PREVIOUSLY ON THE X-FILES
After 14 years off the X-Files, Mulder and Scully are lured back in when a Glenn Beck-type conspiracy theorist named Tad O'Malley takes them to meet Sveta, a girl who claims to have been abducted by and impregnated by aliens. Mulder immediately formulates a theory that the goverment co-opted alien technology from the Roswell crash site in 1947 and has been using it ever since to instigate a global takeover and blame it on aliens. Scully rolled her eyes a lot but when both Tad and Sveta disappear, she realizes maybe he's on to something and agrees to help him figure this thing out. X-Files: Reopened.
THIS WEEK'S CASE FILE
The show opens with a tight shot of a bloody eyeball, in case there was any doubt that the X-Files is back, baby! The eye scanner welcomes Dr. Sanjay to work at Nugenics Technology, where he goes into a meeting and proceeds to have a complete breakdown. There's a high pitched ringing in his head, and he hears his co-workers talking about the reclusive Nugenics "Founder," Augustus Goldman, but all Sanjay can hear over the ringing is snippets saying "get the data" and "go now!"
Mondays, amirite?
So he locks himself in a computer mainframe room and tries to download data until the ringing is too much to handle, then EW GROSS NO NO WHY HE STICKS A LETTER OPENER IN HIS EAR CANAL.
Mulder and Scully are on the case! Scully's like "right cool cool he committed suicide the end." But Mulder points out that there must have been a reason for him to try to get data before killing himself. Unfortch, men in suits appear and won't let Mulder take the harddrive as evidence, because apparently it all belongs to the Department of Defense. They won't even tell him where this Augustus Goldman is, but that's cool because Mulder had already stolen a cell phone off the BODY OF A DEAD MAN and used it to set up a meeting with someone named Gupta, who Sanjay was calling every night.
They meet at a bar, and Mulder asks if they can go somewhere to talk alone, so Gupta leads him into a closet and immediately drops to his knees and starts unbuttoning Mulder's pants. Wow, that lead didn't turn out as planned. (Also, is this some sort of weird Sanjay Gupta shout-out that I don't get?) Meanwhile, Scully is performing the autoposy on Sanjay, and as though watching him push a letter opener into his ear canal weren't enough, we have to watch Scully slowly pull it back out. She then finds he'd written the words "Founders Mutation" on his hand before he killed himself.
Is there literally any better feeling than watching these two walk into a dark space holding a couple of flashlights? No. There isn't.
Mulder and Scully go to Sanjay's apartment in their Totally Cool All New Ford SUV with this Super Sweet Camera Technology that keeps them from running over teenagers. Inside, they find photos of deformed children posted up on his wall. The police show up, but just as they burst through the door, Mulder gets an awful, ringing headache just like Sanjay had before he died. He isn't able to get the photos of kids and the Department of Defense confiscates them.
They meet with AD Skinman who is none too thrilled that they lost the files to the DoD but lo! Mulder made photocopies first, duh. No wonder Skinner was never promoted to director. Mulder's thinking genetic testing is what's up, and Founder Goldman is behind it. Trying to find him, they meet with a nun at Our Lady of the Sorrows, where Goldman is a big time donor to their maternity ward. The nun promises to relay the message that they're trying to find him, and when she disappears a pregnant girl named Agnes beckons them over. She needs help getting out of there - even if something is wrong with her baby. Mulder takes the bait: So the founder of Nugenics also happens to be the biggest donor of a maternity ward where homeless girls are kept to have their babies? And for whatever reason he's being protected by the DoD? Sounds like he's using these women as incubators.
All of this makes Scully think about William, the baby she had with Mulder 15 years ago that she gave up for adoption. There's a dream sequence of her walking William to school, helping him when he's hurt, then ultimately, coming into his bedroom where she sees him turning into an alien.
You will go far in life, young William.
They're finally able to meet with Goldman, who shows them a ward in Nugenics where children are kept locked in rooms, and I kept waiting for Dr. X to wheel around the corner. These kids all have genetic mutations and it's both heartbreaking and, like, SO X-FILES. Scully is definitely feeling the sads about all this, but before she can get information out of Goldman, a girl down the hall has a freakout at the same time that Mulder gets a text. Turns out Agnes was in a hit and run accident, and all she had on her was Mulder's business card. Scully's autopsy report of Agnes shows she was killed by blunt force trauma - but not before the baby was surgically removed. While Scully was autopsying, Mulder found out that Goldman's own wife was convited of murdering their baby and locked up in an asylum, but they never found THAT baby either.
