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Reviews
The X Files: The Post-Modern Prometheus (1997)
Cringe-worthy
I started watching this episode calling out every few minutes "THIS IS AMAZING".... the B- movie feel is spot on, the lighting is (as is usual to x-files) absolutely gorgeous, and i love a solid dose of camp in my TV.... but the last ten minutes or so elicited new cries of "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE?!?!?!"
As other reviewers have pointed out, it is possible that Mutato's father is impregnating the women, but this is left entirely unclear. There is absolutely no mention that he has been experimenting with animal DNA, as another reviewer suggested - only Dr. Pollidori is supposedly experimenting with DNA, and Mutato says that his adoptive father, Old Man Pollidori, had somewhat disowned Dr. Pollidori because he was too obsessed with science... suggesting that Old Man Pollidori would have nothing to do with animal DNA experimentation. The comparisons between Izzy and a pig and the journalist and a chicken are purely stylistic. Furthermore, the suggestion (by the same reviewer) that Dr. Pollidori has artificially inseminated Mrs. Berkowitz and thus explains how she got pregnant with her tubes tied makes absolutely no sense.... THAT DOES NOT WORK. (There is, frustratingly, no explanation given to how she was impregnated.) Given, she does have Izzy 18 years earlier, so it seems that Old Man Pollidori impregnated her then, but Izzy is fully human, while she and Mrs. Pollidori are shown with mutant babies at the end.
Given this evidence - namely the mutant babies shown in a (bizarrely joyful) closing scene - Mutato is a rapist. Yes he has lived a horrible, emotionally and psychologically stunting life, but he is a rapist. The two women, in the end, forget their worries that they were drugged for three days, impregnated, ignored by the authorities, and left to raise children on their own.... and Moulder and Scully, instead of prosecuting Mutato, take him to a Cher concert. I'm watching X-files for the first time... I don't know where things are going, but there have already been a number of rape/sexual assault plot lines that are left largely unaddressed, and certainly not called out for what they clearly are - the plumber who shape shifts into women's husbands and impregnates them, and then becomes Moulder and attempts to seduce Scully, and whom we are prompted to sympathize with because he wants so badly to be loved..... or most notably the abduction of women, either by aliens or the US government/military, and impregnation of them (I assume). I realize the X-files was made at a different time.... but this subject is still unsettlingly brushed over, in a way that should be expected to upset a contemporary viewer! And this episode, with the climatically celebrated Mutato, is the worst so far.
To top it off, we have to watch Moulder and Scully slow-dance to Cher at the front of a crowd. Barf.