the m0vie blog

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Wetwired is an oddity.

It is the penultimate episode of the third season, written by special effects supervisor Matt Beck. It is very much a conspiracy episode, albeit one lacking any real sense of forward moment and with only the loosest thematic ties to the rest of the show’s mythology. Unlike – say – Soft Light, this is not simply a “monster of the week” story with elements of the mythology grafted in. The show has largely move past those, which is why Avatar felt so weird.

Instead, Wetwired is that strangest of government conspiracy stories. It is an episode dedicated almost exclusively to shady goings-on at the highest levels of government, but with no mention or inference of aliens or other sinister long-term plots. Wetwired stands out as something strange and hard to place; perhaps its closest analogue is The Pine Bluff Variant from towards the end of the fifth season.

The result is an oddity that is a little uneven and disjointed, an episode packed with clever ideas and concepts, but difficulty connecting them to each other.

To be fair, it makes sense that so much of Wetwired feels disconnected from the episodes around it. The script came from inside the production team, but outside the writing staff – it feels like a show very close to the heart of the series, but also outside it. It is, according to IMDb, Matt Beck’s only writing credit to date. Beck is a veteran special effects designer who is among the best working in his field. His filmography dates back to Star Trek: The Motion Picture and includes films like Spider-Man II or Titanic or even Into the Wild.

It is worth noting that Chris Carter did a lot to encourage and develop ideas from outside the writers’ room on The X-Files. David Duchovny would be credited on four stories across the first two seasons, eventually writing and directing two episodes by himself. Gillian Anderson would follow suite. William B. Davies would write a script for the show. Even other behind-the-scenes talent would contribute to the show’s pool of writers. R.W. Goodwin would write the script for Demons at this point in the fourth season.

One of the most remarkable features of The X-Files was the sense that Carter was keen to encourage and involve everybody working on the show. Lack of previous experience in a given area would not lock people out. Even a few of the writers moved out of the writers’ room and tried directing. James Wong would direct Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, Vince Gilligan would direct Je Souhaite and Sunshine Days. Frank Spotnitz would direct Alone and Dæmonicus.

That is a stunningly collaborative and encouraging atmosphere. While the talent working on The X-Files is phenomenal, the show’s legacy has been just as impressive. It has made quite a mark on contemporary television, with various writers and directors moving on to influence other high-profile shows. One suspects that the encouraging and experimental atmosphere fostered by Chris Carter played a part in that.

And Wetwired works very well as a first script. It is confident, it has good ideas, it understands the characters. The show’s structure is perhaps a little bit too loose and there are points where it feels like the pacing is a little uneven, but these are not fatal flaws. Wetwired is not a bad episode, even if it isn’t quite a great one. It feels like it has a lot to say, and contains no shortage of memorable images. The opening scene is brilliant, and the effect of “reality” decoding works very well.

It is interesting to have a government conspiracy episode that does not explicitly deal with aliens – that doesn’t tie into plans for “colonisation” or attempts to discredit Mulder and Scully. There is a sense that perhaps these sinister figures have to go about the business of ruling the world, rather than simply preparing it for some vague alien invasion plan. It adds a nice bit of texture to the world of The X-Files, creating a sense that not everything is counting down to some secret plot involving little green men. The government can do shady business on its own terms.

Here, Mulder uncovers a plot to “manipulate people’s behavior, alter their decision making-process.” To tell them “what to buy, who to vote for.” Of course, this ignores the fact that red-green encoded mind control signals are not necessary for that; marketing is often more than enough. However, when confronted with Mulder’s theory, Mr. X responds simply, “You think they’ll stop at commerce and politics?”

It’s a beautiful little line, because it suggests that Mulder’s paranoia is – if anything – too small. Mulder’s pursuit of the truth focuses on aliens from outer space and the plot to conceal their presence on Earth. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg. There is always more. Whatever evil Mulder can fathom, he is inevitably behind the curve. There are no limits. There are no boundaries. Wetwired seems to suggest that – no matter how scared he might be – Mulder is not scared enough.

