TXF Mythology: Critic's Picks
Posted at 10:07 AM (PDT) on Friday, July 15, 2005

The News & Observer
Critic's picks - DVDs

By J. Peder Zane

You're a 12-year-old boy. It's a nice quiet night. Suddenly, your house begins to shake, you see a blinding light, your sister, crying for help, starts to levitate. Then whoosh, she's gone.

This kind of haunts you. So, as an adult you go to work for the FBI, investigating their strangest cases, called "The X-Files."

You uncover evidence that aliens have not only visited Earth, but they're still here. The government knows all about it -- probably knows what happened to your sister -- but is denying everything in a massive conspiracy that involves the fate of the planet.

Given this knowledge, let me ask you a question: Would you ever take your eye off the ball, waste your time tracking down serial killers, roaming monsters or people who can control the weather?

Of course not! As a sane and rational inhabitant of a little realm we call reality, your life would be all-conspiracy all-the-time.

TV, however, is run by folks from fantasy land. So producer Chris Carter and the rest of the gang behind the 1990s hit series "The X-Files" routinely sent out FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his partner Dr. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) to investigate clever and creepy -- yet totally beside the point -- cases. I loved these episodes, but they made the show hard to believe.

That's no longer a problem, thanks to DVD. "Abduction" (four discs, 20th Century Fox) collects all 15 episodes from the show's first three seasons that deal directly with the conspiracy; later sets, including the installment slated for Aug. 2 release, will continue the storyline through the ninth and final season. As we meet such classic characters as the Cigarette-Smoking Man and the Lone Gunmen conspiracy buffs -- and enjoy Mulder's clever repartee -- these early episodes launch one of the most compelling storylines in TV history: a tale of love, obsession, lies and startling surprises.

Knowing how it all turns out, it is interesting to see how much of that very long story Carter had mapped out in the beginning; the fact that the show had a vision it stayed true to was one of its strengths.

As Carter notes in the short "Threads of Mythology Documentary," the conspiracy episodes (he calls them "The Mythology") were particularly popular because they were the most personal. They often involved Mulder's and Scully's families and were usually the episodes in which their platonic love would flower. The DVD also includes audio commentaries for five of the episodes.