I would like to promise that this blog is not going to become nothing more than my delirious rantings about The X-Files, but I can’t make that promise. It’s kind of fun to pretend like I’m 15 again, and that The X-Files is The Most Important Thing In The World.
It’s also fun to watch The X-Files with adult eyes. Earlier in my re-watch, I had a somewhat shocking revelation that, at times in the early seasons, the show wasn’t always that good.
In examining how the show has changed in my eyes, I can’t help but see how I have changed as well. Now, I watch The X-Files with eyes that received a liberal arts education, which means that they are skilled at unnecessarily over-analyzing and spouting half-formed thoughts.
In season 4, Scully is diagnosed with cancer. In the show, there is a clear assumption that her cancer came as a result of what was done to her during her season 2 abduction.
As her cancer progresses and her prognosis worsens, the language in the show increasingly discusses cancer as something that was “done to” Scully or something that was “given to” Scully. It is not approached as an inevitable disease that can occur in anyone, but as a harmful and even violent act that was committed against a specific person.
This “giving” of cancer became literal in the episodes “Redux” and “Redux II” when Scully uncovers hard physical evidence that she was indeed intentionally infected by those who abducted her with a virus that caused her cancer. It was deliberately given to her by men of power, some of whom were high-ranking government and military officials.
It strikes me as interesting given what we learn in real life more and more about how people are “given” cancer, whether it’s cigarettes that people smoke or the cell phones we carry next to our heads or the bad foods that we eat or the toxic waste dumps we build our houses on.
And who gave us those things but powerful industries? Advertising. Military. Government. The dreaded SOCIETY AS A WHOLE. Just as X-Files approaches Scully’s as an item that can be given or taken away at will, we all have these things in our lives that we’re made to have.
Scully didn’t have control over whether or not she was abducted. It was a decision made by people who had their own best interests at heart, and not hers. What harmful things do we have in our own lives that come as a result of what is in the best interest of others, rather than ourselves, yet over which we feel we have no control and no recourse?
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