So this is a project I've thought about undertaking for a number of years, but never had any good reason to get started and ended up making notes in my head. The project is probably one of the nerdiest things I've ever done and reveals just how many hours I've spent watching TV in my life, The X-Files more specifically. I make no secret of the fact that I was and still am a HUGE fan of this show, and now that I've started rewatching it via streaming video (THANK YOU, INTERNET), it's reentered my mind that I still have not proven this hypothesis of mine that I've carried about the show since I watched it as a teenager every Sunday night. The hypothesis is this: at any point in any given episode of The X-Files, you can tell exactly what season you're in just based on Mulder and Scully's hair alone.
Aside from some masterful storytelling (uh, and moments of some not so masterful storytelling - I'm looking at you "Fight Club." Believe me, this episode had nothing to do with the movie and was absolutely terrible), compelling characters and chemistry that practically burned a hole through your TV screen, what makes The X-Files so amusing to watch over and over again is the perfect 90's-ness of the styling of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. From their oversized trenchcoats, boxy suits and giant ass cellphones in the first season, it's hilarious to watch how the costume designers and set people streamlined the look of the show so that it came to epitomize the sexy cool/geek chic that it did in later seasons. I'm also convinced you can place every episode based on the ridiculous fucking tie Mulder is wearing in any given scene, but that requires an attention to detail and tolerance for eye-searing patterns that I just don't have. Mulder really did have a truly atrocious tie collection in the same way that Scully had some seriously ugly shoes in the first couple of seasons.
I'm not expecting many people to get through to the bottom of this post because this is just me revealing my disgusting amount of knowledge about this show, but if you ever tuned into The X-Files and were as big a fan as I am, it'll be a fun stroll down memory lane. I had a ridiculously good time looking for photos for each episode and a good portion of my "Moving GIFs" folder is dedicated to the ridiculous snippets other savvier fans have created over the years.
Season 1
The historic meeting
This is where it all began. Look at how youthful and not traumatized they are... well at least you can see it in Mulder's face here. ALSO does anyone else miss how Mulder and Scully used to wear those giant, round-framed glasses? I was so sad when they either got a reliable set of contacts or a good lasik surgeon because they disappear after the 3rd season.
<3
Oh 1st Season Scully: Queen of the Frump. Gillian Anderson and Chris Carter have stated that they had intended Scully to be a bit on the dowdy side to show that she was all business and didn't have the time in her day to fret about her looks. She displayed an amazing array of truly heinous suits in an array of gag-inducing colors: from pea soup green, to sea foam, diarrhea brown, to probably the color of beige they use to paint the inside of mental institutions. It was pretty painful and none of her clothes fit.
Oh wait, I'm supposed to be talking about hair. Not much to say here: it's just hair. She eventually gets baby bangs later in the season that just add to the dowdily 90s nature of her 1st Season look. She'd occasionally put it up in a clip! Or tie it in a ponytail so she could cut open cadavers! Her hair over the 7 seasons changes the most; I assume it's because she was working with Mulder and c'mon, what lady wouldn't want to put on a little lipstick and get a few layers put in their hair if they were working next to that every day.
You can practically smell the smug from your seat, can't you? This is Mulder before he realizes that Scully is actually smarter than he is and therefore is feeling pretty superior about his insouciant, boyish coif on the top of his head. Mulder is also noticeably less put together in the 1st Season (probably also because the show had a very limited budget and didn't know if it would live to see a 2nd), and his hair is often a rumpled mess. Didn't make him any less endearing though.
Season 2
See what I mean about the baby bangs? They were pretty bad. Season 2 for Scully can be split up in to looks: Gillian Anderson pregnant, and Gillian Anderson not pregnant. For about the first half of Season 2 Gillian Anderson was carrying her daughter (Piper Maru: I only know her name because a mytharc episode from Season 3 is named after her), and in order to ease the burden on her Scully was written off the show a bit. Her wardrobe also got a lot bigger, and I think you could see from Scully's face that Gillian Anderson was pretty fed up with carrying around a fetus. Anyway, the hair is not much better than it was in Season 1, the bangs were a poor decision, but as Season 2 progressed, I think Gillian Anderson realized that this was a nationally televised show growing in popularity and since images from this show would live on, she should perhaps try to spruce up a bit.
Taken from "Anasazi," the Season 2 finale, here is Scully looking at her handiwork after she shot Mulder (I'm too lazy to explain the context, but it was a necessary step to keep him from making a really bad decision), and you can see that Scully's got a little more product in her hair, the dye job is looking a little better, and the ends (though still curled) don't make her look like her mom got her ready for her big day at FBI Headquarters. There's also an awkward phase throughout Seasons 2 and 3 where you can tell Gillian Anderson is trying to grow out those bangs and the hair team does their best to blend them in as best they can. They weren't always successful.
