Pilot episode of X-Files

On September 10, 1993, Fox first broadcast the pilot episode of The X-Files (titled: Pilot), and the next chapter in the world of cult network television began.  Like Twin Peaks before it and Lost much later, The X-Files was defined by wonderful creepiness, mystery, and not a small amount of outright confusion.  I loved it.

I'm not going to get into the plot summary of the episode.  You can read about it on your own, or watch it on Netflix-streaming if you like.  I'm going to focus largely on one scene.  The scene which presumably inspired organic chemists to hop off their couches on that day in 1993 and cry, "Did you see that?" to their indifferent loved ones.  Yes, the pilot episode of The X-Files included a brief glimpse of an honest-to-goodness organic molecular structure.

The scene in question is ridiculously expository.  In fact, a lot of the early scenes are.  That just comes with being a pilot episode.  You have to introduce the show's concept somehow, and the easy way is to have the characters spell things out in plain language even if that type of thing rarely happens in real life.  For example, in an earlier scene (the only earlier scene), at their prompting, Agent Dana Scully spouts off the professional history of Agent Fox Mulder to a room full of mysterious, suited, middle-aged white men who are clearly in charge of something (possibly everything).  She does this despite the fact she's never met Agent Mulder, and the men to whom she's speaking know everything about him.  Obviously, this is all for the benefit of the audience.  We learn that Dana Scully is a smartypants who keeps up on FBI lore, and we learn that Fox Mulder is an "Oxford-educated psychologist" who needs to be spied on.  Boom!  One scene densely-packed with back story and we're on our way.

In the scene with the chemical structure, it's Fox Mulder's turn to teach us about Dana Scully.  She wanders down to his basement office to introduce herself to her new "partner" (Mulder's office arrangements remind me a little of Milton's situation from Office Space.  I wonder if the FBI had secretly quit paying him, too).  Mulder takes the opportunity to recite Scully's educational and professional history to her.  Now we know he, too, is a smartypants who keeps track of people within the Bureau, and that she has a physics undergraduate degree complete with an impressive-sounding senior thesis which she followed up with a medical degree that led her to the FBI where she teaches at the Academy.  Whew!  I'm glad we got all that straight.  Exposition over.  Time to get into an investigation.  And without taking a breath, they do.

Mulder has been following a series of murders of some kids from the class of 1989 of the same high school in Oregon.  Mulder conveniently has a slide presentation of the evidence uncovered thus far (these days he'd use PowerPoint, of course).  The autopsy results haven't provided any compelling cause of death, but each of the victims has a pair of relatively nondescript red spots on his or her back.  After presenting this much to Scully, the following exchange ensues:

MULDER: How's your chemistry?  (advancing to the next slide) This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue.
SCULLY: It's organic.  I don't know.  Is it some sort of synthetic protein?
MULDER: Beats me.  I've never seen it before, either.

Here's what's on the slide:

Again, I drew this myself.  It's pretty close to what showed up on the screen in Mulder's office.

I have to say I think Scully addressed Mulder's inquiry pretty well.  As a doctor she should definitely be able to recognize whether or not a chemical structure is organic.  Even so, she acknowledged that she didn't really know what the structure was, and then she made a reasonable guess that suggested she could recognize a peptide.  That's the type of thinking you're expected to show in your qualifying exams in graduate school.  She gets a B- in my book.

Here's how the conversation might have gone had a trained organic chemist been involved:

MULDER: How's your chemistry?  (advancing to the next slide) This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue.
CHEMIST: It looks like it's supposed to be a tripeptide of some sort.  I couldn't say much about it without knowing what the R groups are.  By the way, you know that the lone pairs don't have to be explicitly drawn on the carbonyl oxygens, right?
MULDER: Huh.  Well...I'm a little out of practice with my structures I guess.  I should have spent more time on that at Oxford.

And what role does this generic peptidey compound play in the rest of the episode?  Absolutely none, and that's sad, I think.  The whole exercise of including the chemical structure is just another piece of exposition.  It's a throw away moment meant to demonstrate that the psychologist and the physics-trained medical doctor knew their way around the chem lab, too. In fact, they're so chemically knowledgeable that merely failing to recognize a random tripeptide (ill-defined as it was) makes the molecule suspicious.   Ultimately, chemistry is taken for granted, as it often is.  It's just a tool for the writers to establish that Mulder and Scully are scientifically well-rounded and wicked smart.

I'm not going to give The X-Files characters too much guff, though.  Not Scully, anyway.  In the middle of the episode she has the following line during an argument with Mulder about his desire to employ fantastical theories to explain the evidence they have:

"What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.  The answers are there.  You just have to know where to look."


That's a real scientist.   I knew there was a reason I had a crush on her.  And she clings to this philosophy even as the most inexplicable ridiculous crap happens around her...at least until she gives birth to the alien baby.