the m0vie blog

This December, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the ninth season of The X-Files.

Trust No 1 is an episode that is more relevant now than it was in January 2002. And not just because “trustno1” is still among the most popular (and least secure) internet passwords.

The core ideas of Trust No 1 are fascinating. In hindsight, it is impressive that the production team were able to produce something like Trust No 1 so quickly after the events of 9/11. The type of surveillance state depicted in Tust No 1 would turn out to be quite close to reality in the era of Edward Snowden and the scandal National Security Ageny. “They’re watching,” the words at the end of the title sequence tease, words which seem even more ominous over a decade after initial broadcast.

Unfortunately, while Trust No 1 seems to get more and more relevent with each passing year, the episode itself is a mess. As powerful and resonant as its central themes might be, Trust No 1 is very clearly the work of a production team with no idea of where the show is going or where they want to take it. All the worst excesses of the ninth season mythology are on display here, from the heartbreaking obsession with Mulder through to the marginalisation of Scully. The dialogue is overwrought and the climax is absurd. Trust No 1 simply doesn’t work.

And yet, despite all that, it exerts an odd power. It is a power muted by some of the creative decisions around it, and by some of the choices made in structuring the teleplay, but it is power nonetheless.

One of the more compelling aspects of The X-Files was always the show’s ability to blend the ridiculously pulpy with the literary. The show is essentially the story of a sinister alien invasion, but the production team used that hokey science-fiction premise to meditate on a variety of profound issues. The show might consciously draw upon the work of populist directors like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but The X-Files was unafraid to pepper its dialogue with references to The Brothers Karamazov or Pale Fire.

That is a very strange combination, and it helped to give The X-Files a unique identity. Scenes and dialogue in episodes like Talitha Cumi or Herrenvolk frequently danced on the line between the ridiculous and the profound, creating a cocktail that could occasionally be infuriating but was frequently intoxicating. As fashionable as it is to complain about Chris Carter’s ear for dialogue (particularly monologues), these weird moments made sure that The X-Files felt like nothing else on television.

The teaser to Trust No 1 is one of those delightfully surreal moments. Skilfully edited together from existing footage of Mulder and Scully, treated to look like surveillance materials and played over a piece of classical music, the teaser to Trust No 1 is one of the strangest teasers in the history of Ten Thirteen. When the inevitable voice-over from Gillian Anderson click in, the heightened absurdity of it all kicks into overdrive. It is not one of the show’s finest moments, but it is reassurance that The X-Files is still fundamentally The X-Files.

It is hard to think of a popular prime-time television show that would throw such a bizarre mish-mash of elements together, as Scully narrates a letter to William over dossiers of information while a piano plays classily in the background. “If one day you should behold a miracle,” she narrates, “as I have in you, you will learn the truth is not found in science, or on some unseen plane, but by looking into your own heart. And in that moment you will be blessed – and stricken. For the truest truths are what hold us together, or keep us painfully, desperately apart.”

The monologue is heavy-handed and ham-fisted, largely offering a taste of what is to come. However, it does suggest something of a thematic continuity between the eighth and ninth seasons. Given the difficulties that the ninth season has endured trying to deal with the legacy of the eighth season, this little dash of continuity is important. Nothing Important Happened Today I rode roughshod over the entire point of the final third of the eighth season, so it is nice to see that the show has not completely forgotten what happened in the previous season.

The eighth season suggested, repeatedly, that the truth was essentially internal; that Mulder’s pursuit of the truth was not a chase towards some external object, but a quest to find peace within himself. Essence and Existence allowed Mulder to find that peace, allowing him to become a better father than William Mulder had been. As hokey as it sounds, “the truth is out there” was perhaps misleading. Maybe that is why the ninth season  is so prone to changing up the motto at the end of the opening credits. The truth, it seems, might be inside.

To be fair, the show had played with this before. The End suggested that the truth was literally inside Gibson Praise. Biogenesis upped the ante by placing that same truth inside Mulder. However, the eighth season made these ideas explicit, with its fixation on the importance of William as a perfectly healthy (perfectly normal) baby boy. The ninth season completely erodes that thematic point, but it seems Chris Carter still likes the idea. He touches upon it in Improbable and returns to it in the closing scene of The Truth.

The teaser to Trust No 1 is a surprisingly powerful piece of television. Sliced together from footage across the show’s nine-season run, it feels almost like a weird yearbook for Mulder and Scully. With Mulder long gone, there is something quite endearing about seeing him again. In hindsight, it is possible to understand the ninth season’s fixation upon its absent centre, even if that fixation feels unhealthy and uncomfortable. The production team’s pursuit of Mulder is smothering the show, but there is no denying the power that he holds.

