Andrew Cook
They say it’s good to save the best for last, and with “The Erlenmeyer Flask” Chris Carter certainly has. There have been many excellent episodes this season, including some true classics, but this is the best work of Season 1, playing against our expectations to deliver a weighty masterclass in portent and dread, its implications spilling far outside the confines of the episode.
It begins with a dangerous high-speed chase and a great car stunt, as a man drives to the harbor to escape the police. The cops corner him, batons ready, but he nabs one and lays a cop out. Another one tries to taze him but to no effect, so he pulls his gun and shoots. He clearly hits the man, but it again seemingly has no effect outside a few drops of a strange green liquid on the pier.
The credits begin to betray our expectations as they end with a different tagline: Trust No One. This signals the episode’s importance. After, we cut to Mulder falling asleep on his couch with Journey to the Center of the Earth on TV and an X-File on his chest. He gets a call from Deep Throat asking him to turn on the news and he does, seeing the aftermath of the chase. The authorities are still there, and Mulder immediately begins taping.
He pores over the tape with Scully, but they struggle to see what Deep Throat found so interesting. The chase seemed meaningless; a guy bolted after being cited for a moving violation. Scully is skeptical there’s anything of worth in Deep Throat’s tip and questions his motivation, but Mulder predictably defends him.
They go to the pier and speak with the police chief, who tells them the body hasn’t turned up yet. He catches Mulder in a lie about why they’re out here, alarming Scully as she knows they’re already on a short leash, but he still directs them to the man’s car, now at the impound lot.
They check out the lot and find the car has been replaced. They trace the original back to a doctor named Berube working on a mysterious project he coldly refuses to elaborate on. He tells them he had no knowledge his car was used in the commission of a crime or even that it was missing and asks them to leave. Still with no clear lead emerging, Scully puts her foot down, no longer willing to go on Deep Throat’s wild goose chase. Clearly Mulder has forgiven Deep Throat his deception in “E.B.E.” but Scully considers it disqualifying. She thinks he’s toying with Mulder, taking advantage of his willingness to believe, and she no longer desires to be a part of it.
Her argument registers, and Mulder goes home to find Deep Throat standing outside his apartment. He’s upset Mulder isn’t working harder on the case and seems legitimately disturbed by whatever it is he’s set Mulder on to, but Mulder presses him on the lack of information. He, too, accuses Deep Throat of toying with him and wasting his time. It’s a great scene; Duchovny beautifully plays the boiling over of Mulder’s pent-up frustration with a year’s worth of vague hints that rarely net him tangible results. Hardin plays Deep Throat as annoyed with Mulder’s outburst but patient, silently waiting for him to finish. When he does, he begs Mulder not to give up but still can’t bring himself to say exactly what it is.
That night a thug, the same thug seen on the pier on the news report, walks into Dr. Berube’s office and asks him about another man named Dr. Secare. Berube claims ignorance and says he has to get back to work. The thug tells him his work is finished and gives him the hard pink slip. The thug’s voice is lighter than you might expect, but detached and casually cruel.
Meanwhile at the pier, they call off the search. As soon as they do the suspect emerges from the water, somehow surviving down there all this time.
The next day Mulder and Scully respond to Dr. Berube’s quote-unquote suicide. It’s at this point the episode’s brilliance starts to become clear. We’re nearly 15 minutes in without a hook, without a case, without an X-File, just a pervasive sense of dread and mystery. It feels wrong, uncanny, like we’ve jumped the track and have no idea where this path could lead. Mulder and Scully find Berube’s suicide fishy, whereas most would probably see it as a symptom of the doctor being overworked. As they poke around and learn Dr. Berube was working on the Human Genome Project, Mulder finds a strange liquid in an Erlenmeyer flask labeled Purity Control. The understated genius of this moment, the seeming lack of importance, betrayed only by the episode’s title, is one of my favorite moments of the entire series. This casual decision, to be there at this time, to pick up this particular flask and decide to test it, will dramatically change the trajectory of both these people’s lives, plunging them into a downward spiral of scandal and death and despair from which they will never truly escape. This is their reward for a year of hard work, but how rewarding is it?
Mulder sneaks into Dr. Berube’s house, lucking into an open basement window, while Scully tests the flask. They find it contains an extremely bizarre bacteria and decide it warrants further testing. Mulder finds a number of outgoing calls in Berube’s phone records and has the number traced to a place called Zeus Storage at 1616 Pandora Street.
