Deep Throat (episode)
From X-Files Wiki
| |
| Series: | The X-Files |
| Original Airdate: | September 17, 1993 |
| Production Number: | 1x01 |
| Date(s): | August, 1993 1 |
| Written by: | Chris Carter |
| Directed by: | Daniel Sackheim |
| |
When he and Scully decide to investigate a possible conspiracy in the U.S. Air Force, Mulder meets a mysterious informant who warns him to stay away from the case but, undeterred, Mulder continues in his investigation, coming closer to the truth than ever before, only to have it snatched away from him.
Contents |
[edit] Summary
[edit] Teaser
NEAR ELLENS AIR BASE,
SOUTHWEST IDAHO
As a unit of armed military police prepare to storm a house, one of the building's owners, a Mrs. Anita Budahas, arrives at the scene and is told by a commanding officer that her husband has violated security protocol and has stolen an armed military vehicle. After the unit break into the house, Mrs. Budahas demands that she be allowed to speak to her husband, who is found by the police, curled up in a corner of the house, shivering, almost naked and covered with a skin irritation.
[edit] Act One
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Four months later, Mulder and Scully meet in a downtown Washington, D.C. bar at lunchtime, as Mulder had arranged. Scully declines his offer of a drink, due to the early time of day, and, as the FBI agents start to search for a seat, they are unknowingly watched by one of several men seated at the bar. At a table, Mulder briefs Scully on the disappearance of Colonel Robert Budahas, the man who was earlier found by the military police and is, since 1963, the sixth pilot to have gone missing from Ellens Air Base, where he had been stationed.
In the bar's washroom, Mulder encounters the man who was earlier watching him and Scully. The man reluctantly introduces himself as a potential government informer for Mulder and warns him to stay away from the case, stating that the military will not tolerate an FBI investigation. Mulder tries to follow the man out of the washroom but loses track of him. When Scully then approaches Mulder and asks if he is alright, he hesitantly replies positively, puzzled by his strange encounter with the man.
FBI HEADQUARTERS
Scully researches Ellens Air Base in a library within FBI Headquarters, finding that the base is known for attracting UFO buffs.
In his apartment, Mulder answers a call from Scully, in which she complains about her discoveries, but he is distracted by his own observations that his telephone is apparently bugged and that a man is watching his apartment window from a van parked outside. He refuses to discuss Scully's concerns with her until their flight and quickly ends their call.
MARRIETTE FIELD
SOUTHWEST IDAHO
The agents' airplane lands on a runway in Marriette Field.
As they later wait for Mrs. Budahas to answer her door, the duo hear the noise of a speeding aircraft, flying overhead. The agents question Mrs. Budahas, who is severely shaken by the loss of her husband and mentions that he started acting bizarrely, prior to his disappearance. She also tells Mulder that Verla McLennan's husband similarly went kind of crazy.
At Mrs. McLennan's home, the agents see that her husband is weirdly picking hairs from his own head and using them as fish bait. Mrs. McLennan reveals to the agents that he began behaving strangely almost two years ago and guesses that his condition was caused by stress. She is highly respectful to and thankful for the Air Force but makes a snide comment to Mrs. Budahas, apparently appalled that she has brought the FBI agents there.
Outside her own home, Mrs. Budahas provides the visiting duo with a list of phone numbers she has repeatedly tried to call. The agents then leave, discussing their theories as they walk to their car. Scully suggests that Mrs. McLennan's husband is suffering from stereotypy and that the pilots may be washouts from the Aurora Project, though these ideas are refuted by Mulder, based on the caliber of the pilots, particularly that of Colonel Budahas.
In their motel, the agents confer with each other, regarding their attempts to speak with a member of the Air Force. Scully mentions that she has managed to arrange an appointment with a Colonel Kissel and, even though Mulder is initially doubtful of this arrangement, he soon starts to search for more information about the colonel.
