Fallen Angels: An X-Files Character Deep Dive

alien abduction phenomena and neurological disorders

Before we start, you may be asking yourself, why does this girl choose to do deep-dives on shows with infamously murky, muddy mythologies? And my answer is simple: It is because the mythology is murky that the deep-dive is even worth it. If it were all crystal clear and I could see straight to the bottom, I wouldn’t need to dive in at all. But I like to get down in the muck! So, just like in my essay about John Locke of Lost, I ask that you take my hand and just trust me to walk you through the twisting and turning, meandering and looping plot of this thing. So let’s dive in, the water’s fine.

March, 1997. A voice speaks out from the past through the warped audio of an old VHS tape. He’s a young man in his twenties with a scruffy blonde beard and long, ratty hair he wears covered by a baseball cap that reads NICAP (which stands for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. A very real, privately funded organization that you can join.) Behind his round-framed glasses are kind eyes, but those eyes are swimming in helplessness, they’re searching. Is he looking for connection, for others like him, or simply a good listener? The tape begins:

“Hi. Max here. But of course. This is, uh, quite obviously, my story, since I’m telling it. Anyway... for those of you who know me already, this is going to be ancient history, but for the rest of you, this is... the story of my life. Actually, all I ever wanted in life was to be left alone. (A gentle chuckle escapes him.) Don’t we all? So it’s just my luck that I’d eventually become an alien abductee. Now, I’m never alone. Any minute, when I’m least expecting it...” he trails off as he motions to the sky.

Max Fenig (played by Scott Bellis)

We first meet Max in season one, four years before this tape would be played. He’s locked up in a chain-link holding cell with Special Agent Fox Mulder. They had both been out scouring the dark woods of Wisconsin for what they were convinced was a UFO crash site. Max is immediately chatty, eager to know if Mulder saw anything. Mulder is understandably not feeling talkative: He’s just been locked up mere miles from the place where he could find all of the answers he’s spent his life searching for. He can finally know whether or not what he saw with his own eyes as a child is true: that his sister was abducted by aliens. He is so close to vindication, to validation, to answers, that being locked up is downright maddening. But he isn’t the only Searcher being held in that cell.

Mulder doesn’t know Max, but our boy Max sure knows Mulder. He’s been following his career for years, both in its legitimate form at the FBI and in its more secretive areas. Apparently, Mulder writes the occasional article on UFO phenomena for certain trashy drugstore check-out aisle publications…

“I published that under a pseudonym,” Mulder says wearily.

“We know! M.F. Luder is an anagram for F Mulder. You really didn’t think that would fool us, did you?” Max replies, absolutely giddy, a child who has solved the riddle of his hero and is finally given the chance to present him with his answer.

Mulder’s face shifts. He’s dazed and surprised, “I didn’t think anyone was paying attention.”

“Somebody is always paying attention, Mr. Mulder.”

Max Fenig is an alien abductee who lives in a silver AirStream trailer, using his (very complicated and illegal) radio setup to track UFO phenomena throughout the continental United States. He follows police scanners, late-night call-in shows, any place where high strangeness and opaque law-enforcement protocol seem to collide. This is his epic search and it bonds him and Mulder over the course of his first episode appearance. After they’re both released from their makeshift lockup, Mulder finds Max convulsing on the floor of his trailer. He’s had epilepsy since childhood, he explains, “I’m not in any danger. I used to wake up in strange places with no memory of how I got there." After this, he goes to lie down. Mulder notices a scar behind Max’s ear, one he’s seen before in UFO abduction cases. He leaves Max to rest, but an unseen alien force enters the trailer and compels Max to walk to the docks. It’s there that Mulder actually sees it for himself, an undeniable alien abduction. Max hovers and twitches in a hazy blue light and then disappears.

