THE X-FILES

Perhaps no television show deals with a more diverse set of science fiction scenarios than Chris Carter's X-Files. Week-in and week-out, FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder confront mysteries of the paranormal. The cases they try to solve involve phenomena that range from telepathy and telekinesis to alien abductions and other close encounters.

This season Carter and his team have focused on the question of other dimensions. In the episode that aired on November 22, Mulder found himself trapped in a maze of dimensions. The episode re-told the history of the British luxury liner The Queen Anne, a ship that perished in the notorious Bermuda Triangle just before World War II. The show treats the Bermuda Triangle as a hole in the fabric of space-time: somehow the Queen Anne fell into that hole in 1939 and sailed out of it in 1998. The ship and everything on it lose 60 years, but, in the episode, the passengers and crew act as though they have not missed a single day. While the actual science of the Bermuda Triangle is never discussed at length, the case of the Queen Anne raises some interesting questions of other dimensions. If the Queen Anne really disappeared from Earth for over a half-century, it must have existed somewhere during that time; it was not destroyed and re-created. Perhaps, the hole in space-time carried the ship through a wormhole to a remote part of the universe. However, if that were the case, then the people on board would have experienced the time lapse as far longer than 60 years: they would not have returned to Earth unchanged by time. Perhaps, then, the ship slipped into another dimension, one in which time is so slow relative to Earth time that the people on board would not age at all (or even notice their absence from Earth). All in all, this episode, like many others, leaves the viewer with far more questions than answers, introducing the question of other dimensions merely to offer far-fetched science fiction explanations for the ship-disappearing phenomenon known as the Bermuda Triangle. The decision even to introduce the idea of dimensions fits within the overall ethos of the series, prompting the viewer to question unexplained phenomenon and then providing a fantastic answer that is presented as a legitimate theory of the truth.

The following week, November 29, the X-Files continued to address the question of different physical dimensions. In this episode, Carter focuses more closely on the science of dimensions outside of our own. One night, after witnessing a mysterious bright light in the Nevada desert near the infamous Area 51, Mulder's personality is switched with that of the man standing next to him, Morris Fletcher. As the episode continues, and the mystery of the switch becomes more confusing, the viewer sees other examples of such switches. A military pilot trades identities with an elderly Native American woman. Another pilot's torso is molded to a rock (while his lower half is missing). A lizard is also molded onto a rock (while his lower half is missing, as well). A man is molded to the floor. And two coins are welded together perpendicularly. Ultimately, the viewer hears one expert's opinion of what happened. Apparently, the military was operating an "anti-gravity system" that bends the fabric of space-time. In this instance, the system produced a distortion that the episode labels "lost time," a phenomenon in which two objects share precisely the same coordinates in space-time.

As always, the episode establishes a base-line of scientific jargon that is not adequately explained: what, for instance, is an "anti-gravity system?" Still, the ideas introduced in the episode are merely seeds of science fiction; the bulk of the fiction, however, is left to our imagination. The viewer is free to interpret the vague science of the X-Files however he/she chooses. The episode repeatedly includes shots of the pilot-rock and lizard-rock, pairs that stand out as incomplete switches when compared to Mulder's experience with Fletcher. These shots beg the viewer to ask what happened to the other halves of the pilot, the lizard and the rocks. With no answers provided in the episode itself, and with several characters' hinting at a porthole to another dimension, the possibility that the missing halves are stuck in another dimension presents itself as an acceptable explanation. Perhaps the pilot-rock is part of a whole that cannot be seen fully in our 3-dimensional world. Like the hovering sphere of Edwin Abbot Abbot's Flatland, the pilot-rock would be partially visible in 3-space but would also be simultaneously partially invisible. Clearly, one could speculate on the possibilities forever.

The important point is that the scientific details that Carter and his team introduce into the X-Files serve two functions: first, they legitimize some of the more outlandish plot twists by supporting the events with the intellectual capital of scientific theory and language; second, they invite the audience to speculate about the details left unanswered by brief scientific explanations.

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