it would be dangerous for Mulder to uncover.)

The point of the scene apparently though is simply to show that Deep Throat, like the Smoking Man, is an important figure at the FBI as well as in the "defence establishment". The assumption always seems to be that they belong to the "executive branch", which for some reason in the X-Files universe is far more influential than it is in real life, so presumably these people have enough clout with the Clintons and/or Janet Reno to be able to do and get effectively whatever they want. (According to X in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone, Mr Mulder. The question is when they'll use it.')

Of course in 'Fallen Angel' Mulder is to all extents and purposes working as Deep Throat's secret agent, spying for Pakula personally on an MJ12 UFO salvage and containment operation. We learn later on that the Syndicate have done a secret deal with the colonists, but the rest of the MJ12's policy is still to shoot first and ask questions later. So this may well be Deep Throat's cover plan if and when he gets found out by the Smoking Man - to claim that Mulder is his asset rather than vice versa.

The first real suggestion that Deep Throat himself is giving Mulder the runaround though (after a certain amount of unsubtle, dramatically ironic foreshadowing) comes in 'E.B.E.' Deep Throat is giving Mulder the truth in this story, but he's also giving him lies. Is he misdirecting him from time to time in order to protect him - because he claims that he's protecting Mulder from truths that (by inference) Mulder is not ready to know? Possibly! But he also tells Mulder that "they" are closely observing him electronically and can "still hear" him. The suggestion then, presumably, is that when Deep Throat says he lied to Mulder to protect him from "the truth", the real truth that he's trying to protect Mulder from is that he suspects that he, Deep Throat, has been rumbled, and so he is now bluffing his colleagues by openly (i.e. in Mulder's apartment) handing Mulder disinformation. Whichever way one slices it though, the point of the story is that by this point Deep Throat has got cold feet and therefore to some extent is prepared to help his military colleagues mislead Mulder. (And arguably this allows him to save Mulder's own arse at the end of the episode when - yet again, implicitly - his colleagues trust him enough to apprehend Mulder and then let him go again.) By the end, however, Mulder doesn't know which lie to believe, however much he wants to.

One subject about which Deep Throat may be telling the truth, on the other hand, is what is later referred to (in the Smoking Man's apocryphal 'Musings', that is†) as UNSCR 1013:

After the Roswell incident in 1947, even at the brink of the Cold War, there was an ultrasecret conference attended by the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Britain, both Germanies, France and it was agreed that should any Extraterrestrial Biological Entity survive a crash, the country that held that being would be responsible for its extermination.

Conspicuously missing from this little list of countries are the three "former Axis" nations represented by the officials who end up calling the CSM (and by implication Garnet) in 'Anasazi', specifically Italy, Japan and (presumably, rather than Germany!) Austria. In '731' we learn that the Japanese government is prepared to do a deal with Dr Shiro Zama to take on his still living human-alien hybrid (and, presumably, sponsor his research). So one can speculate that the reason these governments are interested in the MJ12 files is that unlike the goody-two-shoes UNSC permanent member nations they are still officially open to the possibility of doing deals with extraterrestrials. (Have they even, albeit unwittingly, been sponsoring the Syndicate from afar?)

The next time we see the CSM, in 'Tooms', he seems to have graduated up the food chain from Section Chief Blevins's desk to that of Assistant Director Walter Skinner. It's confirmed that, unlike Mulder's superiors at the FBI, the CSM's concern with the X-Files is not that he thinks they're a waste of time and money but that Mulder may be too good at what he does - getting near the truth.

