Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Firewalker

Today’s episode marks the first time during season two where Mulder and Scully are reunited on an official X-File after Walter Skinner reopened them. What should have been a monumental monster of the week or serial killer case really ended up being rather lackluster and derivative. It pulls themes from season one episodes Ice and Darkness Falls where the agents are sent to a remote location and find a new species. And then there’s the chest explosion copied from Ridley Scott’s Alien.

In Firewalker, Mulder and Scully go to an isolated volcano to investigate the disappearance of the people who were working there, and to figure out what a shadow was on the last video sent out from the site (much like Ice in season one). They find three people alive and one by one they die horrifically by a bone bursting from their chests (shades of Alien) so it can release spores to infect whoever is in the immediate vicinity. While this is going on, one of the missing crew reappears and wants to make sure the spores don’t get out of the volcano. He may have been the shadow on the video, but that is never really explained by the end of the episode.

The special effects are decent for the time period but were heavily inspired by Alien with the bone protruding from the neck much like the Xenomorph burst out of the ribcage in the film, but to less startling effect. Network television didn’t really allow for the kind of gore to make that effective, so it just feels like a cheap copy.

My main issue here isn’t the repetitive story or that they didn’t really go for something bigger, but the fact that they never explain what the shadow was on the video. It just gets forgotten about. Really, the episode serves as a way to get Mulder and Scully together again whilst Scully deals with the post-traumatic stress from her disappearance. The isolated location certainly doesn’t help her with that, but later episodes handle it better so maybe she was still in a state of numb shock over what she went through. Maybe.

Firewalker has one good thing going for it, however.  It has one hell of a cast. Shawnee Smith, who has become a scream queen in her own right over the years, gives a great performance as the final victim to lose her life to the spores. She starred in the 1988 remake of The Blob, Stephen King’s The Stand, and more recently, five of the Saw films.

Leland Orser stars in the episode as well and also starred in Se7en, The Bone Collector, and Alien: Resurrection. Yes, an actual link to the Alien franchise because drawing inspiration from the creature bursting from the chest wasn’t enough. He has had a decent career in both television and film.

Most notably, this episode guest stars Bradley Whitford who went on to have a prolific career across multiple mediums. Most recently, you can catch him in Get Out, The Cabin in the Woods, and the now ended The Handmaid’s Tale. His style of acting allows the viewer to sympathize with any villain he portrays while also seeing him as evil. Well, except for Billy Madison where he plays Adam Sandler’s nemesis. There he was just ridiculously gross in the funniest of ways.

I remember being disappointed with this episode when it aired, but now that I’m rewatching it, I can see the inspiration for The Last of Us now. The spores that were infecting people in that volcano were the cordyceps fungi, same as the game and show. When I watched the first season of The Last of Us, I kept trying to remember where I had seen it before, this cordyceps fungi used to infect people. I did not play the game, so I did not have that as a reference. It was this episode of The X-Files, so I guess you could say this episode tiptoed so that The Last of Us could run especially in the episode in season two when Ellie runs into the room filled with spores and she sees people breathing them out as a way to spread them. That scene is pretty great and I can see the influences from Firewalker which originally aired in 1994.

Until next week, the truth is out there.