Files field trip

I saw lions, beautiful beaches, some seriously cool people the Maasai and made some really awesome new friends. Nairobi is amazing!

Everyone has been great. I have a blog about my experiences. Do read about my adventures! I enjoyed my time in Kenya more than I can express. Thank you so so much for everything you did for me this summer, and just for being a support system back in the US. It was such a comfort to know you were there if we ever needed something.

I feel that our program compared to other American students staying in Kenya was the best because everything was so well planned and there was so much to do. We experienced much more of the country than the other students. There was not anything that I did not enjoy about the program. He was very knowledgeable, kind and accessible. He was a positive part of my KEI experience. Patrick is wonderful!

The girls in Kenya participate more in class discussions than in the USA. It was really nice and refreshing — an interesting cultural difference. There were many more group projects, class presentations and discussions than at my school from home. It is a much more interactive and involved learning process.

I liked it. I was really glad to be on campus. It made it easier to meet people and I felt like I was in the center of everything. Mulder finds the couple alive and all signs point to an alien abduction. But everything is not as it seems. Add content advisory. Did you know Edit. Trivia For their rescue scene, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson spent most of a day in pits covered in mud and yellow sludge. Fortunately, they were both wearing wetsuits underneath their costumes.

Goofs Both Agent Scully and the coroner repeatedly refer to the fungus as a plant. Fungi do not belong to the kingdom Plantae; they belong to their own, and are even considered to be more closely related to animals than to plants.

While neither of them are botanists or mycologists by profession, they would have learned this fact in a basic undergraduate general biology course. Quotes Mulder : Brown Mountain, Scully, that doesn't ring a bell? Scully : No Connections Features StarCraft User reviews 14 Review.

Top review. Dream trap. A mystery involving two skeletons leads the agents on a journey in which nothing is quite as it seems. Wallace and Angela Schiff returning home after a day out hiking in the fields of North Carolina. Angela appears to be exhausted after spending most of the day chasing after her over-eager husband and is starting to get a headache. Whilst taking a shower she thinks she is hallucinating and seeing images of a yellow gooey substance running down the walls in the shower but shakes it off.

Angela and Wallace head off to bed in each other's arms but as the camera pans out we see their skeletal remains in the same position in the middle of a field. Mulder is filling in Scully about the discovery of the remains at a well known site of strange unexplained phenomena but Scully seems keen as ever to find a more rational explanation.

However, they head off to examine the remains themselves. The coroner is just about to send the remains away for burial when Mulder and Scully arrive to view them.

After closer examination they find a strange yellow goo covering the underside of the skeletons which was missed in the original examination. Mulder heads out to the scene of the discovery while Scully stays to perform more testing on the remains. Mulder finds the Schiffs in a cave. They claim the skeletons were a cover-up by the aliens. As Mulder arrives in the fields, he inadvertently drives over a patch of mushrooms with his car which seem to release a cloud of smoke.

As he exits the vehicle and takes a look around he spots what he thinks is Wallace running away and takes chase, eventually following him down a cave. Inside the cave, Mulder finds that the way he came in seems to have been replaced with solid rock. He catches up with Wallace in the cave and discovers that Wallace thinks he and his wife Angela have been abducted by aliens who covered up their disappearance with the skeletons.

Meanwhile, Scully has discovered that the yellow goo mainly consists of organic material found in digestive juices but this seems to emanate from a plant rather than an animal. Unable to reach Mulder on the phone she heads off to find him. Arriving at the field, Scully starts to look for Mulder and accidentally steps on some more of the mushrooms that Mulder flattened earlier.

Starting to follow his tracks, Scully finds they lead up to the cave and apparently lead inside. Mulder and Wallace are now talking when a bright light appears in the tunnel entrance. Spotnitz is quite right here, but Field Trip does more than simply emulate elements of Bad Blood. Mulder realises that there is a humongous fungus among us.

Sitting in the middle of the fifth season, Bad Blood had suggested that Mulder and Scully had differences in perspective that were practically irreconcilable. Struggling to determine the nature of his fantasy, Mulder casts himself as a skeptic. When Scully accepts his theories, Mulder offers dialogue that could have come from Scully herself. Look, something else is going on here.

