WHAT IS MAGNETITE?
Magnetite is a mineral, iron oxide, and a natural magnet. Its magnetic field is caused by a transfer of electrons between two ions in its composition.
Does it truly kill super soldiers? Clearly, it draws them and blows them apart on impact. However, there have been cases of delayed repair after major damage - Billy after Essence, Knowle in NIHT2. It's possible that electron activity interferes with repair, and that if the remains were removed from the affected area, they would repair normally.
This might explain why Jeffrey Spender was able to use it safely on William. It may have bound to whatever it was in William that made him "special", halting its activity without harming organic matter. (Be warned, we're well into pseudo science now, so don't expect this to hold up to detailed query. But it's passable science fiction).
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XF SOLDIERS
Soldiers don't have the best PR on The X-Files. There are decent ones, like Doggett, but most are portrayed as brutes or worse, often complicit in terrible crimes.
The idea of super soldiers created by the government was introduced in Season 1, in Deep Throat and Eve. Research dates back to the 1950s, when additional human chromosomes were used on the Adams and Eves, with some success and some really bad side-effects. It's interesting to note that Knowle and Shannon, according to Shannon, were also known as Adam and Eve.
There is room to argue that Knowle and Shannon were the next generation of super soldiers after the Eves, and the first to use alien DNA. (See NIHT2). This raises interesting questions, chief among them, who made them? Was it the Syndicate, or another interest who concealed them from the Syndicate?
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XINE 04x2003 (APRIL 2003): IMMORTAL BELOVED
OCT 4: FIXED SOME LINKS, ADDED NEW ARTWORK IN CREATIVES.
Welcome to Immortal Beloved, home of X Files late season immortals Knowle Rohrer (Adam Baldwin) and Shannon McMahon (Lucy Lawless). They're soldiers, bred and bound to the government who made them, predators driven by ambiguous ideology and duty. In this e-zine - the first in a series of character and actor tributes - we delve a little deeper into who and what these fascinating characters are, and the bigger picture of the supersoldier arc. Future zines will be available from Xine.
Deep Background
Knowle and Shannon are the two most visible human (or, if you prefer, humanoid) faces of the supersoldier arc. There are others, including Toothpick Man (Alan Dale) and Shadowman (Terry O'Quinn). However, Knowle and Shannon are the two from whom we can draw the most clarity about this thread of the mythology, as well as the only two for whom we have a useful connection or information about their origins.
8x08: Per Manum (transcript)
Knowle was introduced in 8x08 Per Manum. He appeared at that time as some kind of high-ranking official, perhaps positioned in the Pentagon, perhaps in the political sphere. He appeared in tailored clothing and a chauffered car. He was reminiscent of Mulder's informant Senator Matheson. Doggett gave no indication that this style of living was out of the ordinary. It was apparently part of Knowle's day-to-day life. At that point we didn't know how Doggett knew Knowle; only that he was influential and worked for the government. It appeared that Knowle, rather than Doggett, had reason to suspect he was being watched (perhaps a natural byproduct of his position). However, this may also have been an act for Doggett's benefit. Knowle promised Doggett information that Doggett wanted, but Doggett got the information elsewhere first.
Later in the episode, Knowle went to a military hospital to retrieve Scully, who was caught there with Mary Hendershot with people who wanted to obtain Mary's baby (apparently a failed experiment in alien reproduction or genetic manipulation). He had military field medics with him (our first hint that he was military rather than civilian). He and his team got Scully and Mary out, eluded their pursuers, and delivered Mary's baby. Scully grew hysterical and Knowle had her sedated. Scully believed she heard an alien baby's cry.
The question arises - whose side was Knowle on at this point? It looks, on the surface, that he was working with the aliens to switch Mary's baby. But this can't be taken at face value, because there is some doubt as to when he became a supersoldier.
There are a few possibilities. Knowle may have already been a supersoldier, working for the alien race. (If so, it's possible that John Doggett was assigned to the X Files specifically because it was predictable that John might come to Knowle for help). In that case, it was as Scully believed: Mary gave birth to an alien baby, and Knowle switched it while Scully was sedated.
