Around 10pm I asked my lady if she felt like watching an episode.

- Your series? How is it called?
- “The X-Files”.
- Oh, yes. In my head I call it “Scully”.
- Like the co-protagonist.
- To me she is the protagonist.

She felt that we look at the world mostly through Scully's eyes, who is presented as a more neutral sort of character. And she remarked that,
in s01e01 Pilot, Scully is introduced before Mulder.

I was not completely convinced:

- Do you identify more with Scully?
- Of course! Don't you?

Thinking about it yes, now I think I do: Scully always has the more
reasonable point of view for exploring the unknown. But as a young
viewer I certainly sympathised with Mulder.

- That explains why you hate the State so much. You grew up in Italy,
and watched this.

My Anarchist or Libertarian tendencies are more recent; but I have to
concede that even with a delay of decades, this show might have had some influence on my way of thinking.
Thanks for gently pulling me closer to the truth, Agent Mulder.


Tonight once more we lit candles, prepared tea and watched another
episode: s01e06 Shadows.

The mystery began with a sort of unexplained energy that keeps corpses
warm for a long time; “static electricity”, they say. Some agents
(CIA?) ask for Mulder and Scully's help investigating, but then refuse
to openly collaborate with them.

A young woman, distraught, is packing up her things into a box, leaving
her job as a secretary. Her boss has recently died in a dramatic way.
Strange things happen around her: objects move, a coffee mug gets
spilled by an invisible force on the desk of somebody who is being mean
to this woman.

Mulder and Scully soon learn about her, and we get to know why the CIA
is involved. We learn that the enterprise produced weapons: the
deceased co-owner was trying to keep the business and his employees
afloat even by very questionable means, selling components to unknowns
instead of the Pentagon. When learning that these devices were used in
a terrorist attack the owner was overcome by guilt, and committed
suicide.
His young secretary was close to him, and they understood each other;
she is also in pain.

The surviving co-owner, on the other hand, in order not to damage the
business he now completely controls, wants to keep everything quiet
with threats and worse.
The mysterious force saves the young woman multiple times, and in the
end will even directly reveal evidence to the agents.


My lovely wife understood the mystery in advance: the dead man's ghost
is protecting the secretary. Instead I was imagining (since I only saw
the episode once thirty years ago this was for all practical purposes my
first view as well) that the secretary herself had a supernatural
ability she could not control.
My wife made another intelligent prediction that turned out correct: the mystery would not be completely revealed at the end, and would be left
looming.
Very good intuition from her, and a very intelligent idea from the
writers.


Here we have once more the usual clash between two opposite worldviews,
Mulder the believer and Scully the skeptic. In this episode in
particular, however, Mulder gets more justified in his beliefs: he gets
to witness, with his own eyes, the mysterious force grabbing a thug by
the neck in mid-air. Scully is skeptic, but Scully did not witness
this.

All of this is good. A few scientific inaccuracies:

* Static electricity does not work as depicted in the episode: after a
static charge accumulates it is very easy to discharge it in a small
fraction of a second. A little sparkle, an usually mild shock, and
the charge has already dropped to zero. No heat, no light, no work
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics) ).

* A naïveté very typical of the 1990s is the apparently infinite
resolution that can be extracted from photographs and video
recordings, in some circumstances. By choosing some vaguely-named
command like "Enhance 10" one can magnify and show fine details,
perfectly in focus, with no blur; I am speaking of the window scene.
On the other hand the ATM camera recording was treated realistically,
with the limits of the recording fitting the plot: the blur that was
captured can not be enhanced: it will remain just a blur.

I could stop here if not for a very strong objection in my mind I really
have to express: it is about the moral difference between discovering
that the killing machine one makes has been used against its intended
target, or against a different one.
In a shot near the beginning, in the framed picture, we see the recently deceased boss with somebody applauding: was he Bill Clinton, then US
President?

I cannot tell for sure, but for the purposes of this review and my
opinion yes, it *was* Bill Clinton. Hypocrites.

This point is, as far as I can tell, not at all addressed in the
episode.

--
Beard

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