June 19, 1998.  Fight the future. (#179)

“Hey, Greg,” John said, opening his front door.  “What’s up?”

“I’m done,” I replied.  “That’s about all I’ve been thinking about since yesterday.  I’m done with finals.  I’m done with my bachelor’s degree.  It feels kind of weird.”

“I bet it does.  Congratulations.”

“You said you have one more quarter?” I asked.

“Two more.  I’ll be finished in March.  How’d finals go?”

“I think I did pretty well.  What about yours?”

“I did well enough.  Let’s just say that.”

“Hey, John?” I heard Eddie Baker’s voice call from the kitchen.

“Just a minute,” John said.  “I’ll be right back.”

I looked around the living room of the De Anza house, as my friends called it because it was located on De Anza Drive.  I had been here many times over the last few months.  We had our weekly watch parties for new episodes of The X-Files here until a month ago, when the show went into reruns for the summer.  Since then, I had also been here for the Man of Steel competition and the senior banquet for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  John and Eddie lived here with four other guys, all of whom were well-connected in the JCF social circles, and things always seemed a little hectic and noisy at the De Anza house whenever I had been here.

Most episodes of The X-Files were standalone stories, but there were also recurring storylines that so far had continued through the series’ five-year run.  As was usually the case, the recent season finale of The X-Files closed with a cliffhanger, setting up the events of next year’s season.  But this time, fans had something else to look forward to, a feature film in theaters called The X-Files: Fight The Future.  With everything in my life for the last week revolving around final exams, which were now finished, and my upcoming graduation, which was just a day away, going with a group of friends to watch a movie seemed a bit out of place.  But it was important that I still live my life, even with this major event on the horizon.

I was running a little late that morning.  Most people had already arrived, and there were about twice as many guys as girls.  The girls seemed to be clustered on the couch.  Tabitha Sasaki, who was Eddie’s girlfriend, sat next to two freshman girls, Chelsea Robbins and another one whom I recognized.  “Hey,” I said, walking over to them.

“Greg!” Tabitha said.  “Congratulations!  Finals are over!”

“Do you know Morgan?” Chelsea asked, gesturing toward the other girl on the couch.

“I’ve seen you around,” I said as Morgan shook my hand.  “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too!” Morgan replied.  Morgan was of average height, taller than Chelsea, with light brown hair and glasses.

“How did finals go?” Chelsea asked me.

“Pretty well, I think.”

“You’re graduating, but you’ll still be in Jeromeville next year, right?”

“Yeah.  Student teaching.”

“What are you gonna teach?” Morgan asked.

“High school math.”

“Eww.  I hated math.”

“Hopefully my students won’t say that.”

“Yeah, I had a lot of math teachers who weren’t very good,” Morgan explained.

I heard Eddie’s voice again as he walked out into the living room.  “Raise your hand if you can drive,” he said.  I raised my hand, and Eddie began asking people how many could fit in our cars.  When he got to me, I said, “Four, plus me.”

Eddie appeared to be counting people and figuring in his head.  “How about this?  Myself, Lars, Morgan, and Greg will drive.  That’ll be enough to get us all there.  Everyone else, pick a driver to go with.  We’ll leave in five minutes.”

People walked around the room coalescing around the four drivers.  “Do you have room in your car for us?” Dave McAllen asked, approaching me with his wife, Janet.  Dave and Janet were the head staff for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, several years older than the rest of us.

“Sure,” I said.  John joined us a minute later, followed by Colin Bowman, a sophomore who would be the co-leader of the Bible study I was going to be in next year.  The five of us walked out to my red Ford Bronco, parked on the street in front of the house.

“Everyone knows how to get there, right?” Eddie called out as we headed to the cars.  “Let’s all meet outside the theater.  See you there!”

I got into the driver’s seat and unlocked the door, tilting the passenger seat forward so that people could get in the back.  John took the front seat.  “So are you guys excited for this movie?” he asked.

“Yes!” I replied.

“I want to know what happened to the mind-reading kid,” Dave said as I pulled away from the house and headed toward Coventry Boulevard.  The season finale of the TV series featured a preteen chess prodigy who had the power to read minds, because he had been genetically engineered with genes from both normal humans and aliens.  “How exactly does having alien DNA make you read minds?” Dave continued.

“We’ll just have to find out,” Janet replied.

“I want to know more about that creepy black stuff in people’s eyes,” John said.

“Creepy black stuff?” Janet asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “That alien black oil stuff that infects people.”

“I missed that.”

“I don’t know everything about it,” I said.  “I missed a lot of season 3 and part of season 4, because the show used to come on Fridays, and that was when I started going to JCF on Fridays.”

“Oh, yeah,” John said.  “I forgot it used to be Fridays.”

