Oh this is a great episode. It’s one of those fun ones that starts off looking like one kind of mystery but then BAM, it veers way to the left and turns into something even creepier in many ways.
I remember this one fondly from childhood. I specifically remember being freaked the FUCK out by the scene where you can see Teena’s dad slumped over on the swingset, and even more freaked when she tells Mulder about the “red lightning”. So unsettling.
Mulder jumps right on the UFO train, naturally. After Teena is kidnapped, Scully tells him they’ve set up road blocks but have yet to find her, and Mulder responds by pointing up to the sky and saying “maybe they weren’t looking in the right direction”. When Mulder refers to her as being “abducted” and Scully corrects him — “kidnapped” — he jokingly says “potato, potahto”. But the truth is almost as wild and crazy.
We see Deep Throat again, and we get to see a bit of how him and Mulder communicate. Mulder receives a phone call to his room that Scully answers and when she responds that it’s just clicks on the other end, he tries to casually hurry her out of the room (“you’re rushing me out… do you have a girl coming over?”… “what’s a girl?”) before going to meet his informant. Deep Throat reminds him of the Lichfield Experiment, a top secret Cold War-era eugenics experiment to genetically modify children so they would grow into better soldiers… the boys were named Adam and the girls were named Eve. Brilliant.
Harriet Harris — who plays Eve 6 (yes, that’s where the band name comes from) and, well, all of the adult Eves, of course — is fantastic, as are the twins who play the Eve children. They are all subtly creepy in their own ways, the kind of creepiness that comes from shockingly high intelligence paired with deep psychosis.
Lastly, I really loved the scene where Mulder and Scully take the girls under their wings. The girls have convinced them that they are victims in some kind of eugenics cult, so Mulder and Scully are driving them and wind up stopping at a roadside diner to pee and grab some sodas. They fall so naturally into the roles of caregivers together, it’s hard not to squee a little bit. And the tension is high not only when Mulder realizes the sodas have been spiked (totally gripping the seat whenever Scully takes a sip), but when they are chasing the girls down. The whole episode has a decent amount of tension for that matter, which I thought was great.
Overall, a good standalone episode with an interesting plot and great characters all around.
I’ve decided to stop rating these because, honestly, how can I? | Director: Fred Gerber | Writer: Chris Carter, Kenneth Biller, Chris Brancato | Music: Mark Snow | Cinematography: John S. Bartley | Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Sabrina Krievins, Erika Krievins, Jerry Hardin, Harriet Sansom Harris, Tasha Simms
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