The X-Files: Blood Rewatch

March 23, 2020 9:06 PM - Season 2, Episode 3

Mulder is called to Franklin, Pennsylvania, an ordinarily peaceful agricultural district, which is suddenly experiencing a spate of normal, harmless people going on berserk murder sprees.
posted by orange swan (2 comments total)

I don't quite get the mechanics of the subliminal messaging. It doesn't seem to be just something the people affected by the bug spray were hallucinating -- unless Mulder was also hallucinating the mocking "All done! Bye-bye!" message he received at the end. Someone seems to have been deliberately sending the messages to incite the murders, and why on earth would they do that? Was someone from the crop dusting company a complete psychopath, or was there a strategy at play? And if someone was doing surreptitious (and illegal and unethical) tests to discover whether they could control human behaviour with this pesticide and subliminal messaging, wouldn't it have made more sense to do it in harmless ways that wouldn't, you know, have attracted the FBI and probably national media coverage?

Ed seemed to hold out against the subliminal messaging longer than the other people who responded to it, but once he did cave in he went to greater extremes, by deliberately arming himself and going to the hospital tower specifically to kill people.

The subliminal messaging made no effort to play on Mulder's fears, which is strange, because he is paranoid and also supposedly has that phobia of fire.
posted by orange swan at 2:53 PM on March 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

William Sanderson (EB Farnum, JF Sebastian, Sheriff Dearborne, among many many many others), is first rate.

I think Ed's maybe kind of "vaccinated" against the subliminal messaging, perhaps from a pre-existing paranoia/ anxiety conditions. So he's fought a lot harder and longer and upon snapping, had further to fall.

Bit on the nose, location casting-wise, that's the clocktower at UBC. No actual shootings have ever taken place there, and it's been locked since they replaced the original carillon in about '96-97.
posted by porpoise at 5:07 PM on March 29, 2020