It's only in the very last episode of the first season though that we really get the first incontrovertible hints that there's more to "Government denies knowledge" than just the MJ12. For the first time it is implied that the Smoking Man is both of the Government and yet somehow not of it, and that within the official Government's official cover-up "conspiracy" there is another conspiracy even more ruthless, with its own even darker purposes. Deep Throat seems to imply that Dr Berube's experiments in human-alien hybridization are being shut down simply because they got out of hand - they were "too successful", and when one of the test subjects not only survived the experiments but was found to be running around outside alive and well, it was time for the military in "Los Alamos" to bring them to an end. But he also talks about 'so-called "black organizations"' and '[g]roups within groups ['[i]nside the intelligence community'] conducting covert activities, unknown at the highest levels of power'. In other words, this is the Syndicate in all but name. He seems to be trying to suggest that he doesn't really know about the actual Syndicate, though we can guess from what we find out in later episodes that he is quite probably a member. (Presumably he wouldn't want Mulder to associate him with them too closely when the latter does eventually find out about them. And of course it's also possible that Deep Throat knows or suspects that the real reason that Purity Control is being shut down is to stop the Colonists from finding out its real purpose - i.e. following on from his old friend "Bill Mulder's project" - to find a vaccine for the Black Oil. Perhaps it's for Bill's sake that he doesn't tell Fox any of this just yet - and of course he'll never get the chance to later!)

Indeed several things point to this being an operation by what we will later come to know as the Syndicate:

1. we will later discover that although the 'Purity Control' experiments probably were originally about creating super-soldiers for the military, after 1973 they came to be about: (i) creating the means to turn the Syndicate (and their families) into human-alien hybrids so that when alien colonization begins they will be immune to the Black Oil (aka Purity) and thus survive the colonization process (and not have monsters jumping out of their tummies), whilst at the same time "hiding in plain sight" (from their fellow humans, especially any who've survived without being stung into becoming hosts for alien foetuses) in order to serve as a "Vichy Government" for the invading extraterrestrials; and/or (ii) creating a vaccine for the Black Oil that will allow them and the human race generally to resist the colonization process;
2. we will also later discover that cover-ups of this sort, both for "the Government" and for the Syndicate, are almost always delegated to CSM's group Garnet, so the Crew Cut Man and his and his fellow nameless "men in black" goons are almost certainly working for Busch††;
3. Deep Throat's little speech to Scully just before he dies about 'That's the kind of people you're dealing with!' suggests (as does his dying 'Trust no one.') that there's more going on here than just "Government" secrets - because these are the sorts of people who would happily betray the US government in order to save their own skins; and
4. fourthly, it's not explained why the alien foetus that Scully manages to abscond with from Fort Marlene then ends up in the CSM's Pentagon storage facility.

On this last point, it's just possible that what we're seeing here in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' is the first real evidence that although the CSM has a cushty billet at the Pentagon and although he and Deep Throat have various mysterious ways and means of pulling strings both in the military and at the FBI, the two of them have actually been loyal to their own "government within a government". In closing down Dr Berube's experiments and bumping off a man who by leaking to Mulder (whether it was misinformation or the truth!) had become a liability, it's the Smoking Man's people who have ended up getting their hands on '[t]he wellspring ... the original tissue'. Although in 'One Son' it's slightly retconned (because apparently the alien foetus did end up back at Fort Marlene), the final scene, mirroring as it does not just the final scene of the pilot episode but also that of Raiders of the Lost Ark, leaves hanging a very heavy inference that the Cigarette Smoking Man is someone we will see again.

*In 'Young at Heart' Deep Throat talks about "the Government" being interested in the dodgy doctor's research, and Mulder, who has never seen him before, speculates that the CSM is from the CIA. But the fact that both of them are interested in the case, and the perfectly reasonable suggestion some have made that the military might want the secret of youth for their super-soldier project, would suggest that "the Government" even in this episode means the Pentagon. (OTOH we also learn, albeit from the man himself in 'E.B.E.', that Deep Throat is ex-CIA - and we know from JFK that you never really leave "the Agency".)
†In real life UNSCR 1013 is a fairly boring resolution passed in 1995 about arms flows in Rwanda.
††The CSM is clearly the head of Garnet, but as such he evidently has two "hats": sometimes, when working directly for the MJ12, he can call upon military personnel (such as as in 'Anasazi', when he's trying to recover the stolen MJ12 files, and in 'Apocrypha', when he's moving a UFO that's mentioned in the MJ12 files); otherwise, he uses his own MIBs such as Krycek and Luis Cardinal, who are (supposed to be) loyal directly to him.