Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Mulder and Krycek go to Russia

Alex Krycek is the character with nine lives. Regardless of how many times the man is left in dire situations, and you think he won’t return, there he is. Gracing your television with more villainy hijinks. Scheming. Lying. Putting Mulder and Scully at risk. He is so engrained in the mythology of the show that when he appears, you know the episode isn’t going to be a monster of the week. In season 4, his return was marked in two back-to-back episodes, Tunguska and Terma, that see Krycek and Mulder stuck in Russia. Together. For better or worse.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first part of this two part episode starts with Agent Scully presenting evidence in front of a Senate committee. They want to know where Mulder is and of course she won’t tell them because it will endanger Mulder’s life. The Senate is having none of this and threatens to hold her in contempt.

Ten Days earlier, a canister of the black oily substance the show used as a way to have someone’s body taken over by an alien intelligence is searched by airport customs agents after a courier flew in from the Republic of Georgia. The canister breaks and leaks the black oil. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully go on a raid with other FBI agents and the informant turns out to be Alex Krycek, alive and well after season 3’s silo entrapment. Krycek leads the agents to Dulles airport where another courier from Russia carrying a pouch containing a black rock. Mulder goes to Skinner and leaves Krycek handcuffed inside his apartment before he goes to have the rock analyzed. Later, when the courier shows up and demands the pouch back, Krycek throws him over a balcony. Cigarette Smoking Man demands Skinner return the pouch to him. Skinner refuses.

Mulder meets up with Marita Covarrubian (Laurie Holden). I really like this enigmatic character they created for her. I just wish her dialogue and way of asking for elaboration wasn’t just repeating the last thing Mulder says but as a question. Anyhoo, she tells Mulder the rock is Russian and gives him paperwork so he can enter the country. This prompts Cigarette Smoking Man and Well-Manicured Man to have the agents subpoenaed so they have to appear in front of the Senate Committee. It’s too late, though, because Mulder and Krycek are already outside a gulag investigating a link to a cosmic impact event in 1908 (the Tunguska event, they call it). They are captured and imprisoned in the gulag where prisoners admit that experiments are being run on them. Then Mulder is strapped to a table where black oil is dripped on him. To be continued…

And when the story continues, Mulder learns Krycek is a double agent working for Russian taskmasters and that all the prisoners have been giving the black oil virus (or vaccine depending on which site you visit). Over the next half hour, Mulder tries to kill Krycek, escapes the gulag with him, and finds a peasant community who help him return to the United States. Fast forward to the Senate Committee hearing, Mulder walks in right as the senator is threating to hold Scully in contempt. The Committee give up on the hearing – all a little too quickly – which only adds to the conspiracy theories surrounding the black oil.

When I rewatched these two episodes, I was also rewatching Stranger Things. What amazed me watching these two shows is how you can see the direct effect The X-Files had on future television. Both series used the Cold War and the dark relationships between the U.S. and Russia to further their storylines. While Stranger Things leans heavily into the 1980s thematically and The X-Files was soundly in its 90s era, both show what life was like in a Russian gulag and utilize horror elements in their shows. In Stranger Things, Hopper’s experience in the gulag is additionally grueling since he also had to deal with a demogorgan because the Russians had access to the Upside Down. And both shows took the conspiracy theories about Russia in those time periods and gave us some pretty great television.

While these two episodes of The X-Files aren’t my favorite in regards to the mythology episodes throughout the series, it did give us a memorable cliffhanger with Mulder strapped down with chicken wire over his face as the black oil dripped down on him. When I look back on the series when I first watched it, I can remember that moment clearly. One of the iconic images from the show.

Until next week, E pur si Muiove. That’s Italian for ‘and yet, it moves‘ and is attributed to Galileo when he was forced by the Roman Inquisition to denounce his belief in heliocentrism. These two episodes used the phrase in place of The Truth is Out There in their opening title cards.