Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – That Alien Autopsy Video

During the second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, Unit 731 was responsible some of the most atrocious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. It conducted experiments on roughly 14,000 people that included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ harvesting, amputation, and weapons testing. They didn’t limit their testing to adults. They also included children and babies born from the systemic rape reportedly perpetrated by the staff on the compound. To conceal evidence, all prisoners were killed and there are no documented survivors.

Sorry for the violent history lesson, but it was required reading for a two-part episode in the middle of season three of The X-Files that explored a fictional experiment carried out by Unit 731. Chris Carter had an overall distrust of the government so it comes as no surprise that he would use this ugly part of human history to further along the overarching mythology of his series.

Carter also took inspiration from the 1995 release of Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, a grainy video of an alleged alien autopsy. Even Agent Scully, upon seeing Mulder watching this video in his basement office at the beginning of this two parter, pointedly tells him that the footage is too grainy to see what is really going on and there isn’t a single closeup of the alien itself. Her bemused yet frustrated tone is one that many an observer used when viewing the footage in real life – including my parents when fifteen-year-old me insisted that it was real after its release. For all intents and purposes, the videotape on the show was made specifically for this episode and used to evolve the mythology when the doctors doing the autopsy are killed before the footage ends abruptly.

When you combine a Unit 731 experiment and alien autopsy footage, you get the inspiration for episodes Nisei and 731 which were tucked neatly between monster of the week episodes toward the middle of season three. The episodes also utilize a couple members of a fictional group known within the show as the Men in Black. Whenever a man in a dark suit appears and silences someone with murder or steals evidence, they are likely a member of this group hell bent on stopping Mulder’s research. In Nisei, the man who appears is simply called Red-Haired Man in the script.

Mulder and Scully travel to Allentown, Pennsylvania in search of the creator of the alien autopsy tape but find him dead. They arrest Japanese man Kazuo Sakurai in connection with the murder only to have Skinner show up and demand his release. After searching the man’s briefcase which he kept, Mulder finds a list of Mutual UFO Network (MUFON – non-profit organization of people who research UFO sightings) members and satellite images of a ship. Mulder takes this to the Lone Gunman identify the ship as salvage vessel Talapus docked in Virginia. Meanwhile, Sakurai is murdered by the Red-Haired Man assassin.

Scully investigates MUFON which leads her to a group of women who recognize her from her abduction in season two. They all have similar stories to Scully’s and are all dying of cancer after having their implant removed. Skeptical and rattled, Scully has the FBI to some tests on the implant she had removed from her neck earlier in the show. She studies the alien autopsy video again and recognizes a Japanese man on it, Dr. Ishimaru, as one of the men who experimented on her during her abduction. 

Meanwhile, Mulder searches the Talapus as armed men arrive. He escapes and later discovers a craft being fumigated in a warehouse by a hazmat team. Mulder believes the craft is a UFO and recovered by the Talapus. Skinner eventually catches up with him and confronts him about the briefcase whose absence is causing an international incident with Japan. Scully is still in possession of it. Skinner refuses to help Mulder with the case going forward.

Mulder confronts a Senator who links the alien autopsy to alien-human hybrids who were experimented on under Unit 731 during WWII. This leads him to a secret train car in West Virginia. He sees what he believes to be alien-human hybrids before the train leaves. While he is doing that, another Japanese doctor waits to board the train in Ohio when his bodyguard is killed by the Red-Haired Man. This ginger is on a spree, it would seem. Mulder catches up with the train here only to find out that it has left.

Scully, in her apartment, finds MR. X (the man helping Mulder with the conspiracies) waiting for her. He warns her to keep Mulder away from getting on that train because the doctors are aware that he is on to them. Scully calls Mulder who has already driven ahead of the train and plans on jumping onto it from a bridge. The episode ends with him having done so, losing his cell phone in the process.

In the 90s, there was no bingeing entire seasons of a show in a weekend. You had to wait seven entire days to find out what happened next and good luck catching it in reruns over the summer if you missed it. In December of 1995, I missed the second half of this two-part episode for some reason I can’t remember. I had to get a review of it secondhand from a friend. It wasn’t until Netflix had the show available on disc in 2005 that I was able to watch it because I never caught it in reruns.

The second part of this starts in West Virginia where soldiers are invading what appears to be a leprosy colony. When the soldiers start shooting, one man, Escalante, hides and watches as the other patients – alien-human hybrids – are killed and pushed into a mass grave.

Now that Mulder is on that train and has lost his phone, Scully has lost contact with him. Mr. X informs her to analyze her implant because it will give her answers about the train and about her sister Melissa’s murder. Mulder finds the secret railcar is protected by a security system. As Mulder searches for Zama so does the Red-Haired Man to strangles him. In Zama’s compartment, Mulder finds hand-written journals written in Japanese.

Scully has the implant analyzed again finding that it was Zama who manufactured it in a West Virginia compound. Once there, she meets a group of alien-human hybrids who eluded the soldiers. Escalante tells her they were all patients experimented on by Zama. US soldiers arrive and capture Scully and deliver her to the First Elder, also of the diabolical Men in Black.

Mulder finds Zama’s passcode and enters the railcar. Mulder and the Red-Haired Man get into an altercation and the train’s conductor locked them inside the railcar. The Red-Haired Man informs Mulder that a countdown for a bomb was triggered when he gained entry to the railcar.

Scully, with the First Elder, calls Mulder on the Red-Haired Man’s phone. She and the women with cancer were unwittingly operated on by Zama on the secret railway and they used the alien abduction theory as a smokescreen. And there really is a bomb on the train. The person who Mulder found dead I the railcar is infected with hemorrhagic fever and if the railcar explodes, Scully fears thousands will be infected. Mulder finds a way to disconnect the railcar from the moving train and Scully helps him unlock the door but is knocked unconscious by the Red-Haired Man. Luckily, Mr. X arrives before the Red-Haired Man is about to leave and shoots him. Mr. X saves Mulder before the bomb explodes.

When Mulder awakens, he is unable to find out anything about the train and the journal that had been written in Japanese is now a rewritten substitute. The real one is being translated in a dark room whilst the Smoking Man watches.

David Duchovny did all his own stunts during these two episodes, including jumping onto the train. Many of the scenes shot within the interiors of the railcars were intentionally shot with Mulder off center in every shot to show his mental state. Cinematography at its finest right there on network television.

Guest star Colin Cunningham (Escalante) appeared in three episodes of The X-Files as different characters as well as The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Smallville, and Andromeda. Stephen McHattie (Red-Haired Man) had a prolific career in television and film as he appeared in sci-fi and horror projects consistently throughout the years. Don S. Williams (First Elder) reprised his role in the show fourteen times and the 1998 film Fight the Future. Both William B. Davis (Smoking Man) and Steven Williams (X, or Mr. X depending on the site you visit), both put in stellar enigmatic performances as their recurring characters. The plot lines may throw us for loops, reinvent themselves as hoaxes, but the performances of the recurring cast always show up to give us consistency. Do we trust them? Do we not? Can Mulder and Scully?

What these two episodes really do is further erode the faith that Scully has in medical science while setting up the ongoing plot as an elaborate hoax. Smoke and mirrors to draw attention away from the government’s medical and military experiments. Like every other time that Mulder has found his answers, he is forced to reckon with the fact that they aren’t what he is looking for. Watching this unfold now, given everything that is transpiring in our current political climate, the smoke and mirrors hoaxes and conspiracy theories that permeate our society are ever so poignant, and it erodes away our faith in our own government. Perhaps that is why The X-Files still resonates thirty years later.

Until next week, trust no one.