"For fools rush in, where angels fear to tread."
-- Alexander Pope
"Fallen Angel" is a first season offering from the collective pens of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. This pair wrote some wonderful episodes during the first season, and "Fallen Angel" was, for my money, their best effort. This was very much a Mulder episode, an episode where most of the conflict centers around Mulder and his unending quest to prove the existence of extra-terrestrials. After being given a lead by his Season One source, the late, lamented Deep Throat, Mulder takes off for the woods of Wisconsin where he engages in subterfuge, camouflage and a few other nouns of French origin, trying to find his holy grail. ;-)
The crux of the story involves a downed alien spacecraft, deadly encounters with the surviving alien pilot, a massive secret undertaking by the military and, as a wildcard, a UFO-logist named Max Fenig. The climactic scene, wherein Mulder witnesses Max's abduction by the alien's rescue ship, is burned forever in my mind's eye. It is one of the most powerful visual images ever presented by the series. Even though we know what happened with the E.B.E., there was still that open-ended, ambiguous feeling to "Fallen Angel" because we aren't really sure what happened to Max.
Newer fans of the series might be a bit astonished at the single-mindedness of Season One Mulder. Back then, he was much more high strung, much more openly passionate about his quest and much less tolerant of his partner. Many times, Mulder was pretty reckless and nearly every week, he brushed up against that fine line that separates acceptable behavior from insubordination. He was quite animated, and, at this stage of the series, in the ninth episode, he still had the attitude that if Scully wasn't around to help him attain his goals, then she wasn't of much use to him. He was self-centered and egotistical and generally a pain in the ass to bureaucrats (that's the "B" in FBI ;-) everywhere. He was no sycophant, and he was great fun to watch. "Fallen Angel" was a special episode for many reasons. This was the episode where Deep Throat demonstrated just how much power he truly had. He was able to send Mulder off in search of the downed UFO, and yet he had enough juice to rein in Section Chief McGrath when McGrath had Mulder dead to rights for insubordination. Had he wanted to do so, Mulder could have been expelled from the FBI and the X-Files shut down. Although Deep Throat's motives were never clearly and definitively explained, and he remained a shadowy figure right through the very end of his life, it was apparent to me that from this episode on, Deep Throat was really one of the good guys. Mulder was the protégé and Deep Throat was the mentor, and they played their roles with wonderful aplomb right through "The Erlenmeyer Flask."
As a long-time fan of Jerry Hardin's work, it is difficult for me to try to be objective. But the flexibility he displays in a limited amount of screen time was noteworthy. In the brief flashback at the beginning of the episode, Hardin's Deep Throat is seen as the mentor, the advisor, providing the lead to something that Mulder would never have gotten on his own. The sincerity in his voice is readily apparent. In the closing sequence, he plays the man with the power to overturn the ruling of the section head of the Office of Professional Behavior (OPB) as if it were as natural as waving away an annoying mosquito on a humid summer night. He even had the temerity to use the quote from The Godfather about keeping your friend close and your enemies closer. He was smooth, and he was in control, and yet he managed to cause you to have just a tiny bit of doubt about the purity of his motives. Mr. Hardin managed this range with about 8 lines of dialogue and about 40 years of experience using voice and facial inflections. That's what good acting is all about. The man is a consummate professional.
Marshall Bell's portrayal of Colonel Calvin Henderson was pretty much a standard military leader's, "I'm in charge here, and we'll do it my way" attitude that comes directly from Central Casting. He uses every military cliché you've ever seen.
There was one interesting, subtle allusion in "Fallen Angel." Scully compares the burns on the soldiers to those of the victims who were at Ground Zero at Hiroshima. The doctor who was in charge of the ER was "Doctor Oppenheim." For those of you who know your history, J. Robert Oppenheimer was the head of Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed, and is known as the father of the Atomic Bomb. The irony is that a man with a name so close to Oppenheimer's would be treating the victims of radiation burns caused by an E.B.E. encounter.
But for all the heartfelt performances in this episode, the real show stealer was Scott Bellis's Max Fenig. This was a particularly meaty guest starring role, and Bellis was an absolute joy to watch. Consider the joy and excitement that Max feels when he realizes that he's been incarcerated with his hero, through the paranoia when he yells out that he didn't see anything, and eventually the embarrassment when he's caught by Mulder and Scully after rummaging through Mulder's hotel room. You could hear the genuine pride in Max's voice when he was showing M & S his prized toy, the Wolf Ear 2000 Electronic Surveillance Device. And finally, you could really feel the horror that Max experienced when he was being abducted (again). Max Fenig was one of the most finely drawn supporting characters ever created on this series, and the credit must be shared among Bellis, director Larry Shaw and screenwriters Gordon and Gansa. You don't need any more proof of this than to see that Max will be back within the next two weeks.
There were some errors in the episode. For starters, I simply cannot understand why the soldiers who were on the search team did not have infra-red optical devices, when it was apparent that the E.B.E. was not visible to the naked eye. The spotter with the infra-red device could see the entity, but the poor guys who had to find and kill it were walking around with mini-flashlights on their cap brims. That made no sense whatsoever. And of course there was the left ear-right ear inconsistency. When Mulder puts Max to bed, Max rolls over on his left side, thus exposing his right ear, with the incision of unknown origin, to Mulder's view. But when Mulder's looking at the photographs of the abducted women and their scars, their scars are behind their respective left ears. Mulder then insists to Scully that Max bears the same scar, behind his left ear. This may be true, but Mulder has no proof of it, since all he saw was the scar behind Max's right ear.
Finally, there is the unanswered question of why Mulder was only thrown across the room when the alien touched him instead of being burned to a crisp. As far as I could ascertain, the deputy sheriff and the fire-fighters weren't threatening the alien's life when they encountered it, but they were burned like the solders, whose intent was obviously physical harm. So why was Mulder spared that painful ordeal or worse, outside of the fact that he's one of the two central characters on the show? Inquiring minds want to know. :-)
But these errors do not detract much from the whole work of art that is "Fallen Angel." We had a wonderful story that was briskly paced and well directed. Excellent performances by David Duchovny, Jerry Hardin and especially Scott Bellis combined with outstanding special effects. The Mythology, still in its infancy when "Fallen Angel" aired, was further defined and its depth increased. Gillian Anderson began to use "that look" when Mulder runs off by himself and gets in trouble, and she begins to use voice inflection, subtle gestures and body language to help mold the Scully character in the Scully of today.
When I saw it during the first season, "Fallen Angel" was one of my favorite episodes. It has withstood the test of time.
My Score: 9.8 out of 10