“731” – Season 3 Ep. 10

 

(A very cool Hitchcockian poster)

Scully: Don’t you see, Mulder? You’re doing their work for them. You’re chasing aliens that aren’t there, helping them to create a story to cover the shameful truth… and what they can’t cover, they apologize for. Apology has become policy.

Mulder: I, I don’t need an apology for the lies. I, I don’t care about the fictions they create to cover their crimes. I want them accountable for what did happen. I want an apology for the truth.

Written by: Frank Spotnitz

Directed by: Rob Bowman

Original Air Date: December 1st, 1995

Principal Setting: Perkey, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Iowa

Episode Summary:

All aboard the mysterious alien human hybrid testing train! Mulder finds the train car containing the scientific equipment and what appears to be the same autopsy room he saw in the video he bought. There is also an assassin on board that murders the Japanese doctor on the video, and he claims to be an NSA agent. After the altercation in an attempt to murder Mulder, they are locked in the autopsy car and the NSA agent threatens Mulder that there is a bomb aboard which is set to destroy the evidence on the train.

Scully is on another truth journey set to find out who implanted the computer chip into her neck and finds out it traces to a medical research facility in West Virginia which she feels provides a logical way of explaining what has been happening. There has been rogue medical research done on people with leprosy and other ailments by a Japanese scientist working without authority. Mulder on the other hand believes all the testing was to create a human-alien hybrid.

Personal Commentary:

This was a very action packed episode that gave us hope that Scully would finally believe aliens exist and the government has been testing on them for years. Although the twist is the government wants you to think that there have been testing on aliens to cover up the atrocities in testing human subjects with diseases such as leprosy.

The X-Files’ writers always do an excellent job in showing the viewer one thing, but it turns out to be smoke and mirrors for something else entirely. It is somewhat frustrating when they do this towards the end of the series mythology episodes, but when they do it here it causes you to question what really is going on and if you should side more on the paranoid Mulder point of view or the logical, scientific side of Scully.

Episode Grade: A

Featured Video:

Chris Carter’s take on why you shouldn’t explain the unexplained:

Fun Facts:

• “731” refers to Unit 731, a real Japanese chemical and biological army unit that performed horrific experiments on Chinese civilians during World War II, which forms a central aspect of the plot.
• The scene in which X carries Mulder from the exploding train car was filmed against a blue screen and superimposed over the explosion.To create the train car explosion, forty-five gallons of gasoline and 120 black-powder bombs were used for the effect. It was filmed from seven different camera angles.

Faces You May Recognize:

Same faces from last episode.