OK, in general, I don’t much care for the conspiracy/mythology episodes. But this one? One that actually delves in Deep Throat and his motivations? Written by the heavy hitters of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the pair that produced many of the better episodes from the series run? And introducing the Lone Gunmen, characters intended as one-offs but that making such an impression on the fans that they kept coming back and eventually got their own short-lived spin-off? Hey, I’m in!
No, I have no plans at present to cover The Lone Gunmen spin-off series.
The Case:Â Â A Shot Down UFO Might Have Left Behind An EBE!
The Rest:  So, for the record, an “EBE” is an “extraterrestrial biological entity.” And while that is what more or less drives the plot, it also feels incidental to me based on everything else that happens. It feels more like a McGuffin as Mulder’s faith in Deep Throat is perhaps shaken.
It’s understandable. This is the episode that introduced the Lone Gunmen. There’s normal-looking guy-in-a-suit Byers, Garth Algar lookalike Langly, and the odd-looking Frohike. Frohike was played by one of the series’s assistant directors who happened to walk by a casting office at the right moment according to Wikipedia, and that might explain why his dialogue here is limited to repeating how hot Scully is.
As near as I can make out, the Gunmen’s purpose here may be to make Mulder look reasonable by comparison. Mulder may believe in all kinds of things, but the Gunmen sound particularly paranoid. Scully doesn’t do much to discount Mulder’s alien beliefs this time around, but she does suggest to the Gunmen that the government is nowhere near competent enough to pull off half the things they claim, but they don’t quite seem to believe it
Then again, someone bugged their office and Mulder’s apartment.
But the thing that struck me here…how much does Scully believe in things? The only thing she questions here with Mulder is how trustworthy Deep Throat might actually be, and with good reason: he is misleading them this time. But she does go along with what Mulder wants to do, doesn’t really object too hard to the alien thing that I can recall, and for someone who doesn’t believe in alien life, she sure is going along with a lot.
The bottom line here is Deep Throat basically explaining his motivation, or at least a plausible one: decades earlier, the major world powers all agreed to kill any alien life that landed on Earth, and the task had fallen to Deep Throat once, a fact that has haunted him ever since. I’d question if that was true or not given the whole nature of Deep Throat and the conspiracy, but I do vaguely recall an episode that shows, in flashback, the very story Deep Throat tells here, and the tale came from a different source.
But somehow, it’s the Lone Gunmen, three characters who were intended for one-off appearances, two of whom only appear in one scene, that became the break-out characters for the episode. And given how often the series shows some lingering threat that the show never gets back to, that may be saying something.
Next time, a faith healer…and a faith killer!
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