It may also be that Knowle was still human at this point, and on Doggett's side. It is possible that he was identified as a result of his meeting with Doggett and turned between that meeting and the hospital. It is also possible that he was still human at the hospital, and that Mary indeed gave birth to a healthy baby, and Scully hallucinated because of her fears and the sedative. In that case, Knowle may have been identified as a leak as a result of this operation, and turned into a supersoldier afterwards. Finally, it is possible that Knowle was human and witnessed the birth of Mary's alien baby. In that scenario, he panicked, was then caught by their pursuers, and he and his team were either threatened into co-operation or transformed at that time.
In fairness, it is most likely that Knowle was already implicated (and probably a supersoldier) by the time of his scenes at the hospital. It is hard to accept that he could be on the spot with a support team at apparently very short notice if he were not already involved. There's room for the fic writer to take it a few ways, but on balance of probabilities, he was almost certainly a supersoldier by the time of the scenes at the hospital.
8x18: Three Words (transcript)
In Three Words, Knowle met with Doggett covertly (though it's unclear who arranged the meeting). Again, he appeared to be the one in danger of being watched, rather than Doggett. His manner was still congenial. He gave Doggett a password that eventually wound up in Mulder's possession and nearly resulted in both Mulder and Doggett being killed. Again, the situation is ambiguous. It may have been a genuine gift of information (if Knowle were not already transformed) - particularly if Knowle had continued digging after the indicident at the hospital. Or, Knowle might still have been human, but also setting Doggett up under duress (this would happen later to others, such as Kersh). In this scenario, he was transformed after being identified as Doggett's informant. Or, of course, it may be as it seems - Knowle was already transformed, and working wholeheartedly for the alien agenda.
After this incident, Doggett approached Knowle again and told him to stay away from him, believing that Knowle had set he and Mulder up. Doggett threatened to "put Knowle's name on all the wrong desks." Knowle didn't seem overly concerned by this. At this point, a closeup of the back of his neck revealed the ridges that indicate a supersoldier.
It's worth noting that after Doggett told Knowle to leave him alone, Knowle turned his back briefly on Doggett, potentially revealing the ridges. Possibly he no longer cared if Doggett knew, since he no longer had Doggett's confidence. Possibly it just didn't matter, because Doggett - who didn't then have our knowledge of what they meant - might have thought it a deformity or symptom of disease. Or possibly the film crew simply goofed.
Existence (8x21) (transcript)
This time, Knowle approached a wary Doggett. Scully was on the run, about to deliver, after being chased by supersoldier Billy Miles. Knowle conceded that Billy was a supersoldier. He claimed that Billy was a prototype, and that he was after Scully's baby, the first organic version of the prototype. He denied alien involvement. He claimed to want to stop Billy. Doggett believed Knowle was heading towards asking where Scully was, but it's worth noting that Knowle never asked anything of the sort.
Later, we saw Krycek talking to Knowle, and immediately afterwards, Krycek attempted - with clear regret - to kill Mulder. He claimed that the reason Mulder had to die was that Mulder knew that the aliens had infiltrated the FBI. Later, when Doggett saw Knowle and Agent Crane apparently conspiring with someone in AD Kersh's office, Knowle and Crane chased Doggett and Skinner, abandoning all pretense, and in Crane's case, revealed himself as a supersoldier. Knowle was "killed" in the subsequent car chase.
What exactly was happening in this episode? What were Knowle and Crane really trying to do? The idea that anyone had to be killed because they knew about infiltration doesn't hold water. For one thing, Knowle apparently has very amplified hearing (NIHT II) and would have known that Mulder and Doggett could see him and Krycek. Therefore, he deliberately led Doggett away so that Doggett saw what he saw. For another, for Krycek to have this as his motive for killing Mulder, he would have to be on the aliens' side, and this conflicts with everything up to Essence.
