This blog series examines disability and trauma as portrayed in the X Files. In the first season summary, I noted both the fear of stigma portrayed in having a mental illness and the framing of Mulder being seen as being “crazy” due to his belief. The first four episodes of the second season deals directly or implicitly with mental health diagnoses with a lack of emphasis on those diagnoses. While the change in tone is interesting, it is not known why this momentary change occurred.
In Little Green Men Mulder mentions George Hale who built a telescope at the prompting of an elf. Scully asks if Mulder is afraid he has been seeing elf’s his whole life. Mulder’s response is, in his case, Little Green Men. The implication here is that, in his time not actively pursuing paranormal cases, he has begun to question the sanity of that pursuit. Scully is uncharacteristically encouraging and points out George Hale’s telescope still got built. Later, when Mulder says that aliens were “here” at the Puerto Rico facility, Scully asks “Here? Or here?” She touches his head for the last “here?” Words like crazy, insane, mentally illness are not said, but delusions are implied.
In The Host, when told that the Flukeman was being sent for evaluation at a psychiatric facility, Mulder responds that he is not a man but a monster.
The next two episodes deal with phobias, trauma and sleep deprivation. The lack of the usual Scully/ Mulder debate is most remarkable in these episodes.
In Blood, residents of a smaller community are having psychotic breaks and killing people. Each resident are normal middle class residents with no criminal history. Each has some phobia. Mulder surmises that the LSDM is evident in bug spray used in the community and is triggering a psychotic reaction in those with phobias. It did not impact Mulder because of his lack of phobia. In this case, the blame is targeted at the people involved in the spraying. There is sympathy for the people whose phobias are being triggered.
In Sleepless, Vietnam soldiers are suffering from severe sleep deprivation due to surgery by the government that made them not need sleep and increased their agitation to make them better soldiers. The men are obviously struggling with actions they took in Vietnam and people, including children, they killed. There is no discussion of PTSD despite the portrayal. The sleep deprivation is the focus of discussion. The discussion of lack of serotonin due to lack of sleep might have been an opportunity to discuss a correlation with mental illness. Instead it leads to a discussion of telepathic image projections by the man called “preacher.” Preacher is named this because he quotes from The Bible, but there is no discussion about religious fanaticism due to mental health concerns. Preacher has escaped from a sleep disorder clinic, not a psychiatric facility, When Mulder pulls his weapon when he believes he sees someone with a gun, his new partner makes allusions to covering for him because he was waving his gun around and could have killed someone, but there is not “Like a mad man or crazy person” stated- just implied.
These are subtle changes in tone from the first season which might be easy to miss if I wasn’t specifically looking for these references.