Reviews

Despite being so highly rated I was surprised this episode was such a letdown. Everything was so silly and anticlimactic. Just very low quality writing.

Nothing much actually happens except they cut the air off to Liz and Ressler and Tom have to fight off 30 guys inside a cabin. The air thing was maybe the sillier of the two, their base is filled with FBI agents and personnel, but when they mess with the air supply they can't send techs or more SWAT guys to check into it? And I mean, the CIA shows up, it's not a CIA installation, why not just claim you're hazy on the law and you'll have to wait until a court resolves the situation and then have the dozen guys with machine guns show them out? It all feels so silly and small, they only have enough set for Aram to stand in front of the cage and yell at Liz to keep breathing. Such a sad disappointment.

Then there was the cabin fight. They could have just thrown hand grenades in there and blown them all up and be done. But instead they ran in one by one, ninja style, and they got shot. Or something. And then they didn't kill Solomon, because Tom and Cooper were like clutching their pearls over it. The least sensical thing in an nonsensical episode. Literally, if your life depended on it, you could not explain what happened in that scene where Ressler doesn't kill Solomon. You'd die. It's literally impossible.

And then the episode ends, that's all that happens.

A random gang of kidnapping yokels grabs Reddington from a gas station, in the most unnecessary discursion plot ever conceived of by man. This show is always bat---- insane, but I really where did they come up with this bizarre idea. Probably that's what everyone in Hollywood believes the middle of the country is like.

And then Cooper and Tom are on the dumbest action plot where assassins are after them as they try to keep a Russian assassin alive. It's just terrible.

And then there's a shadow government who apparently were revealed but nobody cared, and they murder government officials and FBI agents and nobody cares either, or notices. It's all quite pointless.

And then Liz is arrested. And the shadow government moves to eliminate her, because they can still operate in the open despite being revealed. Because nothing matters.

It's weird how the Director keeps setting up ambushes for Liz that the task force finds out about, but even though the task force talks to her and Red on the phone every 30 minutes, they can in no way ever tip them off about the trap.

This episode is especially bizarre, a group of Middle Eastern terrorists kidnap technical contractors, and hold them hostage near DC, so that the Feds would team up with Mossad to raid their compound because of intentionally left behind clues as to where it was, where they would also discover a group of unaccounted for other hostages, who the FBI would then agree to transport all of to a Mossad safe house, where they would be questioned but otherwise assumed to be harmless and left unguarded, and no American security would otherwise be provided, so that one of the unaccounted for hostages could explode a bomb that allowed the other unaccounted for hostages to violently take over the compound because they were actually all terrorists, and execute the original American hostages, and begin executing Mossad hostages in order to gain access to a safe with a hard copy of the Mossad agents hunting Hasaan.

That plan had a lot of assumptions in it that all went right. For no real reason. It's definitely illogical to send the American hostages to be processed at a Mossad safe house, probably against protocols, maybe even illegal, and certainly fireable as an offense. And then it is also amazing that these Mossad agents didn't follow any normal protocols and assume these unaccounted for hostages were potentially dangerous and keep them in cells at least. Like I said, most of the assumptions in this plan are far less than 50/50 in likelihood.

Also why do we have the pretend Tom and Ressler are in the same league as hand-to-hand combatants? Tom is routinely shown Jason Bourneing his way around the world, defeating groups of armed men with his bare hands, and Ressler is like a guy with FBI self-defense training. I'm not saying Tom's ability as a super spy makes sense, but it's already established. Ressler isn't able to eliminate a half dozen armed men using only his hands, so it's not clear why Tom couldn't just toss him around. Like everything else on this show, the writers put their thumbs on the scale for everything, and this episode was especially lame for it.

They built up the Fulcrum as this big thing that would change the world and reveal the crimes of those in power. But not only have we not seen a single person actually taken down by its release, but it's so un-momentous that the Director of the CIA is allowed to keep his job after being implicated in it. I know this isn't the real world, but Presidents do not risk their necks for bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies, they are fungible assets there to do their jobs and not cause headaches. He's not even suspended with pay!

