X-Treme Possibilities

by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, Keith Topping

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

'Open your mind to extreme possibilities' Scully's desire to be recognised as 'a medical doctor', ooze, mouthfuls of difficult dialogue and the tendency for characters not to make it through the pre-titles sequence were just a few of the tragically underexamined elements of THE X-FILES phenomenon - until the first edition of this book. Now the authors take their study of televisions weirdest show through to the end of series five, and THE X-FILES movie. X-TREME POSSIBILITIES presents a unique analysis of the programme that transformed US television. While sometimes witty and light-hearted, this volume is also a serious study of the elements that made the show such a success. As well as a detailed episode guide of the first five seasons, the book pieces together the nature of the series' Conspiracy - and attempts to discover just what the truth is. Never before has THE X-FILES been put under such focused, affectionate and bizarre scrutiny. Please note this new release of the second edition has not been updated.

Release date: October 31, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 471

Sample

Paul Cornell is a writer of SF and fantasy in prose, comics and television, one of only two people to be Hugo Award-nominated for all three media. He wrote three episodes of Doctor Who for the BBC, Batman & Robin and Superman in Action Comics for DC, and a mature readers series at Vertigo called Saucer Country. His first urban fantasy novel, London Falling, about a modern undercover police unit in London accidentally becoming able to see dark magic and monsters, was published in 2012. He lives near London, and his other interests include cricket, all things Fortean, and his new born son Thomas.

Martin Day has written eighteen novels, audiobooks and non-fiction titles, usually concerning television in general or Doctor Who in particular. He is a regular writer on BBC1’s Doctors, having previously worked on Channel 5’s Family Affairs and been lead writer on CBBC’s Crisis Control. He has also written plays, comic strips, short stories and journalism, and currently has a film in development in the USA. His hobbies include kendo, kickboxing, roleplaying games, and standing as an unsuccessful candidate in local elections.

Full-time survivor, dandy highwayman, bon vivant, author, journalist and broadcaster yer actual Keith Topping’s bibliography includes over 40 books; he was the co-editor of two editions of The Guinness Book of Classic British TV and has written or co-written volumes on TV series as diverse as The X-Files, Star Trek, The Avengers, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Stargate SG-1, as well as music and film critique. He authored four Doctor Who novels (including the award-winning The Hollow Men, with Martin Day) and a novella. His work includes two editions of the acclaimed West Wing guide Inside Bartlet’s White House, A Vault of Horror: A Book of 80 Great (and not-so-great) British Horror Movies, Do You Want to Know a Secret?: A Fab Anthology of Beatles Facts and Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide. Keith was a regular contributor to numerous TV and genre magazines and was a former Contributing Editor to Dream Watch. He is widely considered one of Britain’s foremost experts on the bewildering complexities of US network television. No, he hasn’t the faintest idea why either.

The X-Files has changed everything. Before it, American television, under the influence of series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks, was just starting to become more innovative, more interested in continuity and texts that could be usefully watched a number of times. The X-Files took this idea and ran with it, creating a vast (and difficult) intermittent running story that brought a large supporting cast with it. Having innovated in that direction, it innovated again in the way it used that story arc: the returning characters returned at strange points in the narrative; the central storyline wasn’t restricted to episodes in which our heroes discovered something more about it, but informed other episodes as well. It’s true that The X-Files was a series whose time had come, one of those dead certs that only a TV critic would bet against. With the American psyche turning increasingly against its own government, against all authority, nobody, in the 1990s, can tell an American citizen what to believe. The skies are full of UFOs/black helicopters, containing aliens/UN troops who do experiments on/wilfully destroy herds of cattle. The American public has become thoroughly alienated, shocked that the betrayals of Watergate haven’t stopped: Irangate, Whitewater, many other revelations that power is in the hands of people as mortal as those they govern. Their nation, the one that had always believed in freedom and democracy, is being ferociously shown the realities of power and capitalism. That these terrible things have happened cannot be the fault of the public themselves: it’s the fault of those in power. Not those fallible presidents and their parties, who are just as much victims of the real world as the public are. The real people in power. Those whose presence among the government makes America such a scary place. The Conspiracy. The X-Files is the product of a nation looking for such people to blame.

