Alien invasion, government conspiracy. Feathered hair. I’ve been watching a lot of X-Files (up to season 3 right now) on Netflix, and it’s making me very nostalgic for the 90s. Despite being a show about evil conspiracies, it still has this innocent vibe to it, a feeling that the world was simpler then. It was still considered dark fiction that the government would torture people, for instance. America pre-2001 really was a different place.
It takes watching a show like this to really remind me of that. There’s a scene in which Scully pre-buys an airplane ticket to one location and then, at the terminal, buys a new ticket for another destination, and the attendee doesn’t bat an eye. No identification is shown. Off she goes. Shocking! And yet I can remember how in high school I took the place of another student on the Model U.N. team and flew to Chicago on his ticket, in his name. No problem at all. I held the ticket and that’s all I needed to board.
Certainly, the show reminds us of the olden days, but not always in good ways. I’m appalled at how often Scully is used not as a protagonist but as a motivator or plot point. It seems like she’s being kidnapped or held hostage in every other episode, and it’s always up to Mulder to save the day. There was finally a moment where Scully was in peril, about to be devoured by a fat-sucking vampire when, out of nowhere, the monster is shot. And it’s not Mulder! It’s the other woman who was about the be the vampire’s victim. The scene shocked me for no reason other than how it broke the formula finally. I imagine it passed without notice when the episode aired, but it seemed like a move forward as far as the gender roles. Additionally, the episode featured an old-fashioned detective who doesn’t think women like Scully should be working such cases, and he gets eaten by the monster in the second act. Methinks the writer of that episode knew what he or she was doing when they wrote it.
On another tangent, I learned that the writer of my favorite episodes, the ones with darkly comic sensibilities, Darin Morgan, now consults on Fringe. This guy wrote brilliant, hilarious episodes such as “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (in which a psychic suggests that Mulder will die via autoerotic asphyxiation and that Scully never dies), or my all-time favorite, “War of the Coprophages” about cockroaches. Digging around on Wikipedia revealed to me that not only did he write for the show—he got his start playing the creepy fluke man in an early monster of the week episode. Darin Morgan, if you’re out there listening—you’re a hero of mine and have had a huge impact on my sense of humor. Sorry you had to spend so much time dressed up as a human fluke. That episode gave me and countless other kids nightmares though, so you could say it paid off in a way.
This is how I know I’m getting older. I begin to obsess about things from the past more than I do about modern things. Nostalgia is not a young man’s emotion. But I miss those days when the biggest worry we had was that the government was lying to us about the existence of extraterrestrials. I miss the days when I was credulous enough to believe in UFOs, ghosts, and the like. The world was both more simple and more wondrous then. As I grow older, the world merely grows more complex. But perhaps that’s my own fault. Wonder is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind ![bg15_320a[1]](http://www.jeremiahtolbert.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bg15_320a1-210x300.jpg)