The X-files: Babylon Recap (a.k.a. Let’s Dance to the Power of Suggestion)
- Feb 15, 2016
- 14 min read
Alright X-files, you win. My mind has been officially BLOWN by Babylon. Seriously, I spent half that episode with my jaw on the floor thinking, is this happening? Is this really happening? Is this a REAL episode of The X-files? Because this is AWESOME! And guess what? It was!
I can honestly say that Babylon is an episode unlike anything we’ve ever seen on The X-files before, and you will see Mulder as we have never see him before. And it is hilarious, yet dark, and somehow existentially moving. Also, I don’t ever remember any episode having quite so much music in it, and by that I mean not always awesome Mark Snow score, but say, The Lumineers’ “Hey, Ho”, and Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart”.
But anyway, getting back to, or I guess started with, the recap.
If it’s not obvious, stop reading now if you haven’t seen the episode, because you will be spoiled. Severely. Got that?
*****SPOILERS AHEAD!*****
Still here? Ok, let’s get started.
After a terrorist bombing at an art museum, new agents Miller and Einstein (yes, you read that right, and Scully has the same reaction), show up a knockin’ at the basement office door, interrupting Mulder and Scully bantering over a video of people hearing mystrious God-like trumpet noises from the sky. Insert instant classic X-files scene here:
(Knock on door) "Hello? Anyone down here?"
Scully: Nobody but the FBI's Most Unwanted.
(Mulder gives Scully a look like he can’t believe she just quoted the first words he ever said to her. She isn’t fazed.)
Scully: I've been waiting 23 years to say that.
Mulder: How'd if feel?
Scully: Pretty good.
With Scully beating him to the punch, Mulder calls out that the door’s open, and in walk the second set of doppelgangers Mulder and Scully have encountered over the years. (In case you’re wondering, the first was in Fight Club, though I suppose they didn’t really run into that first set, or else the world might have imploded.)
To Mulder and Scully’s suspicious amusement, Agent Miller is a man obsessed with the paranormal who thinks The X-files would be his dream job, and Agent Einstein is a red-headed doctor who would rather be on a plane right now trying to stop another terrorist attack, not trying to figure out a way to communicate with the one who is braindead and will probably be actually dead any minute now.
After speaking for a few minutes, Agents Miller and Einstein leave, under the impression that Mulder and Scully can’t help them. Agent Miller leaves his card.
As they’re waiting at the airport, Agent Einstein says she pities Scully, that Scully is only staying to help Mulder because, “She’s obviously in love with him.” Agent Miller counters that maybe Mulder appreciates Scully for her open mind.
Suddenly Miller gets a call from---surprise! Not Mulder, but Scully, who thinks she might have a way to help him with science. At the same time, Agent Einstein gets a call on her cell from Mulder, who has an out-there way he would like her help with. She probably won’t like it, but he reminds her that it might help save lives, so she begrudgingly agrees to meet with him.
Agent Einstein shows up at Mulder’s office, only to find out that he wants her to administer magic mushrooms to him in hopes that he might be able to communicate with the man in the coma through non-traditional channels. She refuses, pointing out that if he needed a doctor to do it, he could have asked Scully. Mulder tells her that, “Agent Scully has recently had her own life-altering near-death experience and I don’t want to bother her with this.” She calls his plan that of a lunatic and leaves, promising to “never again darken your basement door.” Mulder frowns, calling out, “So that’s a maybe?” She’s already gone.
Scully heads off to Texas, where she and Agent Miller try to figure out a way to communicated with the man in the coma who is one of the suspected terrorists who blew up the art gallery. When Agent Miller asks Scully why she’s helping him, she says that her mother was recently in a coma, and she wishes that she would have thought of this before she died. She might have been able to get some answers to her own questions if she had (she says, thinking of her mother’s mysterious quarter necklace).
“What I want to try is another novel, but not untested protocol,” Scully tells Agent Miller.
She explains that, “Doctors recently achieved the ability to communicate with a man known as Patient 23 through magnetic imaging, MRI. By prompting his otherwise inert and unresponsive brain with questions that triggered electro activity.” Although the questions were about random things, they unexpectedly triggered the part of his brain that elicited yes/no answers to questions. She proposes they try it with an ordinary electroencephalogram. She cautions him that even if they do manage to contact the patient, “it may be difficult to get the intel that you’re hoping for.”
The Department of Homeland Security (or men claiming to be from there) show up and order Scully and Agent Miller out. Scully refuses and Agent Miller, who overhears and translates the men’s muttered Arabic, pulls out his phone and starts to take pictures of them. He tells Scully they are there for retribution. The men quickly hide their faces from the camera and leave. Agent Einstein just so happens to walk up to the room as they’re leaving, spots Scully with Agent Miller, and turns to call Mulder. She’s decided to help him after all.
