Spoilers

“Tithonus”

I enjoyed this episode of the X-Files for all the ways it turned the typical formula on its head.

First, Scully was out in the field, assigned to a case with a different partner, and she would call back to FBI headquarters to talk to Mulder and he would do the background stuff. Lots of time, this was flipped, with Scully doing info searches or autopsies. Poor Mulder was like a sad puppy the whole time too.

This also felt like an opposite of “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” as we had an older man who could see death. This episode, the man himself could not die and he was determined to take a picture of death with the hope of being able to do what everybody else would do. This episode was played much more serious than “Clyde” was, which had some of the funnier moments in the early days of the X-Files.

The old man, Alfred Fellig, was played by character actor Geoffrey Lewis and he does a great job playing against Gillian Anderson.

At the very end of the episode, after Fellig had taken Scully’s place and had died from the gunshot wound, Scully was in the hospital from the same gunshot wound. Scully said “You know Mulder I don’t even know why I entertained the thought. People don’t live forever.” I think that was a reference, in Scully’s mind, back to Bruckman who had told her that she would never die. This brush with nearly dying herself from the gunshot wound made her question her own mortality in a very different way. At least, that is how I took it.