Something people never really address in media is how completely draining having a seizure is. It’s this insight that makes Max such a heartbreaking figure to me, he is genuinely suffering. Having a seizure means every muscle in your body tenses and shakes uncontrollably. I usually bite my tongue and lose consciousness, and upon waking it feels like you were hit by several freight trains. If you’re lucky, you didn’t hit your head. If you’re very lucky, someone was there to make sure you didn’t choke on your vomit or pee your pants. And then once you’re fully awake, you are profoundly, incredibly disoriented. Your loved one or an EMT will ask you control questions to establish a baseline on how severe the seizure was. These are designed to be simple, instinctual questions, such as: What year is it? How old are you? What is your mom’s name? I have, over and over again, not known how old I was. And that uncertainty about something so basic, but also so important, can stick with you and make you start to question your own reality. At least, that’s what seizures do to me. It seems the same for Max. I myself have referred to them as “torture.”

Later in the episode, Scully finds antipsychotics among Max’s prescriptions. This is season 1 and that’s all our favorite red-headed skeptic needs to write him off as crazy, but Mulder feels so much for Max that he refuses. And I refuse too. I’ve heard of abduction phenomena being reported and debunked as weather balloons, military aircraft, swamp gas, experimental government technology, but I had never heard of the concept of alien abduction as a link to epilepsy until Max Fenig, until I had epilepsy myself. My seizures began once I was in my twenties, but it’s easy to imagine a child going through that same painful and confusing experience and painting it with a fantastical, extra-terrestrial brush. Even the flashing lights and alien figures align with my epileptic experience: the flashing lights of a UFO and the static silhouettes of the would-be aliens look strikingly similar to an ambulance pulling up to your house and the paramedics coming to your door.

The thing about epilepsy that I’ve found is that no matter how many seizures I’ve been through before, I am always stone-cold terrified of the next one. Later on, our next guest, will put alien abduction like this: “It’s like living with a gun to your head… never knowin’ when it’s gonna go off…”

Max seems to have, somewhat, made his peace with his life as an epileptic. He seems more put out by the alien abductions, if I’m honest. No, what Max craves isn’t necessarily simply for this all to just stop, he wants answers. And more than that, he wants somebody to believe him. He wants the truth and he wants to be seen as legitimate. This drive not only comes from his alien abductee experiences, but also from living his life with an invisible but often debilitating disability. The iconic X-Files tagline “I Want To Believe” could mean so many things for Max: he wants to believe his pain and suffering have a source, that it’s not completely random or all in his head (both literally and figuratively.) He wants to believe that one day he will find the proof he needs and he will be seen not as a mentally-ill disabled person, but as a person who has been taken and tortured, over and over again, by outside forces. Max doesn’t just want to believe, he wants to be believed.

I am here to make the assumption that Max does not actually have schizophrenia. I think he simply spoke his truth to a psychiatric professional and has been labeled and medicated ever since. This would explain why even though he takes his meds, he still experiences what anyone in the medical field would call “delusions of alien abduction.” Shouldn’t those so-called delusions end with the introduction of psychiatric drugs, if it were all in his head?

Max is not our first, but I would argue he is our most impactful introduction to the world of alien abductees. A few episodes later, we meet another of a very different kind.

Duane Barry (played by Steven Railsback)

“How does it happen, Duane? Driving in your car? Alone in bed at night? When do they come to you? You’re paralyzed, aren’t you? Unable to move. Sometimes, you can’t even breathe. You feel an electric shock go through your body...” Agent Fox Mulder says this, sweating with passion and desperation, while he’s tied to a chair during a hostage negotiation. He means every word of it, but Duane Barry (who exclusively refers to himself in the third person and it’s downright infectious) a former FBI agent and Vietnam veteran, has taken a handful of hostages at a travel agency (it is 1994, after all) and he is extremely insistent that he has somewhere important he needs to be, but he hasn’t been told where yet. But he makes one thing very clear from the jump, “They ain’t takin’ Duane Barry this time.”

