Hamburger
S1 E2: Deep Throat
X-Files, 20th Century Studios, 1993.
The second episode of The X-Files begins with a military test pilot barricaded in his house, trembling in his underwear.
By the end, Fox Mulder has broken into a secret Air Force installation, seen what may or may not be a spacecraft built from alien technology, been drugged by the United States military, and had portions of his memory deliberately erased.
But in between these events, someone explains a UFO with a hamburger.
“Deep Throat,” which aired in 1993, sends Mulder and Scully to southwestern Idaho to investigate the disappearance of Colonel Robert Budahas, a test pilot whose work at the fictional Ellens Air Force Base appears to have left him psychologically, and possibly neurologically, wrecked. The military won’t explain where he is. The FBI has dropped the case. A mysterious older gentleman corners Mulder in a bar bathroom and tells him, in approximately the least reassuring way possible, that he should stop asking questions.
Naturally, Mulder hears this as encouragement.
Soon he and Scully are driving around Idaho interviewing traumatized military families, buying questionable UFO photography from a roadside diner and sitting beside an unmarked military base waiting for something impossible to happen.
Something impossible happens.
Lights appear in the sky. They hover. They shoot around at speeds and angles that normal aircraft aren’t supposed to manage. Scully, whose primary professional responsibility at this point seems to be standing next to Mulder and saying, “There is probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for the thing currently violating several laws of physics,” is forced to concede that she does not immediately have one.
Then a black helicopter appears, and Mulder and Scully encounter two young UFO enthusiasts who have been sneaking onto the base to listen to music and watch the mysterious aircraft.
One of them is Emil, a long-haired, enthusiastically stoned local kid played by a very young Seth Green, years before Austin Powers or anyone asking him to spend decades yelling as Chris Griffin.
At 5:02 in the morning, Mulder and Scully take Emil and his girlfriend to a diner, because the FBI’s protocol for apprehending teenagers trespassing on restricted military property is “buy them a burger and ask what they know about extraterrestrials.”
Emil explains.
More importantly, Emil explains with his hamburger.
He picks it up and flies it through the air, demonstrating how the mysterious craft swoop low, stop and hover in complete silence. This hamburger has now become a visual aid in an unofficial federal investigation involving experimental military technology.
Imagine being the cow.
Emil doesn’t actually think the ships are alien. He thinks they’re secret government hardware, some “Star Wars cyber-tech new-fangled” weaponry that the military is testing out in the desert. Mulder shows him a photograph of a triangular UFO.
At first Emil says no.
Then: yes. Exactly like that.
This is not enough for Scully.
Shortly afterward, she delivers perhaps the only appropriate scientific response to testimony obtained from a man who has recently piloted a hamburger across a diner table: Mulder could have shown Emil a picture of a flying hamburger and Emil would have claimed that was what he saw.
The prosecution rests.
The episode eventually leaves the relative safety of diner-based ufology and gets substantially darker. Colonel Budahas comes home, but some of his memories are missing. Mulder becomes convinced the military has selectively erased them. He sneaks back onto the base, sees a triangular craft hovering directly above him and is promptly captured and subjected to the same treatment. Scully, meanwhile, discovers that their friendly local reporter is actually base security, pulls a gun on him and essentially swaps him for Mulder at the gate.
Scully: doctor, scientist, FBI agent, hostage negotiator.
Mulder returns with no memory of what he saw.
Back in Washington, his mysterious informant, the titular Deep Throat, confirms just enough to make everything worse. Mulder asks whether extraterrestrials are really here.
They have been, Deep Throat tells him, for a very long time.
And that is where The X-Files really begins: with a government conspiracy, an unknowable truth, and a believer desperate to see it.