With summer quickly approaching, pretty much every show worth watching is coming to an end. That makes the summer the perfect time to binge watch what you missed along with some old classics. That’s where the Multiversity Summer TV Binge comes from. One of my personal favorite shows ever is The X-Files, and it is my mission in life to make everyone ever watch it. This summer, I’ll be looking back at season one. This week we look at “Eve,” a personal early favorite of mine in which science goes very wrong.
1. The Premise
“Eve” finds Mulder and Scully investigating two extremely similar murders on opposite sides of the country. Two men, fathers of girls the same age, both die the exact same way. Each man was killed by hypovolemia. They lost 75% of their blood and their hearts were stopped by foxglove. These deaths cause Mulder to become interested in the case because it reminds him of “alien” cow mutilations and things get more interesting when it’s revealed that the daughters of these men look exactly the same as if they are twins separated by birth.
2. Creepy Kids Are Always Great
Creepy kids are the scariest thing in my opinion. Kids are already weird so when you exaggerate all that innocence, I think the horror level spikes and “Eve” does that in a really great way. These two girls are bad from the get go and you kind of expect that going into things but they play it all so innocently early on and it’s easy to fall into that. When the girls are abducted by one of the other Eves, you don’t ever truly doubt their safety because these two girls play the role so well. They are perfect creepy kids and this episode keeps them in the forefront instead of making them background characters. Usually when Mulder and Scully take a backseat to the action in front of them, the episode suffers but with “Eve” the story is plotted so well and the cast used so well that this doesn’t become an issue.
3. Science Gone Horribly Wrong
The thing about “Eve” is that it has nothing to do with aliens and it actually explains how this entire situation came about. In many episodes of The X-Files, there is no explanation given about someone’s powers or how that relates to the rest of the world. With “Eve” we get all that and it makes the episode feel much more cohesive than some of the episodes we’ve seen already. “Eve” features an appearance by Deep Throat who tells Mulder about the Litchfield experiments. In the 50’s the Soviet Union wanted to build super soldiers so they started messing around with eugenics. Because the U.S. was in the midst of the Cold War, they began to do the same thing and they created boys, the Adams and girls, the Eves. The X-Files has always been a show about aliens but it was also a show about conspiracy theories and this episode is so good because it references some actual science. Genetic testing has always been a thing. Scientists have already proven that they can clone animals pin point exactly where genetic disorders are in the human genome. In “Eve,” all this has gone horribly wrong and the Eves have shown that they are not mentally stable. By 20 they all show homicidal tendencies but these two Eves have shown that even sooner and that’s what makes them so dangerous right now. “Eve” is such a strong episode because it’s so tightly plotted and suspenseful and this very clear explanation of how this whole thing has come together.
4. The One Eve Who Tried
So over the last few weeks I’ve been re-watching Frasier and I could not think of where else I had seen Harriet Harris (she played Bebe Glazer) . I had seen her in this episode and got a reminder of how good she is here. These kids of episodes live and die by their guest stars. They aren’t usually big stars but the actors have to be very good and Harris is fantastic in multiple roles. She plays a maniacal Eve and a sympathetic Eve in ways that make them very different characters. One of the best twists in this story is the kidnapping of the girls by another Eve who wants to help fix them. Her subsequent death by the hands of the girls is very shocking and does a fantastic job at hitting home how messed up these girls and women are.
Continued below5. Adventures in Babysitting
One of the cutest and wildest things in this episode is Mulder and Scully’s interactions with the two young Eves. Their interactions for most of the episode are a little clueless until the later part of the episode but it’s also kind of sweet. It’s a very subtle way of building their relationship and their individual characters. It also humanizes them a bit more as well as we’ve really not seen them in this kind of setting. The last part of this episode, wherein the two young Eves try to kill our beloved agents ends up being a pulse pounding chase that ultimately leads to a sad ending for both of these girls. Nothing actually gets done to help them as they end up in the same kind of prison as the other Eves. It’s a sad ending befitting The X-Files and ultimately feels like the right one.
What do you think of this episode? Let me know in the comments below!