Meanwhile, Dr. Secare, heavily wounded, collapses at a payphone after trying to call Dr. Berube and reaching Mulder instead. He’s picked up by an ambulance, and they pierce his chest with a needle to relive pressure. As soon as they pierce his body something goes wrong. Some toxic gas erupts from inside, poisoning the paramedics. Twenty minutes in and still no clarification.
Scully, framed beautifully in silhouette, calls Mulder to tell him the results of the test. Inside Purity Control’s strange bacteria is a virus, also seeming to contain chloroplasts, or plant cells. Berube seems to have been cloning this virus-laden bacteria, and the only reason for him to do that would be to inject it in something living, a process known as gene therapy. She tells him more testing is in order, but notes bacteria like what they’ve found in this flask are millions of years old and no longer found on planet Earth.
Mulder arrives at 1616 Pandora Street. He enters Zeus Storage, and the camera dolly zooms in on him as he opens Pandora’s Box. The sound design in this sequence is wonderful, a heavy drone and a surreal, repetitive and non-diegetic chime, underscoring the growing surrealism. He enters the storage locker and finds five human men, hooked up to tubes and monitored by computers, lying inside tanks of water. The men are still alive. One turns in submerged sleep. The story still refuses to resolve.
More test results come in for Scully. The DNA sequences from the bacteria reveal more alarming anomalies. In nature, there are four base pair nucleotides for the formation of DNA: Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine. The bacteria’s genetics are impossible to fully map because they contain a fifth and sixth nucleotide, a new base pair. Such a thing does not appear on this planet, making the contents of the flask extraterrestrial.
Mulder is then chased by some thugs after leaving Zeus Storage. He hops a fence and manages to get away. He meets up with Scully and takes her to Pandora Street. She feels the need to apologize to Mulder for questioning his instincts. She feels by this point she should have learned to trust him. The result from that flask has truly shaken her, she isn’t typically so logorrheal. Mulder, so often afraid of vulnerability, tosses her apology aside with a joke. He takes her inside Zeus Storage, where they find nothing. It’s all gone, only Deep Throat waits for them. He tells them the bodies have likely been destroyed but he doesn’t know by whom. Mulder presses him on this, but he insists he doesn’t know, only some dark, malignant corner of American intelligence. Mulder tells him he was chased, Deep Throat says it was probably a scare tactic, that if they wanted him dead he would be.
Mulder and Scully still don’t seem to know the score, much to Deep Throat’s chagrin. This is another great scene from Jerry Hardin, selling Deep Throat as a man with the practiced ability to control, but not completely disguise, his fear. Mulder says Berube must have been doing human experiments with alien viruses. Deep Throat dismisses this observation, major to Mulder, as an irrelevant sidenote. He notes the technology as the more pressing issue, that Berube intended to create an alien-human hybrid, and the unexpected success of his experiments is what led to his death.
The stark lighting and oppressive charcoal background conveys secrecy and gravity as Deep Throat tells them Dr. Secare was one of his experiments, with the goal being to see if the alien gene therapy would cure his cancer. It did, though inhuman strength and the ability to breathe underwater came with it. Dr. Secare managed to get out into the real world, which he knew would make him a target as his blood chemistry was alien and toxic, explaining what happened with the cops and paramedics.
Scully presses him on his decision to so suddenly grace them with all this information. He tells them he didn’t anticipate the speed of the cleanup operation and wanted to give them as much evidence as possible, but his face suggests a deeper, more personal reason.
Scully goes to collect the lab work so they have some evidence. She finds her contact at the lab, Dr. Carpenter, died in a car accident the previous night. Mulder returns to Dr. Berube’s house and finds Dr. Secare in the attic. He tells him he’ll protect him, which immediately goes south as Secare is killed by the traveling thug. Secare’s blood sickens Mulder the same way as the paramedics, and he’s apprehended by the spook.
Scully is unable to reach Mulder, but she does meet with Deep Throat. He tells her they can trade evidence for Mulder. She tells him they got away with the lab work, but he tells her there’s more evidence inside Fort Marlene, which he can get her in to retrieve.
He does get her in, the tension now thick enough to cut with a knife, 38 minutes in and the story still feels huge. It hasn’t yet climaxed, we’ve had no dénouement. She passes row after row of containment units, and she ultimately finds one labeled “Purity Control,” and inside she finds what Deep Throat calls “the wellspring,” what appears to be an alien fetus frozen in liquid nitrogen. The heavy, welling score and chaotic truck in is a cathartic release to a year of build-up. The truth may still be out there, but some of it is right here in Scully’s hands.
She takes the fetus and heads to the meeting place, but Deep Throat demands to make the exchange. Scully’s only real scene with Deep Throat is heated, and well-played by both actors. She doesn’t trust him, and he doesn’t have much time to win her over. She ultimately relents, and gives him the fetus.