What is possible is that Krycek had very recently been transformed, however - perhaps even in the car with Knowle. We don't really know what processes can be employed to transform a person. Lingering personal feelings in the period immediately after transformation are not without precedent - Billy Miles seemed genuinely Billy-ish in DeadAlive - so Krycek's conflict could have been quite real. This would also explain how Krycek apparently knew what Mulder had heard on the telephone, despite being some distance away.
Irrespective of why Krycek was suddenly serving the alien agenda, the infiltration business doesn't hold water. Lots of people knew the FBI had been infiltrated, Kersh among them, and had been threatened into silence. Why would Mulder and Doggett be any different? It appears that the whole infiltration excuse was exactly that - an excuse. What made Mulder and Doggett different was that they knew where Scully was (and Mulder only became Krycek's target after he got Scully's location from Doggett).
This begs the question: what was the purpose in keeping Doggett and Mulder away from Scully? What would have changed if Mulder and Doggett got to Scully before she gave birth? Billy and his cohorts witnessed the birth and then went away without attempting to harm Mulder on his approach, so their objective seems to have been to ensure the baby was born without Mulder and Doggett's interference.
One possibility is that William was vulnerable before birth, but invulnerable afterwards. (This also is implied in Krycek's suggestion that William should be killed in utero). Possibly separation from the mother, the act of breathing, or some other birth event was necessary to activate whatever existed within him. In that case, the alien race might fear that someone might heed Krycek's earlier warnings and kill the baby before birth. This is also implied in the supersoldier's words, that the baby would be born. This explains why Crane seemed to genuinely want Scully and Reyes to get out in Essence, why no-one was interested in killing anyone immediately after William was born, and why William survived in Providence. Mulder continued to be a target primarily because he was the one most likely to work it out - and, of course, because his performer left the show.
An alternative possibility is that there are rival groups of aliens. We've heard reference to this before, in Colony, Patient X, and others. It's worth noting that by and large, Knowle and Crane seemed to be working against Billy. Knowle professed to want to stop Billy, Crane assisted in halting Billy in Essence, and Billy tore apart the work at Zeus Genetics, part of the program Knowle seemed to be involved with in Per Manum. It isn't clear what interests might lie behind such a rivalry. Possibly purity of blood remains an issue among the alien race - there's room for argument that Knowle was born a supersoldier (see NIHT below), while Billy was originally human.
9x01/9x02: Nothing Important Happened Today I+II (transcripts 1 2)
In this episode, Shannon McMahon was introduced. We met her as a sultry woman, dressed provocatively, luring a man to his death. The man was a whistleblower on a government project to introduce mutation-causing agents into the water supply. She killed him by pulling him into the water and keeping him there, revealing a comfort with water and an ability to survive without breathing there.
We next saw Shannon in a photo of Doggett's unit from his Marine days. She, Knowle, and John appeared together, along with some of their fellow soldiers. This was our first indication of exactly how John knew either of them, although it had been said previously that John and Knowle went back "many years". John made reference to Knowle going onto something classified after coming "back Stateside" (presumably from Beirut).
We saw Shannon kill another whistleblower later in the episode. This time, she was naked after another trip through water. What's interesting about these two instances is that she displayed a certain set of contradictions - on one hand, she had a comfort zone with her body. There was no sense of discomfort with allowing it to be seen. On the other hand, there was a certain hostility and disgust in how she looked at both men before killing them. There was definite ill-feeling there, in a way not usual among supersoldier killings. This was perhaps the first crack in the inscrutable supersoldier veneer. My personal opinion is that Shannon had a lot of personal conflicts about her sexualty. These may pre-date her transformation, or they may be a result of being a supersoldier at the disposal of the government who made her. She seemed to consciously dress for utility at other times.
