The Weekend Watch: Rm9sbG93ZXJz

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Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!

No, that’s not a WordPress error you’re seeing in the headline. The Weekend Watch is actually something titled “Rm9sbG93ZXJz,” which is Base64 code for “Followers,” indicative of the playfulness running through The X-Files’ eleventh season episode about AI. Yes, this will be the first Weekend Watch not about a movie (though we’ve featured shorts before, so it was inevitable that we burst from those formal constraints sooner rather than later), instead being about 43 minutes of TV airing all the way back on February 28, 2018. Sorry, AfrAId but folks have been doing horror spins on Smart House long before Margaux did it just two years ago. In fact, they’ve been doing it…well, even before Smart House, like in 1998’s Dream House. But with Blumhouse’s new “My AI home is bad now” hitting theaters, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite entries in that microgenre. It just happens to be a refreshing return to form during the final season of one of the greatest genre shows ever made.

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“Rm9sbG93ZXJz” had a lot going against it. The X-Files was always up and down in terms of quality, but when the show returned to TV eight years after we thought The X-Files: I Want to Believe set us free from the lore, it seemed entirely possible that the new seasons existed only to provide fan service and make us remember how much we hated the mythology episodes. But “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” came during the much-improved final season, and is a standalone monster-of-the-week episode—always a good sign.

Also a good sign is that the Glen Morgan-helmed episode from writers Shannon Hamblin and Kristen Cloke is relatively wordless, relying on visual storytelling and all manner of computer-driven madness to convey its charming, smarmy “has technology gone too far” message. It’s almost like an X-Files version of Maximum Overdrive, if Maximum Overdrive was around during the time of ChatGPT and OpenAI. The episode also references Twitter; it’s utterly jarring to think about Fox Mulder and Dana Scully tweeting, but you know they both would.

The episode involves Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) on a half-assed, phone-ogling dinner date to a fully automated D.C. sushi joint, where things go awry after Mulder fails to tip. It’s a spectacular, elegant, cheeky opening 10 minutes, well-planned and shot with a reliance on Duchovny and Anderson’s baked-in chemistry. They tell all in a few looks, which makes it all the more painful when they’re screwing around on their phones not looking at each other. If Mulder and Scully can’t keep the spark alive, what’re the hopes for the rest of us?

At any rate, Mulder doesn’t tip and the robots running the restaurant get mad. This is the first of many antagonistic run-ins with tech sprinkled throughout the episode, including self-driving cars, drone delivery and, yes, a smart house. As our critic Dom Sinacola wrote in his review from the time, “Skynet-type hijinks ensue.”

It’s a silly, high-concept bottle-ish episode full of horror-like gags (The self-driving car won’t stop accelerating! The smarthome turns on, but doesn’t ignite, the gas fireplace! Drones!) that pester two characters who’ve been built over years and years. It works because of the reason so many late-in-the-game episodes of TV work: They don’t have to worry about convincing us of its world, or about character development, or about pretty much anything aside from putting people we’re confident that we know into a fun situation.

When movies try to do that, they become shallow slashers, with characters simply present to be fodder for the monster. When the monster is something inherently silly, like robots turning evil, it makes it even harder to buy what they’re selling, unless they fully lean into the ridiculousness. Otherwise you end up like a bad Black Mirror episode, where the self-serious Message overwhelms whatever production value you may have brought to the table. With X-Files, though, it’s a layup.

A silly monster is perfect for these two FBI agents; the best episode of the first lega-season involves Rhys Darby as a shapeshifting goofball. Watching these two serious cryptocops get harassed by something dumb is enjoyable because we know, deep in our hearts, that their passions push them closer to a fringe where the dumb is ever-present. Such is the burden of pushing against a government hiding all manner of secrets. We enjoy it even when those dumb things are now subjects which have been covered to death by social thrillers—like Roombas or those Boston Dynamics dog-bots—because we want to know how these people, who we feel that we know and understand like our friends and relatives, would deal with them. In “Rm9sbG93ZXJz,” they deal with them pigheadedly, competently, fearfully and hilariously.

“Rm9sbG93ZXJz” doesn’t quite have the follow-through to stand with TV’s best episodes, or even TV’s best self-restrained moments, like The Wire scene scripted entirely with variations on “fuck.” But its ambitions intertwine with the best thing about the final season, which is the unspoken intimacy developed between The X-Files’ leads. This clever high-tech idea strips things back rather than makes them more complicated, which ironically allows for the humanity of The X-Files to shine all the better.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

For all the latest movie news, reviews, lists and features, follow @PasteMovies.

The Weekend Watch: “Rm9sbG93ZXJz”

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