We just knew.

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Written by Kenneth Biller & Chris Brancato
Directed by Fred Gerberg

Airdate: 10 December, 1993

How's this for a needlessly particular point of distinction: "Eve", from midway through the first season of The X-Files, is almost beyond question the best episode in the show's entire run to be written and directed by people who never came back to write or direct another episode ever. That's partially an artifact of how few people only ever worked for the show just the one time, but really that only kicks the question up a level: why did writers Kenneth Biller & Chris Brancato, and director Fred Gerber, only show up to turn out this one superb episode?

The boring answer is, of course, just that television is a business and the three men all had full careers (Biller & Brancato had logged a substantial amount of time on Beverly Hills, 90210 the year prior, before going their separate ways; Brancato moved between TV and feature films; Biller ended up on Star Trek: Voyager and was showrunner for its last season; Gerber started moving into made-for-TV movies in 1996). And the boring answer is then complicated, but not really made less boring, by the fact that, although Biller & Brancato were given sole credit and pitched the idea to showrunner Chris Carter, the final teleplay was rewritten by co-executive producers Glen Morgan & James Wong. So maybe most of what's great here came from in-house.

But surely not all of it. "Eve" has great bones; it is maybe the single best-structured episode of the first season of The X-Files. And I don't see how I can talk about that structure without giving important things away, which is just something that happens when one reviews an episode of television 29 years after it aired, but I still feel a little bad about doing so without throwing out a SPOILER WARNING. So tread carefully if you're a newcomer to the show and wish to remain ignorant of its wonderful surprises. Anyway, the story beats, in order: a little girl named Teena Simmons (Sabrina Krievins) is standing on the driveway on what looks like a chilly day in Greenwich, CT, and a neighboring couple (who I presume are played by Tina Gilbertson and David Kirby) jogging by immediately sense that something is amiss. When Teena says something vague about her dad, they obviously go straight to some mildly dark assumption - "dad's on a bender and/or watching porn" are my guesses - and take Teena to the backyard to confront Dad, only to find his dead body, drained of blood, on the swing set. Cut to the opening credits on the sound of the little girl shrieking.

Apologies for all the detail, especially after I basically just said not to read this unless you've seen the episode, but it really does end up mattering that basically the first thing that happens in "Eve" is two adults misunderstanding a situation - not even that they misunderstand and a man is dead. Both in terms of "what happens in the plot" and "how it is presented to us as viewers", "Eve" is built on a series of wrong assumptions, both the ones that characters make, and the ones the show nudges us towards. The case ends up on Agent Fox Mulder's (David Duchovny) radar, since he sees the telltale signs of extraterrestrial activity in the death, and that's a bad assumption, one that the character makes, but also one the show lets us follow along with. After all, through its first ten episodes, The X-Files was certainly something of "the alien show" - five of those ten episodes were explicitly about extraterrestrial phenomena, and a sixth, "Ice", leaves alien life open as a possible explanation, although not an explanation that's terribly germane to the goings-on of the script. And it's also trained us to expect that whatever strange explanation Mulder comes up with is going to be right, or at least much closer to right than anything levelheaded ol' Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is going to say. This is not the case in "Eve": Mulder's knee-jerk "aliens" doesn't even really get us close, and Scully doesn't really have anything other than "well, it's not aliens".

That's where the episode sits for a surprisingly long stretch of its running time: well, it's not aliens. It's not even really giving us foreshadowing for at least the first third, just strewing out strange clues: there's another girl who looks exactly like Teena, on the other side of the country, Cindy Reardon (Erika Krievins), whose father also died of exsanguination, but the two girls don't seem to otherwise have the same story to tell. It's obviously pushing us towards "twins separated at birth", but that turns out to be another false assumption. It turns out to be genetic experimentation, as conducted by mad scientist Dr. Sally Kendrick Harriet Sansom Harris) - in a yes, but also... sort of way. Well past the halfway point, the episode is still letting us think that Sally is out to kidnap the girls to hide the evidence of her cloning plan, and it's only about two-thirds of the way through that the shoe finally drops: Teena and Cindy, having formed a psychic connection that wasn't at all part of Sally's plan, murdered their fathers together, and now they're going to murder Sally.

Basically, the entire opening three acts of "Eve" are playing a game with us: can we possibly leap to the assumption that these two girls are homicidal maniacs? It's really obvious. Whatever team of writers decided to give Teena the line "they wanted to exsanguinate him", they're basically telling us, flat out, "this little girl is spooky and fucked up", and we haven't even met Cindy yet. It helps immensely that the Krievins sisters, under Gerber's direction, are so eerie and downright uncanny, playing dead-eyed lack of affect and coldly murderous calculation as well as any "murderous bad kid" ever has been played in any movie or show I've seen. They're doing something harder than playing perfect sociopaths, which is playing imperfect sociopaths. They wear innocent little girl behavior like a cloak, switching it on and off as needed, and the episode takes time to make sure that we see the switch happen sometimes. They have to remind themselves to play innocent little girls. And again, it's right there, right in front of, basically demanding that we reckon with the fact that the only way this all fits together, the narrative and the acting, is if the little girls are savage killers.