The second factor in the success of this series is that there is, now, a whole mythos to feed its stories. Thanks to Steven Spielberg (who invented them) and Whitley Strieber (who was abducted by them), the little Grey aliens have become an omnipresent icon, that most miraculous of things, an archetype in a new form. Centuries ago, they’d have been fairies or demons. Now they’re from Zeta Reticuli. The innovation is that they bring with them a folk myth of total fear: we are helpless, totally vulnerable, and not safe anywhere. We have to conform to their agenda, we can’t bargain with them, they have no human emotions to appeal to. It’s a myth, in the end, of bureaucrats from outer space. Their skin colour is no accident. Even the eyes look like spectacles. The Greys are also the dead of Belsen (an image that The X-Files takes literally), aborted foetuses, shaved experimental cats: all those things we’ve done, that we should be guilty about, externalised, mythologised, and back to do to us what we did to them.

The third factor in the series’ success is the millennium. It’s no surprise that Chris Carter’s next show was entirely about the change from twentieth to twenty-first century. It’s coming, and lots of things are coming to an end. The human instinct for closure, and the desire for revelation, are once more upon us. The X-Files is the expression of that desire. We can look forward, thank goodness, to a party decade in 2001, if previous centuries are anything to go by.

So, with all this in the air, the appearance of a series concerning alien mysteries wasn’t really a surprise. The idea would have been floating in many writers’ heads. The surprise was that, when it did arrive, this series was actually done so well. Each episode seems to be the product of concentrated creative energy, as if it were a tiny feature film. For once, the design, the direction and the writing are all being urged to be the best they can be. Chris Carter has to be congratulated for his single-mindedness in achieving that, and American television can take a bow for its realisation that a single, driven creator at the helm is the best way to run a TV series. Witness Star Trek and Babylon 5.

And then there are Mulder and Scully, of course. Intelligent, sexy people, who aren’t involved with each other. That’s us, these days, that is. That’s the Internet Generation writ glamorous. If they shag, the show’s over: thank goodness Carter knows that, or we’d have another Moonlighting on our hands.

Still, he may surprise us. He may have it happen and do it well. That would almost be the obvious thing to do, in a series that thrives on surprises.

Introduction to the Second Edition

Since the first edition of X-Treme Possibilities came out in 1997, the nature of The X-Files has changed. From being a cult series, the show has graduated to mainstream success. The movie is a ‘blockbuster’; Duchovny and Anderson are major stars (in Britain, when Catatonia’s single ‘Mulder and Scully’ was in the charts they appeared as giant backdrops on Top of the Pops); there are Emmy awards and vast audiences. The nature of the storytelling has also changed. Perhaps aware of the impact Darin Morgan’s episodes had, perhaps influenced by the commercial success of such shows as Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files changed from being the most earnest series on television to being one of the most tongue-in-cheek. It’s almost as if one can only sustain a level of pre-millennial panic for so long, that sooner rather than later, an intelligent audience (and the series, thankfully, has shown no sign of being ‘dumbed down’) will start to get restless at being asked to take shivery paranoia so seriously. Perhaps Chris Carter realised that his show was in danger of becoming an anti-establishment cliché in itself, so, very perceptively, he began to emphasise the complicated nature of perception, of how no one version of a story is the objective one. The series started to innovate even further in its storytelling methods, allowing the tone and emphasis of each episode to vary according to its subject matter. The final element in this sea change was that Scully’s point of view, that rational inquiry would always prevail over blind faith, came to dominate Mulder’s more and more. The one worry we have over this course of action is that the series now finds it hard to do stories that are heartfelt, moving, or simply horrific. Among all the various storytelling methods, ‘straightforward’ should still be a valid strain, yet it’s now underused. Very rarely, in the fifth season, does The X-Files produce a sharp, chilling fifty minutes of postmodern horror, and that’s a shame. The series’ original function has vanished. However, it’s thanks to these astute moves that the series remains one that can be proudly discussed in any workplace. Unfortunately, this may have come too late for the UK fan base, which, at the time of writing, is showing the first signs of withering.

