The Post-Modern Prometheus

"The Post-Modern Prometheus"
The X-Files episode
Dana Scully and Fox Mulder at a Cher concert
Episode no.	Season 5 Episode 5
Directed by	Chris Carter
Written by	Chris Carter
Production code	5X06
Original air date	November 30, 1997
Guest stars
Tracey Bell as Cher Lloyd Berry as Old Man Pollidori Stewart Gale as Izzy Berkowitz Chris Giacoletti as Booger Dana Grahame as Reporter Jean-Yves Hammel as Izzy's Friend C. Ernst Harth as Huge Man Vitaliy Kravchenko as JJ John O'Hurley as Dr. Francis Pollidori Chris Owens as The Great Mutato Xantha Radley as Waitress Miriam Smith as Elizabeth Pollidori Jerry Springer as Himself Pattie Tierce as Shaineh Berkowitz Jean-Yves Hammel as Goat Boy
Episode chronology
← Previous "Detour" Next → "Christmas Carol"
List of Season 5 episodes List of The X-Files episodes

"The Post-Modern Prometheus" is the fifth episode of the fifth season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files. It was written and directed by series creator Chris Carter and aired in the United States on November 30, 1997 on the Fox network. The show centers on FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files. In this "monster of the week" episode, Mulder and Scully investigate reports of a mysterious creature that has impregnated a middle-aged woman. They find that the "monster", nicknamed the Great Mutato, is the genetic creation of a Frankenstein-like doctor. The Great Mutato is first ostracized, and later accepted, by his community.

Carter's story drew heavily on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and particularly on James Whale's 1931 film version of the story. The script had been written specifically with singer Cher and actress Roseanne Barr in mind, but both were unavailable at the time of shooting. Talk-show host Jerry Springer appeared as himself, and Chris Owens (who appeared in later episodes as FBI agent Jeffrey Spender) played the Great Mutato. The episode was filmed in black-and-white, with a sky backdrop created to imitate the style of old Frankenstein films. Owens wore makeup and prosthetics that took several hours to apply. The episode was nominated for seven Emmy Awards and won one. It was praised by one critic as "a classic", and by another as the "most striking" stand-alone episode that season.

Plot

FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) receives a letter from Shaineh Berkowitz, a single mother who claims to have been mysteriously impregnated, while unconscious, by an unknown "presence" 18 years ago, resulting in the birth of her son, Izzy. Now she is pregnant again, following a similarly unexplained attack. She has heard about Mulder's expertise in the paranormal from The Jerry Springer Show and wants him to investigate. Mulder and his X-Files partner, Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), travel to rural Indiana. They meet Shaineh and her son Izzy and learn that the description of the creature that attacked her, with a lumpy head and two mouths, is very similar to a comic book character invented by Izzy. His monstrous creation, called the Great Mutato, is inspired by a mysterious creature that has been seen by many of the locals. Izzy and his friends take the agents to a wooded area where they see the Great Mutato from a distance.

They meet an old man who angrily tells them that there are no monsters and sends them to see his son, a genetic scientist named Francis Pollidori. Dr. Pollidori shows them his experiments on Drosophila which include a fly with legs growing out of its mouth. He tells the agents that the same kind of experiment could, in theory, be performed on humans. Afterward, Mulder tells Scully that he believes that Dr. Pollidori has created the Great Mutato, acting as a modern-day Victor Frankenstein.

Later, Dr. Pollidori's wife Elizabeth becomes unconscious and is attacked in the same manner as Shaineh. At the crime scene, Mulder and Scully find a chemical residue from an agricultural agent used to anesthetize animals, that leads them to suspect Old Man Pollidori, who is a farmer. Dr. Pollidori comes to his father's house and angrily confronts him. Later, the Great Mutato, who lives with Pollidori Sr., finds his dead body and tearfully buries him in a barn.