Mulder shows up in Texas, a little surprised he isn’t being Punked, gets his pills from Agent Einstein, and they head over to the hospital, just missing Scully and Agent Miller, who have been ordered out of the hospital because of a terrorist threat. They do, however, arrive just in time to prevent the nurse from killing the man in the bed by turning off his life support. As Agent Einstein takes the nurse outside to talk, Mulder quickly downs his pills, and disappears. As in uh-oh, Agent Einstein lost sight of him, and now she has no idea where a drugged-up Mulder just wandered off to.
The answer to that question? A honky tonk bar. Yep, a happily high Mulder wanders down the middle of the street, totally unfazed by the traffic swerving to get out of his way, and into a bar, where he casually swipes a man’s black cowboy hat right off the guy’s head and immediately turns to join in the “Achy Breaky Heart” line—dancing going on.
The next few scenes will make you wonder if you yourself haven’t been given some magic mushrooms which have turned life as you know it into the most fanstastically bizarre reverse Three of A Kind—complete with Lone Gunmen!! This time Mulder’s drugged instead of Scully, and Skinner’s there rockin’ out at a table with a Mulder the likes of which we have never seen before. He dances. He flips. He freaks out some senior citizens and somehow winds up in a black Harley Davidson bald eagle American flag t-shirt and “MUSH” “ROOM” brass knuckles.
The Lone Gunmen are at his table, happily enjoying the dancing going on around them and some cigars. Honky tonk, badonkadonk, Skinner’s enjoying things just as much, clapping along in his cowboy hat and western wear.
Mulder enjoys the music a few more seconds, then realizes something isn’t quite right here. He loses his cowboy hat, falling back onto—
A red-lit alien (probing?) table, where a much different Agent Einstein walks over and asks, “Is this what you wanted, Agent Mulder? Your woo-woo paranormal?” Before he can answer, she whips him hard. “Say it,” she orders, dressed as a dominatrix. He does, but she won’t give up. “SAY IT!” She whips him again and he cries out, “Woo-woo!”, suddenly finding himself a large death-shrouded rowboat, where a different slave-driver holds the reigns. Alarmed, Mulder turns from the stormy sky and black-cloaked rowers to find none other than the Cigarette Smoking Man wielding the whip.
“You want The Truth, Agent Mulder?” CSM asks. “You’ve come to the right place.” He cracks the whip again as the grim reapers keep on silently rowing their death boat. Misery’s the rhythm of the world.
Wincing, Mulder turns to the front of the boat, to find a woman in white, holding her son in a very Mary-and-Jesus pose. As he moves closer, he finds that the man in her arms is the coma patient he has been trying to communicate with. The man opens his mouth and says something, but Mulder doesn’t speak Arabic.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there more terrorists are arming themselves up for a massive attack in the name of Allah…
Back at the hospital, Scully and Agent Miller get some sort of response from the alleged mass-murderer, but they need to find out a way to set up a baseline, and Mulder is just waking up to find Skinner hovering over him, waiting for answers.
“Agent Mulder? Agent Mulder?”
Mulder’s eyes focus on his boss and he asks, “Where’s your hat?”
“That rodeo’s over, cowboy, “Skinner answers, to Mulder’s confusion. “We’re hanging up your spurs for good,”
“What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about?” Skinner asks skeptically.
“Dude!” Mulder answers, clearly still a little bit out of it, “I was on fire!”
“Dude,” Skinner answers, none too happy, “You were an embarrassment. To me and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Mulder spots Agent Einstein walking by and quickly calls her over to tell Skinner that what they were doing was all under her medical supervision. “All on the up and up.” Agent Einstein tells him that, “It was, until it wasn’t.” Mulder insists that his actions were that of the magic mushrooms. Maybe he took too much? Agent Einstein counters that maybe he didn’t take enough. What? She tells them she gave Mulder a placebo.
“No way, no way that’s impossible,” Mulder argues. “I—I was under the influence of something powerful.”
“Yes, the power of suggestion,” she answers dryly.
Mulder turns to Skinner and, in a moment that feels like a fun nod to Triangle, tells him, “You were there. And the Lone Gunmen.” At Skinner’s silence, he adds, “The badonkadonk?”
Skinner argues that he was in Washington the whole time. “That’s what I’m saying!” Mulder answers, to which Skinner turns and mutters, “I think he’s still tripping,” to Agent Einstein. She tells him that the Placebo Effect has been known to have a lasting psychological outcome.
Frustrated, Mulder insists, “I talked to the terrorist.”
Agent Einstein doesn’t believe him. “What did he say, Agent Mulder?”