The decision to use classical music to score the teaser makes it all the more unique. In selecting the music to be used, composer Mark Snow was able to draw upon his own musical history and background:

Those classical pieces that we used, I chose them because they just seemed so right, and as a former classical musician, I had a lot of classical repertoire “spinning” around in my head. That Brandenburg Ct. #2, is a piece that I use to play as a student at Juilliard, as an oboist. So, working on those shows was especially great because I was able to delve into my past life.

Snow’s work on The X-Files (and its sister series) is quite frankly phenomenal. His productivity is impressive, but even little touches like his choice of accompaniment to this teaser jump out as the work of a true professional.

Still, however striking the teaser to Trust No 1 might be, the rest of the episode runs into all sorts of problems. Quite simply, it feels like the teleplay might have used a bit more work and a bit more revision. The dialogue across the forty-five minutes is woeful, even in a basic nuts-and-bolts sort of way. It seems like Carter and Spotnitz have concentrated so profoundly upon theme and tone that they have completely forgotten how people talk to one another.

This a criticism that can be frequently levelled at Carter’s script, and some of that criticism can be written off as a stylistic quirk. Carter writes with his own unique voice, and it is that voice that makes The X-Files so unique. As hokey as his purple prose might be, it provides The X-Files with a mood that is completely different from anything else on television. While Carter’s dialogue might not always work, there is generally an ambition underpinning it that marks the show apart from its competitors or its imitators.

However, even the exposition in the opening acts of Trust No 1 feels clunky and clumsy. When Scully asks about the information that their contact might have, Doggett replies, “These bio-engineered soldiers we’ve all come in contact with. So-called super soldiers. The same ones threatening Mulder’s life, forcing him to live underground.” It is a very awkward info dump for the audience not paying attention at home. He stops just short of beginning with “… as you already know.” This is not how normal people convey information to people who already know it.

Much is made of the silliness of the mythology in the eighth and ninth seasons of the show, with the reliance upon “super soldiers” and “magnetite.” This criticism always feels just a little arbitrary; after all, the idea of human replacements is no more or less pulpy than the idea of a creepy black liquid that can control a person and turn them into an incubator for an alien life-form. While the mythology of the eighth and ninth season might lack the complexity of the mythology first seven seasons, it is no more ridiculous at its core.

What has changed is the way that the characters tend to talk about these pulpier elements of the mythology. The concept of “super soldiers” might be no more ridiculous than the concept of “black oil”, but the use of abstract nouns like “Purity” or “the Project” helped to prevent the more ridiculous elements of the first seven seasons from feeling too ridiculous. The first seven seasons of The X-Files avoided the techno-babble or exposition dumps that define cheesy science-fiction, instead opting for metaphor or ambiguity. The eighth and ninth seasons get too specific.

One of the biggest problems with the whole “super soldier” mythology might be the way that the characters (and the show) deal with it. Addressing earlier attempts at colonisation through coded language – evocative phrases like “the black cancer” or “the vaccine” – lent the show a credability lacking in a lot of contemporary science-fiction. The colonists do not need a name, because the word “colonist” is enough. The audience doesn’t need a bunch of pseudo-science about “the vaccine”, because the word “vaccine” is enough. These are simple words that convey enough.

In contrast, the eighth and ninth seasons get a little bit too specific in their world-building and mythology. “Super soldiers” is a term that comes straight from a comic book, so it feels weird to have the show’s designated skeptic throwing it around so casually – even with the qualification of “so-called.” More than that, giving the “super soldiers” a weakness of “magnetite” feels a little too specific. It imposes hard-and-fast rules upon an alien threat that had seemed mysterious and ominous to this point.

However, the dialogue problems with Trust No 1 extend further than clumsy over-written exposition. Trust No 1 finds Mulder and Scully in communication with one another over email. It seems that the characters write like sixteen-year-old would-be poets, using evocative turns of phrase and striving towards lyricism. This is not necessarily out of character, as Carter had written both Mulder and Scully this way in Redux I. However, it is rather jarring given the different chemistry that the pair share when they stand in the same room together.

