A pair of young lovers are driving down a dark highway. Suddenly, the car stops and they see a UFO overhead. The teens then pass out when a pair of gray aliens approach their car. Then another spaceship arrives and out comes a furry cyclops alien. In a perfectly human voice, one gray alien says, “Jack, what is that thing?” The other gray alien replies, “How the hell should I know?”
Even by X-Files standards, the opening scene of “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” is truly bizarre.
From violent crimes to government conspiracies, The X-Files dealt with some particularly heavy subject matter. Yet the episodes that are often considered to be the best of the series lean disproportionately towards ones where the show would break format and go for outright comedy. There is no better example of this than season 3’s “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” which took the core premise of The X-Files and turned it into a joke.
“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” is an episode told mostly in flashback from the perspective of Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson). An author named Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) is meeting her at FBI headquarters as research for a book he’s writing about a recent case that involved possible alien encounters in Klass County, Washington.
Chung is primarily interested in the alleged alien abduction of those two lovers mentioned above, and Scully fills him in on the details of the case. While the teen boy in the relationship remembers being abducted, his girlfriend does not. She suspects he took advantage of her, though Agent Mulder (David Duchovny) isn’t so sure, as much of the evidence points to alien abduction. The girl goes under hypnosis and recalls being abducted by aliens, but a later hypnosis session replaces the aliens with government agents. In the end, what actually happened with the teens remains unclear.
Some other locals get involved in the case, like a lineman who witnessed their abduction and swears he was visited by a pair of “men in black” played by wrestler/actor/politician Jesse Ventura and the late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. There’s also an Air Force pilot who tells Mulder he and another pilot have been forced to disguise themselves as aliens while flying experimental aircraft, and a man who finds an alien body, only for Scully to discover a dead Air Force pilot inside. The entire thing is completely absurd, breaking the usual suspension of disbelief that comes with watching an X-Files episode to deliver a satire of the show itself.
But beyond its absurd story, what makes “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” work in the first place (and what makes it such a great episode) is the acting and writing, which work together to mess with the basic premise of The X-Files in creative ways.
Thanks to Mulder’s dry sense of humor, Duchovny often got to be funny on The X-Files, but this episode manages to also make him silly. There’s a scene where Mulder interrogates a diner owner in an especially strange way: He orders a slice of sweet potato pie and asks the man a question. Then he finishes the slice, orders another and asks another question. He does this until he’s eaten the entire pie, and then leaves. The framing here is funny but Duchovny is quite literally eating it up with an exaggerated seriousness, too-big bites, and dramatic chewing.
This episode is also one of the first times Anderson got to stretch her comedy muscles on The X-Files. Agent Scully, while a serious FBI agent, happens to be a big fan of author Jose Chung, and the dynamic between the two characters puts Scully in an almost fawning position, which is really out of character. Reilly, probably best known for providing cartoon voices and for extensive TV appearances in the 1960s and 1970s, is also chewing the scenery as Chung, an author who’s equal parts eccentric and cynical.
However, it’s Darin Morgan who deserves the most credit for the magic of this episode. The X-Files writer is widely credited with introducing a sense of humor to the show. While Mulder’s sarcasm was there from the start, it was Morgan who wrote the season 2 episode “Humbug,” which changed the definition of what an X-Files episode could be by sending Mulder and Scully on a funny case to a town of circus sideshow performers. After that, about two to three episodes each season would be comedic.
But “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” isn’t just a funny case. It’s basically a parody of the show’s central subject matter. The X-Files’ biggest stories were all about alien abductions — the disappearance of Mulder’s sister when he was a child is the character’s defining moment. Yet this episode uses it all for laughs, from horny teens that may or may not be making up an alien encounter, to unconvincing aliens that talk like regular guys. Especially fun are the locals Mulder and Scully interact with, like the paranoid abductee who writes about his close encounter in screenplay format, or the young man who wants to be abducted so he won’t have to worry about finding a job.
In an interview done years later for the FX channel, Morgan said that he knew “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” was going to be his final episode of X-Files, and that remained true until his episode “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” in 2016 as part of the revival seasons. Back in 1996, though, while crafting what he thought would be his last episode, Morgan felt compelled to include everything he wanted. That kitchen-sink approach resulted in something that was not only an anomaly for The X-Files (even for one of the show’s “funny” episodes), but an entirely unique episode of TV altogether.