Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Pilot Episode

I planned on beginning a new blog series about The X-Files at the start of the year. At the time, I was in the middle of a couple of other series that I wanted to finish first and then David Lynch died which, like many of his other fans, coincided with doing a Twin Peaks rewatch. It’s now the end of February, and I’m done revisiting Twin Peaks. As it turns out, the show was the perfect segue into starting my new blog series which I will try to do every Sunday morning about The X-Files.

When Twin Peaks originally aired, I was six weeks shy of my tenth birthday. It was the first adult show I watched, and really, was obsessed with. I did not know it at the time, but the show paved the way for shows like The X-Files to air on network television and not be relegated to late night time slots. Both shows featured unconventional, off beat FBI agents and seamlessly blended horror, thriller, and drama genres.

Though The X-Files draws inspiration from shows like The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Darkside, for me – having just come out of a Twin Peaks rewatch much in the same way I did in 1993 when The X-Files originally aired – The X-Files will always be tied to Twin Peaks in some way or another for me, even if it is for what each show brought to the pop culture table for kids like me who were looking for something different.

And then there was David Duchovny starring as Denise in Twin Peaks before he was ever Fox Mulder in The X-Files. A fact I had forgotten until my rewatch of Twin Peaks in 2025, and boy did I love seeing him appear in it. I clapped, literally. As I said, a perfect segue into the show that made my ’90s.

Another connection was Don. S. Davis who played William Scully, Dana’s father on The X-Files. In Twin Peaks, he was Major Briggs, a recurring character in all three seasons.

But more on him later. We don’t meet Dana’s dad right away in the series I’ll be talking about going forward. This post will simply be about the pilot episode of The X-Files. In the future, I’ll probably group episodes from each season that fit together, but this will just be about one episode. The Pilot episode that aired on September 10, 1993. An episode that not only changed my life, but changed pop culture forever.

Quell surprise when Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a medically trained FBI agent, is sent into the basement office of one Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovney), an agent so immersed in all things paranormal that his colleagues nicknamed him Spooky, to debunk his work. It had me hooked during the first scene with a character who would later be known as Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) stood in the background observing. I knew then that the conspiracies were coming.

I grew up with only network television, so having both Twin Peaks and The X-Files in the 90s really shaped how I viewed movies and television. Both spoke to my liking of all things weird or strange or paranormal. Shows that made people question their reality or the truth they were being told really spoke to me as I questioned who I was during my teen years. Watching two agents with completely different backgrounds and sensibilities bounce theories off each another about unbelievable events to find the real answers is something that is still relevant today during an era where people are so divided over their beliefs that they can barely speak to one another.

In this episode, Scully accompanies Mulder to Bellafleur, Oregon where teens are disappearing only to have their bodies found days later with three small red marks on their backs. There is a moment when Scully finds the same marks on her own back, and though they end up being just mosquito bites, Scully is visibly shaken. It’s the moment the two agents begin to trust each other.

Mulder opens up about how his sister was abducted as a child and never found. That he has been obsessed with the occult and alien abductions since. That he believes Scully is part of the agenda to silence him in his investigations. This wasn’t just his backstory. It is foreshadowing for the rest of the series. For all the places it intends to go and the conspiracies it will deal with. And how he and Scully must trust each other to survive.

Even in small town Oregon, their hotel conveniently goes up in flames, taking Scully’s computer and most of the collected evidence. They decide to exhume the other victims’ dead bodies only to find that the graves are already empty. Someone is trying to stop their investigation. Mulder believes that aliens are somehow responsible for this, and he isn’t wrong. The only evidence not destroyed was an implant found in the body of the latest victim.

“You think I’m crazy,” Mulder states in a cemetery with Scully. He desperately wants her to believe, but she is a skeptic to her core.

When she files her report, it sounds as if she believes, truly believes, but her superiors aren’t having it. She was sent in to debunk, after all, not agree with Mulder’s findings and investigations.

“There were, of course, crimes committed,” Scully states to her superiors as she hands over the only piece of evidence not destroyed in the fire. When she acknowledges that she could not identify the material from the implant, she is dismissed from her meeting only to have Cigarette Smoking Man enter after she leaves. Later, Mulder informs her that the paperwork about their case has disappeared from the office in Oregon, for their suspicions that this was an alien abduction case can’t be made public. Not when the government has secrets to keep.

This entire episode sets up the series as a whole, paving the way for all the cases these two agents will work together only to have doubts cast down upon them by their superiors. To have their work, their scientific findings, hidden away by the powers that be. Like Cigarette Smoking Man who hides the implant in a warehouse at the Pentagon at the end of the episode.

Government gaslighting at its finest. In this respect, creator Chris Carter took already existing conspiracy theories relegated to the fringes of society and created a series that makes the government the villain hiding them. The X-Files relevancy exists more than thirty years after its original air date for that very reason. Because we should question what can’t be explained. We should discern between the false narrative and the truth. Not everything is a conspiracy, but that does not mean they don’t exist. The common ground between the skeptic and the cynic is a perfect place to start.

Until next week, the truth is out there.