From what I have just seen Tithonus was a very appapro title for this episode. It was definitly Xfiles level creepiness.

Good Episode. Almost had the first post, got disconnected!

I got thinking toward the end, what was CC thinking? So far we have had several shipper comedys and 2 serious Myth episodes. Then we get the preview for next week, and I began wondering what is going to happen...

ANP

This also solved a nit from last week. It was such a high numbered Senate Resolution because it was the end that session. And this episode took place around January 3, a Sunday. Three days before this session of Congress started.

ANP

A very cool, but very creepy episode!

So is scully now technically Immortal?

And why did the guy shoot the camera? I don't see how he could have thought it was a gun!

How did he ge scully's phone? She had it when she went into the hall and seconds later he is hown putting it on the shelve.

I thought he took it out of her pocket when he bumped into her.

Creepy episode indeed.

Did anyone find it odd that the FBI office floor that M&S work on quite dark? I haven't been to a real FBI office/bldg. so I wouldn't know what it's suppose to look like. But most of the regular offices I've been to are quite well-lit. :-)

Continuing from last week's point I made, apparently Mulder is tapping into A.D. Kersh's e-mail/account as well. Last week he was tapping Skinner's cellphone calls. ;-) He'd better be careful not to get caught.

The thug that kills a guy and stabs Mr. F. in the dark alley should know not to leave his knife behind. I mean, he was a convicted killer right? But then if he didn't they wouldn't have traced it back to Mr. F. and him.

And when Mr. F. takes pics during the stabbing while at the fire escape ladder, there was no flash .. just the clicking sound of the camera. But when he gets closer, there's the flash.

Mulder suddenly allows people to call him Fox eh? He lets Payton Ritter call him that when Scully introduces them to each other.

Scully, too, lets Ritter call her Dana until the last time when they're at odds over what to do with Mr. F.

What's with the "testing 123" Ritter does when they record the interrogation? And while we're at it, I thought they'd have a far "modern" recorder like those mini-recs. :-)

Yeah, I agree with Amos that Mr. F. picked her pocket when he bumped into her in the dark room.

I guess all Mr. F. had to ever do to end his misery was to stop taking pictures and look at Death himself. I don't think Scully would be Immortal. Mr. F.'s story stated something like he wished the nurse who died in his place to look at death which started his "immortality." In a way, I think his immortality curse hasn't been passed on to Scully unless she made some sort of wish, too. Made sense? Oh, I guess I'm rambling.

Full disclosure 2 weeks from tonight ... wouldn't want to miss that. :-)

Ok, this is it for tonight. ?:-)

He likely said "Testing..." to make sure level was getting to tape. More than likely the recorder is a digital audio tape (DAT) recorder or at least a standard cassette deck, either of which would be preferable to one of those little microcassette recorders--those things are terrible.

In the opening of the episode, Mr. F. is following a mail-women who is dies when her elevater crashes. I think he may have, inadvertantly caused her to die. Follow me on this for a sec., when she is delivering mail Mr. F. starts follwing her through the building and this makes her nervous. So she speeds up and starts delivering mail at a much quicker pace. Eventually she hurries to the soon to be pancaked elevator. But if he hadn't been following her, she wouldn't have sped up her pace, and most likely would have missed the ill-fated elevator. Something here's not quite right.

Anyway, good episode overall. And BTW, all questions you ever had about the X-Files will be answered in...TWO WEEKS!!! AAAHHHH!! I'm sure this will prove to be a painfully long two weeks.

Actually, it starts february 7th. That's in one week. The "Truth" will be revealed over a period of two weeks.

Karra

Pretty good. The similarities to "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" speak for themselves.

What's with the lighting in this episode? Did all the lightbulbs in New York suddenly burn out? The production design people seemed like they were imitating Seven.

The title doesn't quite work. "Tithonus" implies eternal aging, not just immortality. In fact, it would be opposite of the Dick Clark factor.

There's another nice tie-in to "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" - when Dana asks Bruckman how she's going to die, he says "You don't". I guess now we know why.

Actually Feburary 7 would be 2 weeks from last Sunday. First, the 31st which for some unknown reason there is no X-Files. Then the 7th. "All my questions will be answered" Yeah Right! Remembeber PAL

Why does Mr. F take a picture of the murder? Doesn't he realize that this killer will most likely try to get him?

OK, I have to confess to literary ignorance. I had no idea who Tithonus was. So for those who are similarly ignorant (but not admitting it), here's a snippet from
http://athena.english.vt.edu/~kagraham/GrMyths.html
******************************
Tithonus was a mortal loved by Eos, the dawn goddess. She begged Zeus to make him immortal, but omitted to ask for his eternal youth so
that he became an old shriveled creature, little more than a voice. Some versions have him shrivel into a grasshopper. (Tennyson's
poem"Tithonus" has the speaker lamenting his "cruel immortality.")
********************************

And for those who want to read the Tennyson poem of the same name:

http://www.helsinki.fi/~kakivila/Texts/Tithonus.html


And now for my two nits.

1) Scully picks just about the most dangerous way possible to apprehend the thug on the street: walking up right behind him and putting her gun to the back of his head, especially when he's considerably larger than she is. He could easily spin and whack her gun away faster than she could react and shoot. I'm sure she'd fail the Academy training exercise with this tactic. But I did like the way she smacked him in the mouth for smarting off, once he was safely handcuffed. (Well, not exactly safely--she gave him a pretty cursory search for weapons, considering that she let him with a hand free to pull out another concealed gun if he had one....)

2) Mulder locates a case file on our suspect from 1929. At the top of the card it said "Wanted by the FBI" or "FBI suspect" (or something close to that, but definitely had "FBI" in it). The FBI was founded in 1908, but was called just the "Bureau of Investigation." The name wasn't changed to "Federal Bureau of Investigation", with the common abbreviation FBI, until 1935.