The X-Files has drawn quite heavily on some of the darker chapters of American history. F. Emasculata drew from various amoral experiments on prisoners. Paper Clip touched on the rescue of Nazi scientists. Wetwired suggests government tests on an unsuspecting public, very clearly evoking the infamous MK-ULTRA experiments. Ted Kennedy chaired the hearings on the matter:

Some 2 years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to “unwitting subjects in social situations.”

This is an absolutely horrifying chapter of American history – the story of innocent people being experimented upon with mind-altering agents without any prior consent and no concern for their safety or well-being.

Reading over the reports of MK-ULTRA, there is no real sense that these experiments were controlled or monitored; that there was any real scientific method underpinning the callous brutality of it all. In one infamous case, as documented in The Strength of the Wolf, the CIA was literally spiking people’s drinks:

A CIA scientist specialising in the airborne delivery of diseases like anthrax, Olson was attached to the MKULTRA Program under cover of the Department of Defense. His bizarre tale began on the night of 19 November 1953, when, at a secluded country lodge outside Washington that served as a retreat for MKULTRA researchers, one of Dr. Gottlieb’s equally deranged colleagues dropped LSD in Olson’s Cointreau. Unaware that he’d been drugged, Olson embarked on a bad trip that triggered a nervous breakdown and, a week later, a compulsory visit to Dr. Harold Abramson in New York. An allergist with a MKULTRA contract, Abramson treated Olson with a combination of goof balls and bourbon. The effect was hardly therapeutic, and after spending Thanksgiving Day with Abramson on Long Island, Olson returned to his room at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan and, in the presence of CIA psychiatrist Robert Lashbrook, allegedly dashed across the room, dove through the window and plummeted to his death.

This is just one well-known and well-documented example. There are likely countless others buried in history, lost to the ages.

The details of the MK-ULTRA experiments on the public are absurd – they read almost like a conspiracy theory or science-fiction. However, they are a recorded and documented reality:

Before LSD escaped the lab and was evangelized by hippies, the U.S. government was secretly testing the effects of the drug on hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel. In a must-read feature on newly unclassified material on the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert operation, the MK-ULTRA program, which ran from 1953 to 1964, SF Weekly fully exposes the bizarre world of the CIA’s unethical drug tests.  The utterly-unbelievable-but-true story involved using hookers to lure in unwitting johns for undisclosed testing, narcotics agents who slipped drugs into drinks, and a U.S. marshal who held up a San Francisco bar not knowing he was high on acid.

It sounds like something out of a paranoid dream. And indeed, before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic. But the U.S. government’s history of secret human experimentation ought to be kept in mind, particularly when we consider the power we grant to it and the way we regulate drugs.

This makes Wetwired a particularly fascinating episode, even as it strips the aliens out of the conspiracy. What if there are no external factors at play? What if there is just unchecked and amoral power held by those in authority?

In some respects, Wetwired might be seen as a companion piece to Blood. Airing in the second season, before the show’s conspiracy had properly crystalised, Blood was a story about a small town caught in the grip of some sort of paranoia. The episode was quite ambiguous on the matter, asking the audience to decide for themselves whether the conspiracy actually existed or whether Mulder was simply being paranoid. Airing in the third season, when such things have been more firmly cemented, Wetwired is a bit more explicit.

As with Blood, fear is the key factor here. Paranoia is intensified. Everything is consciously ramped up. The child of Holocaust survivors starts seeing a genocidal madman everywhere. A wife sees her husband cheating on her. “You see a pattern developing here?” Mulder asks, rhetorically. “What if this, this video signal somehow turned these people’s anxieties into some kind of dementia? A virtual reality of their own worst nightmares?”

The experiment in Wetwired is very clearly trying to make people afraid. It doesn’t try to make them happy or contented; it seems that the government doesn’t want satisfied citizens. Instead, the signal seems designed to provoke fear and anxiety. The implication is obvious; the government is plotting to control the population through fear. Keep everybody scared, and you will keep everybody in line. Nothing builds consensus like unchecked fear.

