Space (The X Files)

Plot

The episode opens with news footage from 1977, showing the discovery of water on Mars and a face sculpted into the planet's landscape. Lt. Col. Marcus Aurelius Belt (Ed Lauter), the commander of the mission, is plagued by flashbacks of an encounter with the disembodied face during a spacewalk.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are approached by Michelle Generoo (Susanna Thompson), a communications commander for NASA's Mission Control. Generoo believes that someone within NASA is sabotaging launch attempts. A recent space shuttle liftoff was aborted seconds before commencement, and Generoo fears the next launch will be similarly compromised. She also has a personal interest, as her fiancé will be aboard the next mission.

Mulder and Scully travel to NASA and meet Belt, a childhood hero of Mulder's. Belt, who now manages the shuttle program, dismisses the agents' concerns and states that nothing can possibly go wrong with the mission. He allows the agents to watch the launch from Mission Control. The launch is successful. As the agents are leaving however, Generoo informs them that contact is lost with the shuttle in orbit. While driving back to Mission Control, Generoo sees the face come at her through her windshield, causing her to crash her car.

The shuttle has moved into direct sunlight and Mission Control is unable to rotate it into a safe position, putting the astronauts' lives in danger. Generoo believes that the uplink is being sabotaged. Belt orders the uplink to be cut, allowing the astronauts to rotate the craft manually. Over the objections of Generoo and the agents, Belt orders the mission to proceed and lies to the press about its progress. Belt tells Mulder that the shuttle program may be cancelled if the mission is not completed successfully.

Belt returns home and has another flashback, as he lies in bed in some agony an astral presence leaves his body and flies out the window, heading into the sky. The astronauts then report hearing a thump outside the shuttle and begin to experience an oxygen leak. Belt fixes the situation, but orders the mission to proceed. The payload is successfully deployed, but a crew member reports seeing a ghostlike entity outside the ship. Meanwhile the agents examine NASA records and find evidence that Belt played a role in other failed missions, including the Challenger disaster.

Belt begins to act irrationally then collapses screaming as he hears mention of the ghostlike entity from the astronauts. Paramedics are called to attend to him, and find him cowering under his desk whimpering and begging for help. Before Belt is taken away, he tells the agents that the shuttle will not survive reentry due to sabotage by 'the face', which had lived inside his body and possessed him since his time in orbit. At his urging, they alert the shuttle to change its trajectory and are just able to land it successfully. In the hospital, Belt continues to wrestle with the presence, telling Mulder he wasn't responsible but also couldn't stop it, as "it came to me, it lives in me". Eventually, in a last wrestle with the re-possessing entity, he shouts "no more" as he leaps from the window to his death - experiencing a lengthy flashback to his last space mission as he falls. Mulder theorizes that, while Belt was compelled to sabotage the launches by the entity possessing him, he was also the one who sent Generoo the evidence of what was taking place. He lauds Belt's final sacrifice, stating that in the end he gave his life for the mission, as befits a true astronaut.

Production

"Space" was conceived as a low-budget bottle episode, due to several earlier episodes having exceeded their budgets. Series creator Chris Carter was inspired to write the episode after reading about news of the "face on Mars"—an instance of pareidolia wherein a mound in the Cydonia region of Mars was taken to resemble a human face. Although the episode made use of a significant amount of inexpensive stock footage from NASA, the construction of the command center set was subject to cost overruns, eventually leading the episode to become the most expensive of the first season. Carter blames this on the infeasibility of showing the astronauts in the stricken shuttle, requiring additional exposition to explain their situation—something he found he could not manage "on an eight-day television budget". Carter also claims that the episode suffered from being filmed shortly after the pilot episode was broadcast, with the crew overwhelmed by the input, noting that "everything was happening at once".

Several scenes in the episode were filmed at a Canadian Airlines operations center in Richmond, British Columbia. The crew were given permission by the airline to use their flight simulators, leading to the production being delayed while everyone had a turn simulating flights over Canada. The problematic command center set was constructed and filmed at an amphitheater in Vancouver, whose sloping surfaces helped to suggest computer terminals without needing much construction, although false computer monitors were added for shots when they would be in view.

Guest star Ed Lauter had previously worked with the episode's director, William A. Graham, on the film Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. On his role in the episode, Lauter has stated "I don’t really have a lot to say about that, except I thought I did a nice job, and that it was nice working up there in Vancouver with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson".

Broadcast and reception

"Space" premiered on the Fox network on November 12, 1993, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on November 17, 1994. The episode earned a Nielsen household rating of 6.5 with an 11 share, meaning that roughly 6.5 percent of all television-equipped households, and 11 percent of households watching TV, were tuned in to the episode. A total of 6.1 million households watched this episode during its original airing.

The episode—reportedly Carter's least favorite—was very poorly received. Frank Lovece, in his books The X-Files Declassified, called it "perhaps the series' dullest, least suspenseful episode", citing the spectral antagonist's "highly unclear motivations". Keith Phipps, writing for The A.V. Club, reviewed the episode negatively, rating it a D+. He felt that the episode's special effects were "pretty decidedly unscary", and that the episode's premise was confusing and "a little tasteless" in its treatment of the Challenger disaster. In a retrospective of the first season in Entertainment Weekly the episode was similarly derided, being rated a D- and described as "one dead hour". Matt Haigh, writing for Den of Geek, reviewed the episode negatively, feeling that it was "nothing much to write home about", and that the episode's antagonist was "distinctly unimpressive, lacking any true sense of menace or intrigue".