Fallen Angel (The X-Files)

Plot

A UFO goes down near Townsend, Wisconsin, deep in the woods. The deputy sheriff who shows up first gets killed by something invisible, all while bathed in a blinding white light. The Air Force keeps tabs on things, and Colonel Calvin Henderson, the military’s go-to guy for retrieving UFO wreckage, starts a cleanup operation. Fox Mulder talks to Deep Throat, then heads to Wisconsin himself.

He snaps some photos of the crash site but gets caught. Henderson interrogates him, and Mulder ends up locked up with Max Fenig, an oddball NICAP member who was also nabbed in the woods. The next day, Dana Scully arrives to spring Mulder. She tells him FBI Section Chief Joseph McGrath is ready to shut down the X-Files over this mess, and that the wreckage has been officially called a downed Libyan fighter jet.

Mulder doesn’t buy it. Meanwhile, the invisible being from the UFO slips right through an electronic fence around the woods and gets away. Back at Mulder’s motel room, the agents find it trashed by Max, who turns out to be a big fan of Mulder’s, having tracked his X-Files work through NICAP. Max takes them to his Airstream trailer and plays audio recordings from the deputy and a fire crew who also reached the crash site.

Mulder and Scully then talk to the deputy’s widow, who says the government won’t give back her husband’s body and has threatened her to keep quiet. They also meet a doctor who treated the deputy and fire crew; he says they died from incredibly severe burns and that he was threatened too. Henderson shows up at the hospital with a group of burned soldiers, hurt after they cornered the invisible alien at their base. Mulder goes back to the motel and finds Max in his trailer having what looks like an epileptic seizure.

While helping him, Mulder spots a strange scar behind Max’s ear. Checking old X-Files cases, he finds the same scar on two other people who reported being abducted by aliens. Scully thinks Max’s whole experience is just a schizophrenic delusion, pointing to the medication in his trailer. But Mulder believes Max, despite his UFO obsession, has no clue about his own abductions and was led to Townsend that night by his alien captors.

Production

"Fallen Angel" was written by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, and directed by Larry Shaw. The episode foreshadows the closing of the X-Files, which would occur in the season finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask". The character Max Fenig laid the template for the introduction of The Lone Gunmen in the later first-season episode "E.B.E.". Bellis would reprise his role as Max in the fourth season episodes "Tempus Fugit" and "Max", which explained his fate after his disappearance in this episode.

Max's NICAP baseball cap would make a brief appearance in Mulder's office in "Beyond the Sea", later in the first season. Scenes depicting Washington were filmed at Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, where confined space made shooting difficult. The invisible alien was inspired by the movie Predator and was deliberately made invisible to be scarier, with series creator Chris Carter noting that "what you don't see is scarier than what you do see".

Casting director Lynne Carrow praised Bellis' performance as Max, calling him perhaps her proudest find in casting the show. Carter also praised guest star Marshall Bell as Colonel Henderson and was proud the episode permitted expanding the role of Deep Throat. Actor Brent Stait, who plays Corporal Taylor, teaches alongside series regular William B. Davis at the William Davis Centre for Actors Study in Vancouver.

Broadcast and reception

"Fallen Angel" first aired on Fox on November 19, 1993. Its Nielsen rating was 5.4 with a nine share, meaning 5.4 percent of all U.S. households with televisions and nine percent of those actually watching TV at the time were tuned in, reaching 5.1 million households. This episode holds the distinction of being the series' lowest-rated broadcast, a record it never lost. Critical reception was largely positive.

Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+ in a first-season retrospective, praising it as a visually striking episode that best clarified the agents' standing with the government and noting that the character Max Fenig foreshadowed The Lone Gunmen. The A.V. Club's Keith Phipps also awarded a B+, calling it a strong entry that slowly unveiled the show's core themes. He highlighted Max Fenig as crucial for showing the human cost of the series' dark events, arguing that without him, the episode would just be Mulder and Scully investigating a downed object with no real stakes.

Den of Geek's Matt Haigh disagreed, labeling it a mundane forty minutes that failed to impress and followed the same pattern as earlier mythology episodes. In his book Wanting to Believe, Robert Shearman gave it three out of five stars, noting it was made with style and wit but had a relatively static plot. He found David Duchovny's performance and the final scene's ambiguous motivations for Deep Throat to be the highlights, while the rest relied on smoke and mirrors, similar to the earlier episode "Conduit."