The X-Files “Piper Maru”

Ah, the black oil.  The…whateveritis.  Is it alive?  A disease?  Some weird alien thing?

It shows up here for the first time.

The Case:  A Lot Of Radioactive Frenchmen!

The Rest:  Here’s an episode where The X-Files gets a bit more international than it has.  A French salvage ship finds a World War II aircraft on the bottom of the ocean, there’s a guy alive inside, and soon, the French diver is back on the boat with some weird black stuff swirling around his eyes.  Later, he’s the only member of the crew who isn’t dying of radiation poisoning.  What the heck happened down there?

Eh, I don’t know.

It occurs to me I say that a lot about this show.

This time around, I really don’t know.  It’s a two parter, and what I remember of the black oil tells me I may never know.  It goes from person to person, and whoever is infected can give off blasts of deadly radiation.  When the black oil leaves someone, they don’t generally remember what happened.  Or at least that French guy doesn’t.  His ship was after, you know, something, and Mulder will fly all the way to Hong Kong for answers.  By then, the French guy is fine because the black oil infected his wife.  She’s in Hong Kong.  So if Krycek, and the oil infected him.

Two things:  Krycek is still the one guy Mulder can take in a fight, and there is a very confused American woman in a Hong Kong men’s room after the oil takes Krycek.

Back in the States, Scully actually applies knowledge of World War II aircraft to talk to one of her dad’s old friends and learns a harrowing tale set aboard a model sub of the oil infecting a whole lot of people about the same time that plane went down.

Oh, and Skinner refused to stop looking into the death of Scully’s sister, so he got shot by bad guys.  Just about when Skinner was starting to become a real ally…

So, the black oil.  Will it get explained?  Does anything?  Not really.  It’s mostly Mulder making assumptions that might as well be true.

Up next, well, more of the oil.