He can’t tell them because he doesn’t speak Arabic. Skinner just nods.
“Well, I’m gonna get you a wheelchair so we can get you home, partner.” He pats Mulder’s shoulder and goes to find one.
“You were there too,” Mulder grudgingly tells Agent Einstein. “And you were 50 Shades of bad.” She narrows her eyes at him.
As Agent Einstein wheels him out, Mulder insists that the wheelchair is ridiculous. She tells him that they won’t want him dancing away.
“So, I did I—I—I did dance,” he says.
“According to a bunch of very frightened middle-aged Texans.”
He argues that she’s only covering for herself, and as she starts on a rant of how, thanks to him, she’ll probably wind up in her own basement office, ridiculed for—
Mulder’s not listening. He’s spotted a woman standing outside that he knows—the suspect’s mother, who he saw in his… vision? Dream? In any case, he walks through the agents trying to keep her out and takes her up to see her son.
Scully and Agent Miller are surprised to see their partners enter with a woman they’ve never seen before.
“Mulder, where did you find her?” Scully asks, to which Agent Einstein darkly answers, “Please don’t ask him that.”
Mother spots son and stumbles in her shock. Mulder and Agent Miller catch her, helping her to her son’s side.
She talks to him and the machine monitoring his brainwaves lights up. She is convinced that her son lost her nerve. He got caught up in the group he was with, but in the end he couldn’t go through with it. How does she know? She says he tells her in her dreams. The man goes into cardiac arrest and dies.
“I’m so sorry,” Scully tells his mother, having been there herself way too recently.
Mulder isn’t ready to give up just yet. Agent Miller thinks the man was trying to tell them something.
As he watches mother cradle dying son, Mulder mutters that this is just what he saw before. “He spoke to me.”
Scully wants to know how, and when? Mulder can explain, or can’t, but in any case, it was in Arabic and—he thinks, thinks very hard until finally, with Agent Miller’s help, he realizes that the man told him, “Babylon, the hotel.”
Cut to—somewhere out there, FBI Agents quickly raid the Babylon hotel just in time, arresting the terrorists before they can go through with their bomb plot.
At the airport, Agent Miller and Agent Einstein have a talk. She says she didn’t do anything, and yet it worked. She can’t explain it. He points out that, “Maybe some things are unexplainable, Agent Einstein.”
“The most beautiful thing you can experience is the mysterious,” she answers. “The source of all true art and science.”
Agent Miller is surprised. “That’s beautiful, Einstein”
“Yes, Einstein,” she says dryly, “that’s who said it, Miller.”
Ok then. She says the real mystery is why he left with Scully without consulting her. He says he didn’t do anything, that she’s the one who left him for the crazy train. She says she’ll never do it again, though she did realize that words and ideas do have weight, the weight to move people to do psychotic things.
“Giving someone magic mushrooms?” he asks.
“I was talking about Agent Mulder,” she cuts back.
Oh, ok. He puts his earphones back in: Ho! Hey!
Meanwhile, back at The Unremarkable House, Mulder checks himself in the mirror. What are those weird marks on his chest? They’re not vampire fangs, so I guess Ronnie Strickland and his glowing-eyed, flying-squirrel-jumping vampire nest isn’t back. He goes out to listen to music on his porch:
I've been trying to do it right (Hey!) I've been living a lonely life (Ho!) I've been sleeping here instead (Hey!) I've been sleeping in my bed, (Ho!) Sleeping in my bed (Hey!)
Scully drives up and gets out of her car. Mulder gives her a wave and she climbs the stairs and smiles at him, leaning against the porch.
“Talk to me, Mulder.”
“Um, where to begin?”
“Why don’t you tell me about your little scheme,” she answers, somewhat amused already.
“You were on your own mission,” he says, wrapping up his earbuds. “And you would have never bought that.”
“Oh, absolutely right,” Scully agrees. “I have to applaud her though on her clever trick with the placebo.”
Mulder thinks a moment, then asks, “Yeah, how did that work?”
Scully just shakes her head, smiling. “Wonders never cease with you.”
He thinks again, then seriously answers, “I saw things though, Scully… Powerful things. I saw deep and unconditional love.” He says it staring up at his partner. For a moment they don’t speak, sharing another moment that doesn’t need words.
Finally, Scully smiles at him. “I saw things too.” Her smile fades. “I witnessed unqualified hate. That appears to have no end.” Her mood grows dark as she sinks into her own thoughts, a sad look on her face.
“How to reconcile the two,” Mulder answers. “The extremes of our nature.”
“That’s the question. Maybe the question of our times.”
Mulder puts his phone down on his chair and stands up, holding his hand out to his partner. “Walk with me, Scully.”
