Dod Kalm is one of the first episodes in The X-Files where the horror stems from the flipside of network acceleration – analog obsolescence. The setup is both historic and cosmic – a continuation of the Philadelphia Project in which the US government is using alien technology to cloak naval vessels. However, the narrative itself is dramatically confined – a ship that is situated in a “time pocket,” a localised site of accelerated time that has cropped up north of Norway.

When Mulder and Scully investigate this ship they encounter a premature ageing effect in which “time got lost.” Despite being launched in 1991, only four years earlier, the ship has rusted over entirely, and all the crew have aged to death, with the exception of the captain. The time pocket has thus revealed the obsolescence of the known human universe, from infrastructure to bodies. Moreover, once Mulder and Scully find themselves trapped in this temporal “dead calm” they witness their own bodies becoming obsolescent in accelerated time. That gives the episode a distinctive visual palette, full of stippled and rippled surfaces, from the mass oxidisation that has taken over the ship’s hull to Mulder and Scully’s increasingly grotesque prosthetics.

All of that makes “Dod Kalm” a striking example of what I think of as 90s dankness – a mode in which digital technology is figured as a new liquidity that eats away at the old physical world. Here the interface between the hull of the ship and the strange liquid temporality beyond turns it into a topology of the dank 90s (and made me wonder whether the proliferation of ghost ships in 90s horror, from Ghost Ship to Deep Rising, was part of this same moment). As so often occurs in The X-Files, the toilet becomes a point of uncanny connectivity once the agents learn that the only substance free from the premature ageing event is flowing through the sewage system of the ship. 

On the face of it that might sound like a chamber drama along the lines of “Ice” or “Firewalker.” But any sense of spatial confinement is offset by the eerie feeling of drifting through time. Combined with the dim tones and minimal texture of the ship, “Dod Kalm” is more existential than almost any X-Files episode to date (we may as well be in outer space) and ends on an appropriately sombre and elegiac note: a drastically aged Scully recalling a Norse vision of the end of the world (a soft blanket of snow falling while a wolf eats the moon) as she and Mulder sink into oblivion, before we cut to the North Sea wind blowing through the pages of the journal where she recorded her last thoughts. The recovery of the two agents and the reversal of their accelerated ageing is almost an afterthought, crammed into a cursory closing minute that does nothing to offset this bleak Nordic vision of our eventual and inevitable obsolescence in the face of the digital future.