With last week’s installment of The X-Files blowing the lid off the Easter egg game, this week’s seemed less likely to do so.
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A dour, character-driven story, the episode dealt with the loss of a long-running recurring character amid a backdrop of a truly gross monster of the week.
So…why do we have an Easter egg post for it? Mostly because apparently you should never make assumptions about the new X-Files.
So…what did we see? What did we miss?
Read on, and comment below.
Home Again
The episode title — “Home Again” — was widely misunderstood as being a sequel to “Home,” an early episode of The X-Files in which Agents Scully and Mulder face off against an inbred family of killers a la The Hills Have Eyes.
The confusion was compounded by the fact that, right around the time this episode title was revealed and those rumors started to spread online, writer Joe Harris was in fact writing a sequel to “Home,” also titled “Home Again,” in The X-Files Season Eleven, a comic book series which was said to take place in-canon to the TV series.
Following the debut of the TV miniseries, The X-Files Season Ten and Season Eleven no longer seem to be canon, although the quality of the work speaks for itself and a new, ongoing The X-Files by Harris is coming soon from IDW.
The X-Files Season Eleven Volume 1, which collects the three-part “Home Again” storyline, is due in stores soon. You can preorder it at your local comic shop or buy it on Amazon here.
One Breath
When word came that the series wouldn’t be doing sequels to popular episodes — that’s really more territory for the comics, where Flukeman and the Lone Gunmen have been featured prominently in storylines — it didn’t account for episodes like tonight’s.
No, it’s not a sequel to “Home,” or really a direct sequel to anything, but the sensibility of tonight’s episode is arguably very much a sequel to “One Breath,” the Season Two episode in which Scully is in a coma and pictures herself talking to her recently-deceased father.
There are references to that episode aplenty, from name-dropping all of Scully’s siblings (most of whom played very little role in the series) to actually showing footage of Mulder at Scully’s bedside back then.
When Scully tells her mother that she’s been where her mother is right now, and that she knows Ahab and Melissa are there, she’s not exaggerating; at various points in the series, she’s seen apparitions of her dead loved ones, especially during near-death experiences of her own.
Also, like “One Breath,” it’s arugable that the paranormal aspect of tonight’s episode was almost an afterthought; the story was largely driven by the emotional impact of what was going on with Scully.
The color palette and composition of the episode’s final shot even felt a bit like it would have been at home in Scully’s “limbo” on the water in “One Breath.”
The X
Speaking of visual callbacks, when Mulder says “back in the day is today,” or something close to it, and the pair fire up their iconic flashlights, we quickly get the shot above — which seems to intentionally evoke not just images we’ve seen in-episode before, but also pretty much all of the promotional artwork for the series, which found creative ways to make the “X.”
It’s also an inversion of the movie poster for The X-Files: I Want to Believe, in which the shadows of Scully and Mulder cast an X against a wide beam of light evocative of a flashlight.
William
We’ve talked about William before — it’s clear that the child Mulder and Scully gave up for adoption will play a role in their character arcs this season.
But seeing the flashbacks to his birth and when they gave him away was heart-wrenching, piling on what was already a kind of hard-to-watch (in the best way) episode of TV.
…Wow, I crammed a lot of Easter eggs into one kind of umbrella category of “One Breath” above. That might actually be it…!
