Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Zero Sum

In 1997, Gillian Anderson took a week off from filming The X-Files to film The Mighty, a coming-of-age dramedy about two boys’ friendship. It also starred Harry Dean Stanton, Sharon Stone, Eldon Hanson, Gena Reynolds, and Kieran Culkin. This gave Chris Carter a dilemma. Lose an entire week of filming and throw off the show’s broadcast schedule or make another episode that revolved around Agent Skinner. He chose the latter, and this episode keeps us guessing about Skinner in all the right ways.

The episode begins in a postal processing facility where a woman decides to take a smoke break in the restroom. While she enjoys her nicotine, bees begin invading the room. She does not notice until the floor is covered in them. When she panics, the bees attack and sting her to death. These are the same smallpox carrying bees from the season premiere and the first film that takes place after season five.

Agent Skinner is then seen deleting files from Agent Mulder’s computer. Then, impersonating Mulder, he arrives at the processing facility to clean up the mess and burn the body in an incinerator. He visits the local police department to collect the blood samples they took and tells them their involvement is no longer necessary. All this at the behest of the Cigarette Smoking Man.

Mulder, not missing a beat, confronts Skinner and tells him that someone is going to great lengths to cover up the case because the detective assigned to the case is dead, which is news to Skinner. Angered about the detective, Skinner meets with Cigarette Smoking Man and the Gray Haired Man in what would be the character’s final episode. The two men will not let Skinner out of their agreement that he would cover up what happened to the postal worker. Later, Mulder tells Skinner that the detective was killed with a federal agent’s gun and Skinner quickly finds that his own weapon is missing. He is being framed so if he goes to the police with all the information, he will implicate himself.

 To protect himself, Skinner goes back to the processing facility to find new evidence that he can use as leverage to protect himself. He finds a beehive and honeycomb with dead bees behind a wall that he punctures a hole in. He takes the bees to an entomologist only to find that Mulder did the same six months previously. Skinner finds Mulder’s case file on it and finds Marita Covarrubias’ (Laurie Holden) number. She says she has no new evidence for him at that time. The entomologist is later killed by the bees that hatched from the honeycomb that Skinner brought him. The body is infected with smallpox.

Meanwhile Mulder investigates the death of the detective and finds security footage from a nearby bank that shows a man in a hat speaking with the detective before his death. Further photo analysis gives Mulder the identity of the man in the photo. That man is Skinner. This moment will further solidify what happens to Mulder in the season 4 finale and season 5 premiere.

Cigarette Smoking Man meets with The Syndicate, the group responsible for the bees and the alien colonization plot. Afterwards, more bees attack a school where a teacher dies and children are stung by the bees. Marita meets Skinner at the hospital where the kids are infected with smallpox from the bee stings. Skinner believes that the smallpox bees are part of a larger conspiracy.

Mulder confronts Skinner about his gun, but Skinner shows Mulder how his desk drawer lock was broken and the gun was stolen. Mulder turns the gun in as evidence but destroys the serial number first so Skinner is now implicated. Skinner demands from the Cigarette Smoking Man that he help with Scully’s cancer. The nicotine addict uses Scully against Skinner saying that harm will come to her if Skinner kills him. Marita calls the Cigarette Smoking Man and asks how they would like to proceed. She is told to tell Mulder whatever he wants to hear, so now she is not the ally that Mulder thinks she is.

What I find so interesting about this episode is that it turns what would have been an investigative episode for the agents into a story about Skinner trying to save Scully’s life, even if the Syndicate is manipulating him. They made a pact when Scully was originally diagnosed that if Skinner cooperated, Cigarette Smoking Man would help her. Skinner is growing tired of that manipulation, especially since Mulder is pretty intense when he confronts Skinner on it. The growing disillusionment regarding Mulder’s view of his own government is the catalyst for the finale so this well-placed episode made around Gillian Anderson’s weeklong hiatus was a perfect segue for the season.

Much like in Harrenvolk at the beginning of the season, they utilized live bees on set for this episode. Here, the bees needed a little help standing out so they enhanced them digitally before the episode aired. The show has a history of using live bugs and animals on set, much to Gillian Anderson’s dislike. Good thing she was not on set for this round of bees.

The scene with the bees attacking the school reminded me of the Hitchcock film The Birds during which birds attack school children as they attempt to escape. Veronica Cartwright, who played the part of Cathy in that film, also starred in four episodes of The X-Files as Cassandra Spender in later seasons. What is so striking about the similarities between the bee/school scene and The Birds is it draws inspiration from multiple scenes. During Cathy’s birthday party, she stands at the glass door crying after the birds attacked much like a boy does when the bees attack his teacher after she saved him. Cathy was also saved by another character during a bird attack just like the boy. Cartwright has a prolific career and has been a mainstay in horror and sci-fi films and television. I look forward to discussing her further when Cassandra Spender finally makes an appearance on the show.

This was Howard Gordon’s final episode as a writer and producer. He had been with the series since season 1. He would go on to produce and write for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, 24, the short lived and underrated Awake, Homeland, Accused, and The Beast in Me. Quite the career, and he is not done yet.

Fun Fact: one of the files that Skinner sees in Mulder’s file cabinet during this episode was marked “Foo Fighters.” While the term was what fighter pilots referred to UFOs as during WWII, it also references the band who would later contribute music to the film, Fight the Future.

Until next week, the truth is out there.