Yesterday night my wife and I watched s01e04 Conduit.

It was what one would imagine to be a typical episode: about UFOs and
alien abductions, with a story sounding implausible at the beginning
told by apparently unreliable people who are the only witnesses: of
course Scully starts out sceptical, and eventually softens. This time
Scully also develops a degree of understanding and human sympathy for
Mulder who this time is personally distraught by the thought of his
sister, for whose mysterious disappearance many years before in his
presence he somehow feels responsible.

We discover that alien abductions are real, that aliens make people able
to convey secret information without them being able to tell how; and
not much more.
More interestingly we discover that real witnesses are resentful for not
being believed, and prefer not to speak: nobody likes being made fun of.
This episode was a study of character, mostly on Mulder, maybe -- but
again, my memory is decades old -- not entirely consistent with the
following of the series. Here Mulder keeps displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of paranormal history and competency in his field but is not
always in control of himself. In a scene at the end, he is seen alone
in a church, in a sort of dignified despair.


The psychological development of the pain of not being believed was a interesting angle -- even if, I am noticing now as I write, already
touched in s01e02 Deep Throat with test pilot Budahas's wife.

Some naïveté on the technical or scientific side: the papers full of handwritten zeroes and ones decoded from television signal noise were
not credible: the bandwidth must have been very low: one bit every how
many seconds?
And the transmission could be apparently interrupted.
And nobody is able to look at a sequence of binary digits and recognise
a pattern.

The way Mulder can always recount historical events by memory, without research, is a storytelling device maybe necessary for the economy of exposition, but strains our suspension of disbelief.


My lovely wife, who did not know about Samantha Mulder, enjoyed this
episode more than I did; I guess s01e04 does not lend itself very well
to multiple viewings.

For me this episode definitely lacks some fun moment. As a standalone
film a sustained serious tone would work, and the drama could in fact be
made even darker; that was attempted in Millennium, whose first episodes
I remember very fondly as a sort of X-Files in a world of pain and
despair. But Millennium did not last and The X-Files would not have
lasted so long with only the dark angle. We love the X-Files as a fun
series, able to laugh at itself.

--
Beard

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