Here's Mulder after Scully shot him. I included this shot from "Anasazi" partly for continuity from the above, but also because, well, David Duchovny seemed to have it written in his contract that he didn't need to wear clothes:
See? Season 2 Mulder is a little more attentive to his hair than he was in the 1st Season, but not by much. If his hair isn't matted down by the Vancouver rain and humidity, it's usually kind of fluffy and blowing around in the breeze. However, I still think it's around the half-way mark in the 2nd Season that the production crew realized this show could be around for awhile, so they might want to step it up a bit in streamlining the 90s-look that ran rampant in the early seasons of the show.
Season 3
Scully's still trying to hide those bangs, and is doing a much better job here than she was in the 2nd Season. You can see she's cut in a few more layers to frame her face a bit better, though it still seems like the hair team is trying to figure out what shade of red Scully should have. There's a joke in "Jose Chung's from Outer Space" (where this screenshot is from, actually) where someone recollects their encounter with Scully by insisting she's a man who wasn't pulling off her woman's disguise very well because "her hair was red, but a little too red."
You can also see that the costuming department stepped up their game a bit with the colors they used on ol' Scully because the deeper green above and the burgundy here work much better than the shit pastels and weird plaids that ended up on Scully in Seasons 1 and 2. Again, you can see the layers and how awkward her part is due to the attempt to blend her bangs in with the rest of her hair.
Honestly, Season 3 is Mulder's best hair season for me. After this point, David Duchovny goes a little too Hollywood and it's just too... too. He's trying too hard i think is what I'm trying to say, and in Season 3 he's more put together than he was in earlier seasons, but still maintains that boyish arrogance in the styling of his hair that made him so appealing to begin with. You can tell he's working a little more product here, but there's still something a bit more natural about the shape. You'll see what I mean once we get into Seasons 4 and 5.
However, Mulder and Scully did have their really bad hair days. The damp Pacific Northwest wasn't always so nice to them and frizz was often a problem on the show. Believe me, I remember how my hair looked on particularly humid days in Seattle.
Season 4
Season 4 is my favorite Scully-hair season. She's got the bangs to a point where they don't need to be shellacked in place, the color is fantastic, and the overall shape has volume, but not in the way that it did in Seasons 1 and 2 where was just too poofy. She's also got her part in a good place; as the show progressed, the part got deeper and deeper into the left side of her head that at some points it almost looked like a comb-over. And you know who is a redhead with a comb-over?
MULDER MADFACE
Season 4: Mulder Goes Hollywood. Mulder's working the center part and has each side of his hair meticulously arranged to best frame his face. He also works on growing out his side burns throughout the rest of the season. 1996-7 was about the time that David Duchovny was also trying to break into mainstream movies (hence the move he made the show make from Vancouver to Los Angeles after Season 5), and you can see here that he's doing his best to look as conventionally handsome as possible. Honestly, I always though this 'do looked like the infamous '90s Mushroom:
Ugh, I'm having PTSD flashbacks. This coupled with that frosted tips and over-geling due to the late 90's boy band phase reminds me of why I never had a crush on any of the guys in my high school. As Cher Horowitz would say, "AS IF!"
However, double the Mulder, double the fun:
Season 5
Looks like Scully bought herself a flat iron. She continues to streamline her bob through Season 5, doing away with a lot of the volume we saw her develop in Seasons 3 and 4 for something much smoother. The look suits her, but that part again came dangerously close to comb-over territory, and I think I liked her hair a bit fuller. Color is still good, though.
"Go ahead! Tell him your 'theory.'"
God I love this episode so much. "Bad Blood" is a he said/she said tale about vampires that includes Luke Wilson from when he was still hot (I miss those days) with a lot of riffing on the foibles of Mulder and Scully (the scene where she gets completely fed up with conducting autopsies after only half a cream cheese bagel - and it was only LIGHT CREAM CHEESE - and watches the large intestine of her latest cadaver fall off the scale is priceless) and a really deft execution of POVs. As for Mulder's hair, you can't see it as well here (I just wanted to use the clip of him using the damn air quotes while he belittles Scully in front of hot Sheriff Luke Wilson) but he's still got the Mushroom cut from Season 4 going with even fuller side burns and the annoyingly perfectly placement of - for lack of a better term - his bangs.
