Revisiting The X-Files: season 1 episode 10

10. Fallen Angel

My initial expectation was for this to be an episode about angels, which may or may not have been more interesting than the resultant UFO story. A fallen angel is also code for a downed alien aircraft. Curse my inferior knowledge of military terms; had I known, I might have been able to skip the ensuing mundane forty minutes. What we have here is another “bright lights in the forest” story.

It doesn’t take Mulder long to get wind of a crashed UFO, and soon he’s creeping into the restricted area before the military have a chance to cover it all up as if nothing happened. As it goes, Mulder isn’t that great at espionage, and soon ends up in the interrogation chair, with his career on the line. While in a cell, he meets a hyperactive man with an intense interest in aliens, and very big hair. Scully turns up to collect Mulder and, against her wishes, they embark on another case to discover what really happened.

The episode does benefit from its sense of mystery and intrigue. Something alien has clearly escaped from the crashed spaceship, but we never get a real idea of what it looks like. All credit goes to the series for refusing to employ the usual tall, grey, bog-eyed aliens of the Roswell conspiracy and instead focusing on making the lack of anything physical far more threatening. The alien here is almost invisible except for a faint heat haze (think the Predator when invisible, or Harry Potter when concealed beneath his cloak). Much like the thing in the woods that stalked Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead, the alien zooms up to people and incinerates them with a brilliant white light.

The alien is also after the man with the big hair, who also turns out to be schizophrenic and epileptic. The story reaches its climax with this man being beamed into the air by a strange blue light, and Mulder being hauled before some officials who seem determined to get him out of the FBI once and for all. Luckily, the mysterious Deep Throat turns up to get Mulder off the hook.

Like Space, the previous episode, my reaction to Fallen Angel was lukewarm at best. The alien stories all follow more or less the same pattern: something alien turns up, Mulder tries to get close to it, the government intercept and cut him off and succeed in covering up the incident, while the aliens in question always seem to make their escape. None of these conspiracy episodes so far have really gone anywhere, and the pattern is not broken here. Fallen Angel, while apparently being one of X-Files creator Chris Carter’s favourites, really fails to impress.

Check out Matt's review of the previous episode here.