Mulder and Scully go looking for Pollidori Sr. and find a shallow grave, as well as photographs of the man with the Great Mutato. Meanwhile, Dr. Pollidori leads an angry mob of townspeople to his father's house, demanding that Mulder and Scully turn the "murderer" over to them. The agents find the Great Mutato hiding in the basement as the crowd gathers upstairs. Someone accidentally sets the barn alight and in the ensuing confusion, the mob realize that the agents are protecting the monster in the basement. The Great Mutato speaks to the crowd and explains that he was created 25 years before, the result of a genetic experiment by Dr. Pollidori. Unknown to his son, Pollidori Sr. rescued Mutato and cared for him, but was unable to provide a friend or mate for the boy. The old man attempted to emulate his scientist son's experiments, attempting to create hybrids from his farm animals. Mutato asks Dr. Pollidori to create a female companion for him, but the scientist says that he cannot—that Mutato was a mistake. The townspeople realize that Mutato is not a monster after all and Dr. Pollidori is arrested for the murder of his father.

Mulder feels that it is unjust for Mutato not to get a mate and so he demands to see the writer. He and Scully take matters into their own hands and take Mutato, along with the townspeople, to a Cher concert.

Production

Conception

Series creator Chris Carter had long wanted to write a Frankenstein-inspired episode, but had found it difficult to reconcile Mary Shelley's "unbelievable" tale with the stories being told on the show. To achieve his vision, he made the conscious choice to write a script that blurred the real world with the X-Files reality and that had a distinct fantasy element. In particular, he wanted to evoke James Whale's 1931 film version of Frankenstein. He said, "I wanted to tell a story as moving to me as the Frankenstein story had always been." The idea for the genetic engineering story developed via The X-Files science advisor, Anne Simon. Carter visited a friend of Simon, a scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington, who had been able to genetically manipulate flies so that they grew legs from their eyes. After Carter had come up with the character of the Great Mutato, he discovered that there was a character on the comedy animation show The Simpsons with the same name (though pronounced differently). He contacted The Simpsons creator Matt Groening who gave Carter permission to use the name. Like two-thirds of the episodes of the series, "The Post-Modern Prometheus" is a "monster of the week" episode, standing separately from the mythology of The X-Files.

Casting

Cher's music plays a large role in this episode, which Chris Carter wrote for her.

After spending a summer listening to pop singer Cher's music, Carter became "fixated" on her songs and wrote "The Post-Modern Prometheus" specifically for her. He knew her through her sister, a fan of The X-Files, and knew that Cher was interested in appearing in the show. Comedy actress Roseanne Barr had also expressed an interest, and he wrote the part of Shaineh Berkowitz for her. Both Cher and Barr were unavailable at the time of shooting the episode and were replaced by celebrity impersonator Tracey Bell and Pattie Tierce respectively. Tabloid talk show host Jerry Springer appeared as himself. These casting choices went against a long-standing tradition on The X-Files of only casting actors who are not well-known faces.

Seinfeld regular John O'Hurley had auditioned for several roles on the show but Carter had not previously thought of him as "an X-Files actor". For the part of Dr. Pollidori, however, Carter considered him "the absolute perfect casting choice". The Great Mutato was played by Chris Owens, unrecognizable in heavy makeup. Owens had played a younger version of The Cigarette-Smoking Man in two episodes of season four and was later cast as the recurring character of FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Spender.

Stewart Gale, who played Izzy Berkowitz, was a "non-actor" whom Carter passed one day sitting on the back of a truck. Carter convinced Gale's father—who was initially suspicious of the director's credentials—to let Gale travel to Vancouver to take part in the episode. The characters of Izzy's friends were also played by inexperienced actors. One was a snake handler on the set of The X-Files movie, (the filming of which overlapped that of season five), and the other worked at Carter's local coffee shop in Vancouver.

Filming

"The Post-Modern Prometheus", like all the episodes of the show's first five seasons, was filmed in Vancouver. Despite being the series creator, and one of the main writers for the show, this was only the third episode that Carter directed for The X-Files. His decision to film the episode in black-and-white—in homage to James Whale—brought more challenges than he expected. The director of photography, Joel Ransom, had to spend longer than usual lighting each scene because of the grayscale. The stormy skies in the episode were an added visual effect, emulating the atmosphere of old Frankenstein movies. Carter also opted to use a wide-angle camera throughout the episode which forced the actors to act directly at the camera, rather than to each other. According to Carter, it also enabled him to give scenes in the episode a more surreal staging than was usual for the show.

The makeup for the character of the Great Mutato was designed and created by Special Effects supervisor Tony Lindala. Constructed from latex, and containing an articulated second mouth, it cost $40,000 and took between five and seven hours to apply. In addition to the mask, Chris Owens wore contact lenses and dentures. Lindala also created "Baby Mutato" costumes for the twin infants featured in The Jerry Springer Show scene. He said, "[t]he little babies kept tearing their hair off, we kept gluing it back on".

