The Wretched: X-Files - "The Post-Modern Prometheus"

Welcome to the first entry in my very spontaneous blog series chronicling my exploration of the various reanimating or deconstruction of Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus". Earlier this year when the trailer for the 2025 film FRANKENSTEIN debuted, I found myself at odds; I've always been somewhat ambivalent about the way that Western pop culture presents the Frankenstein story, generally averse to the more heretical and transgressive themes that drive the novel. I don't know what angle Del Toro's story will explore but I find myself curious now to see if any of the hundreds of reiterations of the Frankenstein story tap into what I see as one of the most profoundly enlightened stories ever.

As the show recently had a groundswell of interest around my corner of Bluesky, I found myself wondering if The X-Files touched on the Frankenstein story (it seemed obvious). Now that I have the Season 5 episode "The Post-Modern Prometheus" queued up, I'll hit play and give you my stream-of-consciousness reaction.

Immediately, the meta-narrative opening feels like it sets this episode apart from the regular X-Files. We're reading a comic book, rather than experiencing a "real" day in the life of Mulder and Scully. The comic itself is clearly a visual homage to EC Comics and I will say that it's charming to see that $2.50 price tag indicating that this was supposed to be not a vintage comic but a comic of the show's heyday that imitates the EC Comics aesthetic, even though the comic book market at the time was entirely dominated by cape books. Which makes for an even stronger case that this is actually an homage to CREEPSHOW, the beloved anthology movie from 1982 whose own opening uses the 4th-wall-as-comic device.

Also of note that beloved horror artist Bernie Wrightson released his own acclaimed FRANKENSTEIN comic in 1983 via a publisher no less luminary than Marvel Comics themselves, likely a result of the CREEPSHOW phenomenon. There's no doubt Chris Carter was channeling these elements with the introduction to this episode.

I actually am only just now discovering that this episode was shot entirely in black and white. It definitely further reinforces the feeling that this sits far outside the continuum of what I generally associate with X-Files.

So our seeming protagonist is a comic book nerd going to a comic book convention, which at the time this series was airing was still a relatively esoteric medium; Comic-Con had not yet become the place for major studios to stake their claim on the summer blockbuster, and by extension, the year's entire film slate (2021 and on being a somewhat but not much different landscape).

I saw Jerry Springer's name in the credits and thought maybe he'd have what amounted to a cameo but it seems he's getting even less than that here; his appearance on a TV introducing the mother of a half-wolf child yet again highlights how the world of this episode of the X-Files is more openly weird than the average series. Also, even though I haven't seen any jack o'lanterns, there's something very Halloween-ish about the vibes of this episode so far.

Not recognizing this music drop as the titular antagonist makes his debut but it slaps and further reinforces the spooky season aesthetic. Wait holy shit is this Cher covering The Walker Brothers?!?! Oh no, this episode might be too incredible for me to blog about.

This episode's handling of the X-Files mythos is honestly so much more in line with what I had always wanted from the series, which imagines Mulder and Scully less as pawns in a supernatural global conflict and more as itinerant scooby-doo types with a cult following.

I am powerfully curious as to what the hell the story of this episode, at least as far as I can winnow it so far, has to do with Frankenstein.

I had watched the X-Files episode "Home" just prior to this because it has been highlighted as an excellent example of the Southern Gothic Slasher genre (see also: The Night Of The Hunter, 2000 Maniacs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pumpkinhead, Pearl) which is how I like to cap off my summer. This episode might unintentionally homage "Home" as well; a photo appears I close-up twice featuring a boy with a prize-winning swine and the mother says "folks round here don't lock their doors" which was notably a feature of the town in "Home".

Mom refers to her son's bedroom as "pigsty". Again, surely this can't just be coincidence.

Okay so... the comic book from the introduction is also a comic book that exists in the episode itself. What the actual fuck. And Izzy, the kid I assume is the protagonist of the episode, created Mutato... But that can't be right because according to the mother, Izzy was a result of the previous encounter with Mutato. Whatever the hell is actually going on here, it's gonna be a doozy.

Wait. What if the kid simply wanted to get Mulder and Scully's attention so he could figure out who his actual dad was so he recreated the events his mother made up instead of telling him the truth in order to get the attention of Mulder and Scully? Why his mother go along with this idea... unless the opening scene was a fake-out and she's lying to Mulder and Scully and the whole thing is a set-up to get Mulder and Scully to figure out who Izzy's real dad is?

Oh yeah no I can see that this is going to be my favorite X-Files episode.

Dana Scully: Psychologists often speak of the denial of an unthinkable evil or a misplacement of shared fears, anxieties taking the form of a hideous monster for whom the most horrific human attributes can be ascribed. What we can't possibly imagine ourselves capable of we can blame on the ogre, on the hunchback, on the lowly half-breed. Common sense alone will tell you that these legends, these unverified rumors, are ridiculous.

