The X-Files Review: Founder’s Mutation (Season 10 Episode 2)

Guess who’s back and better than ever? It’s the FBI’s Most Unwanted, and they’re already in top form.

Improving vastly on the lacklustre first episode, The X-Files takes on its classic monster of the week style with “Founder’s Mutation.”After a researcher, Sanjay, stabs himself through the ear to stop a strange, high pitched ringing that only he can hear, Mulder and Scully arrive on the case to find the Department of Defence already taking over the investigation.

This is just another demonstration of how the government, rather than some otherworldly force, has become the main villain of The X-Files: not only do the reinstated FBI agents not have access to their crime scene, but also to any files pertaining to the company the victim worked for, either. Well, save for the ones Mulder slyly copied.

SCULLY: This is dangerous.
MULDER: When has that ever stopped us before?

After breaking into Sanjay’s apartment and discovering a wall full of research on various kids, Mulder and Scully both suspect the company Sanjay worked for, Goldman Technology, has been conducting tests on children. Their investigation is halted by Mulder, who collapses as the same ringing that eventually drove Sanjay to suicide starts screaming through his own head. The only thing Mulder seems to be able to make out through the ringing is the phrase “find her” repeated over and over again.

They attempt to access the company’s elusive founder through Scully’s current job at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital. It’s there that they encounter a group of women all involved in Goldman’s research into unborn fetuses with developmental abnormalities. One girl in particular, Agnes, reaches out to Mulder and Scully, saying that she wants to keep her baby, not give it up to Goldman and his research team. She seems terrified of being seen talking to the pair, and quickly pockets the card Mulder gives her.

All of this triggers deep worry in Scully. She flat out asks Mulder if he’s being gentle by not mentioning her own pregnancy and complications with their son, William. It’s clear that William’s adoption haunts Scully deeply–she even takes time to daydream while sitting at home and looking and William’s baby picture, imagining a life where she raised William, took him to school, consoled him when he broke his arm, and then, most horrifyingly, discovered a terrified William with the black oil first featured in The X-Files: Fight the Future in his eyes.

Most of the episode seems to move forward with an undercurrent of “what if” underneath it. What if William, now fourteen, had been taken by Goldman? What if he was just another experiment, and Scully just an incubator? This theme continues through the entirety of their investigation into the “Founder’s mutation” Scully had discovered written on the inside of Sanjay’s hand.

The many avenues they head down eventually do lead them to Augustus Goldman. His research indeed does involve children with grave birth defects or disabilities–but before Mulder and Scully can dig into any of his research, they’re escorted from the building after witnessing a young girl lose control and seemingly use some sort of telekinetic power to throw a temper tantrum.

The resolution to the episode is rather swift, and crammed quickly into the last quarter: Goldman’s wife, now committed to an asylum for “killing” her unborn son, tells Mulder and Scully that she was compelled to remove her son from her belly after running away from her insane husband, who had experimented on their daughter, Molly, and given her the ability to breathe underwater. Mulder and Scully find the very much alive son, Kyle, who is indeed the person who was causing the strange ringing (albeit unknowingly) in both Sanjay and Mulder’s ears. It turns out he was really just looking for his sister, Molly, the whole time.

Kyle and Molly reunite after an intense confrontation with their father, who Kyle kills. He breaks his sister out of Goldman Technology, and that’s the last we see of them–even Mulder and Scully don’t know where they went.

The episode closes with Mulder’s go at daydreaming about what his life would have been like as a father to William. He sees himself watching Escape from the Planet of the Apes with William, teaching him how to build a toy rocket, and then, in a scene eerily paralleled to what happened to Samantha Mulder all those years ago, Mulder sees William being abducted by a bright light through his bedroom window. In his hand, Mulder clutches the same picture Scully held during her own trip down “what could have been” lane.

It’s clear the William issue is far from over. With both Mulder and Scully constantly thinking about their son and what became of him, it seems inevitable that this season will take us deeper into how both agents feel about the missing child–but also, perhaps, down a path to finally finding out where the boy is once and for all.

What did you think of this episode of The X-Files? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Reviewer Rating:

User Rating:

 

The X-Files airs Mondays at 10/9c on FOX.

Follow us on Twitter @TellTV