“The X-Files” has returned to FOX with the much awaited season 10. Join Mieke Zamora-Mackay as she recaps episode 2, “The Founder’s Mutation.”
The X-Files are now open and Mulder and Scully are back on the job. Their first assignment takes them to the offices of Nugenics Technologies where a researcher has killed himself by stabbing a letter opener into his ear. All attempts by Mulder and Scully to investigate the matter are blocked by the Department of Defense, who funds the work by the company. The founder of the company is Dr. Augustus Goldman, who also runs another facility called Goldman Technologies.
Using her own resources, Scully approaches an administrator in the hospital she works in, Our Lady of Sorrows, to gain access to Dr. Goldman. Dr. Goldman, a benefactor of the hospital, sponsors a ward for indigent pregnant women. While at the ward, the agents are approached by a patient who asks them to help her get away from the hospital. She is afraid that her child, who is believed to have a type of deformity, will be taken from her. Mulder slips her his business card to use in case she wants to talk.
Dr. Goldman, who specializes in genetic manipulation, agrees to meet with the agents at his facility. While there, Mulder and Scully are presented with a gallery of children bearing serious genetic abnormalities, all of which, Dr. Goldman claims he is seeking ways to prevent. However, when they witness a young girl with apparent telekinetic abilities throw some sort of tantrum, they are quickly dismissed. Immediately after, Mulder and Scully are called to the scene of an accident involving the girl they had spoken to earlier. A victim of an apparent hit-and-run, however, the baby she’d been carrying has been surgically removed.
The agents suspect that Dr. Goldman is experimenting with alien DNA as part of a secret project that The Syndicate may be involved in – the creation of an alien-human hybrid. They believe that the women in the hospital ward are being used as incubators for the hybrid creatures.
After tracing Dr. Goldman’s background, they find that his own wife is committed to a mental hospital after having killed her own unborn child. Mrs. Goldman tells them that she believed her husband used their own child as a test subject after she found her daughter, Molly, alive and breathing underwater in the backyard pool. Pregnant, she fled the family home and became involved in a car crash. As she attempted to extricate herself, she claims that a piercing sound from within her told her to release the baby in her belly… with a kitchen knife…
Mulder’s keen observation abilities lead them to a janitor at the Nugenics facility, who appears to have a reaction at the exact same time the researcher killed himself. The janitor is Kyle, who has a unique ability to emit a hypersonic sound, the exact same one the researcher and Mulder himself had experienced. It is revealed that Kyle has been looking for his own sister, Molly.
Kyle is brought back to the Goldman Technologies facility, where he is tested. Dr. Goldman tricks him into meeting a girl he claims is Molly. But Kyle quickly realizes the ruse and goes off on a search for his sister. He finds Molly, the girl we saw earlier with telekinetic power, and find that they can communicate with their minds. Together, they are a formidable force causing glass to shatter and throwing Scully and Mulder across the hallway with their minds. Kyle uses his own ability to produce a hypersonic sound that causes his father’s brain to disintegrate.
Kyle and Molly manage to escape after Mulder and Scully black out.
THAT’S MORE LIKE IT…
Now this is an episode I can get behind. As long as you don’t study the episode too deeply (Watch out! you just might find several dropped plot lines), this is a pretty good one. The pacing is good, the underlying theme is intriguing, and the gross-out factor is pretty intense with all the bloody scenes.
Skinner is now more complicit with Mulder and Scully, ensuring that they have enough time to complete their investigation before officially “closing” the file after the Department of Defense blocks their progress.
Within the episode, we are treated to some insight into what Mulder or Scully would have been like as parents to their son, William. Both appear to be doting parents to the young boy, however each agent’s fears are clear. Scully is afraid that her son might actually have been an alien hybrid experiment, while Mulder fears that his son will be abducted just like his sister, Sam. William’s backstory is that he was given up for adoption to protect him and ensure his safety. The presentation of William gives me hope there will be a resolution to what actually happened to their son. Let’s face it, I am a sucker for the Happily Ever After between Mulder and Scully, and now of course, their son.
