With all our favorite shows taking their usual break in the summer months, this opens up an opportunity to watch some of our old favorites. That’s where the Multiversity Summer Binge comes in. Last year, I took a look at the entire first season of my favorite show ever, The X-Files and this summer, I’m back with a vengeance covering season two. The first season of this show was more of a prelude. It teased all the things that were to come and spent a lot of time doing the ground work. In the second season, the show really kicks into gear. Truth be told, of the 11 seasons, this is easily top three for me. I’m really excited to be writing about these episodes, particularly the middle of the season. This week, I’m looking at “Aubrey,” another “monster of the week” case that starts off really strong and introduces a good idea but falls apart a little bit at the end.
1. The Premise
“Aubrey” is a “monster of the week” case so it doesn’t connect to any of the bigger storylines on the show. “Aubrey” begins in Missouri and it introduces us to Detective BJ Morrow and Lieutenant Brian Tillman, co workers and lovers. BJ has just revealed to Tillman that she’s pregnant with his child. He gives her an address to a place for the two of them to talk and while waiting for him, she has a vision that ends up taking her to a field where she digs up the body of a long dead and missing F.B.I. agent. Once the remains are identified as Special Agent Sam Chaney, Mulder and Scully take the case. “Aubrey” is an episode that starts off as a pretty straight forward murder mystery but quickly turns into something else and that something else is interesting up until the very end.
2. Unearthing A Cold Case
One of the things I really like about this episode is that it starts off as a cold case that directly impacts the F.B.I. Chaney and his partner were really into criminal profiling. If you’ve watched the Netflix show Mindhunters then you have a basic understanding of what this is and how groundbreaking the work was at the time. Using psychology to understand murders and to understand serial killers was a big deal and I like how this duo is positioned in comparison to Mulder and his interest in the paranormal. This duo disappeared in this area and when Mulder and Scully arrive, they start digging into this. They start looking into the case that they were working on with B.J. and she lets them know about her relationship with Tillman. Mulder and Scully begin to get close to B.J. and worry about her but soon they start to get an idea of what’s going on here and it’s not good.
3. Harry Cokely
Harry Cokely is soon revealed to be the man that B.J. saw in her visions. Cokely was arrested in 1945 for raping a woman named Linda Thibedeaux. He carved the word sister into her chest which ties back to the cases that Mulder and Scully were looking at. Now another murder has occurred and he’s their first suspect. However, B.J. awakens with with the same thing carved into her chest and that leads them to go back to Linda and talk to her more about what happened to her. This is where the episode gets kind of weird because keeping track of what’s happening gets a little confusing. Harry Cokely in his younger days is absolutely terrifying but in his older self is scary for other reasons. What’s really interesting here is that after the conversation with Linda, Mulder and Scully realize that not only is B.J. the one responsible for what’s happening now, and she’s also the daughter of Linda’s child that was conceived when she was assaulted by Cokely, thus making her Harry Cokely’s graddaughter. The conclusion that Mulder comes to after all this is where the episode kind of gets messy for me.
4. Memories In The Genes
After Mulder puts all this together, he comes up with the theory that B.J. is working off of genetic memories. His theory is that her behavior isn’t learned but inherited and she is doing what she’s doing because the memories from Harry Cokely have been passed down to her, skipping a generation with her father. Mulder thinks that she’s not even truly aware of what she’s doing in the moment and this leads to a tense showdown when B.J goes after Linda. She stops when she sees her scars and she goes after Harry too. The whole thing ends with B.J. calming down and being arrested for what she’s done. The idea that memories were passed down is a really interesting concept for the show to get into but it does mess up what was done with B.J. as a character. I’ll get into this more in the final point but I do want to point how great the last act of this episode plays out. It’s very tense and feels like a cop show which is not a bad thing for this show sometimes. It can sometimes be easy to forget that Mulder and Scully are trained F.B.I. agents and certain skills come with that.
5. B.J. The Fallen
In the end, B.J. goes to jail and remembers all that happened to her. Scully, in her notes, talks about how she chose to keep the baby and got too far along to abort legally. B.J. is in jail and has tried to harm herself and her unborn son multiple times and Tillman has already petitioned to adopt the child formally and that’s all we ever hear of B.J. after this. The X-Files in its run will have lots of great guest stars and one off characters. For most of this episode, B.J. is that but she quickly loses all her character development when it’s revealed what’s actually going on. The state she gets left in is horrific and it really feels a little out of left field. The tragic ending isn’t a bad ending but if we hadn’t spent time actually getting to know B.J., it would have felt a little more right. Instead, it just feels kind of cruel and that’s where it falls flat for me.
