I'd like to suggest changing the part about the description of this episode.
It's suggested that this case is for one of the earliest x-Files. But this can't be true. At one point, when Agent Arthur Dales asks the woman who handles the filing under the director, why are they not filed under U for Unexplained, the responds by saying they are, but we ran out space so we used X.
If that's the case, let us assume they used a filing cabinet drawer for each letter. I'd estimate that they'd have at least 50-75 files in a cabinet drawer for each letter.
She presumably already had files under X as well, otherwise she would say she had just started the files going into X, which she didn't, in fact she clearly was resigned to the shear number of files she had already, so if we're onto a second drawer full of unsolved case files, tthen that is hardly something I'd describe in the description as "one of the earliest X-Files".
Given that first obviously describes number one, and "one of the first" would mean close to number one, I'd say anything past the first 10-20 files, at the most would be the limit for "One of the first". William Henry Harrison was the 9th president of the United States, but I don't think anyone would refer to him as "one of the first presidents of this country, and he served almost 50 years after Washington... and if there was more than one drawer per letter? Shoot, there could be hundreds of previous case files under U.
In which case the description, instead of:
A young Fox Mulder visits retired FBI Agent Arthur Dales, who tells him about one of the first X-Files, a case that his father was involved in.
It should read perhaps:
A young Fox Mulder visits retired FBI Agent Arthur Dales, who tells him about one an X-File from the early conception of the unsolved files department, a case that his father was involved in.
In fact, I'm guessing that because this file sorting was done by the assistant to the director as described by the lady who mentions the files being under U until that was full, the "X-Files" as we know it today in the series wasn't even a specific division or separation from other typical case files...
Anyone else have an opinon?
"Xenotransplantation" = early hybrid test?[]
One thing that's never really explained is why the spider/crab creatures were grafted into the human test subjects.
There are references to making them killing machines, as well as 'doing things your enemy wouldn't even do' in relation to the cold war with Russia, but no concrete explanations.
I'm wondering if perhaps the "Xenotransplantation" is in fact an early effort in the human/alien hybridization techniques that we see later in the timeline.
There are still unanswered questions, like what the goal was in creating the monsters, and why having one introduced into a body seems to leave the corpse dessicated. But these questions aside, do you think the monsters are early hybridization experiments?
Russbird 05:37, April 19, 2012 (UTC)
Bill Mulder[]
Re-Watching this raised a question: In Season 4's "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" we see Bill Mudler being in the Army in 1962. Here he already works for the State Department 10 years earlier. It seems unlikely that he joined the Army after working for the SD, doesn't it?