One reason for the British lack of interest is doubtless the series’ continuing commitment to its Conspiracy story arc. The fact that the ‘mythology’ stories fail to provide many of the dramatic cues that viewers of series television are used to might be cause for applause (for instance, it’s refreshing when we as an audience are given no clue when a character is lying). However, the arc also fails to explain itself as it progresses, often getting cod dramatic set pieces tacked on to its episodes simply to produce an end result that in some way resembles drama. It’s an indictment of any series that it requires a book like ours to follow its complexities, even after the story arc is complete. For instance, most X-Files fans would not perceive Deep Throat as a lying manipulator who never once acted to help Mulder; however, if we follow the conclusions the story arc presents us with, no other interpretation is possible. The version of the world he describes to Mulder simply isn’t the one that the movie reveals to be true. But at no point during the fiction are our heroes or the audience alerted to that. In normal drama, we might expect a line such as ‘So Deep Throat was lying all along’. With this series, the fans themselves have to work for that closure, and the general audience are left none the wiser. The Conspiracy has dragged the series from being about the world of nightmare, where anything might happen and men in suits are just symbols of a terrifying bureaucracy, to being about the world of politics, where the same things happen over and over, and we’re asked to follow the internal bickerings of those same, now very ordinary, men. Continuity is the enemy of terror.

It doesn’t help that the Conspiracy episodes also feature some of the worst scripting in television history. The strange ‘poetic’ prose which Mulder and Scully spout in voice-over during these episodes is simply bad, and Chris Carter’s dialogue in speech for them is sometimes little better. Carter has much, much, to be commended for. Nobody betters him for use of budget and materials, talent spotting, dozens of other jobs that producers are hired and fired for. But he should realise that his scripting Emmy was won for the crisp dialogue and dramatic set pieces of ‘Duane Barry’, not for self-consciously meaningful nonsense. That ‘Memento Mori’ was submitted for that same award a couple of years later is an index to where the show has gone.

The X-Files movie was reported to have ‘solved’ the Conspiracy arc, and, indeed, it offers clever solutions to some of the problems with the mythology episodes, and provides a degree of closure. What it doesn’t do, however, is allow our heroes to do what we’ve wanted them to do for some time, bring an end to the whole Conspiracy business. It seems that when, with the start of Season Six, The X-Files production moves from Vancouver to Los Angeles, the mythology episodes will go with it. At least Mulder and Scully nearly got a snog, which may change the basis of the characters’ relationship. Or it may not. Two steps forward, three steps back.

Still, it’s good to report that The X-Files is alive and well as the millennium approaches, and, through not taking itself seriously, shows every sign of outliving the paranoid phase of American history which produced it.

This Book

There are lots of books about The X-Files, and not all of them are good. This one, we can confidently tell you, is different. We’ve actually delved into the fiction of the episodes, especially in the Conspiracy stories, attempting to make connections, to make sense of what’s going on. We theorise about extreme possibilities, and generally pay attention to what the series is trying to say, what it says accidentally, and what it says despite itself. There’s a lot of speculation in here, but it’s all indicated by words like ‘presumably’ and ‘possibly’. The movie did sort out a lot of the Conspiracy stuff, and we’ve used that information retroactively, to make clear what was actually going on in the episodes. We’ve assumed, incidentally, that there always was a masterplan, that Chris Carter with help from, mainly, Frank Spotnitz, meant every detail to fit together. That assumption looks very dodgy on some occasions, especially where the text contradicts itself and during the first two seasons in general, but without it, we couldn’t have any fun. Also, we’ve used Occam’s razor with regard to the number of alien races visiting Earth: if we can link a particular happening to the Colonists, we will. There’s still a great deal that’s open to speculation, as you’ll see. Unlike our heroes, we don’t have any sources within the establishment – this is a totally unauthorised book – so much of our theorising will doubtless turn out to be wrong. The X-Files is a text which rewrites itself: the latest episodes give new meanings to old ones. The text of the first edition has been revised to eliminate sections where we were wrong, and to highlight things which gained in importance later on. A word about ‘spoilers’: because a lot of The X-Files is interrelated, this isn’t a good book to read if you want to be surprised by a plot twist in an episode that you haven’t seen.

The Headings

At the start of each season, we list the number and length of episodes in that season. Then we run down the production personnel for that season, and the regular cast (by which we mean anybody who appears in more than one story, counting multipart episodes as one story) in order of their first appearance in the series.

For each episode, we give the number of the episode, the title, the US and UK transmission dates, the writer and director credits, and list the cast who don’t appear in the regular cast list at the start of the season, together with the roles they play. We summarise the plot, including giving away the ending.

The headings then proceed as follows:

Don’t Be in the Teaser: Terrible things happen to people pre-credits in The X-Files: this heading documents them. We also include those few times where nothing awful happens, for completeness’ sake.