In a way, Wetwired seems a bit ahead of the curve – it seems to foreshadow the first decade of the twenty-first century. The nineties were a relatively peaceful and prosperous decade for the United States, but the new millennium brought with it politics firmly anchored in fear. Wetwired seems all the more potent in an era where phrases like “Axis of Evil” and “War on Terror” have entered the popular vernacular. The media has become a very effective tool for reinforcing these anxieties and uncertainties.

It has been suggested that people now live in a perpetual culture of fear. As Phil Hubbarb noted in Fear and Loathing at the Multiplex, viewers are constantly surrounded by fear and anxiety in all possible forms:

Though Beck and those who have subsequently developed his ideas have focused mainly on the global spectres of environmental disaster, stock-market meltdown and, post-September 11th, international terrorism, it is important to stress that the risk society has another, more invidious, aspect; namely, the ‘ambient fear’ and anxiety that saturates the social spaces of everyday life. This is a fear that requires us to vigilantly monitor even the banal minutiae of our lives, with Doel and Clarke arguing that fear is no longer confined to the exceptional or the extreme (epidemic, catastrophe, meltdown etc). Instead, everything has become hazardous: ‘from transport, communication and energy systems; through domestic appliances, office furniture and cuddly toys; to the air we breathe, the water we drink and even the ten million potentially dangerous sporting injuries in Britain each year.’

Wetwired seems very much in tune with these concerns. The victims here are affected by fears that are both epic and intimate. People are terrified of international war criminals and personal betrayals. Scully’s fear is that Mulder will betray her to the show’s vast international conspiracy.

There is a bit of a problem with this. The show has already done the “paranoid lead turns against their partner” story with Mulder back in Anasazi, the second season finalé. There, Mulder’s water supply was laced with LSD, pushing the character over the edge and heightening his already strong sense of paranoia. It was a very nice story hook for the character, because it stressed just how much Mulder does need to trust those around him – despite his mantra.

Even outside of Anasazi, “Mulder and Scully maybe turn on each other” has proven itself a solid premise for The X-Files. The show has been aware of this since at least Ice in the middle of the first season, and has used it quite a few times already. The show has got considerable mileage out of imagery of Mulder and Scully turning against one another, even through trickery or paranormal manipulation – consider the Alien-Bounty-Hunter-as-Mulder tossing Scully around a hotel room in End Game or Modell forcing Mulder to play Russian Roulette with Scully in Pusher.

The problem with Wetwired is that it all feels rather superficial. Wetwired seems to treat Scully’s fear of Mulder’s potential betrayal as something of a revelation. The problem is that this is nothing we don’t know already. The tension in Anasazi largely came from the fact that this was Mulder’s normal personality pushed up to eleven – as if the show was offering a glimpse of what might happen when the man Jose Chung would describe as a “ticking time bomb of insanity” eventually exploded.

That tension isn’t inherent to Scully’s character, so her breakdown needs a bit more development and focus. It is interesting to think about how her time with Mulder may have made her paranoid, how it has isolated her from her friends and her colleagues. Her constant exposure to government conspiracies and the horrors she has experienced would put anybody a little on edge. Scully has been sucked into Mulder’s world, so imagining how she might react if Mulder were to suddenly betray her so completely is a fascinating exercise.

There is an interesting story to be told about the toll of Scully’s long-term exposure to Mulder’s world, and the question of how hard it must be for a rational person to hold on to their sanity in the midst of all that. Never Again touches on that in the middle of the fourth season, suggesting that Scully’s personal life has been consumed by The X-Files. There is the potential for a fascinating story about how constant exposure to Mulder’s paranoia and mistrust has affected the young agent who was originally assigned to keep an eye on him.

Unfortunately, Wetwired is not that episode. The show is structured somewhat haphazardly. As much as this is the story about Scully becoming paranoid and mistrustful of Mulder, the story is largely driven by Mulder. It is Mulder who has the meetings with the Plain-Clothes Man, it is Mulder who must track down Scully, it is Mulder who confronts Mr. X at the climax. It is even Mulder who finds the strange brainwashing device and cracks the case with the assistance of the Lone Gunmen.

