Quatermass shows an aged and discouraged Prof. Q, now living in a society that has degenerated into dystopian chaos. There is a cult, "The Planet People", who are mysteriously drawn to ancient gathering places, such as stone circles, from which they believe they will be taken to a better place. When enough of them are gathered there, a beam of light descends and incinerates them.

The Prof. figures out that there is an alien machine subconsciously luring these young people to areas where they can be "harvested". I won't give too much away, but when I compared the "harvesting" scenes in "Quatermass" with the scenes in "Patient X/The Red and the Black" where Scully finds herself drawn (by her alien implant) to a dam in Pennsylvania, and Cassandra Spender's "UFO Cult" is largely incinerated by the alien rebels, I gave up any notions about the similarities between "Quatermass 2" and "Fight the Future" being an isolated incident.

These X-Files episodes are set before Fight The Future in terms of chronology, but due to the grueling shooting schedule, they were actually written and filmed well after the movie was completed. There are many differences in the two stories, obviously (X-Files is much busier, and much less effective, in my opinion), but we see the same plot mechanics and ideas, and -- again -- damningly similar visual treatments. The light reflecting on horrified faces. The beam descending from the sky. In Quatermass most of the cultists are completely disintegrated, but there are a few remnant corpses, horribly burnt and disfigured, which are the dominant image in "The Red and the Black."

We see Cassandra Spender (whose naively optimistic view of the alien's motives is echoed by the Planet People in Quatermass -- well, the other way around actually) levitated into the air, eyes closed, arms extended in religious rapture. We see a very similar scene in Quatermass, as a young woman is belatedly "harvested" by the alien machine.

What really got my pulse pounding, though, is a scene early I Quatermass, before any of this happens. We see the Prof., badly disillusioned and upset over his vanished granddaughter, lash out at the space program, while he is on a TV panel discussing an ongoing US/Russian space mission. The way he debunks his former passion, calling those who still believe in it dupes of the government, is frighteningly reminiscent of Mulder's similar behavior at the beginning of "Patient X." There, you will remember, we saw the beginning of his brief "loss of faith" as he berated a UFOlogy conference for allowing the government to con them. Like Prof. Q, Mulder's experiences a renewal of faith, a rebirth of enthusiasm, by the end of the story. Some fans lamented at the time that this plot twist didn't work too well, as if it had been somehow grafted onto the mytharc without much forethought. Well.

So, as the sixth season of The X-Files wound down, I had found a number of instances of apparent story pilfering, some of them quite serious, some fairly innocuous. As I said before, writers borrow all the time. And while the apparent grabs from Quatermass were integral to the later mytharc stories, it wasn't as if every mytharc episode contained direct grabs. Maybe there wouldn't be any more.

Then came "Biogenesis".