“Drive” (season 6, episode 2; originally aired 11/15/1998)
In which Mulder tries to prove he’s a real human being, and a real hero
Momentum. At the most basic level, that’s all plot really is: an excuse for momentum. There are many ways to approach this. Some stories parcel out forward motion sparingly, using long stretches of dialogue and contemplation to make those moments when events do jump ahead all the more shocking. Other stories run like mad for the finish line, throwing out crazy twist after crazy twist as the ground gives away beneath their feet—call it the bridge burning approach. (For an example of the former, see Mad Men; the latter, The Vampire Diaries.) And then there are the shows that go for constant, steady pressure. The shows with doom coming up behind them and darkness ahead, and heroes who find a way to behave believably and even logically as they trudge closer to death. It’s a blend of slow drama and bat-shit pulp, and it has to walk a thin line, maintaining believability while still finding ways to menace a protagonist enough to keep tension high. Breaking Bad is the best version of this type of show I’ve ever seen (and basically my favorite show ever), and if you want to get a sense of how Vince Gilligan got so good at doing what he does, you could do worse than watching his work on The X-Files, particularly this week’s episode. The obvious reason is that “Drive” is where Gilligan met Bryan Cranston, the man who would go on to star as the cancer-ridden, meth-cooking chemistry teacher Walter White; the less obvious reason is that this hour is a great example of the engine that keeps great television moving. It’s simple: you have to keep moving. If you stop, you die.
I haven’t watched The X-Files since Todd and I concluded our coverage of the fifth season last August. Back then, I was excited about shifting over to The Twilight Zone, and, to be honest, I’d gotten a little sick of the show; you can only write, “This plot is representative of Mulder’s obsessions” or “The mythology doesn’t make a whole lot of sense” or “Scully is just the greatest” so many times before the words lose what little meaning they once had. But watching the sixth season premiere reminded me how much I love all this craziness, as even with the various plot setbacks and cul-de-sacs, “The Beginning” was scary and cool and a lot of fun. With “Drive,” I was reminded of something else before we even got to the title sequence: this series has done some of the best cold opens ever. Here, we get a phony “news bulletin” (from a Fox affiliate, meaning the less than sharp-eyed viewers might be forgiven for thinking this was real—at least until we start cutting to close ups), setting up one of the most purely satisfying premises Mulder and Scully ever had to face. We don’t learn the details for a while, but it’s easy to put together in those first few moments. Initially, it looks like a driver with a hostage is leading police on a high speed chase. The cops use a spike trap to stop the car, and yank the driver out (at which point people in 1998 were saying, “Why is Seinfeld’s dentist fleeing the police? And why does he have a mustache?”). He struggles and screams as these guys always seem to, and while the some officers hold him down, others lead his “hostage” from the car—a woman. The driver’s wife, maybe. He calls out to her, and she’s sick or confused or drugged, and they put her in a cop car, and it looks like everything is fine again. The disruption is over, the criminal has been apprehended, and now it’s down to the paperwork. Until the woman starts bashing her head against the window in the car, and then there’s a burst of blood as her skull bursts.
It’s hard to get much more X-Files than that, right? We think we know what’s going on, but it’s so much worse than our assumptions, in a way that threatens to undermine our view of the world. It’s no surprise, then, that Mulder gets one whiff of the case and jumps on it. He and Scully are on assignment interviewing farmers about fertilizer purchases, and Mulder gets a glimpse of the news footage we saw in the cold open, and he’s off. Scully protests, but barely. It’s not the episode’s flashiest aspect, but where Scully spend “The Beginning” backtracking and rejecting character growth, here she’s basically open-minded and interested in what’s going on. She spends most of the hour doing usual Scully stuff: autopsy, haz-mat suit, poking dead things, talking urgently with Mulder on a cell phone as she tries to save his butt for the umpteenth time. But there’s no “Mulder, despite having seen dozens, if not hundreds, of cases of strange and inexplicable events, I’m still going to act like weird things don’t exist” bullshit. It’s something I’ve noticed in a far number of monster of the week episodes. Scully in the mythology is inflexible to the point of absurdity, a human representation of the show’s inability to ever make a definitive change. But down in the trenches, she’s allowed to be skeptical (and given Mulder’s tendency to grab at any idea which sounds even remotely cool, I think you need some skepticism) but still sharp and adaptable. She’s even responsible for the theory behind what happened to the Crumps, and it’s as nutty a theory as Fox ever dreamed of.