Mulder’s email unironically begins with the words “Dearest Dana”, letting the audience know exactly what to expect. “I’ve resisted contacting you for reasons I know you continue to appreciate,” Mulder writes. “But, to be honest, some unexpected dimensions of my new life are eating away at any resolve I have left. I’m lonely, Dana, uncertain of my ability to live like this.” It feels like a lot of pointless flowery language dressing up the central point of the email. Given that Mulder’s bluntness is part of his charm, it feels like a strange way to bring the character back in.

For her part, Scully is similarly reduced to a love-struck teenager while communicating with her lover. “I am physically shaking right now seeing your words,” she responds. “Wishing it were you speaking them to me.” It is written as romantic prose, but it also feels like a passive-aggressive dig at David Duchovny, who would not even make himself available to provide voice-over for the ninth season. Gillian Anderson does the best that she can with the material, but – as with a lot of the ninth season – Anderson is trapped in a thankless position.

During the final sequences of Trust No 1, these dialogue problems build towards critical mass as Scully writes an email that is intended both as exposition and as romantic prose. In what might be the most awkward voice-over in the show’s history, she reflects, “I cannot help believing that you jumped off that train because you knew what I now know – that these super-soldiers, if that’s what they are, can in fact be destroyed. That the key to their destruction lies in the iron compound at that quarry.” It’s touching and informative! At the same time!

Of course, all of that awkward narration is just a desperate attempt to keep Mulder involved in the show somehow. At the climax of Trust No 1, Scully catches a glimpse of a figure who might (or might not) be Mulder running towards a quarry. Because David Duchovny was not interested in returning to the show, the sequence is shot at night and far away. This is a very transparent piece of fan-baiting, as is the closing shot of the teaser which finds Scully kneeling over a wounded body whose face is obscured by shadow. (The audience is meant to think it is Mulder; it is not.)

Trust No 1 confirms what was suggested by Nothing Important Happened Today I. The show is not ready to let go of Mulder, even though David Duchovny is long gone by this point. Talking to The Complete X-Files, director Kim Manners accepted that the ninth season’s focus on Mulder might have been a miscalculation:

The only thing I thought we didn’t do right during seasons eight and nine was that a lot of the shows were about Mulder, and I thought it was a mistake to make a series about a man that wasn’t standing in front of the camera.

It feels like the most important character in the ninth season of The X-Files is never actually on-set. There is something pathetic around the various “near misses” that the ninth season attempts in order to keep Mulder a part of the show without the participation of David Duchovny.

After all, the production team knew that David Duchovny was not coming back. Discussing Duchovny’s departure the week that Trust No 1 aired, Frank Spotnitz explained, “I wouldn’t expect to see him on the show again, but that doesn’t mean Mulder won’t continue.” This seems ill-judged at best and dangerous at worst. Why should the audience care about a show that spends so much time and energy desperately fixated upon a character who could not possibly return?

More to the point, it completely undercuts the power of the eighth season. The eighth season spent so long taking Mulder and Scully to a point where the audience could comfortably leave them. Given that Gillian Anderson had articulated her own desire to spread her wings and move on, it seems like the ninth season should be about allowing Scully the same measure of closure that the eighth season allowed Mulder. The problem with the ninth season’s fixation on Mulder is that it effectively smothers the other characters.

The ninth season’s insistence upon Mulder diminishes the importance of Doggett and Reyes in the context of the ninth season mythology. Nothing Important Happened Today I teased the idea that Doggett’s military history tied into the “super soldier” programme, but that was quickly sidelined so that the story could focus upon the importance of William. Doggett and Reyes frequently feel like passengers in the ninth season mythology, even if The Truth ironically reduces them to chauffeurs. (Even their climactic confrontation with Knowle Rohrer takes place in Mulder’s shadow.)

However, no character suffers quite as much as Scully. The ninth season focuses so keenly upon the absence of David Duchovny that it seems to forget about the presence of Gillian Anderson. The ninth season has one of the strongest actors working in television, a performer who won an Emmy Award for her work in this role. Instead of focusing on the actor and the character who is still a part of the show, the ninth season frequently reduces Scully to a proxy for Mulder or to a proxy for William who is a proxy for Mulder.

Despite the fact that Scully is the character at the heart of Trust No 1, the script is primarily interested in Scully as a walking and breathing connection to Mulder rather than an individual with any real agency. “It’s about Agent Mulder,” Reyes states in her first line of the episode, setting the tone for what follows. When Scully asks the Shadow Man about the sinister plot at work, the Shadow Man is dismissive of Scully. “I’d be happy to tell Agent Mulder,” he tells her. When Scully asks why he has contacted her, the Shadow Man replies, “Because you can reach Mulder.”

