“Red Museum” and Subversive Mythological Development

The episode “Red Museum” (2X10) combines elements of the monster of the week with mythological implications, quietly working to establish the mytharc without alerting the audience to its implications. Later mythology episodes take the form of the two-part whammy, not even waiting until the end of the teaser to alert the audience that the episodes will expect the audience to navigate and remember the latest twists and turns of government conspiracy and UFO activity within the show. However, “Red Museum” occurs between the show’s first two multi-episode installments, and so occupies a unique position in the development of the show’s mythology. While Scully’s abduction in the “Duane Barry” episodes foregrounds the development of the mythology, and both validates Mulder’s specific quest for answers and raises the stakes for Scully in the pair’s endeavors. However, it is “Colony” and “End Game” mid-second season that truly validate the mythology as an ongoing project within the show. “Red Museum,” six episodes before “Colony,” is therefore on the brink between a view of the show as made up of discrete installments, and a show that is concerned with an ongoing, overarching plot.

The episode takes place in a small town, and the ostensible issue facing the agents is cultism or possession, not abduction or government conspiracy. There is no indication that there is any extraterrestrial involvement, and even midway through the episode, it is not clear that Gerd Thomas, the creepy landlord, is not actually at fault for the abduction, and even murder of local teenagers. It is only at the conclusion of the episode that it becomes clear that the teenagers have been injected with purity control, the mysterious substance that Scully discovered at the conclusion of season one.

A key factor in making this obscure connection is Scully’s recognition the Crew Cut Man, one of the shadow government’s hired assassins, shown through a flashback to the night of Deep Throat’s death invites viewers to connect the episode to “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” as an early example of narrative development of the show. This sets up for the “Colony”/”End Game” two-parter, as those episodes again refer back to “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” and expand upon the alien-human hybrid development and cloning project.

Here a seemingly isolated set of incidents within a small town ultimately raises the question of other possible test groups that could exist throughout the country, and the ways that the Purity Control project is testing its research on unsuspecting citizens. “Red Museum” presents a community with a unique control group; the members of the Church of the Red Museum do not eat meat, and it appears that beef cattle are being injected with some form of the substance. However, beyond that, the teenagers' doctor had been giving them further injections. The results of this indicated that the subjects were unusually health, but that there had also been an increase in violent, aggressive behavior within the community. As Mulder and Scully simply stumble upon this connection to the Purity Control project, the episode implies that the scope of the project may extend to many other communities as well, and that the directors of the experiment have no concern for their human test subjects.