She smiles and takes his hand. They head down the stairs and into the open field, the fresh open air blowing through the trees, the grass. It’s a sunny day and for once they are taking some time to enjoy it together.
“This whole thing has gotten me thinking,” Mulder says. “Thinkin’ about God.”
“You Mulder? Thinking about God?”
“The angry God of the Bible, Tower of Babel and Babylon, scattering people violently so as never to speak the same language.”
“Punishing man for his hubris,” Scully says as they continue to walk.
“Well that lesson didn’t stick,” Mulder muses. “But the anger sure remains.”
“It’s the same angry God as in the Koran,” Scully says as they continue their lazy walk in the sunshine. “Ordering death to the Infidels.”
“What exactly is this God thing?” Mulder asks. “Worship me in my great anger?”
“Well, that’s a good question Mulder. One for the ages.”
They walk a little more, still hand in hand.
“Well, think about the immense power in those prophecies,” Mulder says, “the power in those words to convince young men to put on suicide vests TODAY and murder for their angry God?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Those boys, they just swallowed a pill,” he answers, thinking. “It’s the power of suggestion.”
They stop and Scully studies him a moment, giving her partner an amused look. “Is this received wisdom from your Magical Mystery Tour?”
“Uh, yes, curtesy of the shrooms. Something else, something to trump all hatred.” He takes both her hands, looking right at her. “Mother love.”
“Whoa.” Scully tries to lighten the mood but realizes her partner is very serious. She waits for him to continue.
“I refuse to believe mothers are having babies just to be martyrs,” Mulder tells her. “I want to believe that mothers have a greater purpose. For all of us.”
“I agree,” Scully answers, now as serious as he is. “A child is not a tool to spread hatred.”
“Where does the hatred end then?” he asks her, honestly.
“Maybe it ends where it began,” she says, studying her partner. “By finding a common language again… Maybe that’s God’s will.”
“How can we really know?” Mulder asks. “He’s absent from the stage.”
Scully gives him a rueful smile. “Maybe it’s beyond words. Maybe we should do like the prophets and… open our hearts, and truly listen.”
Mulder studies Scully a second then nods, closing his eyes and smiling as he takes in a deep breath, “listening”. Scully chuckles softly.
Suddenly Mulder’s expression changes as he hears something. There’s a trumpet-like, mechanical grinding noise coming from… somewhere.
“What?” Scully asks. She doesn’t hear it, but she knows Mulder well enough to know something’s not right. He doesn’t answer, still looking around.
“What?” Scully tries again, looking around.
“Did you hear that?”
They continue to stand in the dirt road, holding hands as Mulder searches for the source of the noise. The Universe is clearly trying to tell them something, but what?
I belong with you, you belong with me
In my sweet heart
We zoom out from Mulder and Scully though the clouds, further and farther until we are looking at a shot of the entire world.
The music continues:
I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweetheart I belong with you, you belong with me, you're my sweet
Ho! Hey!
Hey! Ho!
Hey!
GUEST STARRING
BRUCE HARWOOD
TOM BRAIDWOOD
DEAN HAGLUND
Awww *sniff* I miss those guys! I don’t care what Chris Carter says, I thoroughly believe the Lone Gunmen are still alive and secretly operating from beneath Arlington National Cemetery, and one day we will see them again. Right? Right?!
Ok, I can take Agents Miller and Einstein if this is just an amusing way for Mulder and Scully to sort of switch roles this week, yet still remain true to themselves. But listen up FOX, if you’re trying to sneak in a backdoor spinoff or an X-files 2.0, just stop it, stop it now. If this episode proves anything, it’s that Mulder and Scully are back and better than ever and I wouldn’t want it any other way!
Really great episode, as always! I’ve already watched it three times already, and I still can’t get enough! Loved Skinner’s brief but humorous appearance. And the fact that Agent Einstein helped him with his Mulder-induced migraines. Haha! Oh Mulder. He may be a pain sometimes, but Skinner still has a soft spot for his two best agents, and I love it! (And the unexpected appearance of the hallucinated CSM was great.)
I can’t believe there is only one more episode left. Only ONE! That’s so sad! These past months have been so much fun hearing that it was really coming back, and waiting in ecstatic anticipation for the return of Mulder and Scully. We’ve all remembered how much fun it is getting back into the hunt for spoilery clues and reconnecting with a fandom that has remained strong for over two decades. I owe all of my best friendships in the word to The X-files. I really don’t know what I’ll do when it’s over. I’m going to need therapy or something guys. Seriously.
Here’s hoping for a swift and painless end to that misery with Fox quickly announcing a Mulder and Scully-filled Season 11! If that happened tomorrow, I’d be Mulder-dancing like crazy all over the place! (No magic mushrooms required.)
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