The X-Files is one of the few television series that has managed to maintain a consistent and growing fan base throughout the years. After all, why not? What more does one need than two FBI agents tackling weird and unearthly mysteries?
Dana Scully and Fox Mulder worked for the FBI’s special division that investigated cases involving inexplicable occurrences. The show had an overarching storyline but they also used to have monster of the week episodes, which served as stand-alone entries.
In today’s video, we’ll take a closer look at one of these episodes, Ice. The narrative bears striking similarities to John Carpenter’s The Thing and Joseph Campbell’s book Who Goes There.
However, Ice stands out in its own right as a great episode because it puts Scully and Mulder into the center stage and builds the story around them. Every scene, action and dialogue has been specially curated to fit the premise of the show. So, let’s begin, shall we?
In The Beginning
Agent Dana Scully of the FBI arrives in Washington to meet with a few of her top officials who had called her in the pilot. Scully had been with the FBI for nearly two years prior to this encounter.
She joined the FBI after graduating from medical school, but she didn’t want to practise or do research as a medical scientist since she believed the FBI would help her advance in her profession. The men inquired if she was familiar with an agent named Fox Mulder.
Mulder, on the other hand, was already a well-known figure in the investigative community due to his extensive educational and professional experience. Mulder earned an Oxford degree in psychology and utilised his knowledge to produce a thesis on serial murderers and the supernatural.
That work helped the agency to catch the notorious serial killer Monty Props in the year 1988. Though Mulder was considered to be the best analyst in the violent crimes division, he had managed to earn the nickname of Spooky Mulder.
However, Mulder is not anymore assigned to the violent crimes division, instead working in a special sector that attempts to solve the so-called X Files or cases that relate to certain unexplained phenomena.
Scully has been asked to help Mulder in his investigation of the X Files. She’d be producing thorough and detailed field reports, as well as her own personal views and opinions on the work’s validity.
The agency required Scully to do an accurate scientific study of Mulder’s work, it was revealed. To put it another way, she was supposed to disprove the X Files. She then meets Mulder, and their chat exposes a great deal about Scully’s knowledge, intelligence, and intellect.
Scully is basically a sceptic who believes in scientifically verified truths and laws, according to this information. Mulder, on the other side, is someone who, from a logical and factual standpoint, doubts the scientifically accepted facts.
He asks Scully one simple question, Scully tries to give a rational explanation and says that no answers can be found beyond the realm of science. But Mulder doesn’t want to restrict himself with the limited knowledge that science has provided him with; he believes that there’s much more than what we already know!
However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and go on to one of the most well-known X Files episodes, and perhaps the most dramatic and compelling from the first season.
Murder and Suicides
So, episode 8 of the first season of the programme begins at the Arctic Ice Core Project, a research facility located 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska’s Icy Cape area. The location and weather indicate that the struggle at the facility will be difficult.
It’s a region where the wind may kill you, where the conditions are as severe as they can be; the cold, ice desert makes it tough to imagine a warm, pleasant spot where you won’t be frozen to death.
The camera follows a dog around the institution, revealing dead people wherever he goes. An injured and bleeding man comes out from the shadows to turn on the video camera and make a recording of himself, repeating the words, The man was bleeding and it seemed that he had been in a fight recently.
It wasn’t long before another man attacked him. The two of them got into hand-to-hand combat before pulling guns on each other. However, after a stare-off, they pointed their guns at themselves and committed a double suicide. To start an episode on such a grim note is one of the many reasons why Ice received a positive reception from both critics and fans alike.
Mulder gives Scully two videotapes, the first of which depicts a group of Arctic Ice Core Project scientists celebrating after breaking the world record for deepest digging. They had excavated to recover ice that had been buried deep under the surface.
It had chemicals, dust, gases, and shreds of evidence that could reveal the climate of Earth from 250,000 years ago. It was an extremely valuable finding from the frame of reference of geology.
The second recording, which was dated a week later, was from the events at the start of the episode. There were no signals of difficulty or anything else, and the men’s job was virtually complete.
Why did they kill each other now, all of a sudden? The mass murder was unquestionably an example of unexplained phenomena. Naturally, Mulder and Scully were assigned to it. They leave for the Alaskan city of Nome, where they meet the toxicologist Dr. Da Silva, the physician Dr. Hodge, and the geologist Denny Murphy.
The Single – Celled Alien
They arrive at the institution with a pilot named Bear and discover that it is littered with the bodies of scientists, with just a dog still alive. Mulder adhered to protocol and encouraged Scully to photograph the murder scene before touching anything.
The dog attacked Mulder in one of the rooms but was unable to bite him due to his jacket. Bear arrived to aid Mulder and was bitten by the dog as he battled. Hodge administered anaesthesia to the dog and put him to sleep for a time. Scully and Hodge notice several black nodules on the canine during their examination.
They also discover a skin irritant on the animal’s neck, beneath which a foreign item wriggled away. While Bear was bandaging himself in the washroom, he experienced a burst of pain only to discover that he had the same black nodules.
The man completely freaked out at the nodules and made his way to the scientists to get a few of his questions answered. Scully autopsied the dead and discovered that all but Richter and Campbell killed themselves.
Bear approaches Scully, inquiring as to if the nodules were involved in the murders. Hodge stopped the talk to disclose that the black spots on the dog had vanished, and he speculated that they may be an indication of an illness in its early stages.
The scientists were really excavating within a meteor crater, Denny informs Mulder. This is the first time we’ve considered the prospect of an extraterrestrial species being responsible for the killings.