There is something quite disheartening about all this. For all the great work the production team have done with Scully, Trust No 1 sets the show back to the early second season. As with Sleepless or Duane Barry, Scully is really just a proxy through which the conspiracy might strike at Mulder. While the Cigarette-Smoking Man suggested that Mulder was becoming a player in One Breath, the implication of Trust No 1 is that Scully is ultimately little more than a pawn.

“Mulder needs to know what I know or he may have no future,” the Shadow Man insists. Trust No 1 suggests he may not have Mulder’s best interests at heart. As he menaces Scully at the episode’s climax, he threatens, “Mulder must die. Mulder or your son.” But not Scully. Never Scully. It feels disheartening that The X-Files is building its ninth season mythology around two male characters – one of whom is only a baby and one of whom has left the show – while only interested in its primary female character as a bridge between them.

It is ill-judged and unfortunate, surprisingly tone-deaf. After all the hard work that the show did to redeem the fridging of Scully during the second season, it feels weird that the ninth season so readily and so eagerly reduces her to a plot point with no agency. Indeed, Scully is not even afforded the luxury of saving her own life at the climax of Trust No 1. Despite the fact that David Duchovny does not actually appear in the episode, Mulder is still credited without outwitting and defeating the “super soldier”, in what might be the show’s most ridiculous climax ever.

To be fair, the only reason that the Shadow Man comes close to working is because the character is played by veteran performer Terry O’Quinn. Frank Spotnitz explained that he was just glad to have another opportunity to work with O’Quinn:

We couldn’t resist! He’s just one of our favourite actors. He can do no wrong in our eyes. We’d used him in Season Two’s Aubrey and we used him in Millennium and The X-Files movie and in Harsh Realm. We missed him and we wanted a chance to use him and we did it despite the fact that many, many people would recognize him, especially from The X-Files movie.

The Shadow Man might just be O’Quinn most shallow and two-dimensional role at Ten Thirteen. Nevertheless, there is a rather strange poignancy to those shots of the Shadow Man observing the world through those night-vision monitors and filtering all of that information into a portrait of a life.

Trust No 1 continues the ninth season’s theme of mediated reality, the idea that reality is inherently unreal and processed through lenses and cameras. The ominous voyeuristic night vision shots of Scully waiting on platform might not reference television in the same way as the teaser to Lord of the Flies or the plot of Sunshine Days, but they do suggest that the world of The X-Files is viewed through the lens of a camera like the trick cinematography in the teaser to 4-D or the constant changes to the words at the end of the credits sequence.

The Orwellian themes of the episode firmly cement Trust No 1 as a piece of post-9/11 pop culture, but the ninth season’s fixation on reality as something filtered through a camera lens is itself a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist. Unlike other historic events like the attack on Pearl Harbour or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Centre were documented as they happened by official media and amateur film-makers. For most Americans, the reality of 9/11 was ultimately filtered through a television screen.

As Lee Rodney notes in Real Time, Catastrophe, Spectacle, the filtering of the raw footage of the 9/11 attacks through news media and online streaming lent the atrocity a feeling of disconnect and unreality:

If the Titanic was misrecognized in its mediated portrayal, a similar complication is found in the reception of 9/11 as a live televised event, as it could not immediately be disentangled from the fictional images of disaster movies by which it had been preceded. The incessant repetition of the crash scene and the gray haze of ‘ground zero’ ensured that the spectacle remained bloodless. Captured on video by vigilantes and web-cams all over Manhattan (by cameras ‘manned’ and ‘unmanned’ alike) the telegenic spectacle seemed crafted for real-time media.

There are certainly elements of that to Trust No 1, with the Shadow man intimately familiar with Dana Scully through his television monitor; despite the fact that they haven’t actually met.

Indeed, there are points at which the Shadow Man feels like a crazed television fan. “I know your blood type, your resting heart rate, your childhood fear of clowns,” he boasts. “I know the name of your college boyfriend, your true hair colour, your ATM pin number, favourite charities, pet peeves. I know you spend too much time alone. And I know… that on one lonely night you invited Mulder to your bed.” This is quite remarkable, given that he has never had any interactions with her.

However, several parts of his boast stand out. Most obviously, Scully is a natural redhead – flashbacks in episodes like One Breath or Christmas Carol confirm as much. It is possible that she dyes her hair a different shade of red, but “your true hair colour is a slightly different shade of your current hair colour!” is hardly the most earth-shattering revelation. It seems quite likely that the Shadow Man is talking about Gillian Anderson, a natural blonde who dyed her hair red for the role.

