In The X-Files revival recap, Mulder and Scully investigate a mysterious doctor who is experimenting on children that may link back to a larger conspiracy….
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
It’s hard to imagine that after two nights, The X-Files revival only has four episodes to go but that’s where we stand following the latest episode titled “Founder’s Mutation”.
The latest episode felt like a classic X-Files procedural as Mulder and Scully investigate the case of the week, this time involving genetic mutations and a doctor who has been messing with embryos, but if there was one complaint it’s the fact that the larger mystery at hand didn’t really seem to move forward from the debut.
Maybe it’s just me being selfish and wanting the story from the first episode to carry forward to the next or just the fact that I know The X-Files will only be around for a very finite time and I’m worried about the time needed to really delve into this mystery.
Either way, the latest episode felt like a throwback to the early days of The X-Files, which was excellent but unfortunately there were no answers to be had from the first week including what happened to Tad O’Malley, what about the secret society currently plotting the downfall of Earth and nobody seemed to even mention poor Sveta.
Still, it was a solid story and an interesting twist, which is really what The X-Files was all about. With that said, let’s recap the latest episode titled “Founder’s Mutation”….
Get Out of My Head
The episode opens with a man we come to know as Dr. Sanjay — he works at a tech company who refers to their boss Augustus Goldman as “The Founder” — and he’s having a really bad day. It appears as if he’s suffering from the kind of massive headaches that literally makes his eyes bleed, but after he sits in a boardroom for a few minutes in a meeting, Sanjay begins hearing a noise in his head that sounds like a siren blaring at the highest decibel possible. Finally, Sanjay can’t handle the pain anymore but a voice in his head that says ‘do it now, data is the key’ and he runs screaming out of the room while his co-workers are dumbfounded as to what’s happening.
A few moments later, Sanjay is locked in a room full of servers where he’s transferring files to an external hard drive but the noise inside his head is so excruciating that he can no longer take it. Finally, Dr. Sanjay rams a letter opener through his ear and into his brain to make the sound stop. He falls dead on the floor as his co-workers stand shocked just outside the room while gazing through the glass walls.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Fast forward to Mulder and Scully arriving on the scene to investigate.
The band is back together and they are looking into this strange case but there are more than a few roadblocks attempting to stop them. First off, Scully is already trying to dampen the mood by telling Mulder that this guy could have just been a schizophrenic and the noise inside his head was nothing more than a bad case of psychosis. But Mulder is still very curious after the tries to abscond with the hard drive that Sanjay was using but somebody from the Department of Defense shows up and says that the information on there is classified and not even the FBI has the right to open it up. Thankfully, Mulder was slick enough to steal Sanjay’s phone so they could continue the investigation even without any help from the company he worked for before he died.
Mulder finds one particular contact in Sanjay’s phone that he called at least once a day — someone named Gupta.
Mulder ends up meeting Gupta at a bar and when he asks to go somewhere private to talk, he finds out why Sanjay was calling this guy at least once a day. It seems Gupta was Sanjay’s hook up because as soon as the door closes, the guy is diving for Mulder’s zipper. He explains to Gupta that he’s not there for sex but instead just wants help figuring out what Sanjay was doing before his death.
Gupta explains how Sanjay really lived two lives — the one everybody else in the world saw including an apartment that was kept so clean it was virtually antiseptic and another where he would go for his regular life including the study he was doing for “The Founder”. It seems Dr. Sanjay was distraught recently because he worried about his kids dying and this was a man with no children of his own.
Mulder and Scully go to Sanjay’s secret apartment and find scores of photos of children with genetic mutations, which explains the work he was doing for “The Founder”. They also find a slew of files but before they can dig too deep into what Sanjay was doing, the police arrive because a silent alarm was tripped. There’s an even bigger problem when Mulder starts hearing that same ear shattering noise that led Dr. Sanjay to kill himself. Mulder doubles over in pain as Scully rushes to meet the police.
Inside his head, Mulder can’t make out much but there’s a voice that repeats — ‘find her’.
