Landmark TV Episode Anniversary Commemorations: X-Files – Anasazi 30th Anniversary

 

Travel back in time with me 30 years. In the spring of 1995, I was very gingerly dipping by toe into the world of prime time television. Much of it had took place during the early months of 1995.

Prior to this point the few prime time shows I watched were comedies and if I’m being honest my sister, younger by three years, was doing much of the leading. She was the one who watched such part of Must See TV as Mad About You and Friends first (not Seinfeld) and she also watched quite a bit of what was of ABC’s comedies, most of them in syndication from Full House to Growing Pains to The Wonder Years.

What little television I had watched to this period was genre TV and mostly syndicated: Star Trek: The Next Generation but also such lesser known but still intriguing IP as War of the Worlds and Friday THE 13^Th; the former connected to the 1953 film, the latter with no site of the Vorhees family. The first adult drama I ever watched was the first season of Picket Fences in the fall of 1993 and then a slow progression.

I wish I could tell you there was a method to my madness but there really wasn’t during that period: I enjoyed gems such as Frasier and trash just as Melrose Place, was intrigued by Lois & Clark but also liked the second season of The Critic. It was not until spring break of 1995 that I ended up watching, completely by accident, the opening teaser of an otherwise forgettable episode of The X-Files called ‘The Calusari’. A monster of the week and not a very good one, frankly. But it was enough.

Until then I had never watched an episode of The X-Files but I figured it was a show about monsters. The next episode I saw was a rerun of ‘Red Museum’ which made me think it was about government conspiracies. The next two episodes reinforced that but while I first met the Cigarette Smoking Man in the episode F. Emasculata, I had no idea of his significance. (I actually thought his character had a name back then and I’d just missed it in an earlier episode.) I knew nothing about aliens and certainly not the mythology.

Now I want you to imagine what it must have been like for a sixteen year old teenage boy to watch ‘Anasazi’ for the first time in May of 1995. I didn’t know anything about the government conspiracy or the aliens involved in it. I knew nothing of Scully’s abduction or, for that matter, what had happened to Mulder’s sister. And I would have had no idea what landmark television was. What I did know after watching ‘Anasazi’ and seeing the final images was that this was going to be a series I was going to be following the fall.

Now in 1995 there was no such thing as streaming or even DVDs but network television did something back then that this generation of viewers would be stunned by. During the summers they would rerun most, if not all, of the season that had just past. (            Well, not for every show: Melrose Place and Homicide never got that treatment.) I spent much of my Fridays in the summer of 1995 devouring every rerun of The X-Files I saw. I did the same with Lois & Clark and I would engage in a similar pattern with many other series for much of the rest of my teenage years and well into my twenties. This was how I ended up getting involved with such classics of the 1990s as Chicago Hope, The Practice, and many other comedies and dramas right up until the first seasons of Lost and Ugly Betty. I engaged in similar practices for other series I missed the majority of over the next several years, including the first seasons of Buffy, Smallville and even with cable dramas such as Oz, The Sopranos and The Wire. (I actually continued this pattern with some cable dramas over the rest of the 2000s: I think the last one I did was Big Love.)

In a sense The X-Files was more amenable to the structure of reruns than other mythology series would be. Because of its Monster of the Week format being front and center, I got a picture of the series very well by seeing most of the second season in reruns. It helped immensely that the show had critically upped its game during this period; I’m not sure if the first season would have been enough for me to keep watching. (Full disclosure: I didn’t see the entire first season until 2001 by which point the show was all but over.) Fortunately The X-Files didn’t start doing its serialized stories until the second season. More fortunately among the ones I saw during that period were the ones that showed the abduction of Scully and all the repercussions.

But I didn’t know that when I saw Anasazi in May of 1995. So it says something not just about the ability of Chris Carter as a writer and the work of the entire cast that I could appreciate this episode for what it was in 1995 as being riveting television. Usually a season finale is not the best episode to serve as a gateway for becoming a permanent fan; I can’t imagine anyone seeing the season finale of any cable drama that followed – even the first season finales of The Sopranos or Mad Men – that would be enough to make the casual viewer want to watch next season. And it wasn’t the kind of thing that most dramas of that era could pull off: I’m not sure the average season finale for Law & Order or ER could make you do that; I know because I watched more than a few at the time and they didn’t draw me in. (I didn’t become fans of either show until they were deep into syndication.)