Fox Mulder: But nonetheless, unverifiable and, therefore, true in the sense that they're believed to be true.

Dana Scully: Is there anything that you don't believe in, Mulder

This is, no hyperbolizing, a crystallization of the philosophical struggle I've wrestled with so intimately the last few years. For most of the adult life I've been an atheist because I felt that people used their belief in the supernatural to do exactly what Scully describes.

But now I am much more in line with Mulder's attitude about the world. Disbelieving in something personally doesn't make what other people believe less real, to them. The only way to get someone to doubt something they firmly believe is not to provide evidence of a contrary belief, but to undeniably discredit the evidence they use to assure themselves that what they believe is true. But if that evidence is only verifiable in the first-person, there is simply no way to engage in any good-faith reasoning about the truth of such a belief.

Given that fact, what I and Mulder have in common is that there is more solace to be found in embracing the futility of the search for truth, in embracing a belief that all things are always possible, than to ultimately disbelieve anything.

I didn't expect this episode to present that worldview so succinctly, especially not in the fifth season of the series on what seems like such a lark of a story.

IS THAT J. PETERMAN!?!?!

O'Hurley as a not-quite-mad scientist is casting gold and seeing him interact with Mulder and Scully is pretty goddamn magical, though I think I'm a bit confused by how this episode swerves between somewhat gonzo near-parody and, well, the above bit between Mulder and Scully.

I love the lab assistant. I love him so much. He's just like me, for real.

Here's where the rubber hits the road. Our Dr Frankenstein analog (Dr Pollidori) isn't doing the same kind of transgressive science that Dr Frankenstein was and his motives are vastly different. Dr Frankenstein was, as Shelley quite eloquently describes, possessed by madness in his drive to create The Creature, his only rational explanation being that he believed reanimating a lifeless body was a great boon to humankind. When he discovers that The Creature does not inherently possess what Victor believes defines a "human", Victor shuns The Creature.

Dr Pollidori, on the other hand, seems to be cartoonishly egotistical, with his only obvious justification for his scientific experiments as "because I can". In this sense, though, he does more closely resemble the monster of the historical Polidori's story "The Vampyre" in his sadistic exercise of power.

The following dialogue between Mulder and Scully falls flat in comparison to the earlier one. Mulder takes the misanthropic point of view, believing that science, as a tool of mankind, is apathetic to nature. He espouses the idea that the universe is ultimately irrational and it is human nature to be terrified of that irrationality and to respond by trying to assert control. Scully insists that human beings can't behave irrationally, that our inner nature is our only nature and that the act of procreation, as we know it, is too sacred to us to conceive of purposefully defying it.

This, funny enough, is a topic that is broached in "Home" as well, where the Peacock family had decided that their right to procreate as they had been doing for decades unchanged was sacred.

Okay so now we're getting to the genuinely bizarre shit. Dr Mutato is doing a full on dance routine to Cher and the performance certainly calls to mind Michael Madsen's Mr Blonde or Buffalo Bill.

Mulder comes back to Scully and literally rephrases what I said earlier about Victor Frankenstein's motivations but then tries to link it to Dr Pollidori in a way that maybe reflects less how relevant the episode's story is to Shelley's narrative and more closely to the overall skepticism towards science that the series generally advocates. Mulder describes The Creature as a "hideous phantasm of a man" and... like... how the fuck does Mulder, of all people, end up sympathizing with Frankenstein? If this episode doesn't end with a repudiation of Mulder's ethos.

This whole thing is really starting to feel a bit overcooked. I think part of the issue is that it wants to be an homage not to the novel FRANKENSTEIN but the James Whale film. Which is a shame, though not surprising. I'm also sensing that, to a degree, that the 1981 Tobe Hooper film FUNHOUSE was an influence.

But yeah, it's fairly clear by the end that this episode is mostly interested in replicating the classic James Whale FRANKENSTEIN movie and eschewing the themes of the novel. It touches briefly on the aspects of humanity creating supernatural scapegoats for their own sadistic impulses but never explores that any deeper.

WAIT

WHAT THE FUCK

WHAT IS THIS FUCKING TWIST

I.. actually okay, this is gonna take more than one night to unpack. The kids that were born as the result of the father's experiments are animal hybrids??? I mean this certainly ties into the philosophical aspects of Shelley's book, where she exposes man's egotistical delusion of an unnatural inheritance that elevates him above animals... I like this thematic inversion of showing these people who believe themselves to be superior to this Other when they themselves are animals, quite literally.

Yes, I get it, Chris Carter is obsessed with Elvis. It's a clever callback but I'm already just too shook by this episode for these shenanigans. I need to go lie down for a while.

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