Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Time Travel and Tails

I’ve spoken a lot about The Outer Limits and Millennium on my X-Files blog, but one show that debuted in 1995 that I haven’t discussed much is Sliders starring Jerry O’Connell. Thanks to the popularity of Back to the Future and shows like Quantum Leap and The X-Files, Sliders was able to exist for exactly five seasons, three on Fox and two on the Sci-Fi Network, before being cancelled. Teenage me couldn’t get enough of it. The cheesy special effects. The repetitive yet still entertaining we-just-want-to-go-home weekly jump to another unknown Earth. To blend in and not interfere so the group can make the next slide on time. To not run into the “other” you who is sometimes up to ulterior motives. Episodes never turned out that way and more often than not, the group of four would be separated or would realize that one of them was super famous or a super villain and keeping a low profile would become impossible.

Why do I bring up this series from the 90s at this point in my X-Files rewatch, you ask? Because episodes 19 and 20 of season 4 share some similarities with the tropes explored in Sliders and, I’ll be completely honest, I just wanted an excuse to bring it up. To wrangle Jerry O’Connell’s sci-fi show from the annuls of obscurity for just one more blog post so I can discuss Synchrony and Small Potatoes in an era when time travel or “sliding” into the other you seemed to be a popular storyline to explore.

Synchrony

I won’t spend too much time on this episode since it is one of the mediocre episodes of season 4. It follows the agents as they investigate a series of deaths involving the victim’s being frozen with a mysterious weapon. One of the victims is even brought back to life by slowly rewarming the body, but that leads to uncontrolled heating and some very tall flames.

Eventually Mulder and Scully realize that the scientist who brought one of the victims back before flames engulfed him was working with another scientist whose inventions would eventually lead to time travel with disastrous consequences. In hindsight, maybe not the best invention so the scientist travels back in time to kill his younger self and the project as a whole.

If you’ve read stories like The Time Machine where the motivation for building such a machine lies in saving someone you love and saving them would mean you would never end up building the machine in the first place so saving them is really impossible if you’re using the time machine to travel back to do it, then you know that one of the consequences of changing the past is that you change the future too. The same holds true for this episode. The scientist may have stopped himself, but he didn’t stop his partner from making the discovery, so it’ll likely happen in the future anyway making his endeavor to kill his younger self pointless. While the freezing effects are convincing in this episode, the writing is not good enough for the viewer to really care about either scientist or their love story or their inventions. The time travel begs too many questions. If that one guy can travel back, why aren’t other people doing it? Why wouldn’t future Mulder travel back and save Samantha when they were kids? Why wouldn’t Mulder and Scully travel back to stop the Syndicate? Too many questions that don’t even come up in the episode.  If I’m Mulder and my life’s work is figuring out what happened to my sister, I’d be all over finding out how time travel becomes possible. I’m not Mulder, but I do know someone who tried to be in season 4.

Small Potatoes

Mulder and Scully arrive in a small town where babies are born with tails. The culprit is a shapeshifter named Eddie Van Blundht who can look like anyone he wants. The part was written for series writer Darin Morgan in mind, though he had left the show as a writer by the point. I did not know that Morgan starred in the episode until years later, so watching it now is a real treat in the hilarity department.

As they investigate the fertility clinic all the mothers used to get pregnant, Mulder spots Eddie who has signs of having a tail and Scully believes he used the date rape drug. They eventually find that Eddie can transform into whomever he wants so he likely impregnated these women by pretending to be their husbands in the same way he pretends to be Mulder to escape custody. What ensues is a cat and mouse game that leaves Mulder locked in a basement room while Eddie – as Mulder – leaves to go back to Washington with Scully.

In what is one of the funnier scenes in the series, Mulder/Eddie shows up at Scully’s home with a bottle of wine and Scully opens up to him about some personal stuff she hadn’t been before. Just when the two start to kiss, the real Mulder knocks on the door and Eddie is busted. The look on Scully’s face is priceless.

What I love about this episode is that it pokes fun at Mulder and it shows that there is much to learn about each other when it comes to Mulder and Scully. I remember seeing an interview that Chris Carter did during season 1 of the show where he said the two agents would probably never fall in love. With this episode, the show proved that it was plausible. Was this foreshadowing? Had Carter already changed his mind on letting the FBI’s spookiest agents fall in love? Perhaps, but it’s not like I can go back in time and stop him from letting it happen even if I wanted to.

Both of these episodes explore themes of how we never really know someone regardless of how much time we spend with them. Sliders often explored this too whenever the four main characters would meet their other self in another universe. They were the same, but different. Moreover, do we really know ourselves? If the other you, whether it is your past self or yourself in another universe, is capable of something you don’t condone, would it change who you are in the present?

Just thinking about those questions makes me think of the Ethan Hawke film Predestination. Hawke plays a time-traveling agent who suffers burns on his face when trying to disarm a bomb. An unknown person turns on his time travel device so he can return to his own time where he has facial reconstruction surgery. The viewer believes this was how he always looks because we didn’t see his face before it burned.

When he goes on one last assignment back in time, he meets a man named John who tells him his life story growing up in an orphanage as a little girl named Jane. In college she falls in love with a mysterious man but he abandons her so she applies for the space program but drops out when she realizes she is pregnant.  Long story short, the doctors find she has both male and female organs so they perform a sex change without her consent and renamed herself John.

The agent offers her a chance to work for him so John can go back and time to get back at the man who impregnated her. The agent believes this man is a serial bomber. John agrees, and goes back in time only to fall in love with Jane, his former self and realizes he is the man who impregnated Jane. The agent takes Jane’s baby when she has it and takes it further back in time to the orphanage Jane grew up in. Jane parents are Jane and John. John agrees to work as a time travelling agent and leaves Jane behind.

In case you haven’t already figured out this complex paradox of time travel, the agent is actually John after John’s face is burned off by the bomb at the beginning of the film. I know it sounds convoluted, but this film really does deal with the paradoxes of time travel without ignoring them to suit their own narrative (side-eying at you, Marvel). It also deals with the themes of how well we really know ourselves and how we would be later in life if our circumstances suddenly changed.

While these two episodes of The X-Files aren’t the strongest, they do deal with the themes I’ve talked about today. Common themes that arise in shows like Quantum Leap and Sliders. In stories like The Time Machine and Predestination. The Twilight Zone was one of the first to deal with these tropes and fortunately for us, it paved the way for shows like The X-Files to work with them too.

Until next week, the truth is out there.