How Did He Do That?: Recording Mulder’s extraordinary leaps to the oddest conclusions, plus plot impossibilities and other anomalous material.

Scully Here is a Medical Doctor: As we’re continually reminded. Incidents where she snaps on the latex are also reported.

Ooze: Ooze.

Scully’s Rational Explanation of the Week: She usually has one, she often has several. Lately, other people have started doing it too. Here they all are.

That’s a Mouthful: The X-Files has developed its own brand of portentous, quasi-philosophical politicobabble, seemingly informed by the writers having seen a David Mamet film once. Gillian Anderson was quoted in TV Guide as saying: ‘There’s a chance that the cryptic, cultic dialogue we use could prove confusing to people. I hope not. I don’t want people walking away from the movie asking, “What was going on with that chick?” ’ We ask that.

Phwoar!: This heading charts Mulder and Scully’s relationship, and times when they seem especially close. We also mention scenes of unusually obvious horniness. We are grateful for the help of a number of friends of various sexualities in gleefully adding to this section.

Dialogue Triumphs: We quote the bits that sparkle.

Dialogue Disasters: And a few that don’t.

The Conspiracy Starts at Closing Time: We try to work out what the Conspiracy’s up to, how it works, and who’s involved. Big section.

Continuity: This heading keeps track of details concerning Mulder and Scully, their relations, their workmates, their friends, and their foes.

The Truth: This is, as far as we can work it out, exactly what really happened during the episode.

Trivia: We list cultural references, in-jokes, cameo appearances by strange people and stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else. But we still don’t think you’re interested in things like number plates and how often Scully fires her gun, and we’ve become too fed up with the series’ penchant for numeric in-jokes to pay much attention to that any more.

Scientific Comment: Here comes the science part. Concentrate. Our scientific adviser, Dr Janet Wood of the Astrophysics Group at Keele University, passes comment on things that get her goat concerning the use of science in the episode. (And she supplied our box on missing time.) Rather than being, like the Lone Gunmen, an expert on all things, Dr Wood has consulted many other scientists. Science fiction is about science. When the series goes there, it ought to get its research right.

The Bottom Line: The three of us review the episode separately. Partly to show a series of different critical responses, partly to demonstrate that the Gently Mocking Man, the Well-Mannered Man and Quiet Keithy sometimes disagree rather violently. We divided special responsibility for the episodes between us, a season each for the first three and then largely by subject matter, and the review of the person with that responsibility comes first in every case.

Boxes: Throughout the text, there are a number of boxes which highlight particular issues, or just take the mickey. Marty has updated his essay from the first edition to take account of the series’ continuing investigation into the matter of faith.

A note on character names. We’ve changed to ‘The Cigarette-Smoking Man’ rather than ‘The Smoking Man’, and ‘The Lone Gunmen’ rather than ‘the editors of the Lone Gunman magazine’ for this edition to keep up with standard use, even though these off-screen names aren’t established in the show. We have problems with ‘The Alien Bounty Hunter’ because even when it’s really him he’s not a bounty hunter as such. You’ll see.

24 45-minute episodes

Created by Chris Carter

Line Producer: Joseph Patrick Finn (2–24)

Co-Producers: Larry Barber (11–14),

Paul Barber (11–14),

Paul Rabwin (2–24)

Supervising Producers: Alex Gansa (2–24),

Howard Gordon (2–24),

Daniel Sackheim (1)

Co-Executive Producers: R.W. Goodwin (2–24), Glen

Morgan (2–24),

James Wong (2–24)

Executive Producer: Chris Carter

Regular Cast: David Duchovny (Special Agent Fox Mulder), Gillian Anderson (Special Agent Dana Scully), William B. Davis (The Cigarette-Smoking Man, l,2 16,3 21, 24), Ken Camroux (Senior Agent, l4), Charles Cioffi (Section Chief Scott Blevins, 1, 2, 4), Jim Jansen (Dr Heitz Werber, 1), Jerry Hardin (Deep Throat, 2, 7, 10, 11, 16, 17, 24), Henry Beckman (Detective Frank Biggs, 3, 21), Doug Hutchison (Eugene Tooms, 3, 21), Scott Bellis (Max Fenig, 10), Don Davis (Captain William Scully, 13), Sheila Larken (Margaret Scully, 13), Mitchell Kosterman (Detective Horton, 14), Tom Braidwood (Melvin Frohike, 17), Dean Haglund (Langly, 17), Bruce Harwood (John Byers, 17), Mitch Pileggi (Assistant Director Walter Skinner, 21), Lindsey Ginter (Crewcut Man, 24)

