In The X-Files revival recap, Mulder and Scully team up with two other FBI agents to investigate a terrorist bombing with very different ideas on how to solve the crime…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The countdown has started to The X-Files season (maybe series?) finale with the penultimate episode airing on Monday night where Mulder and Scully met a pair of idealistic young FBI agents who looked very familiar to them.
Agent Miller — wide eyed, full of questions and an open mind to the possibility that the answers may not lie in a science book or within our current comprehension of understanding. And Agent Einstein — who follows the truth and only believes in what can be proven while looking at everything through a very inquisitive and skeptical eye.
Sound like someone we know?
As Mulder and Scully accidentally get pulled into a terrorist plot in Texas, the agents behind the X-Files actually get split apart and receive new partners for the day as they attempt to stop a second bombing from taking place.
Add to that some psychedelic mushrooms, the Lone Gunmen and a fever dream that includes a visit from the Cigarette Smoking Man and this had all the makings of a X-Files episode for the ages.
With that said, let’s recap the latest X-Files titled ‘Babylon’…..
Blow Up the World
In Texas, a pair of young Muslim men meet up after prayer before riding in a car together to a local art show where they walk in together and seconds later an explosion rings out and a fireball torches the entire building and seemingly everyone inside.
The terrorist bombing intrigues Mulder and Scully, who watch a video when we catch up with them in their basement office. Mulder says just before the bomb went off, some people nearby heard the sound of trumpets blaring — like something out of the Book of Revelations perhaps?
The conversation gets stopped before it really starts because Mulder and Scully have visitors — enter Agents Miller and Einstein.
It seems one of the terrorist bombers survived although he’s left in a largely vegetative state with no real hope of recovery, but Agent Miller has heard about certain people who have the ability to travel across different plains of existence and contacting someone in a coma just like this. Of course his partner, Agent Einstein, thinks this is all hocus pocus garbage that won’t do a thing except waste a lot of time.
When Mulder tells the pair that the only person he knew who could possibly take on such an endeavor is dead, Miller’s hopes are dashed, Einstein is relieved and they are off to Texas to continue the investigation into the bombing.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Lone Star state — Agent Miller gets an unexpected call from Scully in which she claims that she may have a way to contact his terrorist in a coma after all. Meanwhile, Agent Einstein receives a similar call from Mulder claiming the same thing.
So Scully flies to Texas to meet with Miller at the hospital where she lays out her plan. It seems there was an experiment done several years back by doctors who realized that during an MRI when questions were asked of a patient seemingly comatose but with brain function, they could elicit responses thanks to the nerve centers in the brain firing at certain times to give answers. Scully thought of this after the death of her mother, who was also in a coma not too long ago. She thinks this could be a way to contact the terrorist bomber and hopefully coax out an answer to find where his sleeper cell friends might be hiding.
As for Mulder, his idea is far less scientific — he wants to take some medical grade mushroom that supposedly has extreme psychedelic substances that could take him personally on another plain to then talk to the terrorist himself. Just like the idea that Miller had except Mulder would be the one on the spiritual journey.
Needless to say, Einstein isn’t blown away with his idea.
What Condition My Condition is In
Scully gets to Texas first and lays out her plan of action with Agent Miller, who hopes that this brain imaging idea could possibly get some answers out of the terrorist. Unfortunately, Scully and Miller end up dealing with radical agents and even a hateful nurse, who want to bring the terrorist’s life to an end rather than allow him one more second of oxygen.
It’s up to Scully and Miller to save his life for now but while they are facing off with a vengeful group of agents who are hell bent on putting an end to this terrorist, Mulder and Einstein arrive and she’s got some hallucinogenic goodies for him to sample.
Mulder takes the drugs — and a few seconds later he’s launched into a full on psychedelic trip that’s something out of The Big Lebowski.
Mulder’s trippy experience leads him to a local Honky Tonk where he dances and enjoys a lot of country music including tunes by Miranda Lambert and Billy Ray Cyrus. It’s there he’s reunited with the Lone Gunmen and his boss Walter Skinner as well. Finally, Mulder’s journey ends with a dominatrix Agent Einstein whipping him into shape, getting cracked with an actual whip in a scene out of the Bible before running into the Cigarette Smoking Man, who tells him that this must be what he’s looking for.
It would seem this dream sequence will play into next week’s finale as well but before we get there, Mulder also encounters the young terrorist being comforted by a woman we later learn is actually his mother. Mulder speaks to the boy in a hushed silence before he wakes up in a hospital bed with Skinner over top of him and he doesn’t look happy.
It seems Mulder’s drug induced haze led him on an embarrassing journey around Texas that left more than a few FBI agents hanging their heads that they call him a co-worker. To make matters worse on Mulder, Agent Einstein tells him that she never actually gave him any psychotropic drugs that instead it was a placebo. He doesn’t buy it because he definitely went on a full fledged acid trip and he finally figures out that Agent Einstein lied to save her own ass or risk Skinner firing her for placating Mulder in the first place.
But Mulder is convinced he has some answers but no one else is buying it — until he sees a woman trying to get into the hospital that looks just like the one who was comforting the boy in his dream. As it turns out, that’s his mother. It looks like Mulder really was traveling to another dimension after all.
Sleeper Cell
Mulder and Einstein take the bomber’s mother to his bedside while also rejoining their respective partners. The arrival of his mother and her pleas about why he would actually go through with this murderous plot send him flat lining and a few seconds later, the terrorist is dead. Miller and Scully don’t believe they’ve gotten any answers but then Mulder remembers what the boy told him in his dream.
He speaks out the words in Arabic and Miller translates — and the answer is the Babylon Hotel.
A few seconds later, FBI agents bust into a hotel room where a group of terrorists, who were part of the same sleeper cell responsible for blowing up the art gallery were plotting another bombing attack. The plan has been foiled, the day has been saved — Mulder, Scully, Miller and Einstein got the job done with some science and a little bit of help from the beyond.
Sounding the Seven Trumpets
With the case solved and lives saved, Agent Einstein seems a little more willing to listen to the things she can’t exactly believe with her eyes and she shares a moment with Agent Miller that looks like something out of The X-Files season one.
Back at Mulder’s house, Scully arrives and the two of them hold hands and go for a walk on his gravel driveway. It’s there he discusses God and some of the concepts in the Bible — particularly those about a vengeful deity, who scattered those people who gathered at the Tower of Babel so they could not all speak a common tongue while also contemplating the weight that words hold with them and the hateful way ideas and ideologies are passed along from father to son, mother to daughter.
The idea being children should not be used as weapons — like the terrorist bomber who was so young and yet used as someone else’s sword to cause so much death — and this is clearly yet another reference to Mulder and Scully’s son William, who is all but guaranteed to show up in the finale next week after they’ve been talking about him all season long.
Finally, the conversation turns to smiles as Mulder and Scully gaze into each other’s eyes and it looks like a kiss might just take place — until a loud, blaring noise is heard from the distance and Mulder’s head whips around. It’s the sound of trumpets — perhaps the same trumpets that echoed just before the bombers blew up that art gallery — and Mulder searches the sky for answers.
As the camera zooms away from both Mulder and Scully, through the atmosphere and into outer space, we look bad down upon the Earth from afar. Were these trumpets truly the sound that accompanies the apocalypse?
With only one episode left this season of The X-Files revival, it certainly seems that the end is near.
