When discussing the first season of The X-Files, or the show’s overall legacy, “Ice” deserves special praise. First aired 25 years ago on Nov. 5, 1993, the Season One is a bottle episode set on an remote research base in Alaska.
Borrowing liberally from John Carpenter’s The Thing, the eighth installment was the best of the series thus far, raising the bar for episodes to come.
The alien parasite story is the third by renowned X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong (after “Shadows” and “Squeeze”). More than previous episodes, “Ice” puts the agents’ trust in one another to the test. It aligns with the show’s overarching theme of paranoia but advances the Fox Mulder/Dana Scully dynamic, and places them in their most stressful context yet—while pushing personality differences to the extreme