The messy situation at the travel agency is a means to an end for Duane Barry, he already abducted his psychiatrist to give to the aliens in his place. He’s just waiting on the little green men in the sky to give him the location telepathically. You can see why a psychiatrist was a convenient choice for him: Duane has been institutionalized on and off for decades, mostly without his consent. It is revealed later that he took a bullet to the frontal lobe of his brain in the line of duty, effectively destroying his moral center, Phineas Gage-ing him into a psychopath.

Mulder’s questions perfectly align with the scene in which we are first introduced to Duane Barry. He is, in fact, alone in his bed as the room shakes violently. Suddenly we see a bright, nearly blinding light coming through the windows. The television turns to static, his dog barks wildly, and we see thin, shadowy figures outside the windows. Duane’s eyes open suddenly in a silent scream, his pupils are dilated to hell and back, the whites of his eyes revealed on all sides. Upon realizing that he’s being taken yet again, his mouth opens so wide in fear that you can see the fillings in his back teeth. They sparkle in tandem with his terror, with the beads of sweat that drip down his forehead, with the flashing lights outside his home. It’s a rockstar performance from Steve Railsback, but what I really want to know is this: How much did Chris Carter know about epilepsy? Duane Barry connects to the disorder in a metaphorical sense, but earlier we have a certified epileptic alien abductee in Max Fenig.

I ask… and I ask, and I ask, and I ask while shaking my little trembling fist at the sky because there is no listed contact email for creator of The X-Files, Chris Carter. I ask because he absolutely nailed the sensation of being in a coma, in a way that is honestly downright freaky to watch as someone who spent weeks comatose herself. Mulder’s comments during the hostage scene are eerily similar to something I wrote after my seizures first began, when I was trying to make sense of it all, and also trying to help those around me understand what it felt like to be inside of the body convulsing on the floor:

“Imagine that you’re trapped in your house. There’s an earthquake, then the lights go out. There are no doors and there are no windows. Everything you’ve ever owned ricochets off the walls, hitting you over and over. It hurts, but you can’t scream. Your throat is constricted. Your tongue is bleeding, you’ll spit out a chunk soon. Pictures start falling down off the walls but instead of shattering, they just disappear, until you’re not even sure that it’s your house anymore. All of the details are gone and the walls just keep shaking, shaking, shaking…”

Like I said: I’d like a word with Chris Carter.

The hostage situation ends abruptly with Duane Barry sustaining a gunshot wound to the chest, but this isn’t the last we see of him. In the hospital, the doctors find a metallic implant, right where he said it would be during his ranting and raving. They can’t identify it, so Scully takes it to the FBI lab. They do the fancy TV ultra-zoom in and see a barcode of sorts, as if someone were cataloging Duane Barry. On the way home, Scully stops to get some groceries and when the clerk at the checkout turns her back, she gets an idea. She runs that little barcode through the scanner.

To Scully’s shock, this basically breaks the freaking grocery store. The computer at the register goes absolutely haywire and she gets out of there as fast as she can. But it’s her having this tracking device that entwines her and Duane Barry’s fates. Later, he escapes from the hospital and abducts Scully from her apartment. She takes the place of his previous hostage. He is delivering her to the aliens, by any means necessary. Like I said, “They ain’t takin’ Duane Barry this time.”

After a long and frustrating search (which ultimately was solved by Agent Krycek remembering a roadside sign he saw one time…) Mulder finally catches up to Duane Barry, just as the blinding lights overhead zoom away, revealing that Duane is alone. He’s jubilant, he’s rejoicing, but Scully is gone. Duane Barry raises his arms in triumph and screams, “They can’t touch Duane Barry no more!” He is gleeful at his clever move being successful, as the gunshot wound in his chest bleeds through his dirty sweatshirt. Mulder flies into a rage, demanding to know what he did with Scully, but all Duane Barry can do is celebrate not being taken himself. Before Mulder can get any solid answers from him, Duane dies under mysterious circumstances (murdered!) while in FBI custody. He never even makes it off of the mountain he brought Scully to in the first place.