The agents confront Colonel Kissel as he arrives home. As soon as he learns of Mulder's identity, however, he refuses to cooperate with them and demands that they leave. After he hurries inside, the agents are confronted themselves, by a friendly man who introduces himself as local journalist Paul Mossinger. He remarks at the abundance of "UFO nuts" in the area, seemingly skeptical of the UFO phenomenon, and acknowledges the noise of another speedily overpassing aircraft. Mulder refuses to divulge how his and Scully's investigation is proceeding but asks Mossinger to suggest someplace where Mulder might talk to one of the aforementioned UFO nuts.
At "The Flying Saucer" diner, Mulder and Scully meet a woman who identifies the noise of yet another overpassing speedy aircraft as an F-15 Eagle and remarks on the arrogance of the pilots. With prompting from Mulder, she shows the agents a series of UFO photographs arranged behind the diner's bar, claiming that she took one herself and recalling her experience of witnessing the pictured craft. Mulder agrees to buy a print of the picture from the woman, influencing Scully to teasingly call him a "sucker", and asks about his chances of seeing a UFO himself, at which point Scully leaves the diner. Outside, she is studying a map of the area, worrying that it does not include Ellens Air Base, as Mulder exits. He alleges to have already known of the omission of the base from Scully's map and, calling her a "sucker" in return, he hands her a hand-written map he has been able to obtain that does show the base's location.
OUTSIDE ELLENS AIR BASE
6:04 P.M.
In their car, the agents drive off the main road and head up a hill, passing a military warning sign on the way.
Mulder brings the car to a stop next to a chainlink perimeter fence and then wanders up a grassy embankment on the other side of the vehicle while Scully, remaining at the bottom of the incline, criticizes Mulder's attempt to search for UFOs, now seriously annoyed with him.
At night, Scully is asleep in the car as a low rumble begins to resound but she wakens with a start upon hearing the vehicle's rear window shatter. Mulder hurriedly returns to the car to fetch her, eager to show her something.
[edit] Act Two
9:13 P.M.
The FBI agents watch two strange lights dance above the base, theorizing about what they are. After the lights seemingly rise out of sight and collide, the agents notice an approaching helicopter and two teenagers, a girl and boy, who make a hasty escape out of the base. The agents rush after the two teens and catch up with them. Even though the teenagers initially seem scared of the agents, all four individuals hide together under a tree and the helicopter soon flies away.
5:02 A.M.
In a roadside diner, the teenagers, Emil and Zoe, eat while being questioned, about the base, by Mulder and Scully. The teenagers recount their experiences of the base and Emil mentions one part of the area called the Yellow Base that, according to him, is supposedly a massive hangar surrounded by land-mines. Unknown to either of the four, a car arrives on the road outside and the vehicle's driver reports their presence to his superior, using obscure lingo. Inside the diner, Emil continues demonstrating the way in which the aircraft he has seen at the base fly and jokingly reveals his thoughts about the nature of the craft. When Mulder shows him the picture he obtained earlier, Emil claims it looks exactly like the craft he has seen.
After Mulder bids Emil and Zoe farewell outside a residential property, humorously emulating the teens' casual way of talking, Scully lets him know, in their car, that she doubts the teenagers' claims. Mulder, however, tries to convince her that there is a connection between the crafts at Ellens Air Base and the UFO that reportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, divulging that the base is supposedly one of six sites where parts from the wreckage were shipped and that he believes the military is flying planes built with UFO technology. Scully attempts to poke holes in Mulder's theory and argues that it does not adequately explain the disappearance of Colonel Budahas, an argument that Mulder ultimately agrees with.
Back at their motel, Scully races to Mulder's room and, after he jokingly guesses her purpose there, she relays news to him that Colonel Budahas was returned on the previous night.
The agents drive back to the Budahas residence, where they find Mrs. Budahas completely upset and in shock. She insists that a man sitting inside, who looks identical to her husband, is not actually him.
[edit] Act Three
Moments after Mulder quickly manages to slightly calm the tense situation, he questions the man who looks identical to Colonel Budahas. Mrs. Budahas confirms that almost each and every answer that the man gives is correct but, just as the man starts to voice his frustration regarding the interrogation, Mulder asks him a question regarding a flight maneuver that he struggles with, claiming he cannot remember the answer. He steps towards Mrs. Budahas but she backs away, sobbing.
