Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – The Host

The Host is one of those creature feature episodes that also carries with it some of the overarching mythology that went with the X-Files as this is the episode that Skinner finally decides to reopen them.

Mulder is pulled off of his wire tapping assignment to investigate a mysterious death from a Russian cargo ship with the body so mutilated there is no evidence. Mulder asks Scully to take a look at the body, but not before venting his frustrations to Skinner about the assignments he has been getting. This frustration will boil over again in the season 2 finale, so this is some foreshadowing of things to come.

Scully finds a gray flat worm within the body – still alive. Before she can show Mulder, he receives a call from a mysterious man saying Mulder still has a friend at the FBI. This man is Mr. X who takes the place of Deep Throat as Mulder’s internal informant. He is less hospitable and less willing to help if Mulder demands it of him.

Mulder and Scully’s investigation leads them to the water filtration plant in Newark where a sanitation worker was bitten by something. Mulder believes it is a giant blood sucking worm killing people, and Scully does not want him telling that to Skinner since the X-Files are still closed.

What the culprit does end up being, after multiple trips into the sewers with a city worker and another argument with Skinner, is the Flukeman. It has characteristics of both the worm that Scully found and primate physiology.  After it is captured, Skinner has it transferred to a psychiatric facility and he and Mulder argue- AGAIN. Skinner admits the case should have been an X-File. After the Flukeman escapes, Scully begins to believe that, since it came from Russia, it was a victim of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Something not known to science until this episode.

That foreshadowing I mentioned? For this being only the second episode in the season, it really gives hints to where Mulder ends up in the finale. I always remember this episode being all creature feature so I’m always surprised when I see how much of Mulder and Scully’s frustration is evident as it progresses. Even when the X-Files are reinstated later, this frustration lingers and boils over 23 episodes after this one. I can’t wait to watch it.

Watching this episode again I’m reminded of horror movies from the 1980’s like Slugs and Alligator. Both feature scenes during which people go into the sewers to investigate mysterious deaths. Slugs, a film I watched when I was very young and is the reason I still check the toilet before I sit on one (yes, that was one of the death scenes), brings flesh eating slugs to a small town. This film has one of the best on screen deaths of the time after a man eats part of a slug that made its way into his salad and a day later, his entire cardiovascular system was then flooded with worms after he ingested the slug. The worms caused quite the gory scene in a restaurant. Five-year-old me was never the same and the film makes it into my horror watching enjoyment ever fall. The man having his body changed after ingesting the slug is much like one of the victims of Flukeman who complains of a bad taste in his mouth and ends up throwing up a fluke worm.

Alligator follows an angry cop as he tries to convince there is an alligator living in the sewers. In this one, the overly large size of the alligator was due to fertilizer getting dumped into the sewers. Environmental changes caused by humans. It makes episodes and movies all the more frightening knowing that we are the cause of such things and, eventually, something like this is going to happen with all the toxins we spill into our groundwater and surrounding land.

Another film I’m reminded of is Mimic, a Guillermo del Toro horror film about a doctor (Mira Sorvino) who bioengineers a cockroach to kill off the common roach in NYC because it was making children sick. The engineered cockroach was meant to die off after on generation, but it didn’t and for years it bred and grew to human size without anyone knowing. Even Sorvino’s character says, “We don’t know what we did,” when she discovers the truth down in the sewers and old subway tunnels under the city. A great creature feature if you’re in the mood.

While Chris Carter has never admitted to this, I like to believe that he drew some inspiration for this episode from such movies that were made in the early 1980s. And I do really believe that this episode walked so that films like Mimic could run.

Until next week, the truth is out there.