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, <em>The X-Files</em> 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 “Fearful Symmetry,” one of my least favorite episodes of the entire series. Content warning, I’ll be touching upon animal abuse as that’s a big part of the episode. Let’s begrudgingly jump into this.
1. The Premise
In Idaho, two janitors are working the late night shift and suddenly some kind of invisible force comes through and destroys the windows. It’s like a storm is coming through and it kills a road worker. In the morning, an elephant just appears in front of a truck and it collapses and dies. Mulder and Scully are called in because it’s a strange case but also the road worker was technically a federal worker so they have to investigate. Their case begins with a death and goes on to become about a zoo that’s experiencing strange phenomena with its animals unable to reproduce oh and they also just vanish and reappear out of nowhere. There’s also a super smart gorilla involved. And an animal rights group. And aliens. It’s a lot.
2. A Struggling Zoo
Fairfield, Idaho is known for two things – their zoo and UFO sightings (we’ll get to that). The zoo though is struggling and now with its elephant dying, it will start to struggle more. At the center of this zoo are the two handlers, Willa Ambrose and Ed Meechum and the leader of the local animal rights group Kyle Lang. Willa and Ed are at odds because Willa is more progressive and feels that animals can be kept in zoos but they need space and kindness so they can thrive. Ed Meechum is outright abusive and has no love for the animals. Kyle Lang however believes zoos are horrible and his group has outright freed animals in the past. All three are at odds with each other and through the three of them we are basically treated to an hour long PSA about animal rights, which is fine but the plot gets totally lost and confused because this is what the episode becomes. These three personalities all represent different stances in the whole debate about keeping animals in captivity and of the three, Willa is the most interesting until the end when she just murders Kyle. Meechum also ends up being a bit softer by the end but he’s purely motivated by power structures and seems to just do whatever Willa tells him to do. It’s a bizarre situation with this guy and he never quite makes sense in his motivations.
3. Sophie The Gorilla
After a while investigating all of this, Mulder decides he needs to talk to Sophie. Who’s Sophie? A very intelligent gorilla that has advance sign language skills. Sophie and Willa go way back but Sophie has been behaving weird and doesn’t want to go anywhere near light. The episode then begins to shift about being about Sophie which isn’t a terrible idea but it becomes terrible when she ultimately dies in the end. Honestly “Fearful Symmetry” is one of the most depressing episodes of this show but not in a good X-Files sense. It’s depressing in the sense that you’ll immediately want to watching something light and fluffy. Sophie was a great way to streamline things but it just went south so fast and it leaves you with the worst feeling.
4. Apparently This Time, It Really Was Aliens
Mulder gets an idea about what’s happening here that’s entirely a Mulder idea but first he needs to put some pieces together. With Scully and Willa, they find out that the animals in this zoo have never reproduced but the elephant and the tiger were both pregnant when they died. He deduces that Sophie is pregnant too and after talking with The Lone Gunmen, he finds out that this town is also famous for UFO sightings. Mulder’s theory then becomes that aliens are impregnating the animals and taking them away to build what he says is their Noah’s Arc. His idea is that they aren’t trying to necessarily kill the animals but they are taking the babies and conserving them. It’s a really wild theory that’s backed up at the end when he sees Sophie taken. It honestly comes out of nowhere and kind of derails this whole episode because all of a sudden this is about aliens and it really doesn’t work at all.
5. And Then It’s Over
Mercifully this episode comes to an but it ends up accomplishing absolutely nothing. No animals are saved, Willa and Ed presumably end up in jail and the zoo doesn’t get saved. No piece of media is apolitical. Even saying you won’t be political is a political statement. The X-Files taking a chance to talk about animal abuse is actually great but it does that in a way that takes away from the actual plot. Nothing actually happens here that amounts to anything meaningful. No one learns anything, no one saves anything. To an extent, that works but when you’re telling a one hour story, you’ve got to do something to actually end it. There should be some kind of feeling of resolution, instead it just feels like they ran out of time thanks to the ridiculous alien abduction angle they introduce halfway through. This is my favorite show but when it’s bad, it’s this.