So do we so reckon? Honestly, even having seen the episode many times, I sort of don't. That first half-hour plays so well as a mystery that I still find myself nodding along with Mulder and Scully's extremely fruitless investigation - we know what's going on long before they do, and they literally don't figure things out until the penultimate scene, and then it's basically dumb luck - as if anything that happens in the first 15 minutes was anything other than the reddest of herrings. This is to some extent the power of all "that child is a stone-cold killer" plots in all media, but especially filmed media, where we see the child right in front of us: can you believe it? Or at least, can you empathise with the adults who can't believe it, can't believe it so hard that they don't even think of it as a possibility to dismiss. And "Eve" is right up there with the best of the best of "psycho child" stories I've ever seen.

On top of simply having an airtight mystery-thriller narrative, "Eve" is also, like, just plain really good TV. It finds The X-Files sliding into a sweet spot, where Duchovny and Anderson have figured out enough about their characters that it doesn't need to be "about" Mulder and Scully for it to still feel like the main point of the hour is to spend time with our fictional friends and see what they make of this bizarre case (which is the selling point of The X-Files, and really procedural television as a whole, but this is the first episode that really nails that particular dynamic without anything else distracting from or inflecting it), and there are a few wonderful character beats scattered across "Eve": Scully's shocked and more than a little defensive "You got a girl coming over?" when Mulder suddenly gets very weird, and her extremely probing look of possibly angry curiosity as he hastily shuts the door; a moment when Mulder enthusiastically lays out a chain of events whereby he knows where Teena and Cindy are, and Scully's well-honed cynical rationality gets neatly put to bed with a simple "okay, well, I can't deny that" shrug. This isn't a world-class outing for either star, but part of the appeal is that it's not trying to be: this is what they're capable when they're simply right in the groove.

It is a world-class outing in other ways. "Eve" boasts a real barnburner of a supporting turn by Harris - turns, really, since she ends up playing three different clones, and she distinguishes neatly between each of them to reflect a shared form of psychopathy that manifests in different ways based on how that version of the clone lived through the world. Eve 6 is a tittering, Hannibal Lecter-style maniac, having never been outside of a small prison cell for her entire adult life. Eve 8, barely seen in the episode, is clamped-down industrial evil, the one who was given permission to run her malignant energies through Official Channels and is thus the most stable while also being the most cruel. Eve 7, the one calling herself Sally, is the adult version of the girls: she's learned how to seem normal, but it takes effort to get there, and the effort wobbles when she's stressed. It's showy, bombastic acting, but the trappings of the gritty, dark show all around it keep things tethered to something basically human, so Harris's melodramatic excess never feels too much. It's a great performance of a badly photocopied brain breaking down, and all three faces of Eve feel dangerous in different ways that keep the energy of the episode fluctuating - especially since Eve 6 and Eve 7 are also capable of coming across as rather more lamentable and pathetic (Eve 7 is downright heartbreaking in the scene where she tries to explain to her young clones how they can live a normal life).

And, at long last, back I come to Fred Gerber, and his very fascinating one-off job of directing. "Eve" is both situated within The X-Files's house style and outside of it: most obviously, it's full of very well-lit scenes of bland domestic spaces. This is undoubtedly part of the point of it all: all "bad kid" thrillers are ultimately about the unreliability of the home, and by making the interiors look so utterly drab, "Eve" emphasises that part of the story, the idea that something horrible is invading the superficial security of middle class single family homes. Because there is something disconcerting about the ugliness of an X-Files story happening in the middle of an unexceptional suburban foyer, or a flatly-lit truck stop diner that feels like a thousand truck stop diners all across North America.

But when it needs to count, Gerberg makes it count: his framing of Eve 6 is a bit trite in some ways (oho, she pushes her face against the metal bars on her door to hiss incoherently, that's new), but in concert with Harris's performance, it's suitably disconcerting. He lets scenes play out slowly, letting conversations move with the halting irregularity of people who can't figure out what they're saying, rather than like TV characters who know what point they need to hit by the end of the scene. And he does a great job framing scenes for the Krievins sisters rather than their adult co-stars, subtly (and sometimes much less subtly) giving them the power and control in an episode where their characters are, after all, the main driving force of the plot. The result is an episode as good at visual storytelling as it as the written kind, nervy without being smack-you-on-the-head atmospheric, and in my mind, perhaps the most underappreciated episode of The X-Files's first season.

Grade: A