These two men, Max & Duane, complete and utter opposites in personality, in presence, in reactions to their circumstances, are both after the same thing: They want to be left alone. Not just physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. The strain of being an alien abductee, of never knowing when they’re coming for you, and being in such intense physical pain once you’re finally returned, and of not being believed… well, that could drive anybody crazy, whether it’s the threat of alien abduction or of abnormal electrical activity in the brain.

When we see Max Fenig again, it’s four years later. He has booked a flight under a pseudonym to bring Mulder evidence, actual proof of alien abductions. He’s more paranoid than ever and it turns out he’s right to be: he’s being followed by a mysterious G-Man who intends to take his precious proof and murder Max in the process to hide it. In a brilliant two-part episode (that I maintain would be a solid movie on its own) Max Fenig dies for what he has. He dies for the truth. In a chilling scene, not unlike Duane Barry’s abduction sequence, the aliens come for Max mid-flight. The passengers see bright lights outside of the plane, it hovers in place, suspended in the extraterrestrial tractor beam. Max is extracted by the aliens, along with the artifact he had with him, but the UFO is shot down by a fighter jet. Instead of being returned safely to his seat on the plane, Max falls and dies on impact with the rest of the passengers. Max’s end is proved by Mulder when the same thing happens to him: He found Max’s body in the wreckage, his own business card heartbreakingly still in Max’s pocket, but he also found what Max was carrying. He takes Max’s evidence onto another flight, where he is also followed by a government assassin, but this abduction was successful: The artifact was safely taken by the aliens, along with the murderous g-man. The plane lands without a hitch in Washington DC, aside from the standard missing nine minutes that come with UFO contact, but Mulder is never the same.

Max and Duane present us with so many questions. It’s their opposite natures that really make me step back and think. Duane’s anger, his rage, seem to be amplified by the fact that he was once on the other side of all of this. He was in the FBI. He knows how he sounds to these people, he knows the protocol. Duane Barry doesn’t need anyone to believe Duane Barry because he’s Duane fucking Barry! He knows more about the shadows than our sweet Max. He knows the government is involved, while Max can only suspect based on what he picks up on his radio. Duane Barry is so angry, so terrified, that he abducts an innocent woman to be taken by the aliens in his place. Duane Barry doesn’t care what happens next, as long as he isn’t getting taken. He’s a threatened animal, always cornered and defending himself to violent ends. He will do whatever it takes to make this stop, and he does. The years of abductions and institutionalizations have turned him into a man who operates solely on blind survival instinct. Max would never hurt an innocent person, and I imagine the details of his death would horrify him. He would never take an entire plane full of innocent bystanders with him.

They each represent a different, but oh so understandable, reaction to being disabled, or to not being believed. Duane is all anger and rage, while Max represents surrender and a certain level of acceptance. Early on, Max says calmly, “This is my story.” He takes ownership of his experiences. However unbelievable they may be, they’re his. Duane Barry’s attitude, his personality, his behavior all scream, “THIS IS NOT MY STORY.”

It’s true though, they both were genuine alien abductees. This is The X-Files, after all. But these two men and the neurological conditions they had, whatever the source, were genuinely suffering. Maybe the human mind and UFOs are the same metaphorical black boxes holding unknown information that cannot be confirmed or denied and that’s why we have become so thoroughly fixated and frustrated with both. We want answers and our best way of attaining them relies on high-tech but ultimately opaque images that only give us tiny fragments of what we really want to know. We are fumbling around in the dark with a million piece jigsaw puzzle, more than half of the pieces are missing and there is no picture on the box. As a culture, we are desperate for answers to the inner-workings of the brain and flying saucers. Unlocking the secrets of both would change our understanding not just of science, but of faith and the cosmos and our place in the universe.

As for me, I’m lucky to have access to medication that controls my seizures. The gun may not be to my head, but it’s still in the room. And I am too scared to check whether or not it is loaded.