Now, this isn't a slam-dunk nit, since it's *possible* that at some point after 1935 old files were transferred onto some new system of cards. But I suspect it's just a small point that TPTB didn't consider.

One familiar nit. Phil notes several times in his X-Philes Guide how murders or other crimes tend to increase dramatically in frequency right when M&S start snooping about. Well, isn't it interesting that Ritter's original investigation could only find a few instances of Mr. F. being on the scene early over the course of a few years, but when Scully gets into town, the cases come thick and fast, one right after another?

Two more...

Will the NY FBI guy report to Kersh that Mulder was involved with the case, he even talked with him.

Does Scully really hate doing a stakeout alone? She ended it pretty fast by confronting a man who for all she knows could kill her?

ChrisC,(we have a lot of Chris's) you stole my line! FEWMETS! I was soo happy
that *I* would be the one to casually mention, "BTW, this explains Clyde
Bruckman's comment..." Sigh. Ah well, I forgive ya. :-)
Anyway...
I, at first, found the ep to be made up of four plot threads from other eps, not
paticularly interesting, and with poor sound effects(i.e. that 'creepy' music inthe
teaser as the guy took photos of the bodies.) *but,* as the ep went on it got better
and better, 'til the visual and sound effects blew me away. All in all, it turned out
to be a good thread-tier-upper. I'll just attribute the first half of the ep to John
Shiban directing. Ugggh. On a more sober note, I have the perfect solution for the
guy to see the face of death-- go over to Germany during the Holocaust and tell
them you're a Jew. Lord knows the Holocaust pictures terrify me more than any
Stephen King book.

Can't wait 'til ne

Also, every time someone's eyes aren't open when they die, they stay alive? Doesn't that mean there is a whole lot of immortals out there...
That also explains why Skinner isn't dead, when he flatlined, his eyes were closed, so, there was a contributing factor to 'turned the mechanical cells off...'

Richie, there is no X-Files on Sun 1/31 because that is the SuperBowl, and Fox has it.

-12-

What!!!! no Xfiles???? now thats scary.

In response to Mr. F knowing that the killer might try to kill him, I don't think he cares. He's immortal and invincible. If anything, he wants them to come get him, so he can die.

In another response to Ritter stupidly shooting the camera, I also don't think Ritter cared. I think he was trying to kill Mr. F, since we've already seen that Ritter doesn't care much about due process.

Was the guy playing Ritter the same guy who plays Pete on "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place"? He played Ritter nearly identical to his character on that show.

Finally, Gene Roddenberry once said that authors don't intentionally copy things, they retain it, and subconsciously use it later on. This episode had that kind of feeling. First, the "look of death" reminds me of the TZ episode "The Purple Testament". The elevator scene had the feeling of those old stories about the person knowing the elevator's about to crash, when the operator says "There is room for one more!" Another TZ episode "One for the Angels", in which a man bargains with Death when he wants to die also cropped up here.

The guy playing the photographer was good, if a bit understated to the guy as Ritters' overstated acting. Also, what happens if the guy has his head cut off? Would his head and body continue living? Or is it like a Highlander thing, and that's the only way he can die?

I was confused by the "dick clark" comment....
the joke is that dick clark never ages. That ol'
geezer needs some oil of olay.

I was under the impression that elevators had emergency brakes designed to prevent the disaster shown in the teaser.

Perhaps he was a Highlander. I have one question maybe someone can answer this this. How did Scully I thought she wasn't even near him?

uhh, how did scully what?!

that said, I have the feeling Scully is, in fact, now immortal. I wonder if they'll ever give Mulder a break from being cast in "loser" mode. He's really gotta show what he's made of again pretty soon. He's looking like a dork. A very cute dork; but a dork.

Get shot would be my guess...

I thought it was strange that she was shot, too. She didn't seem near him. I might have mis-seen it.

ANP

Soory about that, I should be more careful next time.

I think the old man moved in front of her at the last minute, but I admit I'm not sure.

Could be that the bullet kinda changed angle after hitting the camera thus hitting Scully. 'coz that's the only way I could think of given the way Scully was standing relative to Mr. F. and how Ritter fired his gun. One question though ... was Mr. F. wounded, too? If he was, then I have no idea how the bullet could've hit the camera and hit him and Scully both. Of course, I'm not gun expert so I wouldn't know ... merely guessing.

Looked to me like the bullet went through the camera, then Mr. F, then into Scully, as he was pretty much directly in front of her. Perfectly possible.

The gun that the FBI agent used was definately not FBI issued, the gun he was using was a Glock 9mm, unneededly powerful, though powerful enough to travel through a camera and two people.

Perhaps he was actually working for the Consortium. It makes some sense if you think about it. He could just say that Scully was hit by "friendly" fire and pow! Mulder and Scully are permantly separated and no one knows what really happened. As for the bullet it was one of those "magic bullets" we are always hearing about.

What's this 'permantly separated'?

If Scully had died, XPS, if Scully had died...

-12-

...if Scully had died, Mulder would be behind bars for killing the other FBI agent.
:-) And i like both Action!Mulder and Geeky!Mulder. Even SelfAbsorbed!Mulder
ain't so bad

This episode reminded me of two poems, one by Emily Dickenson:
Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me

And "Resume", by Dorothy Parker:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

I know Why the X-Files is not on this week. It is called sarcasm, Check it out

Ritter is Pete on Two Guys a Girl and A Pizza Place. And I don't think Pete would shoot an unarmed man. Or anyone, really.

At the very conclusion Special Agent Dana Scully's temporarily assigned partner opens the dark room's curtain with one hand. However, both of his hands are then on his handgun. Who is holding the dark room's curtain open?