I initially read “non-Darin Morgan” as “non David Morgan-Mar” and now I’m wondering what a DMM-written X-files episode would look like.

This one is definitely just an excuse for the director to mess around with tracking shots and putting Scully in period costume, and I’m…okay with that? The whole episode ends on a big “IUNO?” shoulder shrug. It’d be great if an episode with this kind of quirky visual style had a compelling plot to go with it, but we can’t always get what we want (but if we try sometimes we just might find we get what we need etc.)

I love this episode because it’s one of the only ones where anything interesting happens in the FBI building besides the occasional cliffhanger execution of some dude (RIP Chief Blevins AKA Evil Proto-Skinner).

“Another period piece! Mulder disappears in the Bermuda Triangle and gets picked up by a cruise ship that vanished in 1939. In no time he’s fighting Nazis, delivering action-hero quips, and meeting unexplained 1930s versions of Scully and other characters (this episode is, among other things, a tribute to The Wizard of Oz). But the real action is back in the present, where Scully has to navigate an FBI building swarming with agents of the Conspiracy in order to rescue Mulder. An unusually action-packed episode, this is one of a handful directed by Chris Carter, who went all-out with the fancy camerawork. The whole episode is designed to look like a series of extended takes in the style of Hitchcock’s Rope, and one sequence in particular, with Scully running up and down FBI headquarters for eleven uninterrupted minutes, looks impossible to shoot. Near the end, there’s another neat trick: a split screen tracking the 1939 and present-day action, during which the two Scullys pass like ships in the night and switch to the opposite sides of the screen. Also, Nazis get punched.”