The X-Files: Drive Rewatch
November 15, 2015 8:10 PM - Season 6, Episode 2 - Subscribe
Mulder finds himself forced to drive a man in a high-speed dash across the Southwest in an effort to prevent the man's head from exploding.
Jeffrey Wells of Skin Horse notes:
'I hesitate to put “Drive” on my list, because, frankly, it’s not really that great of an episode in terms of objective quality. “Monday” or “Triangle” almost certainly should have beaten it out for my #5 slot, but …hell, I can’t help it. “Drive” occupies a special place in my heart, because I was actually studying inner ear mechanics during the time it was aired, and I like stuff dealing with ELF radiation. Plus, I’m a big fan of constrained, limited-resource stories, and this, combined with the tense and ultimately touching relationship between Mulder and the carjacker, puts this one into my top five X-Files episodes, um, not written by Darin Morgan.'
A couple of noteworthy things about the episode:
Vince Gilligan has noted that one of the things he was trying to do in this episode was to see how unsympathetic he could get away with making Bryan Cranston's character - he's a paranoid, antisemitic carjacker - while still getting the audience to sympathize with him. This is a trick that was repeated, in a very different way, in Breaking Bad, so that's another link between the two. (Of course, having a crazy conspiracy theorist, who also himself happens to have been the accidental victim of an actual government conspiracy, deal with Mulder, also a conspiracy theorist, is interesting, and perhaps is part of how the characters can manage to build a relationship, despite their mutual distrust.)
Related to Cranston's character's antisemitic comments, I believe that Duchovny once said in an interview that, as far as he's concerned, Mulder is Jewish. I don't know if any of the writers have said whether they agree or not.
posted by jwgh at 7:38 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
'I hesitate to put “Drive” on my list, because, frankly, it’s not really that great of an episode in terms of objective quality. “Monday” or “Triangle” almost certainly should have beaten it out for my #5 slot, but …hell, I can’t help it. “Drive” occupies a special place in my heart, because I was actually studying inner ear mechanics during the time it was aired, and I like stuff dealing with ELF radiation. Plus, I’m a big fan of constrained, limited-resource stories, and this, combined with the tense and ultimately touching relationship between Mulder and the carjacker, puts this one into my top five X-Files episodes, um, not written by Darin Morgan.'
A couple of noteworthy things about the episode:
Vince Gilligan has noted that one of the things he was trying to do in this episode was to see how unsympathetic he could get away with making Bryan Cranston's character - he's a paranoid, antisemitic carjacker - while still getting the audience to sympathize with him. This is a trick that was repeated, in a very different way, in Breaking Bad, so that's another link between the two. (Of course, having a crazy conspiracy theorist, who also himself happens to have been the accidental victim of an actual government conspiracy, deal with Mulder, also a conspiracy theorist, is interesting, and perhaps is part of how the characters can manage to build a relationship, despite their mutual distrust.)
Related to Cranston's character's antisemitic comments, I believe that Duchovny once said in an interview that, as far as he's concerned, Mulder is Jewish. I don't know if any of the writers have said whether they agree or not.
posted by jwgh at 7:38 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
I haven't seen this since it first aired, but I remember it freaking me right the fuck out because I get bad migraines. You know how they say you can't really understand how scary The Exorcist is unless you're Catholic? I feel like that might be the case with this episode and people who get migraines.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:20 AM on November 16, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:20 AM on November 16, 2015 [4 favorites]
Obligatory alternative synopsis:
Mulder finds himself forced to drive a man in a high-speed dash across the Southwest in an effort to prevent the man's head fromexploding breaking badly.
posted by Pryde at 10:15 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Mulder finds himself forced to drive a man in a high-speed dash across the Southwest in an effort to prevent the man's head from
posted by Pryde at 10:15 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Even shorter synopsis: Heisenberg on Speed.
posted by KMB at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by KMB at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2015 [2 favorites]
I went to an event at some random JCC in Los Angeles where Howard Gordon showed and then discussed "Kaddish," and I feel quite certain that if there were a consensus among the writers that Mulder were of the Jewish persuasion that would have been the sort of venue where it would have come up. But yeah, I know David Duchovny has said outright that as far as he's concerned Mulder is Jewish, and this episode kind of cemented that for a lot of people.
posted by town of cats at 7:02 PM on November 16, 2015
posted by town of cats at 7:02 PM on November 16, 2015
I always saw Mulder as agnostic/nonpracticing Jewish; doesn't go to temple and maybe never even bar mitzvah'd, but still sees himself as "culturally" Jewish. I have a friend like that, and he wouldn't necessarily advertise his identity, but he'd definitely take offense at some of Crump's anti-semitic talk.