But Anasazi isn’t any season finale. TV Guide once ranked it among the greatest season and series finales of all time: (it was in 2009 but there were fifty episodes among them) and fans of the show consider it arguably the greatest season finale The X-Files ever did. In fairness that says less about Anasazi and more for the declining quality of each successive season finale where the cliffhangers had to work harder to generate suspense as the mythology became more ponderous and more complicated with less hope that Carter would be able to tie things up by next fall. Anasazi has that vitality and freshness thirty years later because while each successive finale kept making the cliffhangers about the alien conspiracy, Anasazi makes it all about Mulder and Scully first and puts the aliens and everything else in the background until the very end of the episode.

One of the few places in Monster of the Week where I am in conflict with the writers is with Zach Handler’s review of ‘Anasazi.’ In it he claims this is an episode where the show is at a crossroads. “The writers can either begin wrapping up the mythology they’ve established…or they can expand outward from what’s established and add another story to the house of cards. They unfortunately choose the latter.”

To be fair Handler is making a criticism that every fan has with the mythology: was there ever a point when it could have been satisfactorily wrapped up? Both Handler and his co-writer (now Emily St. James) will make a convincing argument that the last time the mythology was completely satisfying was in Season 3 and having rewatched the series several times its hard for me to argue with them there. The fault, as always, must be laid at the feet of Chris Carter who never had an outline for the mythology as well for the enormous success of the series which as it became the phenomena it was made the writers have to keep pushing back whatever end game they had further and further and keeping making the house of cards shakier and shakier.

So while I think his critique of Anasazi is unfair I understand why he makes it. It would sadly become a tradition of The X-Files with each successive season finale to introduce an element of the mythology that Carter (who wrote every season finale) to introduce a person or element that changed everything for our heroes! – and by the time the new season began Carter and his writers would entirely restore the status quo. (More horrendously he did it with all three episodes that were supposed to be the series finale but ended with absolutely no closure for the fans.)

Anasazi does have certain elements of it to be sure. In the early moments of the episode Mulder is handed the MJ Files which supposedly have all the secrets of our government and the aliens since the end of the Second World War. But the reason Anasazi works infinitely better than the majority of the season finales that follows is that for almost the entire episode this is secondary to the human drama that’s going on. And for perhaps the only time Carter decides to keep Mulder and Scully front and center rather than use it as an excuse just to bring in all the series regulars we’ve met. And the few we do see are only there to be seen through our heroes.

When the Lone Gunmen show up on Mulder’s doorstep, he seems a bit off than usual. “Defaced any library books lately?” That’s the first sign that Mulder isn’t his normal sardonic itself. Indeed he spends the majority of the episode depressed and far more prone to anger then we’re used to seeing him. He turns into a fury when he thinks the secrets to the universe are a trick, punches Skinner when he tries to talk to him, is barely even civil with Scully. Even the thought of being kicked out of the bureau barely races a reaction from him. When he finally turns on Scully after the halfway point, the viewer has every reason to believe Mulder has finally lost it. He’s never been the most stable individual and even in the few episodes I’d seen up to this point, it was clear his frustration with his job has him simmering. The idea that Mulder might have finally cracked seemed very plausible after just five episodes; I imagine those who stuck with the show from the start thought it very likely.

So when Scully reveals to Mulder in the final act of the episode that for the last month the water supply to his building has been dosed with a major drug, it’s almost a relied that there’s an explanation for Mulder’s behavior. This is a clear triumph for Duchovny as well. Looking back on the first season it seems clear that Gillian Anderson nailed Scully from the word go but Duchovny was erratic when it came to Mulder, sometimes brilliant, but still finding his way. A huge part of the reason for the second season’s exponential improvement in quality is because from the season premiere on, Duchovny seemed to have figured out the intricacies of Mulder and has become far more subtle. It would have been easy for him to go over-the-top. Instead he underplays it and it makes his work so believable it’s almost disturbing.

The bigger revelation in this episode isn’t the MJ files or even what we find in the climax (though that does come close) but for the meeting between the Smoking Man and Bill Mulder. Mulder’s sister has been the lynchpin for his obsession going forward (Samantha actually isn’t mentioned by anyone in this episode) but this is the first time that Carter makes it clear that the connection goes deeper than that. That Bill Mulder clearly knows more about the conspiracy then he’s ever told his son is a very radical move. (It also gives the first solid explanation as to why Fox hasn’t been killed yet.)

