The Pilot — S1 Ep1 (Part 2)
When we left our intrepid duo, their car had lost all power, and they had been blinded by a bright light. Did they survive?
Of course, they did!
When things get back to normal, Mulder jumps out of the car, Scully follows, even though it is teeming down with rain. He checks his watch, which says 9:12 pm. he looks at the road to find the orange “X” he painted there on their way into town.
Of course, Mulder takes this “experience” as proof of paranormal activity, even trying to convince Scully that they “lost” nine minutes, to which Scully tells him unequivocally that it’s impossible due to time being a universal invariant. Just as she says it, the car comes back to life, prompting Mulder to reply with:
“Not in this zip code.”
After their weird experience on the road, we arrive back at the hotel with Scully typing up her report. Like it did with the car, the power goes out, so Scully decides to light a candle and take a bath. And I have to say, why not?
There’s a little something for the men as we see Scully strip down to a very sensible pair of undies, which she’s about the remove when she spots something on the small of her back.
The next we see, she is at Mulder’s door, huddled in her robe, looking like she just saw one of those aliens Mulder keeps banging on about. Ever the gentleman, he invites her in and proceeds to lower the robe. I’m sure Mulder thinks he’s onto a good thing for a moment, until Scully indicates her lower back, demanding to know what they are.
Candle in hand, Mulder lowers himself to look at what has Scully so scared, seeing three small, raised lumps on her back. Realising they’re insect bites, mosquito to be precise (who knew Mulder was an expert on insect bites) he tells Scully, who pulls her robe up and turns to him, burying herself in his chest.
Several minutes, we assume, pass, and we then see Scully lying on Mulder’s bed, a blanket covering her, as Mulder sits on the floor. He’s telling her the story of how his sister Samantha was abducted when she was eight years old, right in front of him.
INTERESTING FACT: Mulder tells Scully in this scene that Samantha was taken right out of her bed, but we know this to be untrue as in future episodes, we see flashbacks when she was in the middle of playing a game with her brother and was standing up when she was taken
Anyway, he goes on to tell her that he believes there are people in government to know about what happened and they are blocking him at every turn. He also says he has only been allowed to continue because he has made connections in congress, which we later discover to be Senator Richard Matheson.
For the first time, we hear Scully telling Mulder that he needs to trust her after he accuses her of being part of an agenda to bring him down, something Scully flatly refuses.
Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call, and they’re soon back out of the motel at the site of an accident, where Peggy O’Dell has been killed. The driver of the truck that hit her tells Mulder she was running, even though she was supposedly bound to a wheelchair, and when Scully looks at her body, she sees that her watch stopped at exactly 9:03 pm.
Mulder practically drags Scully from the scene when he learns the morgue eas broken into and the body that had been in Ray Soames’ grave has been taken. They arrive back at the motel to find it ablaze, and Mulder angrily shouts that they’ve lost all the x-rays and pictures of the stolen corpse. They’re both debating what to do next, when Theresa Nemman approaches them, saying she needs to help her.
The threesome goes to a local diner when Theresa proceeds to tell them that she keeps waking up in the woods with no knowledge of how she got there. She has the same marks on her back, as the others, and she is scared she is going to die. She asks for their protection before she has a sudden nosebleed. Soon after, she is whisked away by her father, who comes to the diner with the Detective, who Mulder and Scully learn is the father of Billy Miles. The detective warns them to stay away from his son.
After pondering what could be in the two other graves, Mulder and Scully head back to the cemetery, again in the pouring rain, only to find someone has beaten them to it, and the remaining two graves are empty. Mulder gets a blank look on his face and tells Scully that he believes Billy Miles is the person responsible. He rambles on about his “out there” theory, until Scully eventually dissolves into a fit of laughter, but not before she tells him the time that was on Peggy’s watch when she died.
They head back to the hospital and find Billy is still in his waking coma, and they are assured by the nurse taking care of him that he never moved from his bed. However, when Scully looks at his feet, she sees the same substance that she found in the woods. She takes a sample and they both leave.
This scene made me smile a little as it’s the first time we see Scully have a mini breakdown at the thought that maybe Mulder was right, and Billy was responsible somehow. She tells him he was in the woods, which should be impossible considering his current medical state. Mulder points out that she needs to write all of this in her report, so she says they need to head back and take another sample from the woods.
And, we’re back in the woods, but before they head into the undergrowth, they spot the detective’s truck. When they hear a scream, they both head off into the trees, and they get separated pretty quickly. Scully is knocked to the ground by the detective, who sets off after Mulder.
They find Billy with Theresa, who is lying on the floor. The detective aims his gun at them, and we cut to Scully, who hears the gunshot. Queue another bright light overhead as Billy picks up Theresa and the light consumes them. When it’s gone, both BIlly and Theresa are still there, alive, and the marks on Bily’s back have now gone.
It’s at this point that Mulder remembers he has a partner and heads off to find Scully, who conveniently missed everything that Mulder saw, so can’t substantiate any of it.
Sometime later, we see Billy undergoing hypnotic regression with Dr. Werber, the same man who took Mulder through the same treatment to find out what happened to his sister. The session is being watched by Mulder, Scully, SC Blevins, a strange man who I don’t think has a name and the creepy guy who seems to like his cigarettes.
When giving her report to Blevins, Scully confirms that she can’t substantiate any of the details in her report, and Blevins says she has zero evidence to show for the time they spent in Oregon. Scully then produced the implant that she found in the corpse’s nasal cavity, confirming that it is made of an unidentifiable material. Before leaving the office, she has these parting words:
“Agent Mulder believes we are not alone.”
Later that night, 11:21 pm to be precise, Mulder calls Scully when she is in bed telling her all their paperwork on the case is gone, and that they need to talk. She agrees but tells him it will be tomorrow. She ends the call.
Somewhere else, we see the creepy man who loves his cigarettes, let’s call him the Cigarette Smoking Man, for now, walking through a large storage area where he deposits the mysterious implant into a container with others like it. He then leaves, and the sign on the door indicates the storage area is within the Pentagon.
Queue End Credits
Well, there you have it folks, my rundown of the pilot episode of The X-Files. Stay tuned for a post that will tell you some fun facts about the episode