However, another bit of Mulder's biography is that he is from Chillmark, Massachusetts, which is on the western half of Martha's Vineyard; I've heard that kind of accent on much of my family, and we're talking serious Cape-Cod down-east accent territory. which is why I laughed like a loon when Crump threw something out the window and Mulder was yelling at him, because instead what came out was Duchovny's own deep-Brooklyn "that was so STOOPID, Crump!" accent.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:20 PM on November 17, 2015
However, another bit of Mulder's biography is that he is from Chillmark, Massachusetts, which is on the western half of Martha's Vineyard; I've heard that kind of accent on much of my family, and we're talking serious Cape-Cod down-east accent territory. which is why I laughed like a loon when Crump threw something out the window and Mulder was yelling at him, because instead what came out was Duchovny's own deep-Brooklyn "that was so STOOPID, Crump!" accent.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:20 PM on November 17, 2015
I always saw Mulder as agnostic/nonpracticing Jewish; doesn't go to temple and maybe never even bar mitzvah'd, but still sees himself as "culturally" Jewish.
There's no internal support for this in the text that I can think of. Mulder's father receives a Protestant Christian burial when he dies, as does Mulder himself when he is, um, temporarily indisposed later in the show's run. In the first season we see Mulder sitting in a Christian chapel by himself, apparently having gone there for a moment of quiet in his anguish over his sister. We see Mulder and Scully exchange Christmas presents. Mulder seems to know Christian theology quite well -- as well as Scully does -- but never demonstrates any knowledge of Jewish culture/theology. It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that Mulder has Jewish ancestry (as David Duchovny does), but is nominally/culturally Christian, if not especially religious at all.
This was a very solid episode, though I suspect the medical science is extremely hinky -- the medical explanation for the exploding inner ear made no sense even to me. It has such a simple, suspenseful premise that it's like an arrow flying straight to the mark.
The ending, with Mulder walking out on the dock and looking over the water, has always stayed with me. Despite Crump's anti-semitism and ignorance and paranoia, he was a man who had loved his wife and was facing his own terrible immediate future with courage, and Mulder saw that, and was hard hit by his own inability to save the man's life.
I don't get how Mulder and Scully get away with the shit they do. How do they still have jobs?
posted by orange swan at 3:57 PM on June 26, 2020
There's no internal support for this in the text that I can think of. Mulder's father receives a Protestant Christian burial when he dies, as does Mulder himself when he is, um, temporarily indisposed later in the show's run. In the first season we see Mulder sitting in a Christian chapel by himself, apparently having gone there for a moment of quiet in his anguish over his sister. We see Mulder and Scully exchange Christmas presents. Mulder seems to know Christian theology quite well -- as well as Scully does -- but never demonstrates any knowledge of Jewish culture/theology. It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that Mulder has Jewish ancestry (as David Duchovny does), but is nominally/culturally Christian, if not especially religious at all.
This was a very solid episode, though I suspect the medical science is extremely hinky -- the medical explanation for the exploding inner ear made no sense even to me. It has such a simple, suspenseful premise that it's like an arrow flying straight to the mark.
The ending, with Mulder walking out on the dock and looking over the water, has always stayed with me. Despite Crump's anti-semitism and ignorance and paranoia, he was a man who had loved his wife and was facing his own terrible immediate future with courage, and Mulder saw that, and was hard hit by his own inability to save the man's life.
I don't get how Mulder and Scully get away with the shit they do. How do they still have jobs?
posted by orange swan at 3:57 PM on June 26, 2020
Bryan Cranston is such a chameleon.
Super hinky, yes, there is no plausible mechanism for the amount of pressure buildup required, nor the remedy, and I suspect debilitating vertigo would kick in long before explosions. Avian and mammalian inner ears are rather different, too. If it's sound frequency based, size matters a lot (resonance).
Scully freaking out to Mulder about the phenomenon being infections is jarring against the fact that she and the other doctor aren't PPE-ing up. PPE late is better than quarantining in close proximity with a possible vector. And how could they tell it's not infectious with just a physical inspection (aside from the Mulder joke from another episode, "We aren't all dead yet.")?
If its not infectious, then why PPE up when checking the mobile home? Other than that it looks cool and fuels the joke where the FBI are referred to as You People on separate occasions by scaring innocent old ladies in the night and rounding her up for no good reason.
Mulder's compassion in trying so hard to save Mr. Crump is amazing, but what end game could he possibly imagine other than absolute faith that Scully will pull through for him? I feel for why he started though.
Whatever the case, the roots of his compassion (and Cranston and Duchovny's performances) is a great study on 'the problem of other minds'; he believes Crump like people believe that other people have the same conscious experience as themselves. Which is a little bit different than simple gullibility.
Scully "Big. piles of manure."
--
The irony is a bit strong here, with Fox, Fox News, (in show real) conspiracy, and conspiracy theories ("put radiation into little retarded kids' gonads") in 2020.
posted by porpoise at 6:21 PM on June 26, 2020
Super hinky, yes, there is no plausible mechanism for the amount of pressure buildup required, nor the remedy, and I suspect debilitating vertigo would kick in long before explosions. Avian and mammalian inner ears are rather different, too. If it's sound frequency based, size matters a lot (resonance).