Scully feels very much like a secondary presence here – she is absent for large swathes of the episode, which means that the audience never gets to feel her paranoia. She is not involved in the episode’s finalé, suggesting that her psychosis is more of a minor inconvenience to Mulder than the centre of the episode. It is a shame, because Wetwired is an episode that really needs a centre, and Scully’s paranoid breakdown feels like it would fit perfectly.

Wetwired often feels like a mish-mash of ideas thrown together, rather than a singular cohesive story. The plot is also a fairly big moment for the character of Mr. X, despite the fact that the character does not appear until the final ten minutes – after Scully’s breakdown has been resolved. There is a sense that Wetwired is never able to fully be whatever it wants to be, so it ends up feeling like a collection of often disparate elements.

Of course, the absence of Mr. X was dictated by production realities. According to  Trust No One, Mulder’s temporary informant was written into the script as a way around Steven Williams’ scheduling conflicts:

The character of the Plain-Clothes Man, who serves as what turns out to be a messenger for X at the outset, was concocted because Williams had a production conflict with his other series, L.A. Heat. “They gave three of my scenes to another character,” confides Williams, who says the producers of his new show are X-Files fans who have pledged to try and work around such logistical problems in the future.

There is a wry irony in that final promise. It would turn out that The X-Files would no longer really need Mr. X after a few more episodes, most likely as a direct result of Williams’ involvement in L.A. Heat. Production scheduling can be a nightmare, and being a lead actor in a television show severely limits availability.

Given the theme of the episode and the behind-the-scenes realities at play, there’s a nice bit of sly meta-commentary in having Mr. X reflect, “I had no alternative. I was being watched too closely.” He was being watched too closely to allow him to be involved in Wetwired. He was just being watched by viewers in other countries. L.A. Heat is an interesting little television show. Running for two years, it was a cop show produced outside the American network system. As a result, it did not air on American television until after it had wrapped up production.

L.A. Heat was filmed in the United States, but sold abroad. It was a massive success in Europe. In Germany, it even managed to supplant Baywatch as the most-watched American import. In a way, L.A. Heat hinted at the radical change coming in the production of television drama, reflecting the diversity and opportunity that would come with the new millennium. No longer would the conversation be almost exclusively dominated by the major American networks. Given Wetwired is a show about television, it is a nice little footnote.

Regarding Steven Williams, the production team (including John Shiban, Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz) have all expressed fondness for Mr. X as a character. However, in I Want to Believe, Spotnitz laid out the central problem facing the writers when it came to the character of Mr. X:

“But we felt that there was only so much we could with him at this level of involvement. Our big decision was either escalate him, make him a bigger player in the show – which we were considering – or have him pay the price for collaborating with Mulder.”

Given the production difficulties posed by getting Steven Williams to guest star in Wetwired, it seemed unlikely that he could be made a “a bigger player in the show”, at least while L.A. Heat was in production. In many respects, Wetwired puts the writing on the wall for Mr. X as a character.

The script acknowledges as much. Mulder’s rant at Mr. X towards the end of the episode doesn’t tell fans anything that they don’t already know about the character from One Breath or Soft Light. However, it very clearly sets up the character’s arc in Talitha Cumi and Herrenvolk. Mulder accuses him, “You’re a coward! You work in the shadows, you feed me scraps of information, hoping that I can piece it together. You make me risk my life, you risk my partner’s life and you never risk your own!”

Even the final short scene between Mr. X and the Cigarette-Smoking Man hints at the shape of things to come. It underscores how little Mulder understands his latest informant. Mr. X is not an equal to the Cigarette-Smoking Man. He is not a colleague who operates in the same level of upper management as Deep Throat. Mr. X is heavily implied to be a middle manager at best. He still gets grunt work like cleaning up failed experiments – in both Wetwired and 731, for example. He never meets the Well-Manicured Man, nor visits the members’ club on West 46th Street.

So the risks that Mr. X takes are arguably greater than the risks taken by Deep Throat, because he has less protection and more accountability. Similarly, Mr. X’s paranoia seems to come from a much more understandable place. Unlike Deep Throat, he isn’t friends with the Cigarette-Smoking Man and Bill Mulder. He is likely expendable in the same way that Luis Cardinal is expendable. He’s probably quite likely to get murdered tidying up loose ends, even if his superiors never discover he’s feeding information to Mulder.

