Sunday Morning with Mulder and Scully – The Great Mutato

Season five of The X-Files really hits the sweet spot. The mythology episodes are juxtaposed with some pretty great monsters of the week in such a wonderful way that the season feels balanced in a way that the previous ones don’t. The inspirations that Chris Carter draws from each week make for some memorable monsters and storylines. And sometimes, these inspirations are taken less from Carter’s distrust from the government and more from pop culture. The Post-Modern Prometheus happens to be one of those episodes. It openly draws from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while also setting the episode soundly in the 1990s as it utilizes our love of Jerry Springer and Cher. Shot in black and white as an homage to the old Universal monster movies, this episode remains one of my favorites.

Actor Chris Owens is no stranger to The X-Files. Between 1996 and 2018, he acted in fourteen episodes of the show as both Jeffrey Spender and the young version of the Smoking Man who, as it turned out, was Jeffrey Spender’s father (but we don’t know that yet as it happens as the end of season five. Pretend I didn’t mention it yet.) He also played The Great Mutato in today’s episode, though he’s unrecognizable thanks to prosthetic makeup that took hours to apply. Kudos to the makeup department on the show because I never even knew until I was reading up on background information about this episode in the year 2026. Mind. Blown.

Anyway, while this episode is certainly a monster movie throwback, it also sends me back to my senior year of high school. I, like so many other 90s kids, went home from school and tuned in to Jerry Springer. This scandalous show was so obviously staged and unserious in its portrayal of actually helping the people who appeared on it that for teens of that era, it was like watching an hour Tik Tok to unwind after school. It offered up nothing educational or inspirational and one of my classmates in college would appear on it knowing he was required to get into a fake fight on stage. Culturally, Jerry Springer was as relevant as Vince McMahon directing professional wrestlers to fake their way through matches. You couldn’t take anything you had seen on it at face value. Of course, this would be enough of a reason for Chris Carter to ask Springer to guest star on an episode of The X-Files with the sole purpose of recreating a fake scene from Springer’s show during which one of his guests would drop Agent Mulder’s name.

 When Scully realized that she has been brought along on a monster hunting expedition because the woman she and Mulder were interviewing had heard Mulder’s name on Springer, the look she gives Mulder is priceless. The raised, questioning eyebrow. The annoyed yet amused smirk. Right away, the viewer knows that we are in for a humorous episode the show throws at us on occasion. The episode also leans a bit on comic book culture using a comic about a character called The Great Mutato drawn by the interviewee’s son. Scully believes her experience of being drugged and then waking up with no memory of how she ended up pregnant was actually a delusion brought on by reading the comic.

The woman’s son, Izzy, leads Mulder and Scully out to a wooded area where they believe they see this Great Mutato from a distance but are stopped by an angry elderly man who tells them there are no monsters. He sends the agents to his son, a geneticist who specializes in the Hox gene which, according to Google, encodes and specifies characteristics of position within the body. Essentially, these proteins make sure our body parts form correctly and in the right places. Mulder believes Dr Pollidori is a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein and that his is responsible for creating the Great Mutato. The doctor’s wife is attacked in the same way as Izzy’s mom and the agents find a chemical residue from an agricultural agent used to anesthetize animals. This leads Pollidori back to his father who is a farmer and the not-so-good doctor kills him. The Great Mutato finds the old farmer and is so broken hearted over the death that he buries the man in the barn.

Doctor Pollidori has blamed the monster for the death of his father after the body is found and leads an angry mob of people, torches and pitchforks ablazing, to kill the monster. As they burn down the barn, Mulder and Scully are in the basement with Mutato listening to his story about how he was created 25 years before as the result of one of Pollidori’s genetic experiments. The old farmer found him and raised him but he was unable to give Mutato a friend or partner for him to be with even though he tried when he impregnated Izzy’s mom. When the agents and Mutato are found by Pollidori after the fire goes out, Mutato asks Pollidori to create him a female mate but the man refuses saying that Mutato was a mistake.

The townspeople realize that Mutato is not a monster at all as Pollidori is arrested for the murder of his father. Mulder is upset that his Frankenstein case ended up not being what he expected and demands that Izzy write a different ending for Mutato during which he could have a mate and maybe see Cher perform. In what turns out to be a pretty fanciful ending, Mulder and Scully take Mutato to see Cher perform life. She was his favorite singer and he listened to her music often so seeing her live was a highlight of his life. While Cher was not available at the time, a stand-in was used for the concert filming. You don’t ever see her face, but it’s convincing enough even if it only happened in the ending of the comic book.

Actor John O’Hurley does a great job as Dr. Pollidori. He has a prolific career in guest and voice roles in television across decades, but is probably most recognizable from his recurring role on Seinfeld where he starred in 20 episodes. His arrogant manner made him the perfect actor to play the geneticist.

This small town this episode takes place in is full of off beat characters who first treat Mulder and Scully like celebrities because they believe their town is about to be famous for its monster but soon realize that Mulder and Scully are trying to find the real answers to what is going on. This turns the townspeople against them much in the way that they turn on the monster when they think it had murdered the old farmer. Mob mentality is alive and well in this episode, something a lot of us see every day nearly thirty years later. There are parallels to Twin Peaks in this episode as well with how the townspeople are portrayed. Both series question what is normal and provide commentary on how personalities are perceived by outsiders when law enforcement shows up to investigate a case.

What this episode lacks in scares it makes up for in humor. Mulder even looks at Scully during the early part of their investigation and says playfully, “It’s alive, Scully.” Colin Clive would be proud. For context, if you’ve not seen the 1931 film based on Mary Shelley’s novel, Colin Clive plays the titular doctor and utters the phrase It’s Alive! maniacally when his creature comes to life.

This episode speaks on themes of not judging a book by its cover and that the creator is more the monster than his creation, much like Shelly’s book. It also speaks on how raising something with kindness teaches it to be kind, which is something our current society could learn from. Both love and hate are learned behaviors and what we choose do with what we learn in our youth defines who we are. Like many of the episodes from this show, the themes are still very relevant today.

Until next week, Awesome Nerds, the truth is out there.