By: Matt Spaulding
The last time we saw Mulder and Scully it was in the ill received 2008 film The X-Files: I Want to Believe. But now our intrepid conspiracy chasing agents are back in Fox's new X-Files event series!
As much as I wanted this first episode to hit the ground running full tilt (after all, this is a series that had over 200 episodes and two feature films to get its legs), it instead hit as a jog. We find Mulder living as a bit of a hermit and Scully has left the FBI is now performing surgeries on children born with a birth defect that causes them to not have ears. However, as the episode goes along, we learn a little bit about what happened to them between the close of I Want to Believeand the opening of this episode.
The plot goes back and forth between a flashback to the crash at Roswell and the present day. The plot at Roswell is almost inconsequential. It serves only to set up the idea that the United States Government has acquired alien DNA and technology.
The modern day plot is a tiny bit muddled, but is, overall, a classic X-Files episode. It centers on a right-wing "news" show host, Tad O'Malley, whose show focuses on every ridiculous conspiracy theory you can think of (think of the things your nutty friend shares on Facebook: "false flag" operations, chemtrails, Democrats coming to take your guns, 9/11 as an inside job, etc.) Sounds right up Mulder's alley, right? That's what O'Malley thinks, and he gets in touch with the FBI to track him down. Not knowing how to find him, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi returns in the role) calls Scully, who does. And so the episode is off.
From here, it's a bit tough to describe. O'Malley brings Mulder and Scully to the home of a young woman named Svetta who claims to have been abducted and experimented on multiple times by aliens, even claiming she has alien DNA. Mulder latches on to this, naturally, and Scully does not, opting to return to the hospital. In the meantime, O'Malley drives Mulder to a secret location where scientists have a craft they reverse engineered from alien technology that uses "Earth energies" for power and is cable of warping space and time. This is also how he learns that all the things he has been chasing all these years weren't perpetrated by aliens, but by humans with alien tech.
If you want know more about what happens, I recommend you check it out! The episode is a solid B and I look forward to the next five episodes!