It's the maw of the Monkey's Paw when a lazy dimwit cleans out an abandoned storage unit, getting three wishes from Jenn, a genie who only wanted a donkey and instead has gotten a lot of jackasses! When Mulder gets the chance to make wishes of his own he discovers... oh, YOU know! The ending is sort of a mild twist, though of course you could see it coming - the assumption being that no previous wish had affected the course of world history...
This is only an OK story, and wouldn't have been more than semi-comic filler in previous seasons. In THIS thriller-forsaken season is stands out like a beacon of quality! We have, of course, long passed the threshold of whether or not the X-Files happens in an alternative universe: magic happens here, get over it!
What really strikes ME about this Arabian-Nights-inspired subject matter is the degree to which non-Christian ideas have been overlooked in the X-Files. Muslim ideas about the nature of reality? How about Djinn as aliens? No, just some throwaway nonsense about magic in medieval France as we're dragged off in pursuit of cheap laughs and philosophical clichés.
This is only an OK story, and wouldn't have been more than semi-comic filler in previous seasons. In THIS thriller-forsaken season is stands out like a beacon of quality! We have, of course, long passed the threshold of whether or not the X-Files happens in an alternative universe: magic happens here, get over it!
What really strikes ME about this Arabian-Nights-inspired subject matter is the degree to which non-Christian ideas have been overlooked in the X-Files. Muslim ideas about the nature of reality? How about Djinn as aliens? No, just some throwaway nonsense about magic in medieval France as we're dragged off in pursuit of cheap laughs and philosophical clichés.