It kind of makes the whole thing seem pointless. Why was anybody worried about the Fulcrum, Reddington, or Lizzie if it all amounts to a nothing burger, non-scandal that harms no one? A gigantic swing and a miss. They should have made its release be momentous. Instead, who cares? The only way I've ever seen anyone take anyone else down in this world is barge in the door with guns out and then murder them. Raymond could have just shot the Director when he was in his house last season. What difference would it have made? He wouldn't be in any more or less danger as a result of it.

It's a problem with this show, you can see the rails. It's an exciting spy adventure every week, but every twist and turn leads to a very obvious, foregone conclusion. Raymond releases the Fulcrum and the world yawns. Reddington gets captured but Dembe shows up (apparently still nursing a gunshot wound he received I don't even know how long ago) and guns down a dozen guys instantly. New bad guy Solomon is there but he doesn't get gunned down because he runs for the door 20 yards away while everybody else just has to stand there getting shot (which made me laugh). Also did Paul Reubens pretend to be tortured with Dembe, only to murder the guards and escape with Dembe, all so Dembe could tell him the secret way to contact Reddington, and then shoot him? A rogue assassin working freelance for Bitcoins found Lizzie no problem, why did the Cabal have to go to so much effort to find Reddington (in exactly the same spot)?

Tom befriending a billionaire's son so he could murder a mobster to then apparently become a mobster was fun. However it works, they didn't explain it yet.

I know the writers' room for The Blacklist didn't contain any biologists, but I do kind of wonder if that played into how ignorant they make every character. Liz is like a Ph. D. I think, and it takes her how long to realize that the plot was to infect her with the virus so in the course of saving the Senator she'd infect him? Like, seriously a 5 year-old would have been yelling at the screen for the first half of this episode, it's that simple a mystery.

Liz actually demands her blood sample's chain of evidence, like she's thinking she isn't the one infected, or that her being infected shows her guilt somehow. She's literally dumb. It's a virus spread by touch and the Cabal can do anything, in a world where you brush pass somebody and can steal their wallet, badge, weapon, literally anybody swipes hands on the street and she's infected. And she's too dumb to comprehend it... and they try to make a big deal of the Union Station event! And he uses some dry ice inhaler thing to shove up her nose and give her the virus. She just killed somebody by touching them!

And then when they confront Connolly, he's all like "I am the Senate!" and says no government organization will look into their evidence, nor will any judge consider it, but of course it could just be on NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox that night. What would they do then? And of course any of them could have recorded Connolly or the CIA Director for that matter because they discuss their crimes constantly.

It was all quite funny, typical for this show, just especially silly because they had so much "plot" to get through. Also Ressler is like, "I'll hunt you down," but he's just an agent, he wouldn't get to decide to what cases he gets to do, or the right to repurpose the task force, and they never show he gets permission for that, he just decides. Which also made me laugh.

I love October, it's my favorite month, and Halloween is my favorite holiday. I like to do special things all month just to savor it, and towards the top of that list is watching scary movies and TV shows. And while horror has plenty of existing media to choose from, it does get a little dull JUST rewatching the classics or trying to find a diamond in the schlock with lesser pieces of work. So it's exciting to get something brand new and watchable at Halloween every year. Mike Flanagan has been a real godsend in this regard, and I've really enjoyed his series on Netflix. They make Netflix worth subscribing to, at least for October, and I hope he keeps at it every year.

So with that said, The Fall of the House of Usher was enjoyable, but not great. It's a love letter to Poe, taking his works and reinterpreting them into one cohesive storyline about a pair of twins who sell the lives of their bloodline to the Devil (a devil, at least). It's a story about an unavoidable conclusion, and lets us know this up front. Six Usher children are dead, and we're going to find out how.

I'll start with the main problem of the show, there's too many children to kill off. I can imagine it in my head, Mike Flanagan is dreaming up this series and he thinks to himself, this year for my horror show I'll do Succession and I'll convert one of Poe's horror stories for each episode! It'll be amazing! But that's not really how it worked out.

