From: ask-me-in-public-if-you-want-my-address@address.invalid   
      
   Yesterday night my wife and I watched s01e04 Conduit.   
      
   It was what one would imagine to be a typical episode: about UFOs and   
   alien abductions, with a story sounding implausible at the beginning   
   told by apparently unreliable people who are the only witnesses: of   
   course Scully starts out sceptical, and eventually softens.  This time   
   Scully also develops a degree of understanding and human sympathy for   
   Mulder who this time is personally distraught by the thought of his   
   sister, for whose mysterious disappearance many years before in his   
   presence he somehow feels responsible.   
      
   We discover that alien abductions are real, that aliens make people able   
   to convey secret information without them being able to tell how; and   
   not much more.   
   More interestingly we discover that real witnesses are resentful for not   
   being believed, and prefer not to speak: nobody likes being made fun of.   
   This episode was a study of character, mostly on Mulder, maybe -- but   
   again, my memory is decades old -- not entirely consistent with the   
   following of the series.  Here Mulder keeps displaying his encyclopedic   
   knowledge of paranormal history and competency in his field but is not   
   always in control of himself.  In a scene at the end, he is seen alone   
   in a church, in a sort of dignified despair.   
      
      
   The psychological development of the pain of not being believed was a   
   interesting angle -- even if, I am noticing now as I write, already   
   touched in s01e02 Deep Throat with test pilot Budahas's wife.   
      
   Some naïveté on the technical or scientific side: the papers full of   
   handwritten zeroes and ones decoded from television signal noise were   
   not credible: the bandwidth must have been very low: one bit every how   
   many seconds?   
   And the transmission could be apparently interrupted.   
   And nobody is able to look at a sequence of binary digits and recognise   
   a pattern.   
      
   The way Mulder can always recount historical events by memory, without   
   research, is a storytelling device maybe necessary for the economy of   
   exposition, but strains our suspension of disbelief.   
      
      
   My lovely wife, who did not know about Samantha Mulder, enjoyed this   
   episode more than I did; I guess s01e04 does not lend itself very well   
   to multiple viewings.   
      
   For me this episode definitely lacks some fun moment.  As a standalone   
   film a sustained serious tone would work, and the drama could in fact be   
   made even darker; that was attempted in Millennium, whose first episodes   
   I remember very fondly as a sort of X-Files in a world of pain and   
   despair.  But Millennium did not last and The X-Files would not have   
   lasted so long with only the dark angle.  We love the X-Files as a fun   
   series, able to laugh at itself.   
      
   --   
   Beard   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)