The X-Files 20th Anniversary Blogging: "Drive" (November 15, 1998)

Before Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston collaborated on the hit series Breaking Bad (2008 – 2013), they worked together on this fast-paced and inventive early sixth season installment of The X-Files (1993 – 2002). 

“Drive's” premise determinedly (if wickedly…) apes the hit action film Speed (1994) and Mulder even references the Jan de Bont movie in the episode’s dialogue.  But because this is The X-Files, there’s a major twist in the tale, and “Drive” functions as more than mere rip-off.

In Speed, as you will recall, a mad bomber (Dennis Hopper) placed a bomb on a metropolitan bus, and that bomb was triggered to detonate if it fell below a certain speed-threshold, 55 miles-per-hour.  This effectively meant that any rescue or de-fusing attempts had to be completed while in the bus remained in motion. 

In “Drive,” however, the “bomb” is not aboard a vehicle.  Rather it is a physical “vibration” inside a passenger’s very head.  Any slow-down in terms of velocity is still deadly in this scenario, but it will result in a cranial explosion.  In Speed, the bomb could be stopped by catching the bomber, or defusing the device. In “Drive,” it’s a race to outrun a sound vibration…an impossible task.

What’s perhaps even more unusual about “Drive” is the nature of the passenger or victim: Patrick Crump.  He’s a racist jerk and a pain in the ass.  He complains about the “Jew F.B.I.” for instance, and marks Mulder as one of “them.”   But despite the character’s paranoia and bigotry, Cranston succeeds in making Crump a sympathetic (if ignorant…) human being, and so the episode’s tragic ending carries unusual and unexpected weight. 

“Drive” is fast-paced, intense, and literally explosive -- as it should be -- but the genuine surprise here is how much the denouement at water’s edge will impact you in sheer emotional terms. 

Against all your better judgment, you’ll find yourself routing for Crump to survive, to out-pace the deadly signal causing him so much pain.  The visual reveal that he doesn’t survive is also a great one.  Very little is spoken, but a blood spatter on a car window tells the audience everything it needs to know…

Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) have been re-assigned from the X-Files by Kersh (James Picken Jr.), their new supervisor at the F.B.I.  Instead of working on cases involving the paranormal and supernatural, the duo is assigned to question farmers about the purchases of fertilizer on the west coast.  

While in Nevada, Mulder sees a strange case on the news, and inserts himself into it, over Scully’s objections.

In particular, a highway chase in Elko turns strange when a passenger in a speeding car dies under mysterious circumstances. Specifically, her head explodes.  Now the car’s driver, Mr. Patrick Crump (Bryan Cranston) suffers from the same affliction as his wife, Vicki.  He hijacks Mulder and makes him drive west at over fifty miles-an-hour because only the sensation of speed can relieve the pressure in his head.

Meanwhile, Scully investigates a top-secret Navy project called “Seafarer” that may have caused the Crumps’ odd condition…

Mr. Crump’s strange malady in “Drive” is caused by a Navy project called “Seafarer,” and like many of the best X-Files episodes, the narrative and mystery here boasts a basis in fact.  Specifically, a project called “Sanguine” was proposed in 1968, and then again in 1975, but as “Seafarer.  In 1982, the same project was actually implemented in Wisconsin, but called “Project ELF” (for extreme low frequency).  

The notion underlying all these projects was the creation of a transmitter facility which could communicate with nuclear submarines submerged in the ocean following World War III or other nuclear detonations.  The transmitter remains controversial, however, because the effects of high ground currents on the environment and surrounding electromagnetic files are not known. 

“Drive” plays with this tantalizing premise, and suggests that ELF waves impact “the inner ear,” unbalancing internal pressure to the point that human heads could -- a la The Fury (1978) or Scanners (1981) -- simply explode.  But where those rated-R horror films featured full-on exploding heads, “Drive” takes a different tact, perhaps because of TV limitations.  Here, the heads explode off-screen like popping zits, and we see the sudden spurting of blood, but not flesh literally blowing apart.  This visualization is remarkable effective, and sickening.

Amusingly, “Drive” also functions as something of a character-piece.  The episode suggests that the ill-informed conspiracy theories of a knucklehead like Crump could, in fact, be accurate on some occasions. He reflexively suspects that the government has “done this” to him, and in fact he’s right.  Even a broken clock is right two times a day, and in this case Crump’s paranoia, as Mulder notes, is entirely justified.  Of course, he is not the government’s “guinea pig” as he fears and suspects, but rather the collateral damage of the government’s pure incompetence.  The Seafarer project suffered an unexpected power surge.  Nobody was out to get Crump, in other words, but nor was anybody protecting him.

Mulder and Crump clearly don’t like each other very well, or understand each other much, but their mutual situation -- trapped in a speeding car with death just moments away -- allows them to bond on simple human terms, and that’s where “Drive” really excels.  Nobody deserves to suffer in the way that Crump does, and Mulder does everything within his power to save him.  This episode is about showing humanity towards someone who, quite frankly, can be horrible to deal with.

In fact, the episode’s final act carries so much emotional weight because we have become thoroughly invested in Crump’s plight, and the episode teases us with the possibility of a fix...a cure.  Scully plans to meet Mulder at the coast, by the sea, and will insert a long needle into his ear to relieve the pressure.  This act will render him permanently deaf, but it's a trade-off he’s willing to make.  Accordingly,“Drive” lures us into believing there’s still a chance that Crump could yet live.

But then, Mulder drives by in the episode's closing moments, and we see that scarlet blood spatter on the window of his car.  He was moments -- maybe just feet -- away from saving his ward.

“Drive’ succeeds on the principle of “you stop moving, you die,” and speeds towards its conclusion with purpose and pathos.  I wonder too, if the “you stop moving, you die” edict applies to Crump's life.  He’s a man who has been cut no breaks in life, and hates everybody ahead of him in the “line.”  Every day he has to keep trying -- keep moving -- or he and his wife fall further behind in the race of life.   

In “Drive,” Crump runs up against something that makes him run even faster, but it’s a race he can never win. There's something very human about that predicament, which is why what happens to Patrick Crump matters to Mulder.  It matters to the rest of us too.

Next week: "Monday."