Long time coming in a review of season 2; I’ve been concentrating more on recent tv shows and slowly watching some of of the older tv shows like The X-Files, Andromeda and Charmed. Anyways, season 2 sees several episodes also furthered the alien conspiracy mythology that had begun to form. Season two introduced several recurring characters—X (Steven Williams), an informant to Mulder; Alex Krycek (Nicholas Lea), Mulder’s partner-turned-enemy; and the Alien Bounty Hunter (Brian Thompson), a shape-shifting assassin. Also to accommodate the pregnancy of actress Gillian Anderson; it was decided that Scully would be kidnapped and abducted by aliens, explaining her absence and allowing her to appear comatose two episodes later, which ultimately added more intricacies to the mythology.
As the season starts Dana Scully is reassigned to teach at the FBI Academy while Fox Mulder is given lowly surveillance assignments. when an old political ally gives him a new reason to believe, he goes alone to an abandoned SETI program site—Arecibo Observatory—in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Concerned for his safety, fellow FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) has to track down his whereabouts before someone or something else does. Next Scully’s autopsy turns up a parasite living inside the body of a decomposed body found in the sewers and a sewer worker is attacked and bitten by something. Next our duo investigate a case where, prompted by messages from digital appliances with instructions to kill, several residents of a small farming community suddenly turn violent and dangerous. An audio cassette hidden in his morning paper brings Mulder to request the case of a scientist’s death consistent with burning, despite the lack of any evidence of any flames or burns. He is given his request along with a new partner, Agent Alex Krycek.
Mulder and Krycek are sent in to help with the negotiations of an ex-FbiBI agent who claims to have been a UFO abductee and escapes from a mental hospital and holds several people hostage in a travel agency. Mulder races to Scully’s house after listening to the recording of her attack on his answering machine. Duane Barry (Steve Railsback) has kidnapped Scully, determined to offer her to the aliens in his place. Asst. Director Walter Skinner reopens the X-Files, but Mulder is finding it difficult to work without the missing Scully. When he recognizes a Los Angeles killing as the work of the Trinity murderers, a trio of killers with a fetish for drinking blood, it gives him work in which to immerse himself. Scully mysteriously re-appears comatose in a hospital, Mulder drives himself crazy trying to find the people responsible. A malfunction in a robot designed for volcanic exploration yields evidence of a lifeform living in the caves. When this lifeform seemingly causes the death of a member of the research team, Mulder and a newly recovered Scully are flown out to the site in The Cascades to investigate before anyone else dies. Mulder and Scully travel to Wisconsin where several teens are found wandering in the woods in their underwear with “He Is One” scrawled on their backs. The next case begins with the rape and battery of a nurse in a Massachusetts convalescent home. What makes it an X-File is her claim that her attacker was invisible. But upon their arrival, they discover that the unrest is not limited only to the live in residents.
When a detective mysteriously uncovers the remains of an FBI agent who disappeared in the 1940s while investigating a murder case similar to a modern-day one she is investigating, Mulder and Scully believe that the original killer had passed his genetic trait of violence to his grandchild. Someone is excavating graves in Minneapolis, New Hampshire teenagers feign an occult ritual in an attempt to score and inadvertently cause the murder of one of their group and a group of Haitians with a voodoo angle also follow. The crew of a research vessel find the wreckage of a UFO in the Beaufort Sea. The pilot who survives this crash walks out of the hospital and kills identical-looking doctors in various abortion clinics. An alien bounty hunter kidnaps Scully and wants to trade her for Mulder’s sister, Samantha Mulder (Megan Leitch). Mulder asks for Skinner’s help in making the trade, and has the FBI Director set up a sniper to take down the bounty hunter. Next is the case of the invisible animals. Mulder and Scully travel to Norway where a boatload of US soldiers seem to have aged drastically. Mulder and Scully must find the paranormal among the abnormal when they are sent to investigate a long standing series of ritualistic killings which match no known patterns. The latest of which was the death of the “Alligator Man,” just one of many sideshow acts around which the town of Gibsonton, Florida, is built. A photograph taken just before the death of a two year old boy yields evidence of some supernatural intervention which piques Mulder’s curiosity. When another death in the family occurs, the grandmother of the remaining child requests the aid of some Romanian ritualists (called “c?lu?ari” or “horsemen”) in order to cleanse the home of evil.
After several men in a prison die of a mysterious illness, Scully tries to discover the cause while Mulder attempts to find two escapees who could potentially spread the disease. An ex-student of Scully’s (Kate Twa) asks the agents to help her with her first investigation concerning a number of disappearances with very few clues. Mulder ponders the idea of spontaneous human combustion but rethinks it when they find a man who is afraid of his own shadow. The man is Dr. Banton, a scientist researching dark matter. Dudley, Arkansas, is the site of the latest investigation for Mulder and Scully, who are sent to find a missing poultry inspector. The case takes a twist when another poultry worker is shot after she goes insane, giving Mulder a hunch that the townsfolk really are what they eat. The trust that Mulder and Scully have is sorely tested when Mulder begins acting strangely. His aberrant behavior is compounded when the Lone Gunmen direct him to a hacker who managed to break into some very closely guarded files. The files are encoded in Navajo and need to be decoded by a former Navajo code talker. Mulder is presumed to be dead at the end of this episode but his body is not found.
Kölsch a is a local beer specialty that was originally brewed in Cologne, Germany. It is a clear beer with a bright, straw-yellow hue, and has a prominent, but not extreme, hoppiness. It is less bitter than the standard German pale lager. Kölsch is warm-fermented at a temperature around 13 to 21°C (55 to 70°F) and then cold-conditioned, or lagered. This manner of fermentation links Kölsch with some other beer styles of central northern Europe, such as the Altbiers of northern Germany and the Netherlands. The name Kölsch is, like champagne, Appellation Controlée, protected by law so that only beers brewed in and around Köln can bear the name, although many breweries elsewhere make Kolsch type beers.