This leads Mulder and Scully to Goldman's wife, who tells them the story of leaving her husband when she realized their daughter, Molly, could breathe underwater. She figured it had something to do with Goldman's "experiments" and being nine months pregnant with a baby boy, she wasn't waiting around to see what he might do to that kid either. So she leaves in the middle of the night, but hits a deer and crashes her car. She climbs out from under the wreckage and gets a terrible, high pitched headache and hears someone telling her to cut the baby out. AND SO SHE DOES OH LORD SHE CUTS RIGHT INTO HER PREGNANT BELLY and out shoots the tiny bloody fist of an infant WAVING ITS HAND IN THE AIR LIKE IT JUST DON'T CARE.
FINALLY Mulder and Scully realize that the teenage janitor from Nugenics/kid they almost hit with their car - Kyle - might be involved, so they drive out to his house where his mom yells at them while Mulder gets another terrible headache - but not before realizing this screaming woman isn't Kyle's biological mother. Scully finds him and they bring him in, getting him to admit that he can do the headache/mind control thing, but he can't control it. Because it turns out, THIS is Goldman's son, who told his mother from LITERALLY INSIDE OF HER to cut him out of her belly. Yup. One and the same. And he's searching for his sister Molly. They take him to Molly, who is being held in Goldman's glass rooms. The siblings can talk to each other with their minds, so he explodes the glass room she's in, and when Goldman tries to stop him, Kyle makes BLOOD COME OUT OF ALL OF GOLDMAN'S ORIFICES JESUS CHRIST.
The episode ends with Mulder having his own dream sequence about William, in which they build toy space ships and watch movies, until the day Mulder comes in and finds William being abducted by aliens, just like his sister was.
BIGGEST COVER UP
The biggest shocker, for me at least, was the fact that Goldman had experimented on his own kids. I knew the janitor kid was important, but I certainly didn't realize he was Goldman's own son!
Runner up: Well, I certainly didn't see that whole BJ scene with Gupta coming, did you?
WORST KEPT SECRET
The janitor kid. He LITERALLY ran into Mulder and Scully twice - once in Nugenics and once into their car. Even as distracting as their Totally Rad Ford SUV product placement was, that was hard to miss.
MONSTER OF THE WEEK
The only "monsters" we got this week weren't actually monsters - they were kids with medical deformities, and some of them were pretty cute. So we'll name the evil doctor doing experiments on them as our Monster of the Week instead. (Though I did scour the web for a GIF of that one kid with a melted face because WHOA.)
THIS WEEK'S TOP RANKING AGENT
I'm awarding this one to Spooky Mulder. He had a hunch, he followed it, and he was right. We know Mulder's hunches only have like a 15% success rate.
THIS WEEK'S LOSER-HUMAN HYBRID
Goldman, Goldman, Goldman. First you do experiments on your own kids, then you do experiments on sick and deformed kids? This episode was never going to end well for you, bro.
FROM THE BUREAU SURVAILLANCE FILES
"He had a psychotic break and committed suicide. Note the letter opener sticking out of his head." - Scully, cold as ice.
"You want to walk on the wild side but when it comes down to it, you're repressed," said Gupta, secret gay man. "The truth is in here." He pokes Mulder in the chest. Mulder responds, "Yeah, I've heard something like that."
"You're never just anything to me, Scully." - Mulder
"Space is hard." - William, son of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully
BEST SCULLY EYE ROLL
When Mulder asked Goldman's wife why she didn't like cats.
UNSOLVED CASES
- So clearly Mulder and Scully both have some serious issues about their ability to be good parents. Neither of them was certain they could save little William from a terrible fate. Do y'all think we'll get to meet the real William?
- Why is the Skinman still just an Assistant Director? He's had that same job for like 25 years, at least.
- And is Skinner bathing in the same blood of virgins that Gillian Anderson does?
- Does the X-Files being reopened mean that Scully has quit her surgeon job? Is this even a real job or does she just use up PTO to chase aliens a few days a week?