As with Malcolm Gerlach, it feels like Mr. X is just a day player in all of these big events. He’s a working stiff, who gets lots of crappy work and no credit for doing it. The X-Files tended to focus quite a lot on the highest levels of the conspiracy – the old white guys who ruled the world from the shadows. Still, it is interesting to imagine Mr. X as a glimpse into the more routine low-level stuff – a guy doing a job at a much lower level than Mulder or the audience is expecting to deal with. Mulder – himself the son of a high-level conspirator – has no sympathy or understanding of this.

Of course, Wetwired is perhaps most interesting as an exploration and critique of television. It is essentially a television episode about how television turns people into disillusion paranoids. It was quite timely for an episode that aired in May, 1996. It was broadcast as the nation was in the midst of a debate about violence in media, following the publication of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The media was locked in a debate about the impact that violence in television was having on children and others.

It is worth pausing here to note that the issue remains hotly contested, with no real proof that violence has any impact on the conduct of the audience. When Scully mentions the implied connection, Mulder reflects, “What you’re talking about is pseudo-science used to make political book.” His position is not unreasonable. David Gauntlett’s examination of the evidence has suggested that any studies demonstrating a correlation between violence on television and violence in real life were flawed, and often biased by political ideology.

On the surface, it might seem like Wetwired supports the argument that violence in television can have an adverse impact on people – after all, it is a story about how people who watch television have violent breakdowns with horrendous results. It would be very easy for the show to adopt a populist attitude on the topic and suggest that violence on television is a very bad thing. However, given the show’s content and themes, that would also be just a little bit hypocritical. So Wetwired does something just a little shrewder and more subversive.

It is revealed that the sinister force at work here is a piece of technology that the government has been using to manipulate content provided by other sources. It seems quite pointed given that one of the cornerstones of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had been the introduction of a “v-chip” for every television set, a piece of technology that the government would use to manipulate content provided by other sources. Wetwired seems less concerned with the content of television than it does with the idea of meddling in the service of government interests.

Wetwired stresses the normality of the perpetrators of these violent actions, with Mulder quite astutely disarming any of Scully’s attempts to sensationalise the case. “I think television plays a large part in both of these murderers’ lives,” she states. “As it does in almost every American home,” Mulder adds. In many ways, Wetwired could be seen as an episode more interested in television as an institution rather than with the low-hanging fruit of violence in television.

This idea is supported by the fact that Wetwired subverts expectations somewhat when it comes to violence committed by those under the influence of the signal. Those driven to kill are not impressionable kids or sinister teenagers, but a family man and a suburban housewife. They are also not watching the types of shows associated with the debate over violence in television; he was watching the news, she was watching “The Price is Nice.” Current affairs coverage is “worthy” and game shows are “harmless”, and so are often excluded from debates on televisual decency.

It’s telling that the two kids watching the violent movie are completely unaffected by this manipulation. In Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, Paul A. Cantor makes the case that Wetwired is more interested in television as an institution than in any specific content:

Marshall McLuhan argues that we are too obsessed with the question of the content of television – what specific message it conveys. For him, the more significant issue is the very medium of television, which in itself has more of an impact in changing us as human beings. Wetwired also seems ultimately less concerned with who controls television than the way that television controls us. The real horror in Wetwired is a world in which anybody would tape hundreds of hours of CNN broadcasts, let alone watch them, and unfortunately, that world is not far away from the one we already live in. The episode seems to say: “Forget about government conspiracies: television is already running our lives.” The central concern of the episode is the passivity of average television viewers, which makes them captives of the TV screen and puts them at the mercy of the medium. Mulder tries to dismiss that view of television’s effect in his early remarks, but everything in the story, especially Scully’s behaviour, seems to contradict him and reinforce the idea that Americans in fact “are just empty vessels waiting to be filled with any idea or image that’s fed to them.”

While there’s still the faintest whiff of moral panic around this argument – after all, the same argument might be made of the internet – it is a lot more sophisticated and nuanced than the typical “violent television makes people violent” argument.

