Dod Kalm

Season 2, Episode 19, Aired
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Episode Summary

When half the crew of a Navy ship abandon their boat in a life raft and are rescued 18 hours later looking about 60 years older than they should be, Mulder suggests that the ship is caught in a time field which is speeding up their aging.moreless
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Fan Episode Reviews (12)

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  • Moulder and Scully travel to Norway to investigate a ship with rapidly ageing sailors.

    4.2
    "Poor"
    By Crimson_Salmon, Jun 01, 2011 Report Abuse
    This episode was hilarious. The feeble attempts at speaking my language (Norwegian) had me roaring with laughter. Admittedly they had som lines which were close to the real deal, but mostly the actors sounded like a drunk russian trying to speak a hybrid between Norwegian and Danish. And the Norse apocalypse (Ragnarok) is quite violent, with a great war in which most of the gods die. I mean, get your facts straight.
    As for the episode itself, the parts i could catch between bouts of laughter, I've seen worse. But I've seen a lot better too. The upsides were the Norwegian tavern with the large Norwegian flag and the last scene inside the boat, with the actors showing some real emotion. The downsides were inbetween.
    Oh, and Henry _Trondheim_? I live in Trondheim for crying out loud! It's the third largest city in Norway, and no one has it as a surname. It would be like someone being called Henry New York.moreless

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  • A rehash of Ice, Firewalker and Darkness Falls?

    8.0
    "Great"
    By JaCkKbAuEr2424, Dec 02, 2010 Report Abuse
    Reading some of the other reviews, I do agree that this is nothing more than a re-hash of the aforementioned three episodes. However, one can't help but be intrigued by the premise, the fact that not only are they trapped on this boat but they're aging at an accelerated rate. Of course, one would be dumb to assume that Mulder and Scully would actually be in danger of dying (they are the main characters, after all, which makes all of this anti-climatic). However, the way they arrive at the point makes everything much better, and there were some truly good scenes here between Mulder and Scully involving death and science.

    I thought it was pretty lame the way the episode ended though. We're given this huge build-up to the point where Mulder and Scully appear as if they're going to die, and with just three minutes left in the episode, they're saved, with nothing resolved and just a few passing lines to explain what happened to the boat. This is also the hundredth time that an episode has ended with one of the two detectives, or even both, in the hospital, waking up after something's happened. It's getting a bit predictable.

    However, for an idea or a concept that the show has done many times now, this was a pretty decent episode of the show.moreless

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    0 0

  • Yawn!

    2.2
    "Terrible"
    By RJNeb2, Jun 06, 2010 Report Abuse
    And so to another of those X Files where the agents find themselves trapped in an isolated situation, hemmed in by an encroaching threat of danger. However, for every "Ice", there's a "Firewalker" or "Darkness Falls" to follow. And in this case, "Dod Kalm" turns out to be an episode as listless as the ship upon which the 2 agents find themselves trapped. It does however open with a suitably creepy teaser as the fleeing members of a beleaguered ship are all found prematurely aged. Consequently Mulder summons Scully to a naval hospital, gives her NO information whatsoever about the case and then gets her to investigate where he can't. To her credit, and our continuing surprise, Scully agrees to this kind of mistreatment without much in the way of complaining, and also holds her own in the process against a hostile doctor. Equally annoying, when Mulder starts expounding his theories about the Philadelphia Experiment, Scully comes across as being extremely thick and blankly waits for him to fill her in with all the details of his spurious case theory. And then the episode plummets when the agents travel to Norway. One small consolation is that they do encounter a gifted actor in the form of John Savage who manages to bring an interesting characterisation to his limited Trondheim. And from here on though, it's mainly lots of scurrying along darkened corridors, with the added bonus of seeing our two actors buried under mountains of not entirely convincing make-up. However, as a plot device, the rapid aging of Mulder and Scully just doesn't work because we know that both of these actors will be reporting for their next episode in normal fettle, not as some geriatric version of each other. (Besides, they don't look that good in old form!)

    But as the ship rather wearisomely starts to come apart, so too does the plot. Holes start becoming apparent and questions demand to be asked. Why did the renegade pirate Olaffsson kill Trondheim's mate? For what reason? When exactly did someone call the navy to come and rescue the survivors on the stranded ship? How the hell did they find it? And what exactly is the point of Scully's Norwegian wolf story? Surely that would be the last thing someone scouring a medical journal trying to ascertain the medical condition of the ship's survivors would need to know? Either way, while the agents may have been rescued in the nick of time, the same cannot be said about the episode itself. With its seemingly disinterested contributions from all involved, "Dod Kalm" may translate into "dead calm" but it only unfortunately fulfils the first part of its title. 2/10moreless

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    0 1

  • Mulder and Scully go on a ship

    8.5
    "Great"
    By OnePerCentClub, Sep 07, 2009 Report Abuse
    Mulder never stops and he drags Scully with him, although he doesn't make her do it this time.

