The X-Files: Three Words   Rewatch 
August 22, 2020 8:14 PM - Season 8, Episode 16 - Subscribe

A man makes an attempt to burst into the White House, screaming about how he has to speak to the President about an alien invasion, and is shot, and Mulder, who has been denied reinstatement to the X-files, investigates in an effort to find out what the man had to say.
posted by orange swan (5 comments total)
 
I'm sort of surprised that the White House/ grounds have been breached a fair number of times [wikipedia], and aside from a crashed airplane in 1994, the intruders appear to have been apprehended non-lethally.

October 18, 2017 – Curtis Combs, 36, of Somerset, Kentucky, jumped a concrete barrier on the outer perimeter of the south grounds of the White House complex and was quickly arrested. He was dressed in a Pikachu suit.

Mulder's chest incision, maybe the aliens wanted to cure him of his lung beetle damage?

Given that Mulder has no next of kin (?), perhaps he owned his apartment and nobody got around to dealing with its disposition? I wouldn't be terribly surprised if, after Teena Mulder's passing, that Mulder might have named Scully as NoK/ emergency contact? Or maybe it's tradition, the Mulder country house was kept around/ maintained for years.

In 2000, a Quantico initiate starts at $40k (GS-10 Step 1) and maxes out at at 110k (GS-15 Step 10) - all with a +25% availability pay, whereas executives start at $106k (ES-1) at tops out at $122 at ES-6.

2020 numbers appear to be around $65k (GS-10, 1) to $166k (GS-15, 10), +25%.


Mulder has a new pocket knife, can't tell what it is, but it's got a dumb tanto point (not terribly practical other than for stabbing someone with armour/ thick clothing on) like Krycek's. Might be the same prop.

That laptop looks like it's running MS-DOS (possibly Win95 or Win98), the 10 gigabytes that Mulder finds exceeds the maximum partition size of 7.84. That looks like a Dell Latitude XPi P133ST running DOS/Win3.1 and came with a 1.2 gig hard drive, although it looks like Mulder was looking at a secondary internal hard drive. Even with an upgrade to Win95 or Win98, the typical limit is 8.4 gigs.

The 80mm CD the White House intruder has, has a max capacity of 210 megabytes.
posted by porpoise at 5:18 PM on August 23, 2020


The cast of 'The X Files' reunites (remotely) to sing the (made up) lyrics to the theme song, 'Song in the Key of X,' for charity.
posted by porpoise at 5:58 PM on August 23, 2020


Arghh, I see I mixed up the content of this episode and the last one in my comment in the previous episode post. Mulder's homecoming scene was in this episode, as was Doggett's abduction by Absalom and Mulder blaming Doggett for getting Absalom killed.

Was Howard Salt trying to give the president a homemade copy of Fight the Future?

I did not recognize some of the X-Files cast in porpoise's link until I looked at the names on a second watch. It's been a long time and they've...er... changed.

The conflict/tension between Doggett and Mulder doesn't feel real. It feels manufactured. Chris Carter doesn't know how to create believable conflict between his characters -- one of the characters always acts in a way that makes no sense.
posted by orange swan at 5:51 PM on August 25, 2020


Mitch Pileggi looking amazing.

Robert Patrick really leaned into growing more mature - love his tats. I'm beginning to suspect that his role in 'True Blood' didn't stretch any of his acting muscles whatsoever.
posted by porpoise at 6:31 PM on August 25, 2020


homemade copy of Fight the Future?

With the video codecs (coder-decoder computer algorithms for mainly for video) of 2001, a 121 minute long movie stuffed into 210 Mb would be completely unwatchable. It'd probably still be rendering right now if by some miracle it didn't crash.

Nowadays, with unbelievably more powerful and cheaper hardware, a highly compressed 480p 121 minute copy of 'Fight the Future' at a "watchable" quality could weigh in under 210 Mb but pirate kids are going to yell at you about how your quality sucks compared to theirs.
posted by porpoise at 11:02 PM on August 26, 2020


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