Am I the only one who thinks that? Bad Blood suggested that Mulder and Scully were really just archetypes — believer and skeptic. In contrast, Field Trip suggests that both characters have come a long way in the six years from The Pilot. Mulder is more willing to examine and interrogate his beliefs than he ever was before; Scully is willing to accept the possibility of irrational and seemingly impossible phenomena. Mulder and Scully might appear to occupy opposite positions — and their dynamic may play into that appearance — but they are more than just cardboard cutouts.

Monday suggested that there was still room for growth and development between various iterations of the same day, even with the characters trapped in an unending loop. Field Trip is a curiously optimistic take on some core sixth season themes. Speaking of those sixth season themes, Field Trip even features Wallace and Angela Schiff as a romantic couple who stand in for Mulder and Scully.

It reinforces the romantic theme running through the sixth season, the sense that Mulder and Scully might be partners in more than just a professional capacity. The sixth season has repeatedly hinted at the idea of Mulder and Scully as a romantic couple, juxtaposing them against romantic couples in How the Ghosts Stole Christmas and The Rain King and teasing pseudo-romance in Triangle , Dreamland and Arcadia.

Even the casting of Wallace and Angela references Mulder and Scully. Wallace is tall and dark-haired, while Angela is shorter with red hair. Wallace is undergoing his own version of the character arc that Mulder experienced during Duane Barry , Ascension and One Breath.

Mulder grappled with the same sense of helplessness. When Angela is returned, she is returned like Scully; she has a chip in the back of her neck.

The script cleverly sets up all of its revelations, but even the use of repeated words and phrases from the first act helps to lend an uncanny feel to the adventure. It is clear that the fantasies drawing from the recent memories of Mulder and Scully, so all those repeated phrases and ideas make a great deal of sense.

It is a very clever and very effective way of lending an ethereal feel to the episode even before Mulder starts seeing green gunk everywhere. The plot for Field Trip seems to have been inspired by the real-life discovery of a 2,acre fungus found in the Blue Mountains of Oregon during , displacing the previous record-holding 1,acre fungus found in Washington in Field Trip acknowledges this quite heavily.

The decision to shift the action from the Blue Mountains of Oregon to the Brown Mountains of North Carolina is a particularly nice piece of wordplay. Interestingly, the discovery of these gigantic fungal organisms and their claim to be the largest living organisms on Earth sparked debate about what actually constitutes a single organism :. Ironically, the discovery of such huge fungi specimens rekindled the debate of what constitutes an individual organism. Both the giant blue whale and the humongous fungus fit comfortably within this definition.

So does the 6,ton six-million-kilogram colony of a male quaking aspen tree and his clones that covers acres 43 hectares of a Utah mountainside. Even the use of the fungus ties into the themes of Field Trip. If the fungus can claim to be a single living organism, then perhaps the same can be said of Mulder and Scully? Perhaps the two characters are not so different. It is through the fungus that Mulder and Scully come to share the same hallucination, and it is through that hallucination and their understanding of one another that they confront the unreality of their situation.

If Bad Blood was about how Mulder and Scully had two very different and irreconcilable perspectives, then Field Trip offers a convincing counter-argument. It offers a nice cap to a year that has been fascinated by the relationship between Mulder and Scully and with the existential challenges posed by the success of The X-Files. Filed under: The X-Files Tagged: believer , ending , field trip , fungus , hallucination , john shiban , mulder , sceptic , scully , skeptic , the x-files , vince gilligan , x-files.

This is a pretty underrated episode. The two episodes are structured almost identically, beginning with the two agents meeting in the office to set up what follows, then proceeding with two variations of the case. The reconciliation is more profound in Field Trip. Field Trip is not only a commentary on that but follows it through to its conclusion. Mulder begins to second guess Scully when she dismisses the substance as bog sludge and the skeletons going unexplained. To cap it off, Mulder is the one to point out the scientific inaccuracies of their report to Skinner.

I like both Bad Blood and Field Trip. I think Field Trip does that wonderful Gilligan thing of wrapping up the themes of the year in a nice stand-alone story that has no bearing on the mytharc. Same as Je Souhaite and Sunshine Days. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.