Deep Throat has had an arc this entire season. It’s subtle but clear and poignant on rewatch, and it’s all led him to this moment. He’s gone from a willing cog in an infernal machine to a man who seeks to expose the misdeeds of others while covering for his own. He was motivated by his growing distaste with secrecy despite it having become second nature to him, but this position was untenable and led him to deceive the closest thing he has to a friend. Realizing this, he enters the final stage of his journey: a man willing to do what it takes to bring even the darkest truths to light, no matter the cost.
He delivers the fetus to our number one thug, who immediately shoots him dead. His own life was part of the deal, outing himself as Mulder’s informant. He leaves Scully with a final dying message, the same as the episode’s first: trust no one.
The episode ends with Scully receiving a call from Mulder in the middle of the night. He tells her he just got home from a late meeting with Skinner (and the way he says Skinner’s name is a treat on rewatch) where he was informed they’re closing the X-Files and reassigning Mulder and Scully. Lastly, the Cigarette Smoking Man files the alien fetus away with several others in a scene which brings the season full circle with the pilot, suggesting their work was far bigger than we’d previously realized, and their progress much smaller.
“The Erlenmeyer Flask” is just an excellent piece of work, ending the season on a high note by diving into messy ambiguity, marking importance not by growing more bombastic, but by accentuating the weird. It both fulfills the show’s potential and subverts the form of the season at large, demonstrating the narrative power of abstraction and a refusal to cohere. The casual nature of its storytelling, of Mulder and Scully’s ensnarement in this trap, juxtaposed with the title and opening credits calling attention to what at first seems unassuming, is a stroke of genius.
The first season of The X-Files is a good, solid year of TV with a handful of true standouts. It feels quaint in retrospect, but in 1993, a time before The Sopranos and Lost, before even the reappraisal of Twin Peaks, The X-Files’ first season sat at the bleeding edge of serialization on primetime American television.
Through its set of mostly disconnected, standalone cases it tells a consistent story. The story of two people, forced together in an institutional attempt to sow discord, but drawn together by their shared dedication to the truth. How they get to know each other and how they learn more about themselves in the process. How Scully’s appointment to the X-Files backfires, how her superiors’ continued wish to retain Mulder as an agent for his investigative gifts backfires, how it sets Mulder and Scully on a path to discover the very things their superiors intended to remain hidden. It tells the story of how one of Mulder’s benefactors grows from a haunted spook to a true hero, willing to sacrifice himself for humanity.
The creative dynamic which drives this first season is the interplay between series creator Chris Carter and the writing and producing team of Glen Morgan and James Wong. They’re credited as writers on 15 the season’s 24 episodes, with uncredited rewrites to several others. It makes sense, then, that they’re responsible for the season’s best and worst episodes. Morgan and Wong’s “Beyond the Sea” is an all-timer episode of television, and encapsulating their unique blend of pastiche, horror, and feminist themes. Conversely “Tooms”, their noxious sequel to early standout “Squeeze,” is a shallow mess, wasting Assistant Director Skinner’s introduction and David Nutter’s direction on a script which feels like an X-File produced special for the Daily Wire. Carter’s all-timer “The Erlenmeyer Flask” takes the show into a much more surreal and profound space than it had existed in up to this point. Conversely his episode “Space” is far more ambitious than he had the time and budget to explore, resulting in something awkward, didactic, and boring.
Further, the two play off each other particularly well. Carter is given to establishing ideas Morgan and Wong will later stress-test. This adds significant depth to characters like Deep Throat, allowing him to transcend a merely expository role, as well as expanding the vision of the show with the creation of “Monster-of-the-Week” episodes. Carter plays off their work as well, answering their excellent episode “Ice” with “Darkness Falls,” an equally strong slice of atmospheric eco-horror, and with “The Erlenmeyer Flask” weaves the events of “E.B.E.” even deeper into the story.
Also of note are the contributions of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. The duo prove quite consistent, steadily producing mostly good work. The Season 1 episode “Miracle Man,” a collaboration between Gordon and Chris Carter, begins Carter’s series of episodes earnestly ruminating on the nature of spirituality and faith, a tradition which will wind all the way up to Season 10’s “Babylon.”
Though the season grows increasingly assured and ambitious over the course of the year, it still feels like a preview of greater things to come, ending on a strong note of grace and growth. Many first seasons weren’t particularly good back in those days, yet the first season of The X-Files has more than its share of triumphant moments and iconic images. Deeper, darker, and weirder moments await our heroes in Season 2.