We continued discussing The X-Files as I turned south on G Street toward downtown.  I zigzagged to Cornell Boulevard, drove under the notoriously narrow railroad underpass and past Murder Burger and the new In-N-Out Burger, and turned onto Highway 100 eastbound toward Capital City.  At that time, Jeromeville had only one six-screen movie theater and one older single-screen theater.  It would be difficult to get tickets for a group of twenty people for the first showing on opening day of the X-Files movie, so Eddie and John decided instead to get advance tickets to see the movie in Capital City.  Capital City, in the next county to the east across the Capital River, was much larger, with many large movie theaters spread out across the city and its suburbs.  I crossed the river about ten miles after leaving Jeromeville, with the historic drawbridge visible about half a mile north of the modern freeway crossing.  I drove through downtown and then got onto another freeway headed northeast, toward Capital East Mall, a familiar destination to me.  My first time at that mall, freshman year, I had begun to have an emotional breakdown, running an errand as a favor to my mother that was not as easy as I expected it to be.  I had been there many times just to buy clothes, since Jeromeville’s anti-corporate City Council had successfully kept department stores out of Jeromeville.  Twice, I had been there with a group as temporary workers to do inventory for one of the large stores, to raise money for JCF.  One of those times I was paired with an attractive young female store employee, whom I never saw again.  My mind drifted to her, wondering what she was up to these days.

The movie theater was a detached building in the same parking lot as the mall.  I parked and walked with the others in my car to the front of the theater, where Eddie and his passengers were already waiting.  Lars and Morgan and their passengers each arrived separately within the next ten minutes.

“Do you have the tickets?” Lars asked Eddie.

“Yes,” Eddie replied, handing each of us a ticket.  We all walked inside, and after using the bathroom, I waited as some people bought snacks.

As the movie began, the title credits appeared over a graphic effect meant to look like black liquid.  Apparently the creepy black stuff that we had discussed earlier would figure in this plot.  The scene quickly transitioned to two prehistoric Ice Age humans being attacked by a fierce otherworldly creature.  One of them stabbed the creature; as the creature bled, its black blood began flowing into the man, as if the blood was sentient.  The scene then transitioned to the present day, where some boys playing outside discovered the skull of the prehistoric man and promptly became infected by the black alien blood.  This was going to be interesting, I thought.  Hopefully I would be able to follow the story, since I had missed some of the previous episodes about the black liquid.  Or maybe this one scene was enough to explain the origin of the black liquid sufficiently enough to follow the movie.

The series’ main characters, Mulder and Scully, first appeared in the next scene, with Scully trying to think rationally about their assignment and Mulder rambling philosophically.  Even though I was sitting in a movie theater watching a big screen feature film, this felt just like a typical episode of The X-Files.  The next several scenes also stayed faithful to many the series’ core themes: black helicopters, government cover-ups, and Mulder and Scully’s superiors getting on their case.  The scene shifted back to where the boy found the black alien goo, and many in the theater gasped when the Smoking Man, a recurring villain from the series, first appeared.  Watching a movie with a large group of fans, having that collective experience of seeing things on the big screen for the first time, was a new experience for me, but I loved it.

About midway through the movie, Mulder and Scully discovered a top secret facility involving corn fields and millions of bees.  They barely escaped the facility, but one of the bees hitched a ride on Scully’s clothes and stung her several hours later.  Scully began describing her symptoms in detail as she lost consciousness.

“No one is really gonna say all that as they’re fainting,” Lars whispered from somewhere near me.

“She’s a doctor,” I replied.  “She might.  It’s her area of expertise.”

Instead of regular paramedics in an ambulance, mysterious agents took Scully away and attempted to shoot Mulder.  Mulder woke up in the hospital, surrounded by his three weird friends, who were also recurring characters on the show.  I clapped at their appearance, and I heard a few other people start to clap after I did, but the rest of the theater did not seem as excited to see these three as I was.

On the screen, Mulder encountered a man with a British accent.  I recognized him; he had worked with the Smoking Man and the others behind the conspiracy in several episodes of the series.  Now he was betraying the others and helping Mulder, apparently disapproving of the conspirators’ plans to create human-alien hybrids to resist the alien colonization.  He said that Mulder’s father, who had connections to these people, had hoped that Mulder would fight the future.

Fight the future.  That was from the movie’s title.  Nice.

On the screen, Mulder traveled to Antarctica, acting on information given to him by the British man, to break into a facility operated by the conspirators.  Mulder rescued Scully in the end, as I expected since I knew that the television series would be continuing.  But the final scene implied that the conspirators had other facilities elsewhere, including one whose location was given by onscreen text as “Foum Tataouine, Tunisia.”

“Dude!  That says ‘Tatooine!’” Lars whispered loudly, referring to the similarly named home planet of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars.

I did not like whispering in movie theaters, but Lars happened to point out something related to a tidbit of knowledge that I knew. “That’s where that part of Star Wars was filmed,” I whispered back.  “The planet Tatooine was named after a city in Tunisia.”  I was impressed with myself for having gathered much knowledge of Star Wars in the last year and a half, since my old roommate Brian Burr had made me a fan and brought me to the films’ theatrical re-releases.

