Season 1 Ep. 1 - "Pilot" A.K.A. Where Mulder isn't Mulder yet and is kinda a Douche and Also Aliens 

And thus we begin. (This one feels extra long but come on, it's the pilot. The episode had a lot to do.)

TLDR:

Kids from the same high school class in small town Oregon (or as Mulder says, "Ore-gone") keep dying from mysterious circumstances. Instead of using local town resources and law enforcement, the FBI allows Agent Fox Mulder and his new partner, Agent Dana Scully, to literally fly across the country to determine the cause of death. Mulder thinks it's aliens, Scully doesn't, they do things without warrants, realize it's a comatose kid named Billy Miles who's responsible for something? And then it's over? Kinda? But it's definitely aliens.  

Rating: 7.5 orangutan-corpses/10 

Plot: 

We open on a genuinely scary shot of a young woman running for her life in the forest, only to stumble on a strange bright light with a creepy, unknown man standing over her. 

Cut to the forest being overrun with white men in trench coats (note: 90's law enforcement = trench coats). The lead investigator clearly knows the young woman once they flip her over, but before they do, we see two strange dots on the bottom of her back. Everyone's all "oooh, she's from that one class where people keep dying" and the lead investigator looks out stonily across the forest. Dun dun dunnnnn. 

Now that we've set the scene, let's meet our precious angel of a protagonist, Dana Katherine Scully. Scully walks through the FBI in pure 90's-business-suit-fabulousness:

LOOK AT THE SIZE AND NUMBER OF THOSE BUTTONS. SHE'S NOT EVEN USING THE BUTTONS BUT BY GOD DOES SHE HAVE THEM. 

Over-sized coat and pants aside, Scully walks into a room of old white men, with a suspicious character acting suspiciously in the background. 

If you can't tell - he's smoking. A cigarette. Evil. 

It's an interview/exposition extravaganza as we learn about Scully's accomplishments through the old white men, and about Mulder's accomplishments/spookiness through Scully. 

Basically: Scully is a new agent, is a medical doctor, super smart. Mulder is another agent, was really good at his job chasing down serial killers, is now a weirdo working on the X-Files (aka aliens and stuff). 

Beyond that, it's heavily implied that Scully is being sent down to debunk and destroy Mulder's work. Which, let's think about that. Here you are, a young and bright agent, a friggin' medical doctor, no less, finally being sent out to work in the field, and your job is to undermine your newly-assigned partner. For someone as ethically upstanding as Scully, it's surprising that she would even agree to take the job in the first place. Of course, the way she handles it is to out-integrity everybody else by focusing on the work and the people she's trying to help. Still. You should never be placed in that position by your employer. She should quit. 

But she doesn't and it's all ok because we finally get to watch these two characters meet:

Do you feel that? Do you feel those vibrations? Those love vibrations? That's what you're feeling. 

Scully walks in, takes note of the strange images on the wall, then plasters on a professional smile and offers a handshake to her new partner. Mulder, on the other hand, is an ass. He immediately calls her a spy and plows through the Ore-gone case description without giving Scully all the details. This will be a pattern with him throughout the episode. Ass. 

They fly off to Ore-gone, experience some turbulence, which gives Mulder a chance to prove how bro and cool he is when he barely notices it. He does more mysterious (see: douchey) things like this - like pulling off to the side of the road to mark a bright red "X" when there's radio interference, and not answering Scully when she asks what's going on. 

I get the point is to make him seem like this enigmatic guy who has a Sherlockian ability to see these supernatural clues, but if I had to work with a guy like that, the lack of communication would drive me to violence. Pure violence. 

Anywho, after getting the lay of the land, Mulder decides to dig up an old corpse of another kid who died under similar circumstances. While in the cemetery, a man and his daughter pull up on a road and park conveniently next to the grave. The man and daughter argue about being there, before he manhandles her back in the car. (This is Tracy. Tracy has a scary and sad life.) 

He goes up to Mulder and Scully, explains that he's the medical commissioner and he objects to having his work reviewed by the FBI, which is a great way to avoid suspicion. Mulder asks why he allowed them to do in the first place, and he said he wasn't, he was on vacation when the request came through and another commissioner gave them permission. 

I bring this all up because we finally get the first line that Duchovony delivers in true Mulder-Fashion: "Guy should've taken a longer vacation." It was such a relief to hear that one bit of dialogue in between his manic portrayal of Mulder during the pilot.

And it's right after this line that we get the next creepy bit of the show. The coffin falls from the thinga-ma-jig used to dig it up, then dramatically opens up to reveal the corpse of a poor orangutan. 

This shit's clever, y'all. No one would've seen that coming. 

A bunch of things happen in quick succession.

1) We get an autopsy - Scully's narrating, Mulder's taking pictures, and of course, they find an implant in the nose of the orangutan-corpse;

(This happens like, a lot, over the next several years.)

2) We meet Peggy O'Dowell (O'Dowd?) and Billy Miles - both in an institution, both from that same high school class, both unable to walk. Both have those mysterious dots on their backs;

3) We get sexy times - Scully finds two dots on her back, freaks, and runs to show Mulder, requiring her to be in her underwear.

(Let's face it - if these two less emotional issues they would've sexed it up right then and there.)