It is also interesting to note that Byers suggests that the corrupting influence is not the television show itself, “information that’s being added into the spaces between the still pictures.” Which is interesting, because that is exactly how television works. The brain processes still pictures in order to intuit movement and dynamism. That space between the still pictures is inevitably filled by the audience themselves.

Wetwired is somewhat infamous for its introduction of the idea that Mulder is red-green colour blind. This is not particularly notable of itself – after all, eight percent of American men of white European ancestry are colourblind. It is interesting because it is never mentioned anywhere else in The X-Files. Much like the now-ironically named Phoebe Green in Fire, it is a detail of Mulder’s story that just gets brushed aside once the episode is done with it.

What is particularly interesting with the whole red-green colour blindness revelation is the fact that aliens on The X-Files are defined by their green blood. According to Wetwired, Mulder would be unable to distinguish between a bleeding human and a bleeding alien on sight. (Although the fact that alien blood is toxic would probably help matters somewhat.) It is a revelation that is both absurd and a little brilliant, in that it suggests that one of the most obvious pieces of “proof” of Mulder’s conspiracy theories is forever invisible to him.

More than that, it reinforces the idea that perhaps humanity and the aliens at the heart of the show are not so different after all. Given that The X-Files likes to play with the idea of what “alien” really means, this cannot help but seem a little clever. Just as the show suggests that the aliens are the planet’s original inhabitants or that the European settlers are the real aliens in America, the fact that Mulder cannot distinguish between human and alien blood on sight plays quite well into that theme. Of course, this is probably reading too much into the episode.

Wetwired also marks the introduction of what will become a recurring in-joke on the show, with a fleeting reference to a character named “John Gilnitz.” The name would pop up quite a bit in the years ahead, serving as a composite of the names of X-Files veterans John Shiban, Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz. These would be three members of the writing staff who would stick with the show through to the bitter end.

Oddly enough, the in-joke seems almost prophetic. In the fourth season, the three writers would collaborate on the script to Leonard Betts, the highest rated X-Files episode of all time. The collaboration proved so fruitful that the trio would regularly collaborate, even running The Lone Gunmen together. It is interesting to see the portmanteau in use here, even before the writing partnership has established itself.

Wetwired is an interesting little episode, even if it never gels as well as it might. It is bristling with interesting ideas, and has enough energy and enthusiasm to sustain an uneven plot.

You might be interested in our other reviews of the third season of The X-Files:

• The Blessing Way
  • X-tra: (Topps/TV Guide) Circle Game
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – The Pilot
• Paper Clip
  • X-tra: (Topps) #8-9 – Silent Cities of the Mind
• D.P.O.
• Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose
• The List
• 2shy
• The Walk
• Oubliette
  • X-tra: (Topps) #10-12 – Feelings of Unreality
• Nisei
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – Hostile Visit
• 731
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – Choice or Chance
  • X-tra: (Topps) Digest #1 – Big Foot, Warm Heart
• Revelations
  • X-tra: (Topps) The Pit
• War of the Coprophages
  • X-tra: (Topps) #1/2 – Tiptoe Through the Tulpa
• Syzygy
  • X-tra: ‘Ship Shape or Ex-Files? Mulder, Scully and Paranormal Romance
• Grotesque
• Piper Maru
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – Never No More
• Apocrypha
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – The Angriest Angel
• Pusher
  • X-tra: (Topps) #13 – One Player Only
• Teso Dos Bichos
• Hell Money
• Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”
  • X-tra: (Topps) #14 – Falling
• Avatar
  • X-tra: (Topps) Digest #2 – Dead to the World
• Quagmire
  • X-tra: (Topps) #15-16 – Home of the Brave
• Wetwired
• Talitha Cumi
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – And If They Lay Us Down to Rest…
  • X-tra: Space: Above and Beyond – … Tell Our Moms We Done Our Best

Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: conspiracy, Control, Government, l.a. heat, matt beck, media, middle management, morality, mr. x, mulder, paranoia, politics of fear, scully, Television, the x-files, v-chip, violence, x, x-files |