Similarly, Scully’s “childhood fear of clowns” has never been mentioned before either. It is entirely possible that this is meant to be a revelation to the audience akin to Scully’s story about discovering the origin of evil in Orison, but it could also be a reference to Gillian Anderson’s own history as a “class clown” in high school. That said, David Duchovny has admitted in interviews that he is “not a big fan of the clown.” It really seems like the Shadow Man might not really know that much about Scully.

In fact, his reference to that “one lonely night” makes him sound like an obsessive fan of The X-Files, insisting that all things must be the only time that Mulder and Scully actually had sex because that was the only time that the show even acknowledged the possibility of them having sex. It is a very fact-based argument anchored in the finer details of what has actually been shown on the show, rather than an in-depth understanding of Mulder and Scully as characters. (After all, their letters make it clear that it was more than “one lonely night” that brought them together.)

That said, what is most striking about Trust No 1 is the way that the episode prefigures a lot of the revelations about surveillance in the post-9/11 era. The episode is filtered through indexed and referenced photographs, computer screens, security cameras, night vision. There is a sense that everybody is always being watched and observed, that the lives are being constantly filtered through monitors and screens. Given subsequent revelations about the nature of the United State’s government’s surveillance on its own citizens, Trust No 1 is striking.

“You’ve been listening to us?” Scully demands of the Shadow Man. He replies, “It’s all I could do after you closed the shades, Agent Scully.” Scully asks if he has ever heard of the Constitution. The Shadow Man immediately offers the mandatory post-9/11 response. “Yes. It’s what allows foreign terrorists to live here and enjoy the American dream, until time comes to destroy it.” Scully is horrified by all of this. “Who authorizes you?” she demands. “I mean, what gives you the right? Who are you?” The Shadow Man answers, “I’m the future, Agent Scully.”

Given revelations about the sheer power and influence of the post-9/11 security state, it seems like the Shadow Man was correct. In fact, the scenes set in the Shadow Man’s office largely prefigure the depiction of various intelligence services in twenty-first century media. Although it may have seemed intrusive or uncomfortable in January 2002, it seems quite likely that contemporary depictions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation would not be too far removed from the office of the Shadow Man. After all, 24 had already launched on Fox, even if it had yet to fully break out.

Trust No 1 feels surprisingly brave for a show airing only four months after the events of 9/11. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, it seemed like a wave of patriotism stifled dissent and criticism. It is good to see that The x-Files has not lost its teeth, even if there is a larger debate to be had over whether audiences were particularly interested in those kinds of stories at this particular time. While the “super soldier” mythology was arguably awkwardly positioned for post-9/11 realities, Trust No 1 does hint at a post-9/11 X-Files.

Of course, a lot of this is simply down to carrying over themes and ideas from earlier in the show’s run. The X-Files has always been anxious about surveillance culture, particularly in episodes like E.B.E. or Gethsemane. After all, the surveillance state was not invented on September 12th. In Ancient Rome, the philosopher Cicero complained that he could not trust letter-bearers with his secrets. “How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.”

Even within the United States, the culture of surveillance dates back to at least the nineteenth century. The occupation of the Philippines lead to the development of a security apparatus that would become invaluable to those hoping to police the homeland during the First World War. It frequently seems like only the technology itself has changed, as tools like CCTV and the internet serve to make surveillance and observation easier than ever. In a culture where everything is electronic, interception and filtering only becomes easier.

A significant portion of the security measures introduced after 9/11 had originally been proposed during the nineties as a response to tragedies like Waco or Oklahoma. The attacks upon the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre did not summon the surveillance state into being, they merely allowed it to fortify its position. Trust No 1 is very much consistent with the themes of the show, but it feels all the more powerful for filtering those anxieties through twenty-first century technology and resonating with post-9/11 realities.

Trust No 1 is very much a paradox. On the one hand, the plotting and dialogue suggest that The X-Files is very much trapped in the past and unable to escape from the gravity exerted by Mulder into the twenty-first century. At the same time, the episode’s themes demonstrate that the core themes and ideas of The X-Files resonate as much as they ever did. Even if it seems like the audience might not be comfortable with them at this particular moment. Trust No 1 is not a good episode, but it is a timely one.

It only seems to get more timely.

Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: 9/11, chris carter, frank spotnitz, mulder, surveillance state, terry o'quinn, the x-files, trust no 1, war on terror, x-files |