Not even going to say what it was, or where it was. But it was the coolest car I've ever seen. It just magically appears in this, the most bizarre X-Files episode, ever created. I remember when this episode and the previous episode written by Stephen King, "Chinga", were being promoted by Fox. I was expecting a treat with both episodes, and I certainly got a treat.
It's just one of those inexplicable things, especially with a story that William Gibson wrote, which could be a sequel to season two's "ghost in the machine"... where Blu Mankuma vows to keep trying to figure out a particular AI "until it kills him"... it probably did, if it was anything like the one in this episode.
But where ghost in the machine was a standard X file monster of the week, this episode is quite different. The story is different, the look is different. The music is very different. There are places in this episode that are very eerie.
Kristin Lehman is "InvsiGoth", One of three hackers responsible for creating this conundrum, and it is hard to describe how she appears in this episode, half punk rocker, half Halloween night reject- she is not as hot as she became in the series "Altered Carbon", where she played a woman that was hundreds of years old, but did not look too much older than she appears here except, more mature. She had always been one of my favorite actresses, especially in scenes from the Chronicles of Riddick that got removed from the theatrical release. I had followed her in a couple of other shows as well.
As far as the hacker element, The first hacker gets dealt with in an unusual way by the monster he has created in the very strange teaser, leaving behind his one-off franken-laptop, in which Mulder finds a CD that plays the song "Twilight Time". Which is just another piece of unusual music, more unusual than normal for the X-Files. Also, remember that CDs do not only hold music, they can also hold data. This becomes an important plot element later. One other thing about the teaser that is interesting is that the AI is calling drug dealers on the telephone. And the voice that it uses is a very human voice but there is that one little bit of quality where you can determine that this is an artificial voice. Most people upon hearing this would not figure it out... so they would assume any telephone calls from the AI were legitimate, because it uses the correct language when dealing with each of the different crooks that it calls. It's just another one of those things that adds to the eeriness of the café...
Kate Luyben is "Nurse Nancy", who was also (a victim) in two episodes of Chris Carter's other show "MillenniuM", The first one being the pilot, the second, "13 years later", where she plays/gets murdered alongside Paul Stanley of KISS.
Now you would think that the Lone Gunmen would be valuable assets to help figure out this episode, but they really only appear a couple of times, mostly to be made fodder of by InvisiGoth- Who is not very impressed with them in the least.
There are things here that remind me of William Shatner's Tek War series, some of the same things that we saw in that series of TV movies, we also see here: mainly, the existence of a virtual reality where you can't tell it from the real thing. This is an emerging technology that this episode predicted, on its way to happening today, but not quite, because we can't immerse all of our senses into a virtual reality platform - Yet. We can use vision and hearing, but not yet smell, taste, movement.
In the 1960's there were rides at Disneyland as a matter of fact that invoked a sense of movement... there was the one ride where you were actually standing in a "theater" with screens all around you and the film you were watching was as if you were on a cable car in San Francisco. And when you went down the hill, you felt like you were going downhill. There was also a Star Wars ride in the area that used to be the Tomorrowland "Space Stage", where C-3PO and R2-D2 piloted some kind of shuttle to bring you to Tatooine and the journey was a Mr. Toad's wild ride through hell, only in space- it was nothing but a theater but they used haptic feedback to give you the sense that you were making sharp turns, turning upside down, coming to a sharp halt.
And this was some thing that was available in the early 80s. Eventually we will be able to virtually plug ourselves into "another reality" and probably forget that we have to get up and eat and do other things. And this is something that Mulder gets to have a good look at... although, in his case it is not a Disneyland ride, it is a crazy artificial intelligence feeding him a nightmare alternate reality that keeps getting worse...
And this leads us to the question we should be asking, if we ever succeed in creating a thinking machine, that has the speed and storage capabilities of our modern computers, which even now can connect to other devices in our homes and control them, for one thing how are we going to treat it? What are we going to teach it? And how will it treat us depending upon how we treated it? This episode veers away from the X-Files way of telling that story and toward the William Gibson style... where everything is just a little bit off, uncannily, eerily, off.
And it all starts when InVisigoth escapes from her confinement in the lone gunman lair, and kidnaps Skully. After which the coolest car in the universe magically appears out of nowhere, with no explanation, and of course, nobody speaks about it, ever again.
Finally... until I get another Epiphany, there's this:
Regarding "InVisiGoth"
To not have her reprise the role ever again, This was a lost opportunity to the nth degree, especially with the Kill Switch "Sequel" "First Person Shooter" and the Langley based episode in S11 "THIS".
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