TELEVISION: Justin Pearce
‘WE’LL be okay as long as we stay in the light,” insists FBI Agent Dana Scully — a trifle optimistically, perhaps, as she cowers beneath the guttering lightbulb connected to a generator that’s about to run out of petrol in the middle of the night in an impenetrable forest inhabited by swarming fluorescent green bugs. The bugs escaped recently when the tree they had been inhabiting for the past few centuries was felled, and have been attacking people in the dark and leaving them neatly trussed up like giant
But then Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson) has been on the X Files long enough to know its two rules. One, that evil things happen in the dark; two, that she and her colleague, Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), always make it through to the end of the episode. They do this by appearing only in those scenes where the lighting crew appear not to have gone on strike — a rare thing in a series where you spend a lot of the time wondering whether you should adjust the brightness on your TV.
Not only does this mean that they avoid the horrible ends that are met by most of the other characters — it also ensures their exquisitely-chiselled profiles are always seen to their best advantage. Scully and Mulder are without a doubt the prettiest FBI agents since Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks — notwithstanding Scully’s gleaming braces and opaque horror-movie eyes.
The resemblance to Twin Peaks, in fact, goes a lot further than David Lynch would care to admit. X Files mysteries happen in dank forests or wintery cityscapes in the United States’ cold north. These settings are a great excuse for lots of darkness. As the opening credits remind us, “The truth is out there”: out there, lurking somewhere in the dark — where our two pretty FBI agents can glean just enough of it to make us thoroughly glad we don’t know the
This all makes perfect sense — if you buy the theories that see significance in the fact that the world’s best- selling monotheistic religions all evolved in the deserts of the Middle East, while the misty climes of northern Europe spawned goblins and wodwos. As it was in the Old Testament, so shall it be in contemporary America: while the sunny Midwest glories in gunslinging fundamentalism, those whose lives involve fending off the cold on the edges of woodlands are titilated by the thought that there might be something more out there than lots of trees and men in plaid shirts.
But the FBI does its best to battle irrationality with reason, the forces of light using suitably post- enlightenment scientific means to fend off the things that lurk in the dark. “They’re oxidising proteins,” Scully remarks helpfully while looking through a microscope at the luminous bugs which, left to their own devices, would leave her hanging from a tree in a crocheted coffin.
Computers make a sterling contribution to the search for the truth out there, whether producing a 3D reconstruction of a dead man’s teeth, or reading the brainwaves of an eight-year-old girl possessed by the spirit of a murder victim. Scientific inquiry becomes elevated to a ritual, with characters bumbling around in priestly surgical gowns or anti-contamination gear that looks like it came from NASA’s closing-down sale.
Sometimes, though, the forensic playacting is all in vain. “Conventional methods don’t work,” Scully admits in exasperation after the reincarnated Eugene Toomes (geddit?) confounds the prison psychologist by eating the liver of yet another victim as he’s been doing regularly since 1903.
As long as the truth remains out there, getting close to it requires a leap of faith that isn’t to be found in the FBI’s training manual. So it’s no wonder that the real FBI tries to deny that X Files exist and that the cases are based on real incidents. No self-respecting law-enforcement agency would dare admit its agents can only prove half the truth when they know that the whole truth is out there,
X-Files is on TV1 at 8.30pm on Saturday