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 “The Host,” the first monster of the week episode for this season and a classic one at that. There will be spoilers within this.
1. The Premise
“The Host” is a monster of the week episode but like last season’s “Squeeze” it sets a high standard for these kinds of episodes. Mulder is called on a murder case in New Jersey (YEAH NEW JERSEY). On a Russian ship in the Atlantic, a worker on board is killed mysteriously as he tries to fix the ship’s toilets. His body washes up in Newark, NJ (Mulder was so close to me) and initially Mulder sees this as another punishment case. He quickly discovers that this is far more involved that he first believed. “The Host” is a creature feature in essence. It’s about a fluke worm-like monster that lives in the sewer system. Mulder spends the episode trying to chase it to stop other people from being hurt and to stop it from reproducing. It’s a very creepy episode with an even creepier creature at the center of it. The X-Files has a lot of monster of the week episodes but when you really look at it, a lot of them don’t involve actual creatures. They tend to involve people who can do things or actual unexplained phenomena so this is a little rare and that’s probably part of why it feels so special.
2. Scully Is Helping
The first two episodes of this season, well, most of this first part of this season, is very light on Scully. This partially due to the change in their partnership (temporary, obviously) but also because Gillian Anderson was actually pregnant at this time. They obviously couldn’t write this in at this point so that’s why she’s not around so much. However, the parts that she is included in are written pretty well. I really consider this season the true start to The X-Files because the relationship between the two has shifted into what it will become legendary for. Scully volunteers to work on the autopsy and she helps Mulder all that she can. She’s supportive of him in this episode but initially is skeptical of what he thinks is going on here. She also helps in finding out some valuable information at the end of the episode because for her, the science matters most and that’s what she’s going to find out. Scully is present in a way that she wasn’t in the first season and this is really the Scully we love being formed.
3. Mulder Keeps Fighting Back
One of the more interesting things to come out of the first season of this show is the dissolution of the X-Files division itself. Mulder versus Skinner is a great idea that gets rolling here. Their relationship is very different from Skinner and Scully’s. I mean, people don’t typically “ship” Mulder with Skinner because it is a very antagonistic relationship at times. They push each other a lot and will physically come to blows more than once. However, there’s this weird level of respect and care there and Skinner is actually not an entirely bad guy. There’s a vulnerable side to him and brave side that’s starting to come out and yet again, this season will be pretty important in building his character.
4. Mr. X
In the wake of Deep Throat getting killed, Mulder has basically been flying blind when it comes to the X-Files themselves and continuing his investigation after all he’s seen. While he’s looking into “Flukeman” he gets two calls from someone unidentified who tells him that he has an ally in the F.B.I. and that his work on the X-Files is important. This is a character who will play into things that are going to go down in this season very soon so I’ll hold off on talking about him more for now. I will say this, yes, he’s basically a new Deep Throat but he’s very different and his relationship with Mulder is full of much more conflict. I’m really hoping to pick up something new as I watch this again.
5. We Make Monsters
At the end of the episode, when Mulder believes the monster is long dead, Scully approaches him again to kind of wrap things up. Scully reveals to him that this monster isn’t a monster, it’s a man. She puts together that the Flukeman came off a Russian freighter and that he can spontaneously regenerate like a worm. In her findings, she pieces together that the freighter was hauling waste from Chernobyl and that Flukeman was a byproduct of what happened there. At the time this episode came out, this was the end of it. Humanity basically caused this monster to take shape. In the comics that followed (which were actually pretty great), we’re told in detail that this is exactly what happened. Flukeman was a regular guy and was trapped in a sewage tanker and he basically mixed with that sewage, radiation and worms and became what we see in this episode. He makes a reappearance in the comics and he’s still extremely unsettling.