Throughout it all we get the push and pull between these two characters that become the cornerstone of the show. Mulder believes, Scully doesn't. Mulder can draw conclusions without science, Scully can't. And really, neither can I. All that Scully has in front of her is a bunch of dead young twenty-somethings, strange markings, and an implant in an orangutan. Nothing about that objective evidence would lead a rational person to think "Ah yes, aliens." No spaceships. No sightings. Nothing to connect the radio interference and "lost time" to these deaths. So why does Mulder do it? 

Mulder tells Scully about the night his sister disappeared. He also tells her about using hypnosis to extract his memories from that night. It was through these sessions that he remembered a bright-white light and a "presence" that he believes was alien. His proof came to him as a child, so he can make these leaps as an adult. Again, this stuff is really clever. The pilot does a great job at setting up the foundations these two people live on, and how through trusting each other they can still find common ground.

Anyway, wheelchair-Peggy dies, but she dies on her feet, so people are confused. This leads Mulder to suspect that Billy's not as comatose as he seems (you know comatose patients, such liars). Mulder and Scully go back to the psychiatric ward where Billy lives, and sure enough, Billy has muddy feet. 

Tracy then calls Mulder and Scully, panicking because all of her friends have died and she feels like she's next. Could you imagine??? You had this terrible thing happen to you as a teenager, you can't remember what it was, and all the people who went through it with you are dying!!! How the hell do you get over that??? (We find out how Tracy's doing in six years, and, turns out - therapy.) 

While Tracy is speaking with Mulder and Scully, her father (angry, not-suspicious medical commissioner) comes in with the sheriff, who happens to be Billy Miles' father! Dun dun dunnnnn. They take Tracy away and Sheriff Miles tells Mulder and Scully in no uncertain terms to "stay away from my boy." Because that's how Canadian actors think Americans speak. (I'm assuming he's Canadian because all the actors are Canadians except the billed ones.) 

Meanwhile: their hotel rooms and all the evidence burns down. Suspicious.

Scully's caught on to the idea that this is a cover-up, but again, without more evidence, she's still not on the alien-bandwagon. 

Now that they know that Billy Miles is possibly a murderer (or co-conspirator with aliens) and that Tracy is probably the next victim, Mulder and Scully run out into the forest. They then do the brightest thing ever and split up. Scully gets chased off by Sheriff Miles, but Mulder stumbles on this: 

Billy's just, you know, carrying Tracy into a clearing in the woods while a bright light from above appears. Lots of wind, too. 

Then boom! Bright light disappears, Sheriff Miles is there, Mulder's there, Scully's conveniently not there. By the time Scully shows up, no evidence of alien-stuff. (We're creating a drinking game. This is rule #1: drink when Scully misses supernatural event.) Comatose-Billy is gonna need another nickname as he's now awake and walking, and his two dots are now gone. Tracy's fine too. I mean, physically, she'll need years of therapy. 

Now Billy's talking to a hypnotherapist, recalling the events that started all of this when he was in high school. They were all hanging out in the forest, partying, when a bright light appeared. He and his friends were taken, had something placed in their heads, and experiments were done on them. Classic alien-abduction. 

Scully's being asked by the old white men who hired her "how can we prosecute a case like this?" The only evidence they have, they say, is one young man's testimony, given under hypnosis. Everything else was burned in a fire. Scully's all "nah, bitch" and pulls out the implant that she kept in her pocket. Scully goes back to the basement, while smoking guy takes the implant and buries it deep in the Pentagon's underground warehouse. 

The End. 

Thoughts:

Phew boy that was a lot. Obviously pilot episodes have a lot of ground to cover, and this one didn't even know what ground it was covering. It's pretty well-known that the creators of the show (Hello, Chris Carter), weren't planning on having a giant myth-arc that would connect throughout the series. Therefore, a lot of the stuff in the pilot episode (two dots on the back, giant implants in the nose), don't match up with other details in future episodes. 

The benefit to not starting out with some grand plan is that it allowed Mr. Carter to focus on these two characters. It's strange - Scully has the least background between the two of them in this episode, yet Gillian Anderson's performance is about 85% on point with who Scully will become. Mulder has way more of a background, but Duchovony's performance is around 45% of who Mulder really is. But the chemistry between the two is obvious. They're not quite "gazing" at each other yet, but you can feel the respect Mulder develops for Scully, and vice versa. 

That respect is what sets this relationship apart from others. It's frustrating to watch a show from the 90's these days - in case you didn't notice, all of the characters who had jobs and authority in this episode where white men (aside from Scully). That won't change much as the years go on, but the one bright spot is that these two characters continue to rely and trust each other, regardless of their sex/gender.

New thoughts I've never had before:

The end caught me off guard for the first time. "How can we prosecute a case like this?" Now that I have a working knowledge of criminal procedure, I've realized that Mulder and Scully were terrible cops. Awful, constitutional rights-breaking cops. Those habits start in this episode when Mulder and Scully are investigating a scene without a warrant. 

But if this did take place in the real world, would Billy Miles have suffered any criminal consequences? The old white men were wrong at the end of the episode. There's plenty of evidence to bring against Billy Miles. Tracy's alive, she can give testimony to essentially being kidnapped by Billy (although it'd be easy to argue that she had an opportunity to get away). Mulder himself caught Billy at the scene, holding onto Tracy. Would a District Attorney try to link Billy to the previous deaths? And how sad would that have been? This poor kid potentially losing his liberty because some aliens decided to pick his friend group for experiments. 

Aliens are dicks.