The scene between Fox and his father (played by the superb character actor Peter Donat) is exceptionally well done. I didn’t know the details about the Mulder family when I first saw this episode but I could pick up on the awkwardness between father and son even then. It’s clear he wants to unburden himself of his guilt, so I while its shocking that Krycek shows up in Bill’s shower to kill him, it’s hardly surprising. And when Fox holds his dying father in his arms it’s clear at the ruthlessness of the conspiracy in a way it just wasn’t before. I would later learn the lengths of Smoking Man’s evil even by this point but the fact that he is willing to talk to a man one minute, order his killing the next, and at the end of the episode use him as a cudgel over the man’s son shows how cold he is.

Anasazi is also the first episode that really makes it clear just how far CSM’s power is. For two seasons we’ve known he has influence in the FBI, that he gives orders to assassins and that he can walk through the halls of government buildings with critical evidence. But this episode is the first time we see that malevolence fully executed. In the opening sequence when the telephone calls go out about the MJ files being broken into, he takes a call from a German (answered fluently) and then says: “Gentlemen, that was the phone call I never wanted to get.” We see his oily charm mixed with dismay at the clearly alcoholic and depressed Bill Mulder. And in the final sequence he calls Fox on the phone and tells him that his father was never against the project. “In fact he authorized it.” It’s clearly a move done in order to trace the call and when we see him getting in a helicopter with men in camouflage we finally realize that his power is not just being able to smoke wherever he wants.

The episode also works because Scully is the one who has to guide Mulder through this. At this point in the series there’s no one else capable of recognizing that something is wrong with her partner including the fact that she can no longer talk him down the way she used to. She spends most of the episode doing the spadework, finding a translator for the files, realizing Mulder might be framed for the murder of his father, doing the ballistics work for him to prove his innocence (nearly taking a bullet for her work) learning that Mulder’s building is being dosed and in an action that will be a plot point from this forward shooting Mulder to stop him from killing Krycek.

By the end of the episode she has to explain to him everything that has happened to him and the nature of what’s in the files. The biggest revelation is not just about a series of tests the government has been doing – but that Scully’s name is in the latest entry, along with Duane Barry the man who abducted her. Bill Mulder’s killing made this personal for Fox, this confirms that for Scully she can’t go back either. And what happens next will be an open question. In saving Mulder she has missed a meeting with Skinner and her position at the Bureau may be forfeit.

What lifts the conspiracy to a whole other level is what Mulder finds in the desert. After everything we’ve gone through we’re almost relieved to find aliens again. But as Robert Sherman writes in Wanting to Believe in his five star rave of Anasazi:

…this isn’t business as usual. The realization that the alien corpses piled up there have smallpox vaccination marks, coupled with Scully’s information about experiments on humans, takes the series into new and darker areas. The implications are honestly chilling. And The X-Files suddenly seems less … escapism about the FBI chasing monsters, and something nastier and much angrier.

Indeed much of the reason the mythology will be so satisfying in Season 3 is because Carter will spend much of it leaning in to the idea that the conspiracy has nothing to do with aliens at all but something far more unsettling.

Now imagine watching all of this for the first time and seeing the Smoking Man climbing out of a military helicopter with soldiers and demanding they go into the boxcars. Imagine him sneering at an indigenous teenager for answers (which would be chilling no matter what race the boy was). Imagine the soldiers climbing out of the boxcar and saying Mulder isn’t in there. And then here a line we heard said by Albert Hosteen a few minutes earlier: “Nothing vanishes without a trace,” only delivered with something close to anger, followed by a dismissive “Burn it.” Then we see someone drop napalm into the boxcar and Smoking Man climb back in. We hear an explosion and a flame and as the chopper flies off, CSM lights up incuriously.

Intelligent viewers would know Mulder would be all right and at some level I knew it even at sixteen. But in 1995 cliffhangers were still not the season ending event they would become a few years later. By and large, though I didn’t know it yet, cliffhangers were almost the sole property of sci-fi dramas at the time (I don’t think network television began to fully embrace them until the early 2000s) and they were the kind of thing that made the average fan want more. I spent much of the summer watching every X-Files episode that was rerun and they gave me enough of a taste to realize what I’d been missing.

It took a while for me to become a more devoted fan but by November of 1995 I was fully committed to the X-Files, aliens and monsters and the idea that someday the writers would explain everything. It took me a long time to realize they had no idea what they were doing but it never eroded my love of the show then or now. And it did all start with Anasazi, a show that really did reveal The X-Files mission statement. The truth can’t be buried forever, but there are forces that will do anything they can to stop it from being unearthed.