The X-Files: Biogenesis (Part 1/3) Rewatch

July 15, 2020 8:29 PM - Season 6, Episode 22

The discovery of fragments of an artifact in West Africa leads to several murders. As Mulder and Scully investigate, Scully's findings imply that aliens have engineered human evolution and history, and the artifacts have an unexpected effect on Mulder's mind.
posted by orange swan (3 comments total)

I recall feeling hopeful about the mytharc again, the first time around.

I know better now, both from experience and education. And having watched 2/3 and 3/3, the mytharc just gets beyond silly. There's a very specific example of it in 2/3 that personally pisses me off beyond the utter general stupidity.

Interpreted in 2020 - we've got some stupid rich-kid aliens trolling Earth. That's the whole conspiracy. Fcking kids.

I swear there's a Gary Larson 'Far Side' comic about alien kids buzzing Earth for fun, but can't find it right now.

Mulder's (bs) "cosmic ray" headache sound effects were super annoying.

The lab in the opening scene is clearly a chemistry lab staged with some monkey cages, but I'm not going to let that bother me. That is one abnormally giant pestle the African researcher was murdered with, and authentic looking. I wonder what it's specific purpose was for originally irl?

I really liked the opening "introduction to evolution on Earth" montage with Anderson/ Scully narrating it, though. She's apparently narrated a few audiobooks, anyone have an opinion of them?
posted by porpoise at 9:32 PM on July 15, 2020

If I remember right, it was this series of episodes in combination with the movie, where they now had clear experience of aliens, that made any future episode skepticism seem ridiculous. Like, iirc, right after these episodes, they completely forget they just witnessed an alien spacecraft. Pretty sure this signaled the beginning of the end of my caring about the show (this was back when it was originally aired).

fwiw, back then, I loved the mytharc more than the one-off monster episodes... i haven't re-watched to see if that's still true
posted by kokaku at 2:11 AM on July 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

The monologues on this show tend to be a bit of an eye-roller in their pseudo-profundity, but this episode's opening monologue was actually really good, a sort of nutshell explanation of evolution and then a posing of some fairly reasonable questions that make Mulder and Scully's quest like a logical extension of that.

I don't like the myth episodes much, but I remember enjoying this three-parter more than most of them, as there were some cool/eerie moments.

David Duchovny does quite a good job of acting manic, even if it is silly that he'd be so affected by a mere tracing of one of the fragments.

Nice call back to Fight the Future, with the use of the shot of neanderthals running through the snow.
posted by orange swan at 6:24 PM on July 16, 2020