The first thing The Post-Modern Prometheus does is announce that it isn't a normal episode. The color is gone. The image is black and white, and the story opens like a comic book. Written and directed by Chris Carter for the fifth season, it's an open homage to James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), and its title points even further back, to the subtitle of Mary Shelley's novel: The Modern Prometheus.
It's one of the show's great formal gambles, and it's worth understanding why the gamble pays off.
Why black and white
For an audience in 1997, black and white wasn't neutral. It meant old movies: late-night monster features, Universal horror, the kind of film people watched on a black-and-white set long after color television arrived. Draining the color from The X-Files drags it into that tradition.
It also changes how the show's usual tools behave. In color, darkness is moody. In black and white, it's graphic. Shadows become shapes, faces become planes of light, and the image takes on the hard contrast of Whale's era. Joel Ransom's photography leans into that, with deep blacks and bright, sculptural highlights, and it earned him an Emmy nomination.
The monster and the mob
Whale's Frankenstein is famous for making its creature sympathetic. Boris Karloff's monster is a confused, wounded figure, and the real menace is the village that hunts him with torches. Carter's episode keeps that moral structure and moves it to a small Indiana town.
The creature at the center of the story is a lonely, gentle figure created by a scientist's experiments and hidden from a town that would not accept him. He loves the music of Cher. The townspeople, meanwhile, are obsessed with getting on a daytime talk show. The episode suggests that the real monstrousness lies in a culture that turns pain into spectacle.
That's where the "post-modern" in the title earns its place. The episode isn't only borrowing from old horror films. It's aware that its characters live in a media world where everything, including monsters, is something to be watched.
Tone
The episode is funny, which is easy to miss when you describe it on paper. It's also sincere. That combination is hard to pull off, and it depends on the black and white. The old-movie look gives Carter permission to be openly sentimental in a way the show's usual realism wouldn't allow. It's a fairy tale, and it knows it.
The ending, which trades the torch-wielding mob for a pop song, is either the most joyful or the most baffling moment in the series, depending on who you ask. It may be both.
Form as meaning
The best formal experiments on The X-Files don't just change the look of an episode. They make the form part of the argument. The Post-Modern Prometheus uses the vocabulary of 1930s horror to tell a story about how audiences treat outsiders, and it asks the viewer to notice that they, too, are watching a monster for entertainment.
It's a reminder that the show's sense of film history was never just decoration. The creators knew where their genre came from, and they were willing to go back to the source when a story called for it.