Grace Duffy, For The Mary Sue
On the MulderDitch! and Scully’s fight scene
“The reaction is dramatic, but his behaviour here actually seems crucial in conveying the sheer desperation of his belief. If Mulder has spent most of his life believing UFOs took his sister, his dogged pursuit of anything even remotely connected to them is likely to overcome his better judgement.”
“How Scully isn’t a conspiracy theorist already, I don’t know. She manages to grab his gun and forces him to drive her to the base, lest she call the world’s media and invite them down to take a look at the local ~experimental aircraft. (Dana Scully, zero fucks given since forever.)”
On Mulder and Deep Throat’s last conversation
“Spooky Mulder would like to issue a formal in-your-face to everyone.”
As An Amoeba, For Key of X
On Mulder and Scully’s aesthetic
“…sleepy Mulder eyes and his crazy Mulder tie and his moussed-up-to-Jesus hair.”
“Scully’s got a shoulder bag—remember when she used to carry a bag like a normal woman? Before she figured out the trick to carrying her wallet, keys, glasses, hairbrush, lipstick, tampons, gun, flashlight, rubber gloves, ziploc baggies, and giant cell phone in her jacket pockets? She has so much still to learn.”
*We also see her eating a lot more frequently in Seasons 1 and 2. In later seasons we don’t see her eating all, or it’s a salad. Sad.
On the Canadian aesthetic
“It seems the answer to Mulder’s question is The Flying Saucer, a charming local eatery full of UFO freaks. We see some lady in tapered mom jeans and a guy in a denim jacket walking in. I LOVE YOU, CANADA. Seriously. I love you and your realistic extras. Los Angeles WISHES it had enough dumpy people to hash together a single scene of regular townies walking into a diner, let alone five years’ worth. Bless you, Vancouver, and your cloudiness and regularness. You don’t look much like Idaho — or Florida, or Oklahoma — but you look like a real place, and your actors are blessedly not all trying to be the next Jessica Simpson. I find it so refreshing, I really do. The lady at the counter is middle-aged and somewhat heavy and wearing a hideous loud blouse and ugly lipstick, instead of being a 20-year-old model in a tank top who’s been given a ponytail and smudgy eye makeup to make her look “plain.” Anyway. Pet peeve of mine.”
On Mulder flirting and Scully’s transcendent awesomeness
“Scully (very much in need of a sports bra, BTW) comes running out of the motel’s office toward Mulder’s door. He sees her out the window, jumps off the bed and scurries to the door so he can be there in time to open it and laconically drawl, “You didn’t come to raid my minibar, did you?” It’s not the joke I like — it’s all the effort he puts into it. Without betraying his cool exterior, indeed.”
“Oh, she is so awesome in this. I mean, she’s awesome in lots of episodes, but one reason she’s so EXTRA awesome in this is that she’s kicking ass while wearing a sassy ponytail and her dad’s shirt and tiny workboots and being approximately in third grade. Love!”
Meghan Deans, for Tor
“…Each vocalization of doubt chips away at the fresh partnership. When she sees that Mulder isn’t listening, Scully stubbornly, fatally, digs her heels in even further. As she grows more strident, he grows more poker-faced, like a teenager turning a deaf ear to his mom who totally doesn’t understand.”
“’These are questions we have no business asking’ (a fair turnaround from her position at beginning of the episode, when she sternly informed the Colonel’s wife that ‘the government is not above the law’).”
“Here be aliens. That’s now a given. But who, how, and why, that’s trickier. Feeling like you’re the first to figure something out, that’s fun. But feeling like you’ve been left out, like decisions have been made on your behalf, like a whole lot of people have known and you haven’t ever been one of them, like the guy you thought was a reporter is actually a government spy that’s wrenching. And wrenching leads to desperation. And desperation leads to danger.”
Autumn Tysko’s Reviews
“One of the things I will always respect about Chris Carter is that he gave us Action!Scully so very early on. Yes, the partners spend a lot of this episode arguing, but she puts herself on the line at the end to bring him home. Despite the fact that she has unfortunately left her gun in her room, Scully (and isn’t that “no gun – bummer” look precious) is allowed to prove her value as a partner and save the day. We find Mulder looking very much like he’d been through the spin cycle without a helmet.”
Keith Phipps, for AV Club
“So far the series has been working through the greatest hits of UFO lore. Last week we had abductions for the purpose of some kind of presumably alien experiment. This week we have an Idaho-based Area 51 stand-in called Ellens Air Force Base, a military facility that’s home to some sort of secret technological experiments. There is a real Area 51 in Nevada at Groom Lake that, like Ellens, doesn’t show up on public maps. It’s known to have been the home for experimental aircraft work and… who knows what else? It’s provided a big, blank for the conspiracy-minded to fill as they see fit.”
Darren, for m0vieblog
“Watergate was an obvious (and admitted) influence on Carter, and the production team were fond of All the Presidents’ Men. So it’s interesting that the reporter character here turns out to be a rat. Indeed, over the course of the nine years of The X-Files, we very rarely come across those sorts of archetypal crusading journalists.”
“As we start peeling the layers of the onion, The X-Files will give us a sense of a conspiracy that is improbably vast and almost impossibly powerful. […] Like a blind man groping an elephant, we only catch a small section of the larger picture at any given moment, and trying to piece it together is something confusing and almost horrifying.”
“The X-Files really tapped into the paranoia after the Cold War, and part of that paranoia was the belief that the tools that had been used to fight the enemy might so easily be turned against the domestic population. The fact that everything was outwardly fine and that there was no looming threat just allowed that fear to fester in the shadows.”
WTFDIDIMISS on Tumblr
“When it’s finally dark, he STUPIDLY stands IN THE MIDDLE of the landing strip, and pretty much gets abducted. But not by aliens—BY THE GOVERNMENT. All these flashy vehicles come around the bend, and he starts running straight down the runway as if he can actually out run a fucking MOTOR VEHICLE. I’ll give you an A for ambition but an F for logical thinking and execution.”
“Scully’s like, ‘THAT’S ENOUGH, MULDER,’ scolding him like dog that shit on the rug for the 50th time this week.”