After Mulder hurriedly leaves the Budahas residence, Scully rushes out after him, demanding that he professes whatever he believes is going on. Complying with her request, Mulder admits that he thinks Colonel Budahas' brain has been rewired, using some kind of selective memory drain. Scully argues that the means to do that do not exist and suggests amnesia as a cause for Colonel Budahas' memory problems. Mulder is unwilling to accept this possibility, however, and like the methods Scully claims do not exist, Mulder sarcastically says the same of the technology to fly the aircraft that the agents apparently saw on the previous night.
Mulder and Scully continue their discussion while driving along a highway but the agents are confronted by two cars, out of which step several Men in Black. After joking to Scully about his reluctance to open the door to the Lead Man, Mulder eventually does so, before the group of men remove any and all evidence from the agents' car. When Mulder questions their motives, he is assaulted by one of the men. Both agents are threateningly told to leave or risk the consequences of breaching national security.
In her motel room, Scully ends a phone conversation with a contact named Gail, finding that her attempt to track down one of the cars has been unfruitful. Mulder suggests that the helicopter that seemingly chased the teens out of Ellens Air Base was actually warding himself and Scully away, and that the military not only preemptively knew of the agents' visit but also returned Colonel Budahas as a decoy. Mulder then divulges to Scully that he was approached by the cautioning, secretive man in Washington, D.C. and that his own phone was being tapped, facts he assigns to a huge conspiracy that he believes not only exists but is also covering-up the presence of a UFO in the area. He and Scully passionately converse the consequences of such a secret but Scully, now that Colonel Budahas has been returned, is eager to leave. Mulder makes a futile attempt to appeal to Scully's curiosity and, moments after he agrees to prepare for their departure, he exits the room. Scully is soon alerted by the noise of their car, however, and hurries outside to see Mulder driving away without explanation.
Emil and Zoe show Mulder to a hole in the fence that surrounds Ellens Air Base. Though he is at first surprised when the teenagers don't follow him through the hole, they explain that they've only ever gone in at night. The teenagers describe the area inside the perimeter to him and Mulder wanders off as Zoe shouts after him from behind the fence, warning him not to go past the edge of some tall weeds that she knows about. Suddenly realizing they have forgotten to remind Mulder about the land mines, Emil calls after Mulder but he is too far from the teenagers to hear Emil's shout.
Mulder later nears the edge of some tall weeds, where he waits until nightfall. After he roams onto a runway, a triangular craft speeds towards him, instantly slowing to hover above him, and then shines a dazzlingly bright, white light down on him before darting away. Mulder is then chased a short distance along the runway by two military vehicles and, though he struggles, he is forcefully taken captive by men who emerge from the vehicles, restrain him to a gurney and then load him into one of their transports, both of which are then driven away.
[edit] Act Four
Still struggling inside one of the military vehicles, Mulder is injected and held down.
6:30 A.M.
Scully, meanwhile, strives to make a phone call, leaving her gun behind in her room before seeking the Motel Manager's permission to use his phone. After she finds that this phone is not working either, the Motel Manager tells her that one of the many things people commonly blame the nearby military interference for is the fact that phones are pretty undependable in the area.
The military vehicle carrying Mulder enters a warehouse or hangar where Mulder's gurney is offloaded from the vehicle and, as it is wheeled through the building, he, in his drugged state, sees men carrying out mysterious work on a large dark object that is shrouded from him behind a large sheet of plastic.
On her way back to her room, Scully is surprised to meet Paul Mossinger stepping out of her room but she realizes that she does not have her gun with her. He claims to have been looking for her and saw that her door was open. After Scully hears a burst of static from inside his car, however, she hurries inside the vehicle, locking the doors. She finds a gun in the car and military identification that proves he works at Ellens Air Base. Although he tries to break into the car, she manages to pull his own gun on him and forces him to place his hands on the car. After Emil and Zoe arrive, Emil tells Scully that they took Mulder to the base and Zoe adds that they themselves waited for him. Scully threateningly orders an initially resistant Paul Mossinger to determine Mulder's location.
