In “Beyond the Sea,” The X-Files Showed the Power of Wanting to Believe

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https://popculturereferences.com/in-...ng-to-believe/

Brian looks at how the X-Files episode, "Beyond the Sea," and how it spotlighted the power of wanting to believe.



Today, we look at how the X-Files episode, “Beyond the Sea,” and how it spotlighted the power of wanting to believe.

This is a delayed Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day from March 2nd on this year (plus January 1st-March 1st of 2024), we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.

All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great women-centric TV episodes.

When I started spotlighting great episodes of TV shows, I eventually got to The X-Files, and as I noted then, the trick was that when I FIRST spotlight a show, I need to start with an episode that shows the basic status quo of the series BEFORE I start spotlighting the episodes that play AGAINST the status quo.

In “Beyond the Sea,” Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully tragically lost her father to a sudden heart attack. Before she learned that he died, she saw a vision of him in her living room, so already Scully’s mind is in a weird place.

She finds out that a serial killer who is about to be killed, Luther Lee Boggs (played brilliantly by Brad Dourif), claims that he has psychic information about a kidnapped young couple, and he says he will provide it if his sentence is commuted. He then makes comments to Scully about being able to talk to her dad (and references a song played at the funeral, “Beyond the Sea”), and so she actively WANTS to believe that he DOES have psychic powers, because she wants to think he can actually talk to her dad.

This, of course, is the reverse of the normal setup of the series, where Mulder is the one who wants to believe in every extranormal thing, while Scully is the skeptic. In this episode, it is Mulder who believes that Boggs is trying to play Scully, and it is SCULLY who truly wants to believe.

Mulder believes that the whole kidnapping was part of a plot by Boggs to get his sentence commuted, but in the end, Scully ends up actually TRYING to get the sentence commuted when they rescue one half of the couple, but Mulder is injured in the process. She fails, but lies to Boggs and tells him the deal went through. He tells her that he knows she’s lying, but he believes that she tried her best, so he tells her where the other kidnapped person is, and gives her a mysterious warning about a “Blue Devil.”

Scully leads the operation, and they find the kidnap victim, but the kidnapper runs on to some scaffolding, and Scully sees a Blue Devil on the wall, and stops chasing him. The scaffolding then collapses, and the kidnapper falls to his death.

Fascinatingly, while someone like Mulder would have taken this as a sign that Boggs was telling the truth, Scully decides to believe Mulder’s position that Boggs orchestrated the whole thing. She visits Mulder in the hospital instead of attending Boggs’ execution, even though he told he he would pass on a message from her dad if she attended his execution.

Mulder can’t understand why Scully, if she believed Boggs at all, would possibly pass up the chance to hear from her dad, and she explains to him that she knows everything her dad would want to tell her.

Wow, that’s powerful. Such good work by Glen Morgan and James Wong, the standout star writers of Season 1 of the X-Files, who soon became movie screenwriting stars.