Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – The Rain King

Being able to control the weather has been a familiar trope in comic books and movies for decades. Storm in the X-Men comics, cartoons, and movies uses the weather to stop the villains that she and her mutant counterparts are always trying to stop. Thor also uses lightning as a weapon. Disney utilized this trope in Frozen for a winter themed animated film. In the film Geostorm, government made satellites to help control the weather until those satellites are taken over for malicious purposes. Snowpiercer tells the story of Earth’s remaining humans living aboard a train that continually circles the globe after an effort to control climate change created an ice age. Even the sequel tornado chaser film Twisters features a protagonist trying to use science to stop dangerous tornados in their tracks. Can all of this be traced back to Greek mythology where Zeus could use lightning to smite his enemies? Maybe. One thing is for sure. Humans like control and we often fantasize about controlling things not within our control. The weather in all of its erratic unpredictability is one thing we’ll never be able to fully control.

Another weather related trope used in film and television is using weather to convey a certain emotional quality to a scene. Horror movies use thunderstorms, full moons, and the dark that comes with nighttime to help tell their eerie stories. When dark clouds move aside and the moon appears, we know someone is turning into a werewolf. An ominous sign that something terrible is coming. Romantic movies and dramas tend to use rain as both a way to convey sad emotions and to show a character being washed clean of whatever they were dealing with. Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling having it out in the rain in The Notebook wasn’t a coincidence. Getting all those hurt feelings out before finally coming back to each other was a watershed moment. The rain washed all that clean.

The film Twister used the same kind of trope. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxtons’ relationship is told through a series of storms and tornados, the last of which clears up and they finally end up back together. In another scene, the fight in the rain as Paxton tells her that he was right there for her the entire time and she didn’t see it. Hunt’s character spends her life believing that the tornado who killed her father also came after her intentionally and she spends her adult life trying to defeat tornados.

Why am I going into a history lesson on how weather is used in film and television, you ask? Well, episode eight of season six of The X-Files used control of the weather for an X-File. And it didn’t just have someone intentionally controlling the weather. The episode used this trope as a red herring for something else. For someone who had a broken heart and didn’t have control over their emotions which sent the weather into chaos. The Rain King isn’t one of my favorite episodes, but it is memorable for using heart shaped hail among other special effects. This episode aired three years after the release of the 1996 film Twister which was considered groundbreaking for its special effects at the time. While this episode doesn’t go quite that far with its detail, it does have some great erratic weather scenes.

The episode starts on Valentine’s Day as Daryl Mootz argues with Sheila Fontaine because she announced their engagement in the paper and he wanted to keep it secret. A drought in the area (small town Kansas) had ruined nearby businesses and Mootz didn’t want the engagement announced before the drought ended. He leaves, already drunk, and crashes his car when heart shaped hail starts falling from the sky.

Six months later, the mayor of the town asks for the help of Mulder and Scully because Mootz is now calling himself “The Rain King” because he says he can control the weather. If local retailers pay him a large sum of money, he will make it rain. The local weatherman, Holman Hardt agrees that Mootz does seem to control the weather. Skeptical, the agents watch as Mootz makes it rain on a local farm.

After a cow crashes into Mulder’s motel room, Sheila admits that the cow might be her fault and that she is the one unconsciously controlling the weather. However, not long after that Mootz’s weather controlling powers seem to dry up. Weatherman Holman Hardt seems relieved by this until it is revealed that he is the one controlling the weather because he is secretly in love with Sheila. His guilt over causing Mootz’s car to crash is what caused him to make it rain for Mootz. Once he realized that Mootz had been drunk driving that night, Hardt stopped making it rain for the man.

Sheila is suddenly attracted to Agent Mulder – which is totally fair. I mean, he does look good in those suits. Hardt’s sadness and jealousy spikes, causing a terrible rainstorm that only ends when Hardt finally confesses his feelings for Sheila and she accepts him. Sheila could quite possibly be one of the most annoying characters ever on the show. Perhaps that is intentional. Perhaps it is not. It doesn’t make her any less annoying.

Moral of the story here is don’t bottle up your feelings or it might fester and explode later. Or cause thunderstorms. Tornadoes. Heart shaped hail. And you might miss out on the love of your life while she is with someone else who treats her poorly. Emotions are like the weather. Unpredictable and storms erupt under ripe conditions. A trope used so many times that it should feel overused at this point, but it doesn’t.

Actor Clayton Rohner kind of stole the show in this episode with his portrayal of Mootz. While he’s had a decades long career in both television and film, the only other project I remember him being in is 1997’s The Relic. Perhaps that is because it was released within a couple years of this episode and it was fresh on my mind when this episode originally aired.

Until next week, the truth is out there and if you find yourself bottling up some heartbreak, to the weather a solid and find a therapist.