Poe's horror stories are weird and self-contained. When they tried to bring them into a storyline they already had planned, everything about them that was "literary" was lost, and they just became ways to kill another character through callbacks to a story the TV audience never read. What does Prospero Usher's story and Prince Prospero's story have in common? There's a big party and a scary guest in a deathly mask. The most surface level elements, props basically. Prospero Usher didn't do anything to deserve to die, he was just a rich stupid kid, and through the wackiest series of misunderstandings possible sprayed himself and all his guests with acid. They did include a little bit about filming it all and using it as blackmail to give him a heel turn, but still. It's not the same story, it's similar set design and costuming.

And it continues on like this. An Usher child gets focused on and then they die horribly. The formulaic nature of it gets somewhat boring at times. And it's made worse because the story doesn't really care about the Usher child about to die, we don't get to know them. We don't get to care about them. We actually have time to do so, but we don't. Instead we keep getting this muddled thing the writers do where these children are doomed to die because of a supernatural deal sealed long ago, but also they did something wicked and get their comeuppance. Or sometimes they don't really, they just have problems, and then get a comeuppance anyway. I think it would have been better to pick a side, they gotta die because they gotta die, or they actually live or die based on their own vices and virtues. Because as it is, it doesn't work that well.

And then because it doesn't work that well, it really gets to be a slog knocking all six children off, plus an intro and finale episode. Four children would have been the ideal number, with six episodes. I know that means less Poe homage, but since the homage is VERY surface level and doesn't translate very well, is that really losing out on so much?

While the second story of the Usher twins' backstory starts off pretty well, in a sort of Tim Burton-esque flashback, the next part about them rising to power at the pharmaceutical company, again, gets overly long. It's not that poorly of a conceived story, it's just not THAT amazing that you're sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to hear how they outsmart Longshot from Battlestar Galactica. And most of it happens off-screen through plot convenience. Somehow tricking the federal government and screwing up their case makes them run the company with just one murder thrown in. Or maybe the Devil made that happen, even though it was their plan all along, and the Devil only showed up after it was done. And then somehow they control and extract all the profits from a publicly traded company they don't own a majority stake in. Oh whatever.

Speaking of the Devil, this show also crosses its feet on just what kind of character this character is. She entices people to sell the lives of their children so they can be big successes as corrupt pharmaceutical heads who get millions of people killed... but she won't stop humble bragging about how she would have just murdered this next Usher child painlessly if only they wouldn't have just done that thing they did that they shouldn'ah done. What? Prospero just wanted to have sprinklers during his party, really. Camille just wanted to take some pictures of chimps who were being abused in a lab. Leo just wanted to replace his boyfriend's cat because he was falsely led to believe he murdered the thing (by the Devil, by the way) even though he didn't. They weren't pure and innocent, but neither was Carlo Gugino acting like some justice delivering archangel. She kept blaming them right before she murdered them using any convenient excuse, often while admitting she was going to murder them anyway. Who is this character supposed to be?

The height of this absurdity is her explaining to Lenore how her mother will start some nonsense charity that will save millions of lives before murdering her too. So the Devil is cool helping history's greatest monsters murder and do evil, but she feels bad about killing Lenore. Does she love murder and evil or not? This show can't decide.

She also has a Maoist rant toward the end about how poverty and hunger and boo-boos and sad puppy dogs could all be SOLVED with just some money from rich people. Just a one time cash payment of a few billion, and famine will be SOLVED! For something that clearly wishes to be a progressive piece of entertainment, I think putting a mathematically illiterate, economically illiterate, sociologically illiterate rant in the mouth of a woman wasn't all that progressive. I can believe the Devil would tell you the world's problems can be solved with a one time cash payment (of other peoples' money), but he wouldn't be uneducated enough to believe it himself. And it's cringy to think an adult in Hollywood is trying to preach to modern youth and tell them society's troubles are just the result of rich people not throwing a little cash money at them. It's insulting to the audience to think they're dumb enough to believe that, and it's a little twisted to think mass media is telling teenagers this is how their world works. As you may well know, you could confiscate all the assets of every billionaire in America and it wouldn't fund the federal government for a whole year. And utopian answers don't exist in the real world, even if the rich did have more money. The world has troubles, but it's not because rich mommies and daddies are just too mean to wave a magic money wand at us plebians and solve them.