Hospital of Horrors
Back at FBI headquarters, Mulder and Scully meet with Skinner about their investigation but it looks like they are being blocked at every turn by that pesky Department of Defense, who won’t allow them to look at, much less keep the files they took from Dr. Sanjay’s secret hideout. Thankfully, Mulder copied everything and it leads them down the path to look deeper and deeper into this mysterious “founder” named Augustus Goldman.
During their chat about the children with mutations, Mulder confesses that he wonders if this was all one big experimentation being led by the group currently plotting the end of the world (the one connection to the last episode) while Scully is scared that these same things could have been done to her while she was pregnant with William. She envisions a future where she didn’t give up her son for adoption and he grew up with her until one day to her horror, he transforms from a normal boy into some kind of alien creature.
Her day dream only makes Scully want to find out more about this Dr. Goldman so through some connections at her hospital — where she discovers that he’s a major donor to a wing that cares for girls who are pregnant but have no means of support — he finally agrees to meet with them. Mulder and Scully also meet a young woman there named Agnes, who is desperate for their help after she agreed to some kind of “testing” but now is scared that the doctors are doing something to hurt her baby more than help her.
Mulder gives her his card in case she wants to talk more as they rush off to meet Dr. Goldman at his clinic.
Once they arrive, Mulder and Scully are greeted by the mysterious “founder” who gives them a tour of his facility. Inside, they see children of all ages, all afflicted with one abnormality or another while Dr. Goldman continues to experiment on ways to treat them — or so he says.
They leave the clinic but Mulder knows there’s more to this doctor that meets the eye and that’s when he finds out that years earlier, Goldman was married but his wife ended up in a mental health facility after she allegedly killed their unborn child and was declared insane.
When they visit the woman at the hospital, Dr. Goldman’s ex-wife explains that she found out that her husband was doing experimentations on their embryos after watching their two-year old daughter breath underwater after falling into a pool for a solid 10 minutes. Goldman wasn’t just experimenting on children — he was experimenting on his own children. Horrified by the revelation, she swiped at Goldman with a knife and made a run for it before he could infect her anymore.
Unfortunately, during the trip Goldman’s wife heard the same piercing sound in her head that led her to crash the car. The voices inside told her to cut open her belly where the baby inside apparently crawled out and away from its mother. She was arrested and declared insane and the baby was never found again.
Until now.
About the Boy
It turns out that the baby that Mrs. Goldman “lost” all those years ago, was found and grew up in the area and he’s the one who has been causing these awful sounds to reverberate in the heads of his victims. Mulder and Scully find out that the boy named Kyle was posed as a janitor in the building where Sanjay died and he was also nearby on the night when they investigated his apartment. When they finally track down the boy to his “adoptive” mother, she’s unwilling to help until a flock of birds arrives — which somehow signals that her son is about to unleash his power — and Mulder once again hears that awful noise.
Finally, Mulder and Scully see Kyle and he ends up turning off his ability long enough to explain what he’s been doing this entire time. He’s been searching for his sister Molly — the older sibling born to the Goldman’s who could breathe underwater — thus the whole ‘find her’ thing from earlier in the episode.
Mulder and Scully take him to the clinic where Kyle quickly reconnects with his sister but when they touch hands, all the glass in the place shatters and it’s like the Wonder Twins finally found their power together. When Dr. Goldman tries to intervene, Kyle focuses his power on dear old dad until he bleeds to death through his eyes, mouth and ears. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully attempt to stop the kids, but Molly has apparently developed some kind of telekinesis and she sends both of them flying across the room.
When they wake up again, the kids are gone, Goldman is dead and they are no closer to any answers on this bizarre case.
In the end, the heart of the episode really became about Mulder and Scully’s son William and their shared thoughts about what life would have been like if they kept him. While Scully envisioned a horrific future where the experimentations with alien DNA resulted in him transforming into some kind of creature, Mulder instead dreams about a life where he raises his son to love outer space and the idea of exploration.
It’s a tear jerking ending as Mulder thinks about what could have been and if the first two episodes are any indication, William is going to play a major part in how The X-Files comes to an end.