Oh right, the Crumps: I haven’t talked much about them yet, but that’s the couple we meet in the cold open, one of whom dies before we get much more out of her than whimpering. Patrick Crump, on the other hand… It’s funny; we never really know much about Mr. Crump beyond the surface. He’s a roofer, he’s a bigot (he hears Mulder’s name and immediately starts complaining about Jews), and he doesn’t much care for the government. Beyond that, we don’t get a back-story, because we don’t really need a back-story; who Crump is doesn’t matter as much as what happens to him, and learn enough to keep the character from being just an expendable piece of meet. And yet, the climax of this episode, which has Mulder racing to get Crump to Scully before the ringing in his ears finally does him in, is as moving as it is suspenseful. Gilligan doesn’t go out of his way to make us feel bad for the man, and Mulder spends most of his time as a hostage (deservedly) sniping at the guy. Maybe that’s why his death is as sad as it is. Cranston does excellent work in the role, and if much of his time is spent looking scared and furious and in pain, the actor makes the most of the few pieces we get of where he came from. In particular, his short monologue about what happened to his wife the morning she got infected is haunting in a way these monologue often aren’t; I’m so used to hearing victims give speeches about how crappy it is to be a victim that I’m usually immune to the simple pathos those speeches are intended to illicit, but Cranston sounds and looks so haunted and lost and alone it’s hard not to feel for him. The guy’s a redneck asshole, but not even a redneck asshole deserves this. (And it goes without say that he’s probably not in the best frame of mind when we meet him.) Cranston takes a decently written role, and invests the character with an unexpected sort of dignity, one which acknowledges his failings while still forcing you to give a damn. His final moments, as he begs Mulder to go “Just a little bit faster,” make for one of the better ends I’ve seen on the show. Scully has just come up with a cure, and we’re allowed a moment to think this all might turn out okay in the end. But then Crump starts whimpering, and Mulder checks the speedometer, and the look on his face is all you need to know.
“Drive” is well cast, and our two heroes are both in top form, doing what they do best. The script also manages to wring as much suspense as it can out of its premise without diluting the concept. The episode’s tensest scene has Mulder forced to make a pit stop for gas in the middle of the night. First he pulls up on the wrong side of the pumps; then the hicks in the station won’t switch on the feed, because hicks don’t tend to jump to their feet when some city asshole starts screaming at them. So Mulder steals a handy station wagon just to get back on the road. It’s a short scene, but it works well, and it’s a mark in the episode’s favor that Gilligan doesn’t go out of his way to come up with more contrived threats. At one point, Mulder makes a joke about how similar all of this is to Speed, but where that movie spent most of its running time finding increasingly loopy ways to make “bomb on bus” relevant, “Drive” is more direct. (Admittedly, Gilligan doesn’t have as much time to fill.) There are quibbles you could make over the concept, which is so thin as to be transparent; something to do with low frequency radio broadcasts and the weapons potential thereof, and the possibility this may all have been an accident, or maybe not. But in a weird way, that thinness, and the basic absurdity of the premise, work to the episode’s advantage. The X-Files has always been interested in finding horrors in the thinnest of threads, and this is just another example of a seemingly ludicrous idea turning lethal. It stops being ridiculous when it starts being you.
It all comes back to Mulder in the end. The episode doesn’t force the connection, but the fact that we start with Fox choosing to get involved with a case which has nothing to do with him, a move which means directly disobeying the orders handed down from on high, is telling. And of course he gets involved, and of course once he realizes what’s happening to Crump, he does everything he can to save the poor guy. Partly because he wants Crump to have a chance to tell his story, but I think it’s more that this is just who Mulder is. He has to act, and in his way, he is as damned to forward motion as the poor bastard in the back seat. Throughout the series, Mulder’s determination to press on, his desperate compulsion to seek and hunt down and fix things, has been heralded, undercut, mocked, and even vilified, but “Drive” presents it as a simple and necessary fact. This is who he is, and while we may regret the trouble it causes him (and feel bad that Scully gets dragged along time and again), we can’t deny the necessity. Director Kresh runs through a long list of charges the adventure in Nevada has cost the Bureau, but as Scully points out, their work saves lives. And even more, we need them to keep going; we need them back in the driver’s seat, because without them, there’s no show. I could be reading too much into all of this, and the fact is, “Drive” works perfectly well on its own, without striving to find deeper symbolic significance. But I can’t help thinking of how elegantly it summarizes both Mulder’s character—he is defined by his refusal, his inability, to stop—and how that character, in turn, defines The X-Files. The truth is out there. But it won't stay still for long.
Grade: A