Spoilers

“Ice”

The X-Files meets John Carpenter’s The Thing.

This was an excellent episode. It was obviously just like The Thing, a mysterious creature (probably from space) that causes the crew of an Arctic station turn on each other and kill everyone. Mulder and Scully are among the investigative group sent in to the station to find out what happened.

There was an interesting cast in this episode including Felicity Huffman, Jeff Kober, Xander Berkeley, and Steve Hytner joined David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. The interaction of the performances created an awesome paranoia. It was never apparent which of the group had been exposed to the worms that were causing the trouble.

One of the major moments of this episode was how Mulder and Scully had their first moment of conflict between them. Scully held a gun on Mulder when she was not sure if he was exposed to the worm. Mulder refused to be tested because he did not trust any of them, and Scully had pulled a gun. In the end, they were able to get past the paranoia and had each other’s back.

This was an excellent episode and quite the step up from the last one.