By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Part of what makes The X-Files so fun is that the show focuses so much on fantastic threats. Sure, the series may be grounded in the real world (the heroes are, after all, FBI agents), but the biggest threats are always the most fantastical. Aliens, flukemen, Jersey devils, and chupacabras all threaten our heroes from week to week, fueling Mulder’s relentless quest to expose the various truths the government has been hiding from us. This is one of the major reasons that the show is perfect for those who are stressed out by the real world and just want to escape into a downright spooky hour of television.
Every now and then, though, an X-Files episode hits too close to home. No, I’m not talking about its portrayal of the government as amoral monsters who don’t care if we live or die, which may go down as the most realistic thing about the series. I’m talking about the Season 2 episode “Blood,” which culminated in Mulder and Scully stopping a crazy man before he could carry out a mass murder at a local community college. Shockingly, this plot point was included by the episode’s writer because he thought the idea of going crazy and gunning down a bunch of random people was a joke the audience could relate to!
The Darkest Early X-Files Episode
In “Blood”, residents of a small town keep receiving subliminal messages on various electronic devices urging them to hurt and kill other people. One of these people is a postal worker who does his best to resist the violent instructions he keeps getting. Mulder and Scully arrive to investigate some local killings, and Mulder gets sprayed with pesticide from a crop duster. After he starts seeing the same subliminal messages, he determines that the town is being used as an experiment by the government to spray people and then subject them to subliminal messages. This information helps him ultimately prevent the postal worker from conducting a mass shooting at a nearby community college.
The origin of this episode was a two-word Post-it note that simply read “postal workers.” In the ‘90s, the idea of postal workers going violently bonkers had become so prominent that “going postal” eventually became common slang for “going crazy.” In the episode, the character Edward Funsch is a postal worker who is about to lose his job. As for the clock tower climax, Morgan later said (as recorded in X-Files Confidential) that “It’s almost like the joke that people at work who are stressed say: ‘I’m going to go up in a tower with a gun.’ That’s what everyone points to when they’re going to flip out.”
It Was A Different Time
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine a school shooting was meant to be funny or relatable in any way. As of this writing, there have been over 500 school shootings and over 4,400 school shooting victims in America, making this a phenomenon that regularly terrifies parents and students alike. Why, then, did this X-Files writer think it was something of a laughing matter? Probably due to when it was written: “Blood” premiered in 1994, and school shootings didn’t become a common thing until the infamous Columbine shooting of 1999. In fact, shootings were so rare at the time that the clock tower scene is mostly based on an infamous University of Texas shooting that happened nearly three decades earlier.
So, this is a case of an X-Files episode aging badly for a completely unpredictable reason. “Blood” is a fairly solid episode, and its plot about people going crazy after seeing subliminal messages on electronic devices is arguably scarier than ever before. But modern audiences are likely to react with shock and horror at the idea of someone planning a shooting rather than seeing a would-be clock tower killer as a relatable trope. At least, that’s how they react now, but if the haters get the right subliminal messages on their phones, they might find this episode’s climax funny as hell.
Or, you know, they might just feed a cat to an ATM. It could go either way!