    The plot of this episode was kind of fascinating, although Scully's theory about the ocean being a giant battery sounds kind of far-fetched. I like how Scully is looking out for Mulder all the time. From his dehydration to seeing how his health was deteriorating once again she has to find a way to solve this case on her own. A sad moment was to see that jar of liquid fall and break after they were debating on who was going to have it.

    And I think this is one of the first times Scully says something about her abduction. It was good since she sometimes was reluctant to talk about it.

    Why the Captain's nails were long and they acted senile was never explained. They were aging physically on the outside, but their brains and their neurological systems were supposed to be all right unless the water contained something that affected that too.moreless

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  • Mulder and Scully grow old together.

    9.2
    "Superb"
    By ilovemulder, Dec 30, 2007 Report Abuse
    I was absolutely riveted by this episode. This show is always a bit more suspenseful when the main plot has Mulder and Scully in danger rather than in pursuit. It's not as interesting intellectually that way, but it's gripping. I also love that sometimes Mulder and Scully get themselves in so deep that they have to be rescued; it is an interesting twist on "Trust no one" and on the fact that everyone out there seems to be involved in conspiracies, because even if that's true, certain parts of the systems of the world still save lives and do good, just like Mulder and Scully themselves. However it is satisfying that each time they are saved, the rescue effort is only completely successful because of something they did, like Scully note-taking in this episode. Finally, I was happy that they avoided cliche at the end by saying the ship sank, rather than that the government blew it up or something. I also love that we didn't find out what the government was really up to up there: if you play with fire as often as Mulder and Scully do, you have to get burned sometimes; you can't perform the trick perfectly every time. Also, I find it infinitely amusing that Mulder and Scully got to grow old together after knowing each other for just a few years. Haha.moreless

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Trivia, Notes, Quotes and Allusions

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  • Trivia

    ADD TRIVIA
    • The last US Navy Destroyer Escort, the USS McMorris (DE-1036), was commissioned in 1960 and sold to Indonesia in 1974 hence the USS Ardent could never have been a DE.
    • Mulder's urine sample is a healthy light and clear yellow. Due to his dehydration it should actually be more of a darker brown.
    • Mulder mentions that Scully's journal is almost out of pages, but she keeps writing in it for at least 14 more hours (the time shown in the onscreen caption later) without seeming to use any more pages.

  • Notes

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    • According to an interview with David Duchovny, he and Gillian Anderson could not stop laughing during the scene where Trondheim yells at the whaling pirate. "He kept yelling B'LEAVER! and we couldn't keep a straight face."
    • 'Død Kalm' is an intended foreign-sounding version of "Dead Calm". It is not Norwegian, allthough 'ø' is a letter used in their language. A better Norwegian of 'Dead Calm' is "Dødsstille"

  • Quotes

    ADD QUOTES
    • Scully: Something very strange is going on here, Mulder. Mulder: Did they let you in to see Lieutenant Harper? Scully: Yeah I saw somebody, but whether it was actually the Lieutenant... Mulder: What do you mean? Scully: He looked about 90 years old. Off by about half a century. You don't seem too surprised.
    • Mulder: Scully, what do you know about the Philadelphia Experiment? Scully: It was a programme during World War II, to render battleships invisible to radar. Mulder: On July 8, 1944, the USS Eldridge did more than just hide from radar screens. It vanished from the Philadelphia Navy Yard... Only to reappear minutes later, hundred of miles away in Norfolk, Virgina.
    • Scully: I found a children's book of Norse legends. From what I can tell, the pictures show the end of the world - not in a sudden firestorm of damnation as the Bible teaches us, but in a slow covering blanket of snow. First the moon and the stars will be lost in a dense white fog, then the rivers and the lakes and the sea will freeze over. And finally a wolf named Skoll will open his jaws and eat the sun, sending the world into an everlasting night. I think I hear the wolf at the door.

  • Allusions

    ADD ALLUSIONS
    • Mulder: I think I just lapped George Burns. George Burns was a comedian who died in 1996 at the age of 100. When this episode first aired, he was 99.

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