Somewhere in northern Alaska, in the remote halls of a scientific research facility, on a bitter winter night, two TV shows spun similarly chilling mysteries two decades apart. And for both, it was bad, bad news for scientists.
In 2024, True Detective: Night Country sends you to a station on the snowy outskirts of the fictional town of Ennis, where an entire team of biologists and geologists suddenly vanishes. In 1993, The X-Files sent us to a similar outpost in Icy Cape, where a team of geophysicists met a grim end.
If you're watching the fourth season of the HBO series and want a thematic chaser between episodes, of course, hit up John Carpenter's The Thing, and then join Scully and Mulder for a cold, cold case.
What happens in The X-Files episode "Ice"?
Here's the set-up in "Ice," Season 1, episode 8 of The X-Files.
Everyone's favourite hot FBI agents who regularly dabble in the unexplainable find themselves with a humdinger of case on their desk. This time, the truth is way out there, in Icy Cape, Alaska, at a research facility 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The members of the Arctic Ice Core Project, responsible for drilling into the ice sheets to extract cylinders of ice for climate analysis (kind of like the scientists in True Detective), have been found strewn about the halls, brutally killed.
A bloody lone survivor has left a message. "We're not who we are," he broadcasts. "It goes no further than this. It stops right here, right now." The ever-excellent Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) are called in to investigate with a small team of project consultants, and their time in the Icy Cape is about as relaxing as you'd expect. What exactly did the team extract in those ice cores? And what's affecting the members of the investigation team one by one?
The episode shares a lot with True Detective's first episode, including the remoteness of the location, scientists scrambling to unpack the mystery of the outpost's fate, and the self-recorded videos of the team goofing around before their untimely demise. I'm not going to ruin the ending, but this is The X-Files, so while the answer to real-life space questions is never aliens, in this show, it's almost always aliens.
Ultimately, The X-Files is paying its real homage to The Thing, and all the shape-shifting extraterrestrial possibility that screenwriters love to imagine lurking beneath the ice — that's millions of years of life under there. But it's the perfect TV pairing for True Detective fans, if you're feeling comfortable out in all that sinister ice.
How to watch: True Detective: Night Country is now streaming on Max, and The X-Files is now streaming on Hulu.
Topics HBO True Detective
