The X-Files Season 9, Episode 6: Trust No 1

I don't know who to believe any more. I think that was probably the point, no?

This was not a perfect episode, and I'm beginning to sense with the super soldiers plot, like the previous alien plots, that there are quite a few holes and parts the writers just didn't really think through beforehand. They're flying blind, and it wouldn't even surprise me if, at this point, they still didn't know how the story was going to end.

But 'Trust No 1' did at least advance that story. There's a way for super soldiers to be destroyed, which I assumed would eventually come up, but I'm glad it did early. It's not going to make things easier for Scully and Doggett and Reyes, but at least now we know. There's now a definite end to all of this that we can see. It's a lot like finding out about the Horcruxes in Harry Potter. We knew it was possible to defeat Voldemort, but it's not like it's going to be easy getting there.

The whole time we were teased with the idea that Mulder might appear, but when someone as big and important in Hollywood as David Duchovny is going to be in an episode, it's kind of a hard thing to hide. Like, his name might show up somewhere in the credits or the guest credits and spoil the surprise. I don't know if the person they saw was even supposed to be Mulder at all, or if Mulder was on the train.

I don't even know, for that matter, if Mulder was on the other end of the emails Scully was sending. I don't doubt that his email address really would be trust_no1@mail.com, but it's pretty easy to fake an email address and even substitute in a similar enough Reply-to header that Scully wouldn't necessarily notice the switch.

There's something else about that that I'd like to observe, as well. Scully had five messages in her inbox. Three were spam, one was from 'Mulder', and the other was from someone at the FBI. Don't they have regular, secure email at the FBI? Doesn't the FBI and likely every government agency have strict policies about reading your email on an obviously unsecured computer? (Actually, Scully owns a laptop, right? Why is she logging in to a public computer in the first place? Surely she has DSL at home.)

I guess it's the contrivance of having to run into Patti, though it seems that meeting was more or less inevitable. I'm not entirely sure what to even make of that, because we're never explicitly shown in 'Trust No 1' who is on whose side, which I'm pretty sure is the entire point. Trust no one.

Except, I guess, Doggett and Reyes, who really do seem to be on Scully's side here.

At first, I thought the man who led Scully on her ridiculous wild goose chase was trying to fake her death somehow, so that she'd then be free to investigate what she needed to without anyone believing she even still existed, but I think that theory was pretty well shot down once he turned out to be a villain.

Again, trust no one. But why help Scully at all, then? I know it's kind of a Thing in fiction, especially science fiction, for villains to give the heroes just enough information to solve the case, but I think here, it's possible that with the vague goal of killing Mulder or William (so now he's Harry Potter?) they needed Scully in order to draw Mulder out. I at least understand the email monitoring from that perspective. Still a bit shaky on the whole, "drive out to the middle of nowhere, change your clothes, blow up your car, and I'll tell you all the creepy shit I know about you," plot.

We never got any answer about the train operator - why was he so insistent that the train keep going? Shouldn't the normal policy be to stop the train if it hits any obstacle on the tracks?

And as before, I'm still uncomfortable with the apparent 'Chosen One' plot. I think the thing that sucks about parenting stories in science fiction and fantasy is that unless you're really telling a story about the characters' lives, introducing a child means that child is automatically going to be critical to the story, which means the pregnant woman, Scully in this case, is being used only to bring this special child into the world, which really goes against a lot of what we learned about Scully in the first eight seasons.

Yes, she wanted to be a mother, but now she doesn't get to be a mother in the typical sense because she also has to protect William from plot-driven enemies who wish him harm. Especially because we know Mulder is out there somewhere and makes an appearance in the second movie, so he's not going to die. She doesn't get to raise William in the way a normal person would be able to raise a child.

Not that I'd really want to see that either, so I think overall it's just kind of a stupid plot to begin with.

(Other kind of silly aside - this series is still largely composed of standalone episodes that have no bearing on the main plot. If the super-soldiers are that much of a threat, shouldn't they be around basically all the time? What do they do in episodes like 'Daemonicus' and 'Lord of the Flies'?)