Eventually, Shannon pulled Doggett into water, apparently to save him from being discovered investigating the case against his orders, and kept him alive by giving him her air. She brought him back to his home, and there told him that she and Knowle had been recruited out of Bravo company together into a project to create a supersoldier - "the project Knowle told you about." They were the first prototypes in a program that was now in its seventh generation. It had, she said, resulted in the first naturally-conceived super soldier from a mutated ova (hinting at William). She did not mention alien genetics. She also revealed that, since they could not be killed, Knowle was necessarily alive. She claimed that she killed the men in order to give Doggett a reason to expose the plans to extend the project by introducing a mutating agent to the water supply. She did not tell Doggett the men in fact intended to expose the project themselves - Reyes would learn this later. The one statement that seemed completely sincere was Shannon's declaration that the only difference between she and Knowle was that she hated what she was (and Knowle, it was implied, did not).
At the same time as all this, Knowle was in place on a ship that served as a base of operations for this work. He infiltrated the ship at the same time as Shannon gave her account to Doggett. Doggett, Scully, and Reyes went about investigating. Doggett followed Shannon's leads, but Reyes, suspicious, looked into Shannon's background and discovered that she worked for the Department of Justice, and had been in contact with both whistleblowers. She was using Doggett, it seemed, to track down a third whistleblower, who was on the ship.
Scully, Doggett, and Reyes went to the ship. Meanwhile, Knowle identified and killed the third whistleblower. He then killed the rest of those involved in the work and set the ship to blow up. He found Doggett in the vicinity and tried to kill him. Interestingly, this scene, like Shannon's scenes with the men she killed, looked personal - the method of (attempted) killing was inefficient and brutal. It raises questions about whether Knowle was carrying any old resentments towards Doggett.
Whatever the case, Shannon saved John by decapitating Knowle, but Knowle managed to take her into the water with him, where they both recovered - Shannon awoke onscreen, and Knowle apparently regenerated after fadeout.
What was happening in this episode? Clearly, Shannon was lying to John. We know from multiple sources that the mutations are of alien origin, and she withheld that information. Shannon knew what Knowle had told John, and their stories supported each other despite being patently false. Knowle and Shannon's actions both served the same ends - the death of the informants and the destruction of the work and/or the proof. It is almost certain that Knowle and Shannon were working together, and that their only area of disagreement was that of involving and/or killing John.
This raises the question of a love triangle. At this point, the XF powers-that-be were talking a lot about love dynamics on the show, including the Scully - Doggett - Reyes - Follmer quadrangle. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that it was intended for a similar situation to exist in the supersoldier arc - for Knowle to want Shannon and for Shannon to want Doggett. There are fanfic possibilities here, some of which are already being explored.
Above and beyond romance, another question is, which side were Knowle and Shannon on? Were they attempting to stop the introduction of the mutation to the water supply? Or merely to stop its exposure, and the end of the work was collateral damage? If they did want to stop the work, why? Were they opposed to it on humane grounds? Purist grounds? Lack of confidence in the implementation? Self-protection? Were their interests the same, or merely in alliance?
Perhaps the biggest question is whether Shannon told the truth about when and how she and Knowle were made into supersoldiers. Her story doesn't hold water. If she and Knowle were transformed in the mid-1980s, they would have been, in effect, the first successful alien-human hybrids (not Cassandra Spender, as we were told in One Son). What is, however, very possible is that either she and Knowle were born supersoldiers in the 1960s, following on from the Litchfield project, or they had both been transformed quite recently along with the other recent victims.
In the born-supersoldiers scenario, early transformation is plausible because mutating an existing person is more complex and less predictable than directing the course of a new embryo. Mutating existing people would also be more desirable, because then one could take over people already in positions of power, rather than waiting for one's creations to grow up and get into those positions in the usual course of things. So the progression was probably first to create a prototype from scratch, and then to find ways of introducing the mutation to existing people in order to get into positions of political, military, and civic power, and finally to human ova so that their species could continue to populate the planet by stealth. This might also explain why Knowle and Shannon exhibit a certain (albeit limited) range of emotion and experience - contrast this with Billy Miles, who, after his initial moments, became almost zombie-like. Other supersoldiers kept their intellect and memory, but appeared not to retain any real emotion, and there's nothing to indicate that they continued to have human or human-like attachments. Something essential of the person seems to be lost upon or shortly after transformation. Whereas if Knowle and Shannon were supersoldiers from infancy, they probably have their whole experiential base to draw on. (To play devil's advocate, it is also possible that the supersoldiers retain their experiential base until the first time they lose their head - losing memory with it - and that they then become automatons. Knowle was less human in NIHT II, having been in a car wreck in Existence).
