The X-Files, as most everyone knows by now, is the story of FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. It chronicles their journey into America’s weird heart and their discovery of a dark conspiracy, an alternate history of the United States which serves to teach us about our own. It’s also the story of how they fall in love along the way.
While The X-Files’ reception has been mixed, I consider it a quintessential piece of 90s pop culture, and one of the greatest television shows ever produced. The first three episodes form a perfect introduction to the series. It isn’t an epic three-parter, like how producer Chris Carter would open his later series Harsh Realm, but rather a neat, subtle primer on the show’s various modes, themes, characters, and threads, as well as Carter’s particular voice as an artist.
The Pilot serves as our introduction to both the story and Carter’s approach to theme, dialogue, structure, and character. Not only does it lay the groundwork for the show, it’s just a great episode of television. Carter’s writing is ambiguous but emotionally forthright. He’s unafraid to have his characters openly state their perspective and debate their points of view, sometimes amusingly so, and he never offers reductive answers it would be foolish to try and provide at this point. He embraces a lack of closure, not releasing tension, even in the episode’s closing moments.
The Pilot doesn’t feature the classic theme song, but the trademark atmosphere is immediately apparent. It begins with a woman running through a dark forest in the fictional town of Bellflower, Oregon. She’s approached by an ominous figure, obscured yet standing in a beam of bright light. Her corpse is found the next day with two mysterious marks on her back, and the police aren’t surprised because she’s part of the “class of ’89.” And so the story begins.
This opening is amazing, with the camera swirling through darkness before being broken by the sharp light, with an unnerving and uncanny shroud obscuring the face of the woman’s presumed attacker. These elegant, evocative visual touches continue throughout the episode. Director Robert Mandel and cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth capture the moody Vancouver wilderness quite beautifully, and the mise-en-scene they establish here is just as definitive for the series as Carter’s writing.
Carter introduces us to Scully first, as she receives the X-Files assignment from her boss, Assistant Director Blevins. The decision to lead with Scully positions her as our viewpoint character, making The X-Files essentially her story. Scully is sharp and well-spoken, her remarkable intelligence and fortitude immediately apparent. She doesn’t budge an inch when confronted by these patriarchal authority figures, and demonstrates strong intuition given her discomfort with the ominous, smoking man in the corner of the room. This strange man simply feels wrong, a wordless imposition on an otherwise anodyne office environment, the maleficence punctuated by the elegant over-the-shoulder pan from Scully to him while she speaks. It both roots us in her perspective and her innate distrust of the man. It’s made even cooler for the critique of American power it foreshadows.
We follow Scully down the rabbit hole, unsure what to expect of her odd assignment and strange new partner. But surprise surprise, it’s David Duchovny, and you can even see the moment his hotness registers for her. The next few scenes establish quite a bit of the show’s identity, especially regarding Mulder and his relationship with Scully. You quickly get the sense he’s uncomfortable being the subject of near-constant mockery from his peers. He’s aware he’s thrown his career away in favor of esoteric conviction and practices a sarcastic distance as a result. He expects this treatment from Scully, but she comes away impressed with his record and willingness to stand his ground.
Mulder delivers his first exposition slide show, then his recklessness is established with his cavalier reaction to turbulence on the way to Oregon. Scully’s need to prove herself to people she deems worthy, a subtle but important character trait, is established as they drive into town. After arriving in town they exhume the remains of a previous victim, drawing the ire of the local authorities. This establishes how Mulder’s jaded sensibility compounds his distance from others and creates situations Scully will have to defuse.
Scully performs her first autopsy. Mulder’s giddy enthusiasm suggests they’re making further progress than he ever has before, causing us to wonder if Blevins made a mistake. This is where Carter starts to assert their investigative dynamic: Mulder makes intuitive jumps nobody else can, and Scully finds evidence no one else can.
Their investigation leads them to two more members of the “class of 89.” Both are institutionalized. One, Billy, is a vegetable and the other, Peggy, is paralyzed. She has a nosebleed and a seizure and falls from her wheelchair, where they find more of those marks on her back. This establishes Carter’s emphasis on visual storytelling.
They return to the hotel later that evening. Fox mandated a scene of Gillian Anderson getting ready for bed, where Scully finds marks on her body that resemble the marks they saw before. She shows them to Mulder, who confirms they’re only mosquito bites. It sets the stage for a contrived sex scene, but Mulder’s response is platonic. They do get to know each other better that night, though, as Mulder opens up about his personal experience with the paranormal. As a child, his sister was abducted by aliens, never to be seen again. With this, Carter subverts the audience’s expectations, deepens the bond between the characters, and establishes Mulder’s deeper motivation. This display of vulnerability demonstrates his growing fondness, maybe even trust, in Scully, and is gorgeously helmed, with Mulder emerging from shadows, rain reflected from the window rolling down his face in silhouette, highlighting the emotional motivation for his career-ending crusade. This twists the typical intellectual reasoning for male character motivation, ascribing the intellectualism to Scully instead.
Soon after they get an anonymous phone call telling them Peggy is dead, establishing Mulder’s reliance on shady informants. They go check it out and when they return to the hotel they find it ablaze, their evidence destroyed. This establishes the two steps forward, one step back nature of their work.
Amid the flames they meet the source of the phone call, which turns out to be Theresa Nemman, the Medical Examiner’s daughter. She’s another member of the class of ’89 and afraid for her life.
Mulder makes one of his intuitive leaps and decides Billy, the vegetable, is responsible for the disappearances, acting under orders from some other intelligence. They find some dirt from the woods on him, confirming his hypothesis and leading to the greatest cut in the episode. As Mulder and Scully debate what Billy’s involvement could mean, with Scully now understanding Mulder’s intuitive leaps are truly worthy and not just unhinged, Mulder points out whatever idea of his she agrees with will have to be written up in her report. With this, we move from a two-shot into a reverse of Scully, both the edit and the beat of silence underscoring her understanding of what this means. Scully isn’t sure where the truth is leading her, but she knows it’s led outside her comfort zone. They go back out to the woods and find Billy taking Theresa toward the light. They also find Billy’s father, a police detective, had been assisting in the cover up to protect his son. The Agents convince the detective to help them, and their interference causes the aliens to depart prematurely.
The Agents’ superiors interrogate Billy in a very well-blocked moment which pays off the entire episode’s direction. In the first act, Mulder and Scully are usually framed separately, underscoring their distance. She doesn’t know what to expect from him and he doesn’t trust her. As they work they’re drawn together, framed in the same shot more and more often. Now that it’s over they’re separate again. Mulder stands next to Billy as he tells his story, his proximity signaling his investment in the truth and his support of the person telling it. On the other side of a two-way mirror, Scully stands with Blevins and the mysterious smoking man. Scully has to decide whose side she’s on, who she finds most worthy of respect.
Scully lies awake at night wrestling with what she saw, and the mysterious smoking man files their evidence deep in the heart of the Pentagon, establishing him as a force for secrecy. Cue credits.
Despite the seeming modesty of the episode, the Pilot serves as a Rosetta Stone for the hundreds of episodes and multiple feature films to come. In addition to the several character and structural beats central to the series’ formula we see humans used as test subjects by an immutable force, implants in the body causing nosebleeds, and cross-generational human collaboration with that force. All these things will remain central touchstones for the series, all the way up to My Struggle IV in 2018. This episode serves as the basis for a true example of auteurist television, and it’s one of the best Pilots ever produced.