In a medical facility, a light is shone into Mulder's left eye, into which is then dropped a driblet of a silver solution.
Amid their verbal sparring, Scully and Mossinger arrive outside the base's entrance, where Mossinger walks towards the base as Mulder gradually staggers away from it. As Mossinger passes Mulder, he tells the agents that everything they have seen in the area is equal to the protection that the military gives it and that the agents have been the ones who have acted inappropriately. Moments after Mulder enters the car and Scully hurriedly drives away, she curiously checks that Mulder is okay but he eventually reveals to being totally confused how he got there.
The agents visit the Budahas residence but Mrs. Budahas, noticeably discomforted, claims her husband is fine but is resting and, quickly thanking the agents for their concern, she closes the door on them. Even though Mulder is convinced the military have visited the residence and threatened Mrs. Budahas, Scully stops him from continuing his theorizing, irritably telling him that they know nothing more than when they arrived in the area and that she will write that in her field report. She is eager to leave immediately and begins to do so.
FBI HEADQUARTERS
WASHINGTON, D.C.
ONE WEEK LATER
In an office at FBI Headquarters, Scully types up her field report, in which she recounts that Colonel Budahas was bewilderingly returned home and officially refuses to confirm Mulder's insistence that the colonel may have suffered stress related trauma as a result of flying aircraft using recovered UFO technology. She does, however, collaborate his account of having seen two UFOs in the sky over Ellens Air Base and essentially closes the case, before picking up the UFO photograph that Mulder obtained at "The Flying Saucer" diner and looking at the picture.
On a race-track where he has been jogging, Mulder meets Deep Throat - the secretive man who approached him in the bar, earlier. The man now warns that the agents' lives may be in danger, because they have seen things that were not meant to be seen. As Mulder starts to talk about what he saw, Deep Throat interrupts the FBI agent with a reminder that he can provide information to Mulder, only so long as doing so is in his own best interest - namely, the truth. Although he does not confirm nor deny whether Mulder indeed saw a military UFO, the man reminds Mulder, by way of quizzing him, that the reason those who, like the FBI agent, believe in the existence of alien life on Earth are not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary is because it is not entirely dissuasive. Deep Throat starts to walk away but momentarily turns back, upon Mulder asking if aliens are indeed already on Earth, to admit that they have been there for a very long time.
[edit] Background Information
[edit] Introductory Details
- This was the first regular episode of The X-Files' first season, preceded only by the series' pilot episode. This is also the series' first episode to have the usual opening and closing credits sequences, accompanied by the expected theme tune.
[edit] Story & Script
- When Mulder briefs Scully on the specifics of the case near the start of this episode, the setup varies in this episode from the series' usual formula, as the setting is a Washington, D.C. bar instead of Mulder's basement office.
- As a compromise to 20th Century Fox, which wanted more closure to the story, Chris Carter added a narration by Scully near the end of this episode after it was filmed. Although Carter continued to argue against pat resolutions, voice-over narrations became a recurring narrative device.
[edit] Cast & Established Characters
- This episode features Jerry Hardin in his first appearance as The X-Files' recurring character "Deep Throat". The character was based on the infamous Watergate informer who used the same pseudonym, particularly as depicted in All the President's Men - one of the primary inspirations of writer and series creator Chris Carter, and a big influence on the series' writing staff in general. According to Carter, he intended the character to be someone who comes from a mysterious, shadowy government, of which the public has no knowledge of, and selectively helps Mulder and Scully when they reach a dead end or mistakenly follow the wrong lead in an investigation, without giving them too many answers. Somewhat surprisingly, the character's historic pseudonym is never mentioned within this episode itself, being first used by Scully in "The Erlenmeyer Flask", the last episode of Season 1.
- Regarding casting this character for the series, Chris Carter contrasted the role to the Cigarette Smoking Man, setting out to find someone who could portray "Deep Throat" with a similar but different quality. Jerry Hardin's role in the 1993 Sydney Pollack movie The Firm essentially became his audition for the part and evidently won him the role.
