#1998 episode

[lifewithaview]

David Duchovny and Lili Taylor in The X Files (1993) Mind's Eye

S5E16

Mulder and Scully assist local police when they suspect woman they arrested at a murder scene, Marty Glenn, is the murderer. The problem is that the woman is blind. Mulder finds it all very unlikely That a woman who has been blind from birth could actually commit the crime in question. Matty knows a great deal about the crime scene and can describe much of it in detail however. Testing confirms her blindness but Mulder begins to think that she is "seeing" things in a far different way than a normal human being can.

*Writer Tim Minear deliberately chose to make his blind protagonist Marty rather dislikeable as most interpretations of blind people tend to make them rather noble.

[lifewithaview]

Gillian Anderson and Kristin Lehman in The X-Files (1993) Kill Switch

S5E11

Mulder and Scully's investigation into a mass shooting in a coffee shop leads them to believe that the targets were not the low level drug dealers and wholesalers who were killed but rather Donald Geldman who had been sitting at a table working on his laptop computer. The Lone Gunmen tell Mulder and Scully that Geldman was one of the original computer geniuses who disappeared years before. His laptop leads the agents to a hacker, Esther Nairn, who goes by the name Invisigoth. She tells them of a vast government conspiracy involving artificial intelligence that allows them to see everything and take action against all enemies.

*Gillian Anderson's fight scene with the nurses is one of the actress' favorite scenes in the series.

[lifewithaview]

Emily Perkins in The X-Files (1993) All Souls

S5E17

In the confessional at her local church, Scully tells a priest that she is responsible for the death of a young girl. In flashbacks, Scully and Mulder are called in when a young woman is found dead in the street not far from her home. No one has any idea how she got there as she was severely handicapped and was not mobile. Scully's parish' priest asks her to look into the case as the girl's parents are also members of the parish. As the case progresses, Scully will come to face evil and must also come to terms with the loss of her own daughter...

*The visual effects for the shifting heads of the Seraphim were created by means of CGI and took visual-effects supervisor Laurie Kallsen-George a long time to complete, who didn't finish until "hours before airtime."

[lifewithaview]

Gillian Anderson in The X Files (1993) Kitsunegari

S5E8

Robert Modell (see Pusher (1996) ) seems to have recovered from his gunshot wounds and is again using his power of suggestion to get his victims to see things that are not there. Scully and Assistant Director Skinner are particularly concerned as they assume Modell is out to take his revenge on Mulder. As the murder count rises however, Mulder however realizes that Modell may not not be the killer this time around and may have another purpose in mind.

*The series hired two Japanese translators to yield a proper translation of the title phrase, due to the fact that "fox hunting" is not readily rendered in Japanese.

[lifewithaview]

Gillian Anderson and Veronica Cartwright in The X-Files (1993) The Red and the Black

S5E14

Scully survives the mass killing but has no memory of what might have happened. She agrees to undergo regression hypnosis and recalls what happened, including that Cassandra Spender was re-abducted. Agent Spender refuses to believe anything to do with his mother's abduction stories. The conspirators now realize that there is a war among the aliens and that the alien resistance fighters would make formidable allies. The Well-Manicured Man also reveals that, courtesy of Krycek, they may now have a vaccine against the black oil.

*The list of victims that Scully reads from Skyland Mountain is actually a list of members of the cast and crew of the show.

[lifewithaview]

Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, and Luke Wilson in The X-Files (1993) Bad Blood

S5E12

After Mulder drives a stake through the heart of a would be vampire, he and Scully review what happened before they meet Assistant Director Skinner. Their recollection of the case is significantly divergent. They had gone to Texas to investigate a death by exsanguination and Scully thinks that someone is playing at being a vampire. Her autopsy finds a high level of chlorohydrate in the dead man's system. There's soon a second victim and she finds that both victims had eaten pizza. As she recalls it, she saved an incapacitated Mulder and tried to capture the culprit. Mulder's recollection is somewhat different. It was he, not Scully who developed the key clues in the case including the fact that the victim's shoes were untied and then discovering a second victim in a runaway RV. Before they can speak to Skinner, they have to return to Texas when the vampire Mulder killed seems to have disappeared...

*In an AMA that Gillian Anderson did on Reddit in October 2014, she said this is her favorite X-Files episode.

[lifewithaview]

Jenny-Lynn Hutcheson in The X Files (1993) Chinga

S5E10

While on a weekend off in the small New England town of Ammas Beach, Maine, Scully comes across a grocery store full of people who tried to gouge out their own eyes. The people have no idea why they did this to themselves. On the telephone, Mulder tells her it all sounds like witchcraft but she isn't so sure. One woman in the store, Melissa Turner, seemed unaffected by it all but her reputation for being a witch works against her. She was widowed the year before and her boyfriend Dave stabbed himself in the eye and died in the grocery store incident. Scully focuses on Melissa's daughter and in particular, the young girl's doll...

*This marks the introduction of the pencils in the ceiling in Mulder's office, a sign of Mulder's boredom without Scully. They would feature in various episodes throughout the show's run.