Music

The score was devised by series composer Mark Snow, and was, according to him, his best that season. He described the main theme as "a very dark, macabre, insidious sort of nasty waltz". The episode features three Cher songs: "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves" and "Walking in Memphis", which is played at the end of the episode when the agents take the Great Mutato to a Cher concert.

Themes and cultural references

"The Post-Modern Prometheus" is the most obvious reference to Frankenstein made by the series, although traces of the story are seen elsewhere, in "Young at Heart" (season one), "The Beginning" (season six) and in the overreaching "mytharc" of the show that revolves around shadowy Syndicate leaders who salvage alien spacecraft for their own technological use and create human-alien hybrids. The episode's title is a play on the subtitle that Mary Shelley gave her novel, "The Modern Prometheus", and the Frankenstein-like doctor shares his name (albeit with a slightly different spelling) with Shelley's contemporary, John William Polidori, who was present at the conception of her novel. Several lines in the episode come directly from James Whale's 1931 movie Frankenstein. According to film studies writer Linda Badley, this episode, along with season four's "Home", foreshadows Scully's impending motherhood and her realization in following episodes "Christmas Carol" and "Emily" that her body has been used to create a "monstrous" human-alien hybrid.

Despite her physical absence from the episode, Cher's presence can be felt throughout. Three of her songs feature on the soundtrack in scenes featuring the Great Mutato. The character watches her 1985 movie Mask, and derives comfort from the loving relationship between Cher's character and her son, who has a disfiguring genetic bone disorder. According to film scholar Diane Negra, Cher's persona is "the marker for transformative empowerment" in the episode. At the end of the episode, Mulder and Scully take the Great Mutato from his small town to a Cher concert, where she picks him out of the crowd to dance with her.

Broadcast and reception

"The Post-Modern Prometheus" was first broadcast in the United States on November 30, 1997, on the Fox network. In its original broadcast, it was watched by 18.68 million viewers, according to the Nielsen ratings system. It received an 11.5 rating/16 share among viewers meaning that 11.5 percent of all households in the United States, and 16 percent of all people watching television at the time, viewed the episode. The episode was nominated for seven 1998 Emmy Awards by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, for Outstanding Writing, Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Art Direction, Outstanding Cinematography, Outstanding Single-Picture Editing, Outstanding Makeup and Outstanding Music Composition. Graeme Murray, Greg Loewen and Shirley Inget won the award for Outstanding Art Direction. Chris Carter was also a nominated for an award for Outstanding Directing by the Directors Guild of America.

Writing for the Daily News, Eric Mink gave the episode a rating of four stars and praised it as an outstanding episode in a weak early fifth season of the show. He said that the two stars acted "flawlessly", and that Chris Owens' performance as the Great Mutato was "especially touching". He summed up his review, saying "[w]ith Shelley's classic as inspiration, Carter and company have created a classic of their own." In a review of the whole of the fifth season, Michael Sauter of Entertainment Weekly said that "The Post-Modern Prometheus" was the "most striking" of the season's stand-alone episodes.

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Badley, Linda (2000), "Scully Hits the Glass Ceiling: Postmodernism, Postfeminism, Posthumanism and The X-Files", in Helford, Elyce Rae, Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, ISBN 0847698351, OCLC 43634837 
• Koven, Mikel J. (2010), "The X-Files", in Lavery, David, The Essential Cult TV Reader, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 0813125685, OCLC 318875078 
• Lacy, Cherilyn (2004), "Women and Mad Science: Women as Witnesses to the Scientific Re-Creation of Humanity", in Bartter, Martha A., The Utopian Fantastic: Selected Essays From the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Westport: Praeger, ISBN 031331635X, OCLC 470354613 
• Meisler, Andy (1999), Resist or Serve: The Official Guide to The X-Files, Vol. 4, London: HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-257133-1, OCLC 42005360 
• Negra, Diane (2001), Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom, London: Routledge, ISBN 041521677X, OCLC 471020938 

External links

• "The Post-Modern Prometheus" on The X-Files Wiki, an external wiki
• "The Post-Modern Prometheus" at the Internet Movie Database
• "The Post-Modern Prometheus" at TV.com