Now to the other hand, what did work was all the technical stuff, the filmic stuff. The cinematography was engrossing, the score was great, the sets were great. The atmosphere and the mood were on point, which is huge when you're talking about horror. Things could drag out a little too long (if one could selectively nap through every scene about Tamerlane, would you really miss anything of value or substance?), but on the whole the direction and pacing were good.

And the modern day stuff with Roderick Usher was fun. Bruce Greenwood did a great job, I did wonder where his story was going and what was going through his head, the actor made the character fascinating. Mark Hamill was also fun in this regard. And the frame scenes between him and August Dupine in the haunted house were fun, and did a good job adding interest and mixing the action up. While the children's stories had their boring parts, being able to bounce back to the haunted house helped break that up (which was needed).

And also a special shout-out to 30-something Madeline Usher, because despite that whole late 70s thing taking too long to get anywhere and not really getting anywhere that amazing, she was distractingly hot in every scene she was in and made most of it very easy to watch.

All in all, this is another solid effort by Mike Flanagan and his team, and if you've enjoyed his past work it's easy to recommend. As usual, it's really much less about the destination, and much more about getting some fun, well-made horror on the way there.

The X-Files returns to the tried and true formula of giving a weird mutant guy a name and then naming the episode after him. Genius!

This episode features a new kind of cancer man, one made of it. I guess as far as The X-Files goes, I can't be too harsh, that's an idea on their level. But once again the writers could think of nothing interesting or new to do with it, so he quickly becomes a monster/serial killer who murders people when his life would be infinitely easier if he just didn't.

It's really rather confusing why the writers decided to start the episode off as they did, a talented EMT with seeming psychic powers is killed in an automobile accident. (The ambulance driver took her eyes off the road because she was talking to somebody! Don't TV characters know 100% of all TV car accidents occur because the driver takes their eyes off the road while talking to somebody?) The now decapitated man seemed to be a model citizen, if a bit private, he even volunteered in cancer wards.

Why set up your monster/serial killer to be a normal guy who isn't a monster or a serial killer? Don't you realize that the audience will notice that and then when he suddenly turns into a monster/serial killer for no explicit reason it'll seem really contrived and silly? The answer is no, they did not realize that.

This guy has a secret, he can't die from things like car accidents. Okay I get keeping that a secret, but it's not like he'll be put to death if people find out. I mean heck, look at Scully's reaction, most people will go out of their way to excuse all of the evidence that something bizarre is going on here. He probably could just lie and tell people what they want to hear, like there was some kind of mistake and he's actually alive. If his headless corpse had told Scully that in the first five minutes of the episode she would have gone home and there wouldn't have been an episode.

But no, it makes way more sense to start murdering people who knew you, because that will ensure the authorities come after you and disrupt your life. And do it at your job too. With many witnesses standing 20 feet away. I'm sure they won't notice. But oh no, wait, they did notice!

And then also he has to eat cancer, and now suddenly he needs to eat cancer so bad he has to murder people every 12 hours or so and cut the cancer out of them so he can eat it. How did he manage to survive as a child? Did this cancer evolution thing only happen after he conveniently became an EMT and volunteered in cancer wards and snuck out cancer samples and ate them? And it just naturally dovetailed with that? Because if not and it caught him totally unprepared, and he needs to eat cancer every 12 hours, how'd he complete the EMT training, find a job, sneak into a cancer ward, steal some cancer and eat it, all in 12 hours? Seems like a lot to do in 12 hours. And if he can do that, once discovered, why not just drive to a new city, get a new job as an EMT, and steal cancer there? He clearly must have all the prerequisite skills to do that, he's already done it here.

Of course, I'm just playing, none of this episode is shooting for anything higher than totally stupid, and it hits the mark. Wacky cancer monster/serial killer starts killing people and Scully figures out his one weakness and shocks him to death. Because that stops your heart. Getting decapitated, see that doesn't stop your heart. Burning to a crisp, that doesn't stop your heart. But getting shocked, there's no coming