Scully freaking out to Mulder about the phenomenon being infections is jarring against the fact that she and the other doctor aren't PPE-ing up. PPE late is better than quarantining in close proximity with a possible vector. And how could they tell it's not infectious with just a physical inspection (aside from the Mulder joke from another episode, "We aren't all dead yet.")?
If its not infectious, then why PPE up when checking the mobile home? Other than that it looks cool and fuels the joke where the FBI are referred to as You People on separate occasions by scaring innocent old ladies in the night and rounding her up for no good reason.
Mulder's compassion in trying so hard to save Mr. Crump is amazing, but what end game could he possibly imagine other than absolute faith that Scully will pull through for him? I feel for why he started though.
Whatever the case, the roots of his compassion (and Cranston and Duchovny's performances) is a great study on 'the problem of other minds'; he believes Crump like people believe that other people have the same conscious experience as themselves. Which is a little bit different than simple gullibility.
Scully "Big. piles of manure."
--
The irony is a bit strong here, with Fox, Fox News, (in show real) conspiracy, and conspiracy theories ("put radiation into little retarded kids' gonads") in 2020.
posted by porpoise at 6:21 PM on June 26, 2020
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Much was made of the fact that the opening shot of The Beginning, the first episode of season 6, was the bright yellow Los Angeles sun. After five years in Vancouver X-Files production had moved to Los Angeles. The LA Times was thrilled, as I recall - X-Files was at the height of its popularity at the time and the fact that it wasn't shot in Southern California had been bandied about as a signal that LA no longer occupied the place in show business that it once had. Would it soon be the case that you could shoot a world-class TV show anyplace you pleased? So the fact that X-Files had moved to LA was seen as a sign that Los Angeles still had something special that other shooting locations just couldn't match - even though it was widely known that "something" was David Duchovny's new spouse, Téa Leoni, who wanted to stay in LA because of her own acting career.
But the big yellow sun doesn't seem to me to be quite as symbolic of the move as the cold open of Drive, which features an unmistakably SoCal landscape and a fake news intro from Fox 11, the station number of the local affiliate in Los Angeles, with a helicopter covering a high-speed car chase. What could be more LA than that? I currently live in the Pacific Northwest and we've had a rainy week here (although it was nice today) and the driving scenes in this episode made me just desperately homesick for LA - especially the very beginning which looked suspiciously like some of the back streets in the West Valley where I took my first few driving lessons. And they throw in a little stunt driving like it's just nothing at all, which is not something they did much in the first few seasons because in fact stunt driving isn't totally cheap in terms of people or cars, and they're a little thinner on the ground up north. And then, of course, there are the shots of Mulder contemplating the Pacific after he's failed to get Crump to Scully in time. This is a very "Woo! Los Angeles!" episode, although most of it isn't even set in CA.
This episode is a strong one in terms of pacing and suspense. The plot is a bit thin but it seems self-aware about it; ultimately it's clear that the X-File isn't really what this one is about, it's just about Mulder and Scully going rogue and doing what they love to do and getting in trouble for it. Notable are the facts that Scully a. offers only token resistance to Mulder's plan to go check out this case instead of staying on the straight and narrow and doing their assignment and b. never once tries to offer any kind of skeptical explanation for the exploding-head situation they have on their hands. Scully's totally on board with checking out these weird deaths, willing to take in the evidence and come up with plausible theories. She and Mulder work together like a well-oiled machine in this episode. I love when the police motorcycles come up behind the speeding car and the cop just hands Mulder a cell phone. The police are like, "Well, these people are psychotic buuuut so is this case so let's just let these crazy fuckers handle it."
Project Seafarer is a real thing, apparently, and I guess the government did shut down some of these big extremely-low-frequency transmitter arrays, under circumstances conspiracy theorists consider Pretty Suspicious, so this is about as ripped from the headlines as X-Files episodes get.
I guess the big deal about this episode is that it's the first time Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston worked together but I haven't watched Breaking Bad so that's not terribly meaningful to me. Ultimately I'd say it's a nice little package of an episode but I'd hesitate to make it the first episode I showed to someone I hoped would be a new fan; in particular Scully kind of totally fails to act like a medical doctor in a lot of the autopsy-ish situations and the theories they come up with to explain why the head-asplode situation is occurring are pretty unsatisfying and goofy. It's solid but not spectacular.
It's part of an insane run of episodes, though; next up is Triangle which is one of my personal favorites (ohhh boy those long tracking shots, wiggles in anticipation) and then there's the Dreamlands which some people love and some people hate and I happen to very much like, and then there's How the Ghosts Stole Christmas with Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner. I guess X-Files was drunk on the power of being able to throw in guest stars without having to fly them up to Vancouver.
I have a lot of holiday stuff going on for the next few weeks, so my usual Sunday night posts may not occur. I'll do my best, though, and I am really looking forward to seeing Triangle again.
posted by town of cats at 8:17 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]