The X-Files: Død Kalm   Rewatch 
April 8, 2020 9:16 PM - Season 2, Episode 19 - Subscribe

Mulder and Scully go in seach of a US Navy vessel that has disappeared in the Norwegian Sea and just 18 members of its crew are found in a lifeboat, aged beyond all recognition.
posted by orange swan (4 comments total)
 
This is a pretty good filler episode, but the easy resolution at the end never sat well with me. I know that Scully figures out the mechanism by which the contaminant causes rapid aging, but that doesn't necessarily imply that it would be easily reversible. Whatever, though.

Also, 90s-era aging makeup looks so bad on modern screens instead of small, fuzzy CRTs.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:19 AM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]


Yes, it's not at all plausible that Mulder and Scully could make a full recovery.

Scully: Trondheim's locked himself in the sewage hold. He's backflushed all the water and he's keeping it for himself. I looked everywhere and this is all I could find [she places a capped jar half full of yellowish liquid on the table]. It's sardine juice, half a dozen lemons and uh, the water from a snow globe.
Mulder: [licks his lips, making an anticipatory slurping sound]

Mulder: I always thought when I got older I'd maybe take a cruise somewhere. This isn't exactly what I had in mind. The service on this ship is terrible, Scully.

Trondheim's death... karma's a bitch, dude.

I don't understand why there weren't more food supplies on the ship. The crew, which was 20+ men, all left/died very suddenly, and they surely would have had a fair amount of food stores left. Olafsson and his friends would have eaten some of it, of course, but there couldn't have been that many of them, so it was unlikely they would have eaten it all. The water in some of the food stores (i.e., in canned peas or peaches, say) would have helped keep them alive.

Which leads me to ask how Olafsson and his friends got onto the boat at all, and why they were hiding in it.

Would Mulder and Scully have been placed in the same hospital room, given that they're male and female?

And I really MUST share this "weirdest celebrity encounter" tweet about Duchovny:

Met David Duchovny in an elevator in Vancouver, BC.

Him: *long-suffering sigh* “So. This must be a real thrill for you.”

Me: *blank stare* “I’m sorry. Why?”

Him: *sulked all the way to the 11th floor*


It's little things like that that'll keep you humble, buddy.
posted by orange swan at 6:10 PM on April 9, 2020 [5 favorites]


I remember this episode for the wonderful "Norwegian" accents and the character name Trondheim, which is the name of my city but hardly a common surname. I don't remember it in detail though, so maybe he was referred to by his hometown?
posted by Dumsnill at 3:56 PM on April 11, 2020


This episode marks an honest moment of nerd revelation for me - Scully kept notes. Observations. Those led to a theory, were discoverable by others and of enough quality to be used to save them.

Of course even in the reality of the X-Files universe economy of characters means they're saved just in time, but if I consider the characters and story a kind of stand-in for how insight comes best from well kept records and serves as a way to communicate across time, this story really makes me respect Scully as a scientist who behaves like a scientist. There are other examples (and lots of counter examples, naturally), but television of this era was sparse with anything resembling that kind of naturalistic rigor.
posted by abulafa at 5:13 PM on April 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


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