Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Jose Chung’s From Outer Space

Nestled between two strong episodes are episodes 18 and 19, Teso Dos Bichos and Hell Money. Neither of these episodes rank among my favorites so I’ll mention them fleetingly before moving on to the main event.

Teso Dos Bichos is about an ancient artifact being brought to Boston from South America and leads to a series of mysterious deaths. It reminds me of the film The Relic which tells a similar story with better effects and more interesting characters. Beyond that, the crew hated filming this so much they actually made T-shirts saying ‘Teso Dos Bichos’ Survivor’. We hated it too when it aired and now I’m wondering if the t-shirts are still available.

Hell Money follows a Chinese man who enters a lottery selling body parts in order to pay for medical care for his daughter. While I like what this episode tries to convey about how immigrants struggle when they arrive in our country, I find this episode to be mid at best. I remember it for the gruesome body part lottery, but not for much else.

What I really want to talk about today is episode 20, which I find to be one of the best comedic episodes in the series. Jose Chung’s From Outer Space contains so many in jokes from the UFO culture that existed in the 1990s that it sends me right back to that era just thinking about it.

Mulder and Scully investigate the abduction of two teenagers in this episode while writer Jose Chung writes about it. The witnesses all tell varying stories of the same event, none of which are at all unreliable. Manipulation by false points of view was used several times throughout the series, and each of those episodes is an absolute banger for their humor and inventive storytelling.

Jose Chung interviews both Mulder and Scully for his book about alien abductions. Both agents tell what they believe to be factual from their point of view. Since neither of their narratives match, Mulder begs Chung not to publish the book because he believes it will further discredit how UFO abductees perceive their experiences. Chung, of course, publishes anyway.

This would be Darin Morgan’s final episode of the original series before it was brought back by Fox in 2016. Morgan did not like the frantic schedule the show operated on to make it’s weekly episode schedule viable so he moved on to other opportunities. He did write another episode for the Millennium series entitled, Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense.

This episode also has two of my favorite cameos. Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek appear as Men in Black. Fun fact – Jesse Ventura would serve as the governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003. I did not know it at the time this aired in 1996, but I would be accepted into an art college in Minneapolis in 1997. I moved here in 1998 and have lived here ever since. When Jesse Ventura was elected as governor, and whenever he would be on the news, it was this episode I would think of. Crazy how things work out sometimes. Alex Trebek appearing in this episode is another link to that time David Duchovny appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy!.

Those jokes I mentioned? Part of the episode takes place in Klass County, a reference to known skeptic Philip Klass who always argued that UFO sightings were just people seeing the planet Venus. There are two pilots dressed as aliens named after authors of UFO phenomenon literature. A detective in the episode named Manners was named after series director Kim Manners. Both the fictional detective and the director had a rumored proclivity for swearing.

If you’ve not seen this episode in a long time, I suggest revisiting it. It holds up and I’m still laughing just thinking about it.

Until next week, the truth is out there.