1x07: Ice
Our mini-rewatch begins! So, "Ice" has it all: sex, violence, black humor, bad science, plenty of opportunities for scenery chewing, and some of the tensest scenes between Mulder and Scully of the entire series
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SCULLY: Good night, Mulder.
MULDER: Good night, Scully.
SCULLY: At least everyone's okay.
MULDER: Don't forget, the spots on the dog went away.
The little series of bedtime scenes establish character, too. Murphy is in the lab, listening to his radio and eyeing the door. Scully studys the room she's staying in for clues about the former occupant, then bars the door and sits with her back against it. Dr. Hodge is staying up, making notes and trying to figure out the mode of transmission. Mulder is awake in his room, looking disturbed. And DaSilva is in bed, tossing and turning and looking very distraught (Why Look It's A Clue!)
Shirtless Mulder! I love how Duchovny gets to be the eye-candy in this series. He finds the dead man, knows he's innocent, gets accused on the basis of completely circumstantial evidence and gets locked up.
MULDER: Scully! For God sakes, it's me!
SCULLY: Mulder... you may not be who you are.
I love his line to Scully, and the way he glares at her, too.
MULDER: In here, I'll be safer than you.
Agent Scully wearing her scientist hat figures out that two worms in one host will kill each other, not that they have any real proof of that. It's a working hypothesis at best, but she decides it's Mulder's best shot at a cure. Funny, because she doesn't know for certain he's infected yet. Whatever.
The scene where they test her hypothesis on the poor dog is hysterical. They put it in the dog's ear canal, a few moments pass, and we get a miraculous cure. The doctor puts a stethoscope on the dog. Was there something wrong with its heart? And then the worms are passed in the dog's stool. How exactly do these dead worms get from the hypothalamus gland to the intestinal tract?
The scene where Scully goes in to Mulder to try to convince him to get dewormed (or wormed) is tense and well-acted. While I don't find it erotic in the least, it is edge of the seat scary stuff. She's very caring as she examines him but he just grabs her. If she hadn't conspired with the others to lock him up, maybe I'd see it differently. To me, Mulder just seems angry at her and determined to look at her back. Scully seems startled. DD and GA have palpable chemistry, though, so I have no trouble shipping them...
MULDER: It's still there, Scully. 200,000 years down in the ice.
SCULLY: Leave it there.
(She picks up her bag and starts off. Mulder looks into the distance. She looks back at him. He picks up his bag and they walk off.)
[THE END]
Does anyone else think that Mulder and Scully have switched roles a little bit in this episode. He's the one who's really interested in studying the organism. Her scientific curiosity is dormant, over-ridden by fear, perhaps.
OT: I wish I could figure out a way to turn on subject lines for this community.
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Right, F. Huffington. One of the joys of X-Files rewatches is noticing all the stars who began as the little people on Fox.
Duchovny once called "Ice" "our first rockin' episode." Whatever he meant, it grabbed attention and was acted without restraint. Lots of yelling. Kind of hormonal teenage science nerd in its demeanor. I loved it. Moments of goosebumps for Fish: the mutual neck exam, of course, and also the moment in which Scully pulls the ammo out of her guns and flings it into the storm. She is very forthright, for a tiny doctor.
This ep emphasizes that Mulder and Scully are not quite there in terms of total trust. Also that, although Scully is right in her caution, Mulder is of course right in his conviction.
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He's right in so far as he didn't kill anyone. They jumped the gun on that one, definitely, but Mulder's over-reaction fueled that. Mulder had a gun and started after Hodge, who had no weapon, except his big mouth, of course.
Other than serving as a plot device to lock up Mulder, there is no reason Scully couldn't have examined him instead of Hodge
You nurses just kill the fun for us English majors.
Come on, it doesn't take anything but common sense to know that there is no natural passageway between the hypothalamus and the intestines.
Sorry, but I don't see simple facts as malleable. If something is patently ridiculous, turning it into fiction just makes for silliness. I give credit where I see it, in this case, to the writers for what they did do well and to the folks who took the script and turned it into something special despite its obvious flaws.
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You mean "having shit for brains" is not a genuine medical condition? Consider me flumoxed.
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LOL. I saw that and just split my tea everywhere. Excuse me while I find a mop.
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Hee. How's that working out?
Are there any limits to this suspension of disbelief? Any shows that are just too ridiculous?
They can slip a lot past an audience the first time around, but the plotholes look very obvious now, don't they? You're saying that TV wasn't designed to be analyzed like this. But I can't turn my mind on and off the way some people can. Maybe I don't watch enough TV?
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I guess the brain tunes out a lot of info the TV is sending you, and between the picture, the sound and the spoken word, well, it really depends on what the watcher is focusing on at this precise moment in time. So it only takes a moment of distraction, while the characters are talking, to have a huge inconsistency fly right by. I mean, you light Mulder's lower lip a certain way and you can rest assured I will have no clue what he's rambling on about.
Someone, claiming to be an actor, told me to 'chill' and 'get a grip' once on TV Com, saying TV shows were not meant to be watched more than once (I was discussing with other GoT fans whether the slaves collars sent over the city walls were those of the crucified kids or those of all the slaves Daenerys had freed). So this guy chimed in to say that more than the expected amount of collars may have been sent only at the producers demands because more props meant a bigger scene. He went on saying that a "television series isn't supposed to be catered to the audience of only the most insanely observant people."
I politely told him to go google the word "Fandom", said it would explain to him how these things worked.
That guy was being a dick about it, but he had a point, we are Olympic TV watchers in a way, ergo we pay a lot more attention to things that a one time watcher will miss. All the inconsistencies in Ice didn't struck me the first time around. And I suspect S9 is such a disonantly (is that even a word?) painful season to watch because I know the show too damn well. Many newbies love S9.
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I think The X-Files was among the first wave of detail-oriented, rewatch-worthy series. But we are still early in the show, the staff is pressured and underpaid, and SF fans (like me) are habituated to not giving the science much credence.
Tech is moving faster than people can internalize.
All this reminds me of something OT. I was watching Fred Astaire in (I think) Swingtime with friends, and we laughed when Fred took a ride through the snow (in a sleigh?) and stood up with snow, or its movie equivalent, all over his rear end. Did not compute. And someone said, "Well, studios didn't know that people would be really watching this thing a century later." Fred, like the Files, turned out to belong to the ages.
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I found it hot too. Just forgot to mention it. I have had a Scully in a tank top fetish since that picture:
Still, the erotic highlight is the neck stroking IMO.
Eye candy Mulder. I need to find a pic of shirtless IWTB Mulder for evidence that there has been some manscaping taking place. I remember him less hairy. Or maybe he was just less pale. His "my lame joke for my small penis" line doesn't really hold water after we all saw him in that Speedo.
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He's not small. But I've seen a lot of penises in a flacid state and I recall his as pretty average, frankly.
But I am willing to be proved wrong. Pictures?
Hairy? He's not hairy. He's heavier than he was in his thirties but looks great for a guy in his fifties. He's not a kid anymore.
You can see his chest hair peeking out a little in this shot.
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As I said above, I'd love to be proven wrong...
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Guys, I'm so moving to America.
Plus there's Pileggi's comment in the Bloopers "Yeah, he's a Big Boy," which probably helped the rumor become fanon.
No, not hairy, hairy-er. In Ice it just looked like he has more chest hair than he does in later seasons.
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I'm pretty sure that it was DD who made the "big boy" comment about Pileggi. Because he is.
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