The X Files: Pilot

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the airing of the pilot episode of The X Files. Here is what happens.

Young agent Scully (those shoulder pads!) gets called into FBI headquarters where she is told that she is to work with an agent that she knows by his nick name 'Spooky' Mulder. Mulder, despite being considered the best analyst in the violent crime section, appears to his peers to have lost his direction and dug himself into the so-called X Files, that are often dismissed and ridiculed. 

They meet for the first time in the basement office and get to work on a case right away. The ingredients of it will be a few classic themes that will reappear often in the 9 series of the show: alien abduction (or not), time loss, air turbulence, car radio going weird, bright lights and the implant one will come to associate with little green (or rather, grey) men.

The setting is Oregon and the victims are all from the same high school class (class of '99). The fourth of the group has just died when Mulder digs up the case and the two agents fly across country to investigate. There they meet the defiant locals (of course), headed by the sheriff (of course), and immediately make their mark by exhuming a body - or so they think. What they actually find are the remains of what Mulder would like to be an alien and what Scully believes to be an orangutan, but (nearly) all the evidence they gather gets destroyed when the motel they stay in burns to the ground.

One key player in the deaths and possible abductions is Billy Miles, who is in a catatonic state that he only ever wakes up from when time stops and people die. And his father - the sheriff - knew it was his boy that kills or causes the deaths of those kids. In the end, he and Mulder intervene when Billy is in the woods with a would be victim, while Scully is too far behind to see what is actually happening. This will also be happening again and again.

Billy Miles will revisit the show much later for several episodes. One frequent player is also introduced, but wordlessly, the Cigarette Smoking Man, who in the end stores the one piece of hard evidence that Scully managed to bring back from their trip - the implant - in the huge storage room deep inside the pentagon (also, to be revisited again and again).

And so it begins...

7/10  

Gone

Two years ago, Jill was kidnapped from her home and dumped into a hole in the middle of a huge forest near Portland, OR. Law enforcement tried for all of two weeks to find said hole where, according to Jill, several skeletons are buried. They start suspecting that the girl made it all up and have her institutionalized.

Jill now lives with her sister Molly, the only family she has anymore. When she comes home one morning after a night shift at the restaurant she works in Molly is gone and Jill becomes immediately convinced that her kidnapper has come back to finish her off.

When she goes to the police to alert them, the do not believe her yet again and don't move a finger to find Molly, who is a recovering alcoholic and they are convinced she will turn up on her own account. Jill sets out to find her and their kidnapper by herself.

At the same time, she is being hunted because she carries a gun, and having been a mental patient she lost the right to do so (even in gun crazy Merica), and has threatened someone with it to gather information. So the film is the police hunting Jill hunting the kidnapper and recovering her sister.

Actually quite entertaining.

6/10

The Ward

Kristen is put into a mental facility after she burned down a farm house and can't quite remember doing it or why she did it.

She shares the ward with a handful of other young women who are different kinds of crazy. Collectively they are being haunted by one Alice Hudson, who appears to be a ghost or apparition. Alice kills off the girls one by one while the remaining few try to get away from the hospital.

In the end, Kirsten slays the ghost (with an axe, you know....like you do) only to learn that she was all the inmates all along. She came in as Alice and to deal with a childhood trauma she developed multiple personalities.

The whole thing was kind of meh! and the conclusion is stupid if you want my opinion.

3/10