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Review by Garnet Brooks

By Season Five the long running series had developed a complex mythology about aliens and governmental conspiracies. These themes are developed across the years at times becoming so intricate that only loyal viewers could easily understand them. At the end of Season Four the X-Files project is being discredited and Mulder is presumed dead.

Season Five begins with a two part-episode. The action is picked up where the last season cliffhanger left off. In it Mulder seems to be dead. Having been surveilled by a man upstairs, Mulder has found the location of the surveillance and confronted the man. This man who is an employee of the Department of Defense is then killed in a struggle. Mulder places the body in his own apartment and asks Scully to lie to her superiors gaining the pair a little more time to investigate. Another government employee named Kritschgau has become a whistleblower and is instrumental in convincing Mulder that the alien invasion theory is a lie and that a supposed alien body is actually the fulcrum of a hoax. While Scully has cellular material tested Mulder goes to a DOD facility looking for a cure and he finds multiple alien bodies which appear to be housing growing alien embryos. Scully finds that the cellular material is a chimera hybrid which is neither plant nor animal and is not identifiable. Mulder finds a sample labeled with Scully's name hidden among many others and delivers the sample to his three friends who publish the Lone Gunman magazine. Mulder makes it known that he is not dead. He returns to find that Scully is hospitalized and near death. Mulder finds that a chip is in the container he found and that it may be the cure for her cancer. He persuades her to try implanting the chip. For whatever reasons, Scully's cancer goes into remission.

This season begins with speculation about whether or not the aliens are real. What emerges across the season is the nature of the alien physiology. Often in the series the thing in question is glimpsed briefly and is vague, half-hidden, or ambiguous. But the aliens are real-they just have a complex etiology and genealogy. They are transmitted in black oil. They can grow in a human host. They have more than one stage of adult development. By the season's end we see that there is actually a way of communicating with them. This is through a little boy named Gibson Praise, a boy who is telepathic. He can read their thoughts. For this reason he is extremely important to the Smoking Man who schemes to take him for the leaders of the governmental conspiracy to use as an experimental subject. When Mulder and Scully find the child he is guarded and hidden away. But while a friend of Mulder's, Diana Fowley, is guarding Gibson she is shot and seriously wounded. Gibson is taken. Through an intricate set of maneuvers, the Smoking Man is able to discredit Mulder and Scully and by season's end the X-Files are shut down.

This season is one which contains a number of extremely good stand alone episodes. One of those is "Unusual Suspects." This episode is a flashback to 1989 where Mulder first encounters the three men known as the Lone Gunmen. The episode is focused on Byers, the most traditional of the three. We see Byers in a three piece suit attending a trade show as a representative of the FCC. He is enamored of a mysterious blond named Susanne Modeski. She tricks him into hacking into a governmental database and retrieving and decoding a secret document. She persuades Byers that Mulder is a psychotic and abusive ex-boyfriend who has kidnapped her child. The child is nonexistent. Modeski is really a chemist who has fled a top secret project when she finds that they plan to use her work to harm the public. A newly developed drug which makes people paranoid is to be tested on a sample of the population by distributing the medication in asthma inhalers. Modeski is able to persuade Mulder and the trio to help her find the shipment of dangerous chemicals. There is a showdown in the warehouse in which they are stored. Two mysterious men threaten Mulder then try to kill him. Modeski shoots them. In the process some of the medication is released causing Mulder to hallucinate. A clean up squad comes in taking the evidence away leaving the trio standing there alive. Modeski flees. Mulder and the trio are picked up by the police where the trio spend time in a jail cell till Mulder is well enough to verify their story and get them out. Byers sees Modeski one last time as she is attempting to get newspapers to print her account of the whole incident. As she leaves the men who were responsible for the clean up take her away in a car leaving Byers with his regrets. This is the beginning of the friendship between Mulder and the trio and is apparently the point in time that he changes directions looking into conspiracy theories and a little later finding the X-Files.

Another great stand alone episode in the season is "The Post-Modern Prometheus." This is one of the darkly comic episodes that punctuate the X-Files gloom from time to time. It is the story of a mad scientist type called Dr. Pollidori in homage to Mary Shelly who wrote Frankenstein. This silver haired scientist is played by John O'Hurley. His experiments in genetics have produced a mutated human whose distorted appearance makes him a social outcast. He lives in secret in his grandfather's basement. The grandfather loves him and protects him. The local people see glimpses of the boy from time to time. One of them Issy Berkowits a budding comic book writer and illustrator has already immortalized him as "The Great Mutato" in his comic book. Mutato is obsessed with Cher probably because of her role in the movie Mask. In this film she is a good mother to a boy whose appearance is like that of Mutato's. He craves a mother like this but has only his grandfather. In a very unrealistic fairy tale scenario Mutato impregnates lonely childless women including Issy's mother presumably because Issy is eighteen and about to leave her. Its tragic-comic plot mirrors the plot of Frankenstein, at least the film versions of it. Done in black and white, it evokes the feel of those early films. The plot builds to a conclusion as an angry mob pursues Mutato to his grandfather's barn where instead of burning the monster they decide he is not so bad after all. Mulder's character insists that the sad ending which must necessarily include loneliness and isolation for Mutato be rewritten. Issy is the ostensible author inside the story and its real author Chris Carter makes a nicer ending-one in which Mutato gets to go with the FBI agents and some of the townsfolk to a real live Cher concert. At least briefly, the mutant gets a good mom.

These two outstanding episodes are not the only ones in the season. Other stand alone episodes include "Kill Switch," "Bad Blood," "Mind's Eye," and "All Souls." Each of these deserves repeated viewing. "Kill Switch" is a cyberpunk episode authored by William Gibson. In it a cyber vixen named "Visigoth" is part of a plan to create a cyber intelligence. It becomes willful and gets loose on the net. "Bad Blood" is a rarity in the X-Files universe: it is a vampire tale. Scully becomes fascinated by the sheriff vampire played by Luke Wilson. "Mind's Eye" is about a blind woman played by Lilli Taylor. "All Souls" is a venture into Scully's Catholicism and in some ways echoes the themes developed in the second season of Millennium, also a Chris Carter creation.

The DVD boxed set of this year contains the usual features. The commentary is quite good especially Carter's. This is the year that precedes the X-Files movie. It takes up where the last episode leaves off and by the beginning of Season Six the FBI agents' artic adventure is over leaving them to try again to explain to their superiors why they believe in little grey men.