train, and kept the character away from the center of the screen, to accentuate his "paranoid" mindset. This was deliberately contrasted with the concurrent scene featuring Scully, who is speaking to Mulder over a telephone. This was shot using a camera dolly and a "graphically balanced" mise-en-scène, intended to leave the character seeming as "balanced, confident, strong" as "the Rock of Gibraltar". Bowman, who felt that the finished episode "was really like a movie", has stated that his cut of the episode impressed series creator Chris Carter enough for Carter to offer Bowman the job of directing the series' film adaptation. Themes Jan Delasara, in her book '"PopLit, PopCult and The X-Files" argues that episodes such as "731" and "Nisei", or the earlier third-season episode "Paper Clip", show the public's trust in science "eroding". Delasara proposes that "arrogated" scientists who are "rework[ing] the fabric of life" are causing the public's faith in the scientific method to fade drastically, "a concern ... that is directly addressed by X-Files episodes". Moreover, she notes that almost all of the scientists portrayed in The X-Files are depicted with a "connection to ancient evil," with the lone exception being Agent Scully. In "731," and earlier in "Nisei," the scientists are former Japanese scientists who worked for Unit 731. In their attempts to create a successful human-alien hybrid, they become the archetypical scientists who "[go] too far," a serious factor that Delasara argues "'alienates [the public] further from science and its practitioners". Critical opinion has also noted that both parts of the story arc offer an alternative explanation for the events of the series so far, a "less romantic" outcome that paints the ongoing plot as an elaborate hoax to defer attention from the government's experiments, both military and medical. Reviewer Emily VanDerWerff feels that such an explanation would "speak more to the sadness at the core of the X-Files to have Mulder find his answers and be forced to accept they weren't what he was looking for", comparing such a realization to the hero of Don Quixote. This "hoax" plot device would later be revisited in both the fourth season finale "Gethsemane" and the fifth season's opening two-part episodes "Redux and Redux II", although to a much lesser degree of effectiveness. Reception Ratings "731" premiered on the Fox network on , and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on . The