Themes
The episode contains literary motifs, which have been studied. Near the beginning of the episode, Mulder uses one of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" in an argument with Scully: "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Sharon R. Yang, in her essay "Weaving and Unweaving the Story", writes that this is an example of the character using affluent literature to "justify his passionate dedication to questing for knowledge in arcane areas scored by mainstream intellectual authority". In addition, the unique structure of "The Unnatural" has been analyzed. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, argue that the episode functions as a fairy tale. As Dales is telling his story, Mulder is attempting to "tie up everything he's hearing into the established myth arc like a diehard fan".
Ideas of racism and segregation permeate the episode, and several writers have commented on the theme. Sara Gwenllian-Jones in her book Cult Television argues that throughout the entry, "the blacks are equated with aliens", making them into a certain type of "other" that is "never allowed to fit in or feel safe". Gwenllian-Jones highlights the scene wherein Dales, late one night on the team bus, wakes to see the Exley's sleeping body reflected as an alien in a window as an example of the racial comparison. She points out that, despite coming to Earth, Exley has moved from one segregated society—that of the aliens—into another. She writes that Exley, after revealing his true form to Dales, says that "my people guard their privacy zealously. They don't want our people to intermingle with your people".
Read more about this topic: The Unnatural (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)