The screen faded to black, and the credits played over the song “Walking After You” by the Foo Fighters, the song from the movie soundtrack that had been released as a radio single. After the credits ended, we all walked into the lobby, sharing our thoughts about the movie.  “So I have a question,” John said.  “When Mulder got to Antarctica, I was thinking about the midnight sun and all that kind of stuff.  And I realized something.”

“Oh yeah?” Tabitha replied.

“It looked like it was summer in America, like in the beginning of the movie when the boys found the skull.  It looked hot and sunny outside.  But if it’s summer here, then it’s winter in Antarctica.  So shouldn’t it have been dark?”

“Dude, you’re right!” Lars exclaimed.  I thought about this; he was right.  This seemed like the kind of thing I should have noticed.

“Maybe it was a hot day in the fall, or the spring,” I suggested.  “Then it wouldn’t have been completely dark in Antarctica.”

“Or maybe you’re just making excuses,” John teased.

“Now this is going to bother me,” I said.

“Dos Amigos is right next door,” Dan said, gesturing in the direction of Dos Amigos.  “You guys want to get lunch?”

“Yes!” I shouted.  It had now been over seven hours since I had my small bowl of Cheerios in the morning, and I had not snacked during the movie.  Others seemed in favor of this idea as well.

The original Dos Amigos restaurant was a quarter-mile from my house in Jeromeville; this one in Capital City was the second location, and the menu said that there was a third location in Blue Oaks.  Dos Amigos served Santa Fe style Mexican food, different from most other Mexican restaurants here in the western United States.  I had been to the Jeromeville Dos Amigos several times, and this one was clearly a different building with a different layout, but the decor was similar.  The walls were painted in the Southwestern adobe style, and decorative strings of dried chiles hung from wooden beams painted turquoise.  I ordered the same thing I had gotten before in Jeromeville, the Southwest Chicken Burrito.

“So what’d you think of the movie, Greg?” Dave McAllen asked.

“I loved it,” I replied.  “Even if it did just leave me with more questions than answers.”

“Of course they’re gonna do that, though,” John said.  “The series is still going.”

“I heard once that the show was going to end after this season, and they would just make movies after this,” Chelsea said.

“I heard that too,” Eddie replied.  “But then they decided to keep the show going instead.  Probably because it was getting high ratings.”

“Makes sense,” I said.  My food arrived, and I dipped a tortilla chip in pico de gallo and ate it.  The pico de gallo at Dos Amigos was amazingly good, different from any other pico de gallo I had ever eaten.

“Did those actors just come out of nowhere when the X-Files series started?” Janet McAllen asked.  “What else have they been in?”

John, Eddie, and I looked at each other awkwardly, as if trying to decide who would speak the awkward truth to our spiritual mentors.  It felt like we were each saying “not it” to each other in our minds.  I finally broke the silence.  “I heard David Duchovny did adult films,” I said.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly adult films,” Eddie said.  “It was a racy TV show on premium cable with a lot of nudity.”

“Hmm,” Janet replied.  No one said anything more about that.

“It’ll be interesting to see how much from the movie makes it into the show when they start again next season,” Lars said.

“I know,” I replied.  “Apparently the alien colonization is inevitable now.  What did that guy from Tataouine say at the end?  ‘One man cannot fight the future.’”  The others chuckled.

The rest of that afternoon, amidst the rest of the movie discussion and small talk that happened in Dos Amigos and on the drive home, I kept thinking about the movie’s title.  The X-Files: Fight The Future.  The title screen at the beginning of the movie simply said The X-Files, although the longer title appeared on the movie posters.  What did it mean to fight the future?

As far as I knew, my future did not include an Earth where humans would be used as hosts for alien parasites to gestate and colonize.  But equally grand changes were coming in my life.  Tomorrow, I would walk across a stage in the Recreation Pavilion, with Mom, Dad, and my brother Mark watching from somewhere in the stands, as I received my Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Jeromeville.  Next year, I would still be in Jeromeville, but I would be spending my mornings twenty miles off campus, student teaching at Nueces High School.  And a year after that, I would have a job as a teacher somewhere, no longer taking classes at UJ.  My future did not present a choice as stark as the one in the movie.  I did not have to decide between secretly developing a vaccine against the black alien liquid or genetically modifying myself with alien genetic material.  But changes were coming in the future, as they would for the rest of my life, and then, as always, I had a choice.  I could fight the changes, with no guarantee of success, or I could adapt myself to live with the changes.  Knowing which to do in each situation was not always easy, but it was an important life skill.

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So I kind of messed this up. Years ago in my notes, I wrote down to use “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters as the song for the episode where character-Greg almost wins Man of Steel. And with episodes about movies, I usually use the popular song from the movie as the song for that episode. But this means that two of the last three episodes have used Foo Fighters songs, and I try not to repeat artists that quickly. Oh well… not much I can do about it now, and I don’t think any of you will be picky enough to care.

Readers: Are you usually the kind of person who fights changes or embraces them? Tell me about it in the comments.

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