- Actor Vince Metcalfe, who appears in this episode as Colonel Kissel, would later guest star as General Groves in the Millennium episode "Matryoshka".
- Andrew Johnston, who portrays Colonel Budahas in this episode, would return to The X-Files as Agent Barrett Weiss in Season 2's two-part "Colony" and "End Game", as well as a Medical Examiner in the fourth season episode "Demons". He would also appear in Millennium, as County Coroner John Tasini in "Weeds" and as Principal Kramer in "TEOTWAWKI".
- Sheila Moore, who appears in this episode as Verla McLennan, would return to The X-Files, as Mrs. Dawson in the second season episode "Excelsis Dei" and would also guest star as Clea Bangs in the Millennium episode "The Well-Worn Lock".
- Michael Puttonen would, following his role in this episode as the Motel Manager, also reappear in The X-Files, as Dr. Pilsson in the Season 2 episode "Sleepless", a Conductor in third season episode "731" and as Martin Alpert in Season 4's "Elegy". He would also appear in Millennium and a single episode of The Lone Gunmen, not only guest-starring as Pathologist Massey in both Millennium's pilot episode and "The Judge" as well as portraying a Coroner in "Siren", but also appearing in The Lone Gunmen episode "Diagnosis: Jimmy" as Dr. Bromberg. However, the actor, Michael Puttonen, was informally referred to, in credits of both The X-Files episode "Elegy" and Millennium's pilot episode as "Mike Puttonen".
- Actress Gabrielle Rose, appearing in this episode as Anita Budahas, would later portray the character of Dr. Zenzola in the second season episode "The Host". She would also guest star in Millennium's "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me", as an Aging Stripper, and "Saturn Dreaming of Mercury", as a Welcome Lady.
[edit] Other Episode Notes
- A building used to represent the exterior of the Budahas residence, most clearly seen at the start of this episode, would later regularly feature as the home of Frank, Catherine and Jordan Black in episodes of Millennium, with the notable exception of that series' pilot episode in which another building was used.
- The scene in which a UFO flies over Mulder and casts a light down on him was shot, according to visual effects supervisor Mat Beck, on a pretty hectic day. When the lighting rig was revealed to Beck, he saw that it was essentially a kind of 1970s disco setup that shone some pretty funny-looking colored lights on the ground, while the rig was actually meant to resemble a mysterious high-tech spaceship.
- Long lenses were used for this episode's final scene, of which Chris Carter is a fan.
- This episode was the first from The X-Files that Assistant Art Director Clyde Klotz worked on. He would later marry Scully actress Gillian Anderson on January 1, 1994.
[edit] Memorable Quotes
- "Mr. Mulder, they've been here for a very long time." - Deep Throat
- "It'll be flying over Saddam's house, and he'll be all like...'What?' - Emil
[edit] Footnotes
1 No information to date "Deep Throat" can be found in the episode itself. However, the CD-ROM The X-Files: Unrestricted Access dates the events of this episode to within August 1993, after the late July date of "Squeeze", as seen on a computer screen in that episode, even though "Squeeze" was produced and broadcast subsequent to this episode, and is arranged after "Deep Throat" on The X-Files Season 1 DVD.
[edit] Guest Cast
[edit] Guest Starring
- Jerry Hardin as Deep Throat (First appearance)
- Michael Bryan French as Paul Mossinger
- Seth Green as Emil
- Gabrielle Rose as Anita Budahas
- Monica Parker as Ladonna
[edit] Co-Starring
[edit] Featuring
- Jon Cuthbert as Commanding Officer
- Vince Metcalfe as Kissel
- Michael Puttonen as Motel Manager
- Brian Furlong as Lead Officer
- Doc Harris as Mr. McLennen
[edit] Uncredited
- Charles Cioffi as Section Chief Scott Blevins
- Cody Serpa as Josh Budahas
- Carrie Classen as Leslie Budahas
[edit] References
| Previous episode: Pilot | The X-Files Season 1 | Next episode: Squeeze |
