2.10 - Red Museum
Written by: Chris Carter
Directed by: Win Phelps
Aired on: December 09, 1994
Cold open: 3:50 long
Visuals: A couple strong visuals, the best being the view from behind the mirror as the mother, played by Gillian Barber, enters her suburban bathroom for a shower and finds herself unknowingly ogled by a creep. It's unsettling and shot well, a kind of De Palma homage with the corresponding amount of uncomfortable “nudity” allowed on cable.
The second visual, her son Gary (Bob Frazer), goes out for "five minutes" after he calls his little brother (lovingly) a "butt crumb," which is so '90s I'm surprised he didn't slam a pair of Oakley's onto his face and rollerblade away.
He comes back the morning after instead of five minutes later, and it's weird and creepy for sure, he in his little tighty-whities and all. But when the cops find him, they see him turn away and react to the words "He is one" across Gary's back. The words are just written there in marker, though, so it's kind of not as scary as the cops seem to think. It's weird, sure, but yeah. Just grab a washcloth guys.
An alright cold open, probably watered down from its length.
There's plenty to comment on before we get to Mulder and Scully eating barbecue ribs, but why even bother pretending like that’s not the most noteworthy moment of the first half of this episode. Maybe the whole episode, in fact, because of course, as Scully is commenting on how great the ribs are (smiling; good lord the smile) she has a stray hook of BBQ sauce on her cheek.
Mulder reaches out and dabs at it with a napkin. And the audience is undone!
But, we have to come back together quick, because Mulder starts saying some interesting shit. Mainly, that the concept of "walk-ins" is potentially relevant to the Church of the Red Museum (to help you remember the name, they wear red turbans, thanks guys), who may have written on young Gary's back. I hadn't heard the term walk-in before this episode, but it's definitely been around for a bit. As far as I can tell, however, Chris Carter made up the Lincoln and Nixon/Colson stories. Not that the other ones are true.
...or are they?
"Kinda' hard to tell the villains without a scorecard," Scully says, right after some actual slurs are thrown around by the sheriff's gross-ass son verbally accosting a church member.
This episode has some nice Mark Snow moments on the score that feel reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti's work on Twin Peaks.
"The Cleaner" appears, the silent killer played by Lindsey Ginter. Scully recognizes The Cleaner from seeing him kill Deep Throat back in 1.24 - The Erlenmeyer Flask, but her conversation with Mulder is particularly interesting because she blatantly says what the kids have been injected with is "extraterrestrial," only to then tell Mulder it was never conclusively determined that was the case.
Not very scientific there, huh, Queen Science.
The Mytharc revelations don't come until about 10 minutes from the end of the episode, which means this is actually a great example of how the show could maybe have gone if the intent had been to fold the Mytharc into Monster of the Week episodes more often. The show would have struggled much, much more in my opinion, because eventually the revelations around the Mytharc would’ve started to seem thin at 25 episodes of one mystery being doled out in five or 10 minutes, rather than having full “hour-long” episodes (43-45 minutes without commercials, usually) that sometimes get to feed the Mytharc to us like a magical elixir, baby.
The "will they, won't they?” plots and timelines already get less endearing and more annoying with every episode, whether it's Sam & Diane, Jim & Pam, or Mulder & Scully. In The Office, for instance, it made sense to have Jim and Pam actually start dating early and then to utilize plotlines like them trying to keep their relationship a secret, the drama of exes being in the picture, or of dating “long distance” for a bit, because those stories gave the audience what they wanted but also kept aspects of it distant.
And it doesn't have to be romantic entanglement, obviously, as some of the big questions tied to that rhetorical trope for the X-Files are “Will they find Mulder's sister, or won't they?" but also "Will Scully believe, or won't she?" but also yeah, "Will they freakin' kiss already goddamn, or won't they?"
However, when imagining how the show could've gone if they'd folded the Mytharc into MotW episodes, this episode gives us a kind of bleak peek into our future, say somewhere in the vicinity of 2016 and 2018? Episodes feel like 80% of one story, then 20% of another, with rhythmless transitions between the two, where the 80% storyline sets up a bunch of stuff and the 20% storyline craps it all up in the third act. Then neither feels satisfying.
Writer Glen Morgan said it best, as quoted in X-Files Confidential by Ted Edwards:
"My feeling, and Chris [Carter] knows this, is that to bring [The Cleaner Back], his presence should have been better developed."
Yep. Also, Morgan points out that the cops shooting and killing The Cleaner off-screen is really, really, really fucking stupid. He was nicer than that, actually, but he shouldn't have been, because he also rightly notes it's the dude who killed Deep Throat and that is a big deal! Deep Throat was literally in the pilot episode! He was essential X-Files!
The episode ends with a Scully voiceover and feels so rushed that it's hard to even remember what the hell this episode was supposed to be about. The messages written onto the teenagers' backs like a zine someone dashed together on some napkins have about as much staying power as that, because basically no one can definitively say what the message actually means. There's a thin reference to them being genetic freaks but since we don't know who's writing it - or, worse, the episode says but it isn't clear - the whole storyline falls apart.
"The episode just seems like half of one thing for a while, then half of something else," Morgan also said.
Scully breaks down the whole plot in an info dump that doesn't do much to make this one feel worthwhile.
"Open and unsolved," as Scully says of the case, isn’t unique or even necessarily unsatisfying in this show, but certain things have to happen in the episodes in order to make the open and unsolved cases sit inside entertaining stories. We need character growth, forward momentum, and yeah some neat shit too, some stuff to make us sit up or freak out or coo, maybe ooh and ahh! Namely, give us some spooky, weird, funny, or heartfelt moments and more. And the show is definitely capable of doing that and more, so when it doesn’t my weird X-Files heart aches.
Make huge plot-related choices off-screen over on the Donate page.
-Austin