THE CONSPIRACY STARTS HERE

To help you hang on during what is sometimes a very bumpy ride, a few definitions and first appearances to indicate the thinking behind our investigation into how the Conspiracy arc fits together:

The Conspiracy: An international syndicate of powerful people who know the truth behind matters alien, and a good deal more. They first appear together in ‘The Blessing Way’, but we don’t hear their complete plan and motivation until the movie. (And see the box concerning Chris Carter’s CD on p. 464.)

The Colonists: A single species or organism that visited Earth in the past and intends to return and conquer. Their actions have consequences from the start of the series, but we first meet a representative in (debatably) ‘Ice’ or (definitely) ‘Piper Maru’.

The Rebel Colonists: Our biggest coup in the first edition was realising that the arc only made sense if there were two sets of warring aliens. The series makes that clear in ‘The Red and the Black’, but a representative of the Rebels first shows up in ‘Fallen Angel’.

The Black Oil, the Greys, the Shapeshifters: All different vessels of the Colonist intelligence, the basic form being the Black Oil. These forms are common to both Colonists and Rebels. (‘Ice’ or ‘Piper Maru’; ‘Fallen Angel’; the pilot episode or ‘Colony’.)

Human/Colonist Hybrid Clones: Conspiracy-created beings that initially look human, though they have toxic blood, but eventually (perhaps only if exposed to various biohazards) come to resemble the small Grey aliens of lore. Created from abductee ova and Colonist DNA solution (‘Colony’).

Quasi-Hybrids: US government-created beings, the result of Colonist DNA being injected into existing humans (‘The Erlenmeyer Flask’).

US Transmission: 10 September 1993

UK Transmission: 26 January 1994 (Sky One)/19 September 1994 (BBC2)

Writer: Chris Carter

Director: Robert Mandel

Cast: Cliff DeYoung (Dr Jay Nemman), Sarah Koshoff (Theresa Nemman), Leon Russom (Detective Miles), Zachary Ansley (Billy Miles), Stephen E. Miller (Truitt), Malcolm Stewart (Dr Glass), Alexandra Berlin (Orderly), Doug Abrahams (Patrolman), Katya Gardener (Peggy O’Dell), Ric Reid (Astronomer), Lesley Ewen (Receptionist), J.B. Bivens (Truck Driver)

Collum National Forest, near Bellefleur, northwest Oregon: four teenagers have been found dead, each with two small marks on their backs. The FBI’s Fox Mulder and his new partner Dana Scully order the exhumation of one of the victims and discover an apelike skeleton with a grey metallic implant in the nasal cavity. Later Scully and Mulder ‘lose nine minutes’ while driving along a stretch of open road, and their motel room is burnt, destroying the evidence so far collected. Mulder comes to the conclusion that Billy Miles, another classmate, is responsible for the deaths, despite being in a persistent vegetative state. Billy claims that during a graduation party in the forest aliens kidnapped the youngsters for experimentation, and that once the experiments were concluded he was used to kill his friends. Scully hands over the only surviving piece of evidence – the ‘communication device’ – to her bosses.

Don’t Be in the Teaser: Karen Swinson dies mysteriously.

How Did He Do That?: It is never explained exactly how Mulder works out that Billy is responsible.

Scully Here is a Medical Doctor: Scully states that she went to medical school, but chose not to practise. She performs an autopsy on Ray Soames.

Scully’s Rational Explanation of the Week: The young people might be involved in some sort of cult.

Phwoar!: The bathroom scene in which Gillian Anderson strips to her pants and bra is rather nice. When she shows her mosquito bites to Mulder, it’s perhaps the start of that legendary parasexual ‘thing’ between the two agents.

Dialogue Triumphs: Mulder: ‘In my line of work the laws of physics rarely seem to apply.’

Scully: Time can’t just disappear. It’s a universal invariant!’ Mulder: ‘Not in this zip-code.’

Scully to her superiors: ‘Agent Mulder believes we are not alone.’

