1x07: Ice

[wendelah1]

Our mini-rewatch begins! So, "Ice" has it all: sex, violence, black humor, bad science, plenty of opportunities for scenery chewing, and some of the tensest scenes between Mulder and Scully of the entire series.

My favorite retro-nineties fashion moment from season one is Dana Scully standing there wearing her gigantic puffy coat. She looks all of thirteen in that scene.



Writers: Glen Morgan and James Wong
Director: David Nutter
Originally aired: November 5, 1993

Synopsis: Mulder and Scully are assigned to investigate the mass murder-suicides of a team of scientists at a remote research facility in Icy Cape, Alaska.

Most Memorable Quote:
MULDER: Scully! For God's sake, it's me!
SCULLY: Mulder...you may not be who you are.

Links:
transcript
Entertainment Weekly's X-Cyclopedia: The Ultimate Episode Guide, season one. That magazine's TV critic was so obsessed with this show. Not like us.
Sara Stegall's review
Autumn Tysko's review

Fanfiction:
Everywhere In The Dark by tree.
Summary: A missing scene from Ice. What happened between saying goodnight and Mulder finding Murphy? This is one possibility.

Strange Things Done by Dryad
Summary: The Arctic in eight moments.

Maybe it's time for a reread of Universal Invariants by syntax6.
Summary: This is an AU story in which I play fast and loose with the first season. While I'm just as glad that Ethan got eliminated from the actual show (I don't think he would have added much on the screen) I thought it would be fun to play out the relationship here as Scully gets dragged deeper and deeper into the X-Files.

If anyone wants to rec other post-ep fic for "Ice," leave it in a comment. Don't forget to track this post so you can read everyone's comments.

Comments

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

Your insight is an excellent one. TV--partly due to cable and other forms of entertainment delivery, like Netflix--is enjoying a rise in quality. And I believe this is partly due to the outspokenness of us (fan)atics on line. Of course, most of the audience is still pretty unobservant, which might be traced to many of them working more hours than sleeping.

I think The X-Files was among the first wave of detail-oriented, rewatch-worthy series. But we are still early in the show, the staff is pressured and underpaid, and SF fans (like me) are habituated to not giving the science much credence.

Tech is moving faster than people can internalize.

All this reminds me of something OT. I was watching Fred Astaire in (I think) Swingtime with friends, and we laughed when Fred took a ride through the snow (in a sleigh?) and stood up with snow, or its movie equivalent, all over his rear end. Did not compute. And someone said, "Well, studios didn't know that people would be really watching this thing a century later." Fred, like the Files, turned out to belong to the ages.