Season 6
30s Scully, meet late 90s Scully. This screen grab is from the episode "Triangle" wherein Mulder gets on board a ship trapped in 1939, runs into olde tyme versions of all the major characters on the show, and almost messes up history, but manages to right everything with the help of OSS Scully. 90s Scully, meanwhile, goes looking for him on the ship, which to her appears abandoned, and the 2 Scully's literally cross paths on presumably different planes of existence, but still look bewildered nonetheless. Um, I swear it makes a lot more sense when you see it in motion. You can't see modern Scully very well here, but 30s Scully is rocking the finger waves and a dress that the Scully we've grown accustomed to would never wear. Of course, she outdoes herself in Season 7, but I'm getting to that.
Oh Scully, you floozie! She's been made stupid by a government experiment in this episode ("Three of a Kind," featuring the continuation of a storyline featuring 3 of my favorite side characters, The Lone Gunmen) and resorts to flirting and giggling until Frohike sets her right. But you can see Scully is still leaning very heavily on that flat iron, as her hair is straighter here than it's ever been and those girlishly curled ends we had grown accustomed to earlier on are all but a memory.
The biggest shock for me in Season 6 was when I saw that DAVID DUCHOVNY HAD CUT HIS HAIR. At the time I was kind of sad about it because there's something about a man with thick dark hair, but in rewatching episodes, this look is so much more refreshing than the overly styled 'do he had going through Season 4 and 5. It's a welcome change. Still, he's clearly got a good stock of products sitting on the back of his toilet because that hair ain't moving.
Season 7
In this episode from Season 7 ("En Ami"), Scully tries to bargain with the Cigarette Smoking Man for a cure for cancer by showing as much cleavage as possible. Obviously the storyline is a little bit more complicated than that, but I think Gillian Anderson had had enough of her very nicely-tailored-but-not-so-revealing suits and was like I WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW HOW HOT I AM. Message received.
As for the hair, it's considerably shorter than it was in Season 6, and she somehow found a way to flat iron her hair even straighter. This is not my favorite Scully hair. She just wouldn't have the time in the morning to go out there and battle aliens, mutants, and fucking weird strains of bacteria if she was in the mirror all morning trying to get her ends to lay as flat as possible. I liked my Scully with more volume, all I'm sayin'.
However, Mulder seems just fine with it:
How many times he pulled the tucking-her-hair-behind-her-ear gesture during the course of the show I can't even begin to count.
As for Mulder, he's growing out his 'do and fortunately not putting it through the Hollywood-hair processor. It gets harder to differentiate between the Mulder 'do's between Seasons 6 and 7, but Season 7 is generally longer with a much more defined part on the left side of his head. A far cry from the mop top he sported seven years earlier.
Season 7 is also where I consider the show to have stopped; Season 8 and 9 (when David Duchovny left) have never gotten much play with me, though I've seen the series finale (when Duchovny came back) more times than I can count. However, I have seen the most recent movie several times, so let's see how our heroes have evolved almost a decade after the show ended its run:
As I recall, Scully seriously grows out her hair in Seasons 8 and 9 after keeping it so short in 7, and here our no-nonsense doctor has grown in some high maintenance long hair. Some of the fan boards lit up with complaints that Scully would never ever have hair that long because it just isn't practical for someone who is in and out of scrubs so often, but at least they got Anderson to dye her hair back to red. Duchovny was working the Hank Moody Californication hair throughout the movie, and he also had a crazy Grizzly Adams beard going at the start of the movie. Mulder and Scully have clearly moved on.
Also, the movie was so terrible. I mean really bad. It seemed so unrewarding for all my years of loyal viewership through the mediocrity that was Season 8 and the completely flat Season 9 that I ended up with a movie that didn't make much sense. I'm at a loss right now trying to sum up what happened... something with stealing organs and grope-happy priests. I almost don't want them to make a 3rd movie (still no real news about that either, but Chris Carter wants to do it) because I'm afraid they'll make one even worse than this one. Someone needs to tell Chris Carter to get his ego in check because even in the show he led Mulder and Scully astray with really convoluted attempts to be profound. Some of the monologues he had them do sound like they came out of an 8th graders' diary when they're trying to sound important.
So which season of The X-Files has your favorite Scully or Mulder hair? Do you wish could rock a red bob like our favorite doctor? Or almost make the mushroom cut look good like Mulder? Or do you just think I'm crazy for having paid this much attention for so many years to something that doesn't really matter?
POP QUIZ TIME!
Now with everything you know, can you place the era of each of these X-Files ads?
(Answers: Season 3, Season 5, Season 1, and TRICK QUESTION, the last one is for the first X-Files movie from 1998, between Seasons 5 and 6. Though the movie was filmed throughout the course of Season 5, so you could argue Season 5 for this. HEY DO YOU WANT TO HEAR MORE ABOUT THE X-FILES?!)
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