The Conspiracy Starts at Closing Time: Mulder says that there is classified government information that he has been trying to access but someone at a higher level has been blocking him. He is allowed to continue in his work only because he has made connections in Congress (presumably Senator Richard Matheson who we meet in ‘Little Green Men’). The Cigarette-Smoking Man is seen in Blevins’ office (Blevins perhaps being the one who’s been blocking Mulder’s research, as we see in ‘Redux II’ that he is a Conspiracy agent). The Cigarette-Smoking Man later stores the ‘communication chip’ (along with five others) in a box marked ‘100041’ in a storeroom deep under (or near to, as we later learn) the Pentagon. Mulder and Scully lose nine minutes of time when their car is enveloped in a bright light. Mulder doesn’t seem to regard the fact that, for at least nine minutes, he’s been possibly interfered with, as important. Scully, with her knowledge of physics, ought to be jumping up and down in astonishment, but she shrugs it off. Either she simply doesn’t believe Mulder, or maybe they’ve both been got at. (See ‘Tempus Fugit’ for an examination of the series’ treatment of missing time.)

Continuity: Dana Scully has been with the FBI for just over two years. She was recruited out of medical school (her parents at this stage still regard this as an act of rebellion). She taught at the FBI academy at Quantico and did her undergraduate degree in physics. Her senior thesis was ‘Einstein’s Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation’. (This is a pretty ridiculous subject for a thesis. Einstein’s twin paradox is a simple example of how time dilation affects objects travelling near the speed of light: the twin that’s been travelling comes home and meets the twin who hasn’t been, and finds that twin is now older. Any ‘new interpretation’ in the field of physics (as opposed to, say, poetry) would have to present a challenge to the laws of relativity! On the basis that Scully actually passed, we might assume that the thesis itself concerns some small topic of relativity research (a new proof is virtually the only possible area), and that, for some reason, Scully gave it a screamingly over-the-top title that referred to little more than an aside in the introduction. Mulder himself is somewhat sarcastic about its contents. In terms of the series, however, the title is poetically apt, darkly alluding to the fate of Samantha, not to mention Mulder’s trick with the two watches.) We (possibly) see some of the contents of the thesis in ‘Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man’ and Mulder quotes from it in ‘Synchrony’. Scully is aware of Mulder by reputation. She is assigned to assist Mulder and will write field reports on their activities along with her observations on the validity of the work. Fox Mulder is an Oxford-educated psychologist who wrote a monograph on ‘serial killers and the occult’ that helped to catch Monty Props in 1988. He was considered to be the best analyst in the Violent Crime section. His nickname at the academy was ‘Spooky’. He describes himself as ‘the FBI’s most unwanted’. He has ‘developed a consuming devotion to an unassigned project outside the Bureau mainstream’. When he was twelve, his eight-year-old sister disappeared from her bed one night. This tore the family apart. Mulder has undergone deep regression hypnosis with Dr Heitz Werber concerning the events surrounding the abduction. The X-Files are unexplained cases. Mulder says that at first they seemed to be a garbage dump for UFO sightings and abduction reports.

The Truth: The cover-up perpetuated by Billy’s father seems to be a localised rather than a governmental activity. Later episodes reveal that Mulder and Scully have actually stumbled upon the work of Japanese and German scientists, working for the Conspiracy, who have been experimenting on the class. The nature of those experiments, is, however, problematic. The kids themselves obviously aren’t the Colonist/human hybrids of later episodes (they bleed normal blood). So presumably they’re either having their resistance to the Black Oil tested through being given tiny doses of the stuff (which would explain the Greylike state of their corpses (with enlarged cranium and eyes) and the need for blood-monitoring implants, although these nasal ones seem more concerned with control than protection), or they’re being injected with the Colonist virus inside an alien bacterium (as with the test subjects of ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask’). The latter explanation requires the teenagers to exhibit aggressive behaviour which we don’t see onscreen. Both explanations would account for the deposits of an ‘organic synthetic protein’ found around the puncture marks, and there being no obvious cause of death for the corpses found marked like this. (The Black Oil having presumably left them if the former explanation is correct.) Billy Miles seems under control to an extent unseen again until ‘Patient X’. Suspiciously so, in fact. Considering the fact that when we first see him (in a blinding light) his facial features seem blank and shapeless, and that when he’s ‘returned’ at the end of the episode, his injection marks have vanished, is it possible that he’s now (become or been replaced by) a fully fledged Shapeshifter, the Black Oil having made his skin malleable?