Extreme possibilities

Light spoilers for seasons 1 & 2 of The X-Files

19 Reasons Why David Duchovny and Harrison Ford Are Secret Clone Twins

1. Juicy bottom lips.

2. When Fox Mulder is introduced in the pilot, he is working out of a basement. He turns to look at his new partner, fellow FBI agent Dana Scully. His face is friendly, his hair full and a little mussed. He is wearing large wire-frame glasses, the kind hipsters wear today because normals wore them in the Nineties. He looks exactly like Harrison Ford as college professor Indiana Jones in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark. A poster on the wall has a UFO on it, with the words I WANT TO BELIEVE. A conspiracy theory is born.

3. Duchovny and Ford are artists of withdrawal. They never smile, only grin. Their faces barely change shape when they talk. They have voices like bass guitars murmuring. They are unflappable, even when they get flapped.

4. Midway through the first season, I text M, who as far as I am concerned wrote the book on The X-Files, to tell her I am not impressed by the world-building thus far. She writes back,

   oh yeah totally!!
   the cosmology makes basically no sense at all
   it’s more like an encyclopedia of the weird

5. M is right. The X-Files doesn’t have a central organizing cosmology. Yes, THE TRUTH, as you may have heard, IS OUT THERE. Aliens exist; they’ve been around for a while; they’ve infiltrated the United States Government. But that doesn’t mean all “extreme possibilities” tucked in the X-Files are etiologically or even ontologically related. In Buffy, like it or not, the Hellmouth justified everything: vampires, demons, werewolves, warlocks, haunted frat houses, doppelgängers, evil candy bars. Even sci-fi-level advanced technology usually had demonic roots. In The X-Files, there are aliens—but also ghosts, and also genetic mutants, and also evil AIs, and also shapeshifters, and also body-swapping, and also reincarnation, and also a dude who can set things on fire, and also telepathy, and also spiritual healers, and also worm men, and also ice worms, and also green hippie lice. None of them inherently related.

6. Let me clarify that we are obviously talking about Young David Duchovny and Young Harrison Ford. Once identical cucumbers, they pickled off in different directions. I’m not crazy.

7. Disorganization is actually the point of The X-Files. Mulder and Scully are not really here to explain things. (That would be The Vox Files lol.) With each monster of the week, our heroes wander in, witness some crazy shit, solve a few things, and wander back out. By the end of the episode they haven’t shed light so much as lit a single match in the eating dark. Even the tiny flame will bite your fingers if you don’t put it out.

8. Hair.

9. Me to M: we’ve reached the obligatory native american episode

10. It is possible that David Duchovny and Harrison Ford are both clones of a third, unknown person, but if one of them is the original, it’s obviously Ford. This isn’t just because, if you believe the propaganda, Harrison was born in 1942 while David was born in 1960. Harrison’s masculinity is classic. David’s is a little tamer, a little more buried under paperwork, a little less windowed. Duchovny’s gender is Ford’s gender on desk duty.

11. Both men’s chins are just cleft, as if they both barely escaped from the same freak butcher’s shop accident. It worked anyway: They got butcher.

12. Indiana Jones’s god is God, usually. Mulder’s god is an alien.

13. Wikipedia tells me that the X-Files creators were influenced by Raiders, among other films. The massive Pentagon warehouse of extraterrestrial evidence haunted by the Smoking Man—the Truth is In There—is clearly a nod to the government facility where they dump the Ark of the Covenant, alongside what one assumes are countless other paranormal artifacts. Syncretism is here, too: in the Indiana-verse, the Christian God exists, but so does Shiva, and probably many other gods besides. Also, the most recent Indiana Jones film was about aliens. COINCIDENCE??

14. I will concede that their noses are different. Don’t @ me.

15. sally would like you to know that the gaping plot holes in “darkness falls” are unacceptable. M sends back an acceptable number of ha’s.

16. The episode “Ghost in the Machine” is about a company called Eurisko. “You know what Eurisko means?” asks its insufferably scruffy tech bro founder. “That’s from the Greek, isn’t it?” replies Mulder, flat-toned as ever but clearly excited. He pretends to have to think about it. “Um… ‘I learn things.’” Tech bro bulldozes past: “Not exactly. It means, ‘I discover things.’” I scoff. The writers have slipped up. The actual ancient Greek word is εὑρίσκω, but it’s pronounced heurisko, not eurisko. It’s where we get the English adjective heuristic, meaning “enabling someone to discover something for themselves.” The error is likely the result of the fact that there is no H in the classical Greek alphabet. Instead, word-initial aspiration is denoted by a rough breathing mark—basically, a raised backwards comma. The writers looked up εὑρίσκω, saw Eurisko, and never knew the truth was right in front of them, waiting to be discovered.

17. Or it could be code. Discover. D is cover. D for David. A missing H, for Harrison.

18. The episode “Eve” features two identical little girls living thousands of miles apart whose fathers were murdered at exactly the same time. It turns out the girls are clones, part of a rogue clandestine research program run by other clones. In a breathtaking plot twist, the clone girls are revealed as the murderers. If this is not proof that David Duchovny and Harrison Ford are clone twins, I don’t know what is. But even if it isn’t, it’s fine. There will be other proof. There will always be other proof. Possibility is, by definition, extreme. The truth is infinitely provable, no matter how out there it is.

19. I text M,

    speaking of plot twists
    what if i just didn’t get the phd