The other scenario is that Knowle was transformed late (as was Shannon) sometime in Season 8, when the replicants began to appear. In this scenario, Knowle may have transformed Shannon (particularly if there had been an attraction between Shannon and John in Beirut), or Shannon may have been the one to lure and transform Knowle. Or they may have been working together and transformed together, or been quite separate.
If in fact Shannon was telling the truth, that raises the question - why would Knowle and Shannon have consented to the tests that resulted in their transformation? She said they were recruited - were they seriously ill, and agreed because they had nothing to lose? Were they zealous idealists, to the point of insanity? Were they misled about the possible consequences?
One minor point that leans towards the born-supersoldiers theory is Shannon's name (or rather her initials) and her colouring. It's quite possible that the human element of the embryo that made her was that of Samantha Mulder, and that she has chosen to use Samantha's initials as a point of personal identity. That may have been on the agenda when the character was first written. She was probably not intended to be the original Samantha. It is, however, possible that she was a genetic clone or descendant of Samantha's and might have taken a protective role over William as a consequence - witness her rather odd visit to Scully's home in NIHT I. Now, this theory is not airtight - for one thing, Shannon must have been born in early 1966 at the very latest to be in Beirut in 1983, so she pre-dates the 1972 deal. (It is possible her development was accelerated as in Erlenmyer Flask, but Herrenvolk suggests that the Samantha clones were not accelerated). However, there are other ways (and other reasons) that Samantha's DNA might have been retrieved earlier. It's worth noting that Knowle resembles the boys we saw on the work farms in Herrenvolk, as well. It would be overstating it to say that this is the way it was to have played out, but there are definitely some promising threads there for the fanfic writer with a mythology interest. Some of these threads have been pursued in fanfic already, but there are a lot of avenues still to be explored.
9x19: The Truth (transcript)
Shannon was to be a recurring character, but actress Lucy Lawless - who has a history of miscarriage - became pregnant shortly after the episode was shot. (She had a traumatic pregnancy but delivered a healthy son in May 2002). Shortly after that, Adam Baldwin won the role of Jayne Cobb in Joss Whedon's popular, ill-fated series Firefly, and at the same time, the decision was made to end The X-Files. Their arc, and the supersoldier arc as a whole, ground to a halt.
In The Truth, Knowle served primarily as a catalyst to drive the desired fates for Mulder, Scully, Doggett, Reyes, and CSM. Little attention was paid to him as a character in his own right - a necessary evil, in the circumstances. We learned little more than we already knew - just his military rank, and the fact that he had been working in the relative secrecy of Mount Weather since he went into hiding after NIHT II. It seemed that he did not know of the dangers posed by magnetite (or at the very least, he was unaware that it was present in the pueblo), and he apparently met his demise.
Is Knowle really dead? That's the six million dollar question. In the section on magnetite (a little way up the screen on the left) you'll see that this is not as clear-cut as it seemed onscreen. It is, in fact, very likely that Knowle could recover if his remains were to be extracted and removed from the magnetite.
And what of Shannon? She's out there somewhere too. Are they truly immortal? Will they never die? Or will they expire naturally after a certain age? It seems difficult to believe that any government - human or otherwise - would intentionally make something so indestructible as to be unstoppable in the event that it went bad. Is magnetite the safeguard? Would a troublemaking supersoldier be subjected to magnetite and the remains locked away to avoid extraction and recovery? Do they have any consciousness when and if that happens? Are there any after-effects? In the world of the X Files, even after the credits fade, the questions keep on coming. Fortunately, that's how we like it.
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