They finally figure out that the carnage at the Project facility was caused by an alien entity. Scully found traces of ammonium hydroxide in Richter’s blood sample but this was strange because the chemical vaporizes at very low temperatures, including that of the human body. Also, Denny, the geologist, found the same chemical in the samples that the dead team of scientists had recovered from the meteor crater.
They detected a single-celled creature under the microscope, the identical one that was found in Richter’s blood sample. Mulder took a step further in demonstrating his idea of extraterrestrials on Earth with these findings. So basically, these people are dealing with an unknown organism that survived the sub-zero temperatures for millions of years.
Paranoia Takes Birth
Bear grows increasingly frustrated and enraged as Mulder, Scully, and the others learn more about the parasitic alien. Bear loses his calm and threatens to leave without being exposed to a medical checkup when Hodge says blood and faeces samples are necessary to test if any of them are contaminated.
Bear is imprisoned by the agents and scientists until he agrees to produce the sample. However, upon restraining him, they saw that he started to experience spasms. Adding to this, they saw the same wriggling object on the neck under Bear’s skin. Hodge extracts a large worm from Bear’s neck through an incision, but it turned out that Bear succumbed to some kind of poison that the worm excreted.
Mulder hurried on the radio and sought rapid rescue and quarantine from Doolittle Air Field, but they warned him that no aeroplane could reach the base for at least 24 hours owing to inclement weather.
Scully then retrieved the worms from all of the dead researchers and discovered that the parasitic worm binds to the host’s spinal cord before moving on to the brain’s hypothalamus gland.
Now, the hypothalamus gland produces a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, a hormone that promotes violent and aggressive behavior. All those who had been infected displayed belligerence.
Mulder later tells Scully about his idea to keep the worms alive so that they might be studied. His reasoning is that there may be more of these worms somewhere, and humans won’t be able to battle them effectively if they don’t know what they’re up against.
Scully, on the other hand, believes that the worm should not be sent to the mainland due to the risk of infection. She claims that the parasite takes only a few hours to dominate the victim, causing them to act violently and erratically.
This is very much unlike Sully, who’s a woman of science and always prefers to get to the bottom of things. Here, she wishes for a great discovery of humanity to be burned down. Naturally, she gives more importance to life than science, or does she?
As a result, we’ve created a closed atmosphere in which everyone has cause to fear and suspect the others. The narrative and the environment contribute to the protagonists’ sense of unease.
The symptoms of infection and the behavior caused because of paranoia and claustrophobia feel one and the same. It becomes very difficult for both the viewer and the characters to tell who is actually infected and who isn’t.
When The Disease Becomes The Cure
The others get anxious about the federal officers as they debate. Hodge believes they already knew everything when they got to the institution. They later examine each other for black nodules and, after discovering that no one is afflicted, they decide to rest.
Fear, on the other hand, runs in their veins. Mulder hears a noise late that night and goes to investigate. He comes upon Denny’s body just as DaSilva, Hodge, and Scully enter.
They first suspected him of murdering Denny, but when he denies it, Scully demands that Mulder agree to a blood test. Given the hostile atmosphere, it was challenging to figure out the infection without a medical test.
But Mulder refused to take the test, assuming that Hodge or anyone else may alter the test results to implicate him willfully. Although viewers know that Mulder is innocent, his decision creates huge tension for the characters. This tension is carried forward with an equal amount of momentum throughout the rest of the runtime.
Mulder accepts to be quarantined at long last. (Behind closed doors, I’ll be safer than you) Hodge, Scully, and DaSilva continue to research the worm in the hopes of discovering a cure.
Hodge loses his temper as DaSilva botches a routine surgery that Hodge had requested her to do. This shambles, on the other hand, assisted Scully in discovering that tiny larvae from various hosts kill each other, hinting that adult worms must do the same.
They started by putting two worms in glass jars and placing them close together; the worms acted like beta fish and tried to destroy each other. They tested the theory by inserting a worm into the dog’s ears, and after a while, the poor dog started to behave normally.
Hodge later revealed that the dog passed the worm in his excreta. This proved that an infected host could be cured by inserting a worm from another host. The worms are territorial organisms and kill their own because they can reproduce asexually without the need for a mate.
The Final Act
Scully visits Mulder and informs him of their new strategy. Mulder cautions that giving him the worm will just infect him since he doesn’t already have one within him. Scully requests that he be checked, and he agrees. They go to visit DaSilva and Hodge after winning one another’s trust.
However, they lock Scully inside a room and force their way to dump a worm into Mulder’s ears. But, at the last instant, Hodge notices the slithering maggot under DaSilva’s skin and pushes her away. They overpower her and insert the worm inside her ear.
Finally, they were able to successfully eliminate the threat of population contamination. Later, it was reported that the dog and DaSilva had been quarantined and were being monitored. Mulder expressed his firm resolve to go back to the facility, but he didn’t know that it had already been incinerated by higher authorities, and he didn’t know who.
The episode took considerable effort to develop the characters, particularly Scully’s. She had previously been characterised as someone who followed Mulder’s orders. However, because Mulder was confined in Ice, she assumed command.
She’s also been described as someone who is curious and won’t stop until she’s figured out what’s going on. But she’s probably seen too much in this place to be any more curious Contrary to her fierce and courageous nature, we sense fear in this statement. Nevertheless, she bloomed as a more intelligent person and effectively took the thunder away from Mulder.
If you’ve made it this far and are still having fun, we have a special reward in store for you. Don’t forget to watch our films on movies that are similar to The Thing, as well as an in-depth look at John Carpenter’s The Thing. The links will be left in the description.