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 “Space,” an early, forgettable case of the week episode.
1. The Premise
“Space” begins in 1977 with the discovery of Mars. We’re shown news reports about it with emphasis on some kind of face that was found on the planet. We’re then introduced to Marcus Belt, one of the astronauts a part of this mission. He’s dealing with flashbacks of what happened to this day. We then fast forward to Mulder and Scully being approached by Michelle, a woman who works as a communications director for NASA in their core command center. She approaches them because two weeks prior, a launch was scrapped 3 seconds before it was set to go. This leads the agents to NASA and once there they realize that something is indeed going on but it isn’t as cut and dry as it could be. “Space” is kind of a shame because the idea behind it really should work well for The X-Files but ultimately the plot falls apart a bit and doesn’t quite reach it’s potential.
2. Space Ghost
The big bad of this episode is a space ghost that has possessed Marcus but that isn’t really apparent until too late in the episode. The X-Files has had some questionable villains throughout but this one was a real head scratcher because it’s too big. Think about it. This is a show that’s focused on the unexplained, particularly aliens and in the 9th episode of the show, you give us a space ghost from Mars and do nothing with that. This space ghost has taken over a man with high clearance in NASA and has forced him to sabotage other missions but this is treated like a small thing and given what happens later in the series, this makes absolutely no sense. It’s a ghost force of some kind that wants humans to stay away from space and it’s just a simple monster of the week that never gets addressed again. *shrug emoji* I guess.
3. Overly Detailed Dialogue
One of the things a show like The X-Files is going to do is get into really technical things no matter how fake the actual subject is. That’s fine and I think that any show like this should strive to sound like it know what it’s doing but this episode gets very bogged down in too long scenes at Mission Control. Mission Control in a time of crisis on a TV show should not be boring but somehow “Space” manages to make it boring. The writing in this episode doesn’t pack the same kind of punch that some of the better weekly cases do and it completely loses its sense of humor.
4. Mulder and Scully, Are You There?
One of the worst things about “Space” is how it entirely wastes Mulder and Scully. The first 8 episodes of this series spent a lot of time focusing on this dynamic and all of that falls to the wayside in this episode. It focuses a lot on Michelle, Marcus and the mission but this entire thing could happen without Mulder and Scully there. Scully especially feels like she’s just there to observe and there were times that I forgot she was there. As the unofficial leader of the I <3 Gillian Anderson fan club, you’d have a hard time accomplishing this but somehow, “Space” does that.
5. Loose Ends
“Space” ends on a true downer that attempts to make a hero out of Marcus as he fights the space ghost and the space ghost forces him to commit suicide. Marcus is not remembered fondly as a medical examination shows that he was suffering from dementia. Only Mulder, who idolized him, knows how serious his situation was. It’s a really tragic note to leave things on and Mulder, while not changed by this, sort of sees a different side of the things he’s been investigating for so many years. One of the things worth talking about here at the end is that Mulder frames NASA in the grand scheme of his work on the X-Files. He talks about how there are some people in certain circles who don’t approve of NASA because they believe it’s a front for the government. He also mentions that there are other circles that see NASA as a beacon of hope in the world. This got me thinking about the rest of the series because after this episode, NASA is dropped from the mythology before it could even become a part of this. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here but I wonder why this happened. NASA has direct access to some of the biggest science in the world, particularly in the fields that Mulder would be interested in, yet they don’t have any impact on what comes next. I wonder if “Space” had something to do with this.
