Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – The Spender Family

Before Veronica Cartwright appeared in The X-Files as Cassandra Spender, Jeffrey Spender’s mother, and an alien abductee, Cartwright had already had a decades long film career that started when she was a child. In 1963 she starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds alongside Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, and Rod Taylor after appearing in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and an episode of The Twilight Zone. By the 1970s she was a familiar face in Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the 1980s, I knew her as the protagonist’s mother in Flight of the Navigator and a townsperson in The Witches of Eastwick. When she appeared for a recurring role in The X-Files in season five after having appeared in Sliders and the Candyman sequel in the 1990s, I was beyond thrilled. This lesser known Scream Queen was always on my radar and this solidified her status for me.

Speaking of Jeffrey Spender, Patient X in season five was the first episode that Chris Owens first appeared as the son of a mythology character (we aren’t supposed to know who his father is until the finale of this season so I’m just blowing cigarette smoke knowingly here). Owens also played the Great Mutato and the young version to the Cigarette Smoking Man in previous episodes. While he has a far less prolific career than Cartwright, he is a welcome familiar face within the X-Files cannon.

Patient X

This episode features the return of Alex Krycek (Nicolas Lea) sans one hand. The character really does have nine lives and always seems to reappear when multiple mythology episodes run back to back. Marita Covarrubius (Laurie Holdon) also reappears here after one of the alien shapeshifting bounty hunters kills two boys. The bounty hunter has his mouth and eyes sewn shut giving him a decidedly creepy appearance. As she investigates the deaths and runs into Krycek, Marita informs her superiors that everything is falling apart. Their plan of alien colonization is going to hell. Krycek kidnaps a surviving boy of the bounty hunter attack and takes him to the US with his eyes, nose, and mouth sewn shut so the black oil that signifies he is infected with the alien virus doesn’t seep from the boy’s orifices. He offers the boy up to the Syndicate and Marita informs them that their plan will be delayed by quite a while. It’s revealed by the end of the episode that Marita and Krycek are lovers working against the Syndicate. Marita kidnaps the boy, Dimitri, who survived the alien bounty hunter at the beginning of the episode only to get infected with the virus when he takes the sewn thread out of his eyes.

Mulder’s attitude about aliens has been altered due to events earlier in the season when he found out he was being used as a pawn to further along the Syndicate’s plan. At a MIT conference, he lets people know this and it doesn’t go well. This is where he meets Cassandra Spender who believes Mulder is a hero of hers for his work on The X Files even though he has essentially given up.

Scully meets Jeffrey Spender, a fellow FBI agent who fears his reputation will be damaged if they find out Cassandra is his mother because she is famous for her abduction stories. Scully talks Mulder into meeting with Cassandra only to find that their abduction stories are nearly identical and that they both have the implants in their necks. Unlike Scully, Cassandra wants to be abducted again.

At Skyland Mountain, where Scully and Cassandra were both previously abducted, a group of abductees from only to be burned alive by the faceless alien rebels. Even when they visit the scene, Mulder remains skeptical because he believes the military put the implants in their necks to make him believe they were abductees. At the end of the episode, Jeffrey Spender reveals to Mulder that his mother, Scully, and Dimitri are gone – brought to the Ruskin Dam by a Syndicate assassin named Quiet Willy. As a UFO appears above them, the alien bounty hunter arrives and starts setting people on fire.

The Red and the Black

In a remote cabin in the wilderness, a letter hoping for reconciliation addressed to someone “son” is addressed to the FBI and given to a courier for mailing. We never see this person’s face, but obviously the person is in hiding. At the end of the episode, Spender receives the letter but returns it unopened. We see the letter get returned unopened and the man in hiding is the Cigarette Smoking Man.

While the Syndicate administer their black oil vaccine to Marita, Mulder arrives at Ruskin Dam to find many abductees burned. Agent Scully is found alive with minor burns and Cassandra Spender is missing. Scully remembers nothing and is later hypnotized to remember what happened. The alien rebels burned the fellow abductees and a spacecraft abducting Cassandra Spender. Mulder tells Skinner he still believes this was the US military orchestrating the whole thing.

Krycek, who was being held by the Syndicate, is released and attacks Mulder at his apartment before admitting that the alien rebels are trying to halt the colonization plans and that he is working with them. While Scully is now reconsidering her abduction memories, Mulder now believes that the aliens are now trying to colonize the earth – a complete 180 from his feelings in the previous episode.

Marita finally gets a vaccine from Russia that stops the alien virus as Mulder and Scully arrive at an air force base to rescue the alien rebel trying to stop the colonization of the aliens and alien bounty hunters end up killing each other.

Of the mythology arc episodes, these two episodes are some of the better ones. While the second episode gets a little convoluted with the shape shifting aliens, together they make for a thrilling mini arc in the greater mythology. It gets Mulder back to thinking aliens are real instead of feeling like he and his sister were just pawns in a larger conspiracy. The makeup effects used in these two episodes to show eyes and mouths being sewn shut were also impressive as they were not only convincing, but also looked painful. It added a lot to this arc and pulled the viewer in with the realism. It is terrifying to look at even now.

Fun fact: Both Nicolas Lea and Laurie Holden had to learn Russian for these episodes because the scripts required them to speak it fluently. They even used a dialect coach to get the pronunciation correct. I know this has nothing to do with their characters having an affair, but that revelation was great back in 1997. It also has parallels with Laurie Holden’s other well known horror role as Andrea in The Walking Dead. While in the comics Andrea was a total badass, in the series she had the tendency to make dumb decisions like sleeping with Shane in season two to having an affair with the Governor and then regretting it later in seasons three and four. Like Marita in The X-Files, Andrea’s decisions caused a lot of complications for herself and those around her.

Veronica Cartwright’s career continued through the years after The X-Files ended its original run as she had projects dated as recently as 2025 according to IMDB. She has appeared in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Supernatural, CSI, Eastwick, and the Nicole Kidman film The Invasion. Notably, the underrated and short-lived series Invasion from 2005 has her in five great episodes. She remains, to this very day, one of my favorite Hollywood mainstays. Her parts are usually small, but she shows up for each one and gives genuine performances. Cartwright’s constant appearances in sci-fi and horror projects show the respect she has in the community.

Until next week, the truth is out there. In the words of Veronica Cartwright in Alien, its moving right towards you.