Revisiting The X-Files: season 1 episode 17

17. E.B.E

Mulder and Scully are chasing an E.B.E (or extraterrestrial biological entity) in this episode, but the government sure isn't going to make it easy for them. In my memory, a great big chunk of this episode seemed to consist of little more than montages of Mulder and Scully driving to and fro; scene after scene of car headlights sweeping over desolate, rain-slicked roads, accompanied by spooky, tinkling piano music. And so, there are only a few things to note here, but fairly important things all the same.

Firstly, this episode introduces the Lone Gunmen, a group of men who operate an underground magazine dedicated to unearthing secret UFO and other government conspiracies. It's a topic for debate whether their work is of any worth, or whether - as Scully puts it - they're actually the most paranoid people in the world, taping every phone call they receive and suspecting every possible object of being bugged. Their ideas do seem to carry some weight, after all, when Scully finds a bug concealed inside a pen an old woman gave to her.

There is also the fact that Mulder comes closer than he ever has before to actually seeing a living, breathing alien. Breaking into a top secret military base, he escapes the security guards and pelts downstairs to the lower levels, where a container filled with red light appears to be the home of an extra terrestrial. The mysterious Deep Throat appears, a figure who's information Mulder has begun to suspect, after DT slipped him a photograph of a UFO that turned out to be a fake. Deep Throat informs Mulder that, at the time of Roswell, a great conference involving all the world's major countries was held, where it was decided that, should a live alien ever be found on earth, it was the duty of the country where the alien had been found to terminate it. Deep Throat killed one such alien. When Mulder looks into the window of the container, however, he sees only an empty bed.

Something about the set-up and atmosphere of this episode makes me feel it should have come a bit later in the series, or even should have been the climax episode of series one. Thanks largely to those endless driving montages and the "something big is going to be revealed" music, you can't help but get the impression our inquisitive duo are actually heading somewhere important, that they're actually going to discover something concrete this time. It's possibly to the show's credit that, yet again, it refuses to show its hand too early, instead choosing to crank up the tension only to have us, like Mulder, glimpse through a window and find only the shadow of what lurked there before, hinting at something incredible.

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