Did I miss something: "Unanswered" Questions from "The X-Files" (1 Viewer)

[Rex Bachmann]

I love a good mystery, especially where the supernatural and the weird are concerned. In an effort to tie up some loose ends, though, I pose some questions to the devotee audience of The X-Files. If you think you know the answer, please cite your evidence (where to be found?) in your response.

1. What is the music in "Orison" that Scully keeps hearing and what, if any, significance does it have for the proceedings of the episode?
   
   At there is this note:
   "Among the words scrawled on the prison chapel's walls is the phrase 'Sheep go to Heaven, Goats go to Hell'. This is the chorus line of the song 'Sheep go to Heaven' by the band Cake---one of Gillian Anderson's favorite bands." Not an explanation. The piece sounds to me like a take-off on a Phil Collins song.
2. "The Amazing Maleeni": was any of the stunts actual magic, or were they all sleight of hand, so to speak?
3. What was the true nature of "a world without history" hinted at only briefly by future Jason in "Synchrony"?
4. In "Badlaa", how does the homuncular siddhi-mystic get back to India after being gunned down by Scully? Is he gunned downed by Scully at all, or is that just an illusion?
5. "Chinga": what, if any connexion, the Hokey-Pokey song has to the "devil doll's" activities.
   
   On the last viewing of the episode I was reminded that the doll sometimes acts without the invocation of the song (as when it kills the little girl's father who's fished it out of the sea), so there may be nothing to this speculation.
6. In "Audrey Pauley", what does the "Audrey"-character mean when she says she "finally knows who has told her" to create the model hospital?
7. In "Patience" what relation does the bat-man have to the slain creature of 45 years earlier?
8. How does Alex (Ratboy) Krycek get uninfected from the so-called black oil ("Piper Maru"/"Apocrypha")?
9. What are Alex Krycek, Mr. Anti-Mulder's, motives, anyway? He several times during the series claims to be helping Mulder, and that Mulder just doesn't understand his role. Any truth to that?
10. Why do the aliens in the "mythology" storyline want to colonize and repopulate the Earth?
    
    Maybe I missed the answer to or speculation within the show on this.
11. Why was "Fight Club" ever made?[/list=1]
    
    Feel free to pose your own "unanswered" questions from episodes of the show. I'd like to see questions particularly on the nonmythology episodes, since the conspiracy and the so-called "mythology" episodes have been discussed ENDLESSLY all over the place, and I'd like to give the other X-Files enthusiasts a prominent forum for their exchanges. (Please note, my "mythology"-episode-related queries are pretty generic.)

 

[Ryan Spaight]

How does Alex (Ratboy) Krycek get uninfected from the so-called black oil ("Piper Maru"/"Apocrypha")?

I always thought the oil left him at the end, when it entered its ship in the missile silo.

Ryan

 

[Simon Massey]

Why do the aliens in the "mythology" storyline want to colonize and repopulate the Earth?

they were the original inhabitants of the Earth (the Well Manicured Man to Mulder : X files - Fight the Future)
they probably want it back now

 

[Simon Massey]

What are Alex Krycek, Mr. Anti-Mulder's, motives, anyway? He several times during the series claims to be helping Mulder, and that Mulder just doesn't understand his role. Any truth to that?

I always thought he just kept swapping sides based on his own self interest.

 

[Simon Massey]

What was the true nature of "a world without history" hinted at only briefly by future Jason in "Synchrony"?

I thought he was simply saying that in a world where time travel is possible, history could be altered at will.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Ryan Spaight wrote:

I probably remember it happening that way, but am I wrong to say that The X-Files had a totally inconsistent way of handling the after-effects of "oil infection"? Seems to me that more often than not the infectees were left damaged or dead, no?
I just wondered why Krycek seemed perfectly healthy after his experiences.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Simon Massey wrote:

Are we talking about the "black oil" or the "grays"? I thought they were separate alien groups.

 

[Michael Reuben]

2. "The Amazing Maleeni": was any of the stunts actual magic, or were they all sleight of hand, so to speak?

I think they're all meant to be conjurer's tricks, but I say that only because Maleeni was played by Ricky Jay, who does wonderful illusions (he's currently doing them at his sold-out stage show off-Broadway; feature story in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly).

M.

 

[Ryan Spaight]

Are we talking about the "black oil" or the "grays"? I thought they were separate alien groups.

My impression was the the black oil was the "life essence" of the grays, as well as their means for reproduction (see "Fight The Future" and "The Beginning") and control of other races (hence the faceless rebels). That's why the grays and the Syndicate were collaborating on a human-alien hybrid that could survive the black oil -- the human race wouldn't do the aliens much good as slaves if the black oil killed them.

Of course, if the grays reproduced via the methods shown in "FTF"/"The Beginning", then there should be no such thing as the gray fetus seen in "Erlenmeyer Flask". Maybe that was a red herring, or an alternative means of reproduction.

Ryan

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Ryan Spaight wrote:

Your answer is most welcome, but frankly it confuses me even more. Your post makes it sound as though the "black oil" is both of the grays and against the grays.
Who, then, are the "faceless rebels"? Are they "rebel grays" (as seemed from "The Unnatural")? (Think of it: a whole race of "Johnny Rebs"!) I had always thought they were another humanoid race (of shapeshifters) from outer space. Were the "regular" grays flying the spacecraft that incinerated the "faceless rebels" in "The Red and the Black"?
Is the "oil" intelligent/sentient, and, even if it is, how does "oil" design and build spaceships, anyway?

 

[Ryan Spaight]

Near as I can tell (and this just my own interpretation), the oil is the main malevolent alien force on the show. Whether the oil came from the grays, or the oil took over the grays at some point in the past (needing hands to build ships?), I don't know. They seem to be linked at some level in any case, since we've seen black oil infection lead to the creation of a gray via a human host.

It generally makes more sense to me that the shapeshifters are a separate race from the grays -- that way the efforts of the "faceless" rebels to avoid the oil makes more sense.

"The Unnatural" certainly muddies these waters by showing that the grays and the shapeshifters are the same race. There are three ways to deal with that episode:

(1) To take it at face value and assume that the grays *are* the shapeshifters, then try to wrap your brain around that concept. Of course, even if the oil is sentient, it doesn't necessarily have to be monolithic, so it's certainly possible that the faceless rebels are protecting themselves from the "bad" oil, while the oil in their own bodies is "rebel" oil. I mean, if there are two factions of shapeshifters, why can't there be two factions of oil? Of course, that raises the question of why the "bad" aliens don't sew up their eyes to protect themselves from the "rebel" oil...

(2) To take it as a fanciful story from Arthur Dales (and David Duchovny) that is not necessarily true. (The fact that the "alien" bleeds normal blood at the end tells me that we can't take everything literally.)

(3) To just pretend it never happened. (Sort of like Season Nine.)

I tend toward #2, though it's an interesting mental exercise to defend #1.

Ryan

 

[Simon Massey]

This is what I can remember (and it is a while)
the oil is the life essence of the grays, but has some form of sentience. It needs a host to develop into the gray which is a human, but can still remain inside an human without developing into an alien if it wants to (ie. Krycek in Piper Maru). If a gray is killed, the "oil" can leave the body of the gray, and infect another human.
the Syndicate have been working with the aliens, under the impression that the oil only controls people, and didn't gestate inside a human host (they found this out in the film) The aliens presumable want a secret "invasion" with the release of the oil into the population by bees/pollen, so as not to end up with a full scale war, etc (reducing their host population). The Syndicate have made a bargain with the aliens to buy them time to try and develop a vaccine/immunity. One of the ways was the creation of an alien/human hybrid, which are the aliens which are killed with a stab to the back of the neck, and dissolve into green slime. The gray fetus in the Erlemeyer Flask" is either a frozen alien/human hybrid, ir it could well be a pure alien foetus (presumably with the oil inside it). This alien/human hybrid program, the abduction of people for experimentation, and the cataloguing of the population through immunisation programs was the mainstay of most of the first 5 seasons.
The "oil" storyline was an alternative attempt to discover a vaccine, which was ultimately successful.
The faceless grays seen in Patient X are another race of aliens (I think) trying to prevent the colonisation from succeeding. The regular grays did incinerate the faceless rebels in Red and the Black

 

[Rex Bachmann]

. . . . . . . . . . .
No wonder I never got it straight!