From: ask-me-in-public-if-you-want-my-address@address.invalid   
      
   Around 10pm I asked my lady if she felt like watching an episode.   
      
   - Your series?  How is it called?   
   - “The X-Files”.   
   - Oh, yes.  In my head I call it “Scully”.   
   - Like the co-protagonist.   
   - To me she is the protagonist.   
      
   She felt that we look at the world mostly through Scully's eyes, who is   
   presented as a more neutral sort of character.  And she remarked that,   
   in s01e01 Pilot, Scully is introduced before Mulder.   
      
   I was not completely convinced:   
      
   - Do you identify more with Scully?   
   - Of course!  Don't you?   
      
   Thinking about it yes, now I think I do: Scully always has the more   
   reasonable point of view for exploring the unknown.  But as a young   
   viewer I certainly sympathised with Mulder.   
      
   - That explains why you hate the State so much.  You grew up in Italy,   
   and watched this.   
      
   My Anarchist or Libertarian tendencies are more recent; but I have to   
   concede that even with a delay of decades, this show might have had some   
   influence on my way of thinking.   
   Thanks for gently pulling me closer to the truth, Agent Mulder.   
      
      
   Tonight once more we lit candles, prepared tea and watched another   
   episode: s01e06 Shadows.   
      
   The mystery began with a sort of unexplained energy that keeps corpses   
   warm for a long time; “static electricity”, they say.  Some agents   
   (CIA?) ask for Mulder and Scully's help investigating, but then refuse   
   to openly collaborate with them.   
      
   A young woman, distraught, is packing up her things into a box, leaving   
   her job as a secretary.  Her boss has recently died in a dramatic way.   
   Strange things happen around her: objects move, a coffee mug gets   
   spilled by an invisible force on the desk of somebody who is being mean   
   to this woman.   
      
   Mulder and Scully soon learn about her, and we get to know why the CIA   
   is involved.  We learn that the enterprise produced weapons: the   
   deceased co-owner was trying to keep the business and his employees   
   afloat even by very questionable means, selling components to unknowns   
   instead of the Pentagon.  When learning that these devices were used in   
   a terrorist attack the owner was overcome by guilt, and committed   
   suicide.   
   His young secretary was close to him, and they understood each other;   
   she is also in pain.   
      
   The surviving co-owner, on the other hand, in order not to damage the   
   business he now completely controls, wants to keep everything quiet   
   with threats and worse.   
   The mysterious force saves the young woman multiple times, and in the   
   end will even directly reveal evidence to the agents.   
      
      
   My lovely wife understood the mystery in advance: the dead man's ghost   
   is protecting the secretary.  Instead I was imagining (since I only saw   
   the episode once thirty years ago this was for all practical purposes my   
   first view as well) that the secretary herself had a supernatural   
   ability she could not control.   
   My wife made another intelligent prediction that turned out correct: the   
   mystery would not be completely revealed at the end, and would be left   
   looming.   
   Very good intuition from her, and a very intelligent idea from the   
   writers.   
      
      
   Here we have once more the usual clash between two opposite worldviews,   
   Mulder the believer and Scully the skeptic.  In this episode in   
   particular, however, Mulder gets more justified in his beliefs: he gets   
   to witness, with his own eyes, the mysterious force grabbing a thug by   
   the neck in mid-air.  Scully is skeptic, but Scully did not witness   
   this.   
      
   All of this is good.  A few scientific inaccuracies:   
      
   * Static electricity does not work as depicted in the episode: after a   
     static charge accumulates it is very easy to discharge it in a small   
     fraction of a second.  A little sparkle, an usually mild shock, and   
     the charge has already dropped to zero.  No heat, no light, no work   
     ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics) ).   
      
   * A naïveté very typical of the 1990s is the apparently infinite   
     resolution that can be extracted from photographs and video   
     recordings, in some circumstances.  By choosing some vaguely-named   
     command like "Enhance 10" one can magnify and show fine details,   
     perfectly in focus, with no blur; I am speaking of the window scene.   
     On the other hand the ATM camera recording was treated realistically,   
     with the limits of the recording fitting the plot: the blur that was   
     captured can not be enhanced: it will remain just a blur.   
      
   I could stop here if not for a very strong objection in my mind I really   
   have to express: it is about the moral difference between discovering   
   that the killing machine one makes has been used against its intended   
   target, or against a different one.   
   In a shot near the beginning, in the framed picture, we see the recently   
   deceased boss with somebody applauding: was he Bill Clinton, then US   
   President?   
      
   I cannot tell for sure, but for the purposes of this review and my   
   opinion yes, it *was* Bill Clinton.  Hypocrites.   
      
   This point is, as far as I can tell, not at all addressed in the   
   episode.   
      
   --   
   Beard   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)