Sena and I used to watch the X-Files back in the 1990s, but I must have missed quite a few of them. My memory is at best spotty for a lot of episodes, probably because I was on call a lot as a resident and as a psychiatry faculty member at the hospital.
The other night I saw the Tunguska episode in which Mulder travels to a gulag in Russia to investigate the black oil contamination, which was of extraterrestrial origin. A lot of the episodes had titles which I had to look up on the internet to find out what they meant. Anyway, a rock of extraterrestrial origin is found and becomes the subject of an intense search after black oil spurts into the face of a scientist who was dumb enough to poke a drill in it and who then becomes catatonic.
Actually, if I have the Wikipedia facts right, the episode was not inspired by the Tunguska explosion in a place called Tunguska, Siberia in Russia in 1908. There’s a recent story about it posted on the web in June of 2023. The gist is that a large asteroid impact killed animals and destroyed millions of trees in the area. The mystery didn’t leave a crater, though. At one time, some people thought the devastation was caused by a crashing extraterrestrial spacecraft. Long story short, a similar event occurred in 2013 and the explanation is that the asteroid broke apart 15 miles above the ground, generating a massive shock wave that injured thousands of people and blew out a lot of windows. The importance of it is that events like that can occur every several hundred years, making it important to plan on how to prevent them.
OK, so the other science fact pertaining to the X-Files episode is that, despite it being named for the Tunguska episode, it was actually inspired by the Allan Hill 84001 event, which was the discovery of a Martian meteorite in the Allan Hills in Antarctica in 1984. In 1996 scientists thought they found fossils of bacteria in this rock, which led everybody to think this meant there had been life on Mars. Even United States President Bill Clinton made a speech about it, although later he was more often connected with a blue dress than with black oil. Eventually, there were other features of the rock which led to abandoning the idea that the features were bacteria fossils.
Confused yet? The black oil contamination thing is a weaponized extraterrestrial substance which infects humans and against which the Russians and the Americans were both working on a vaccine to combat it. As far as I know, neither planned a vaccine mandate.
This is a two-part show and, get ready for more confusing titles, the title of which is “Terma.” The episode has a tagline, “E pur si muove,” (instead of the usual “You can’t handle the truth!” No wait, it’s actually “The truth is out there”) which is not translated in the show, but which means “And yet it moves.” That’s about Galileo’s investigation of whether the Earth moves around the sun or vice versa. Galileo said the Earth moves around the Sun, but the Roman Inquisition forced him to recant it because the religious dogma was opposed to heliocentrism. He did but under his breath he supposedly mumbled “And yet it moves.” Galileo probably had Oppositional Defiant Disorder as a child.
I’m not sure what the tagline “E pur si muove” means in this context. This is just my guess, but maybe it refers to the persisting opposition of Mulder and Scully to the government hiding the “truth” of the existence of extraterrestrials.
I found out that terma (the word means “hidden treasure”) is a set of Buddhist secret teachings that are hidden from the world. A terma could be a text or object (like a rock) buried in the ground or a crystal, perhaps hidden in space. In the end, an old KGB agent manages to destroy the rock by blowing it up. He gets away and returns to Russia where he finds a guy named Alex Krycek waiting for him and who has an artificial left arm (with which he uses to stir tea) and who congratulates him on his success.
Now this Alex Krycek guy is a known villain who is in and out of X-Files episodes, even coming back from the dead. He’s this traitorous, murdering, lying devil who, judging from Mulder’s reaction to him every time he sees him, is Mulder’s favorite punching bag. This is partly because Krycek probably killed Mulder’s father.
But in this and every other episode in which they meet, Mulder evidently gets a charge out of repeatedly smacking Krycek. A typical interaction would be Mulder seeing Krycek, and then punching the crap out of him while grinning with great satisfaction. Notably, in just about any other fight Mulder gets into with anyone who is not Krycek, it’s Mulder who typically gets beat up. But the usual exchange with Krycek goes like this:
Mulder goes into a bar. Mulder sees Krycek. Mulder whops the stuffing out of him, just for the heck of it. Mulder gets tired and says:
“I’m tired of whopping the stuffing out of you, Krycek. I’m also hungry; so, while I snack on these sunflower seeds I’m incessantly eating in every episode—beat the crap out of yourself right now!”
And then Krycek beats himself up.
The only way to understand their relationship is to assume that Krycek is the worst turncoat double agent and compulsive liar you ever met and typically works for anyone who offers him the most money including most terrestrial countries and any extraterrestrial governments bent on taking over every fast-food franchise on the planet earth (“Yeah, I’ll have the mutilated cattle burger with black oil sauce, three and a half pickles, cheese, ketchup and secret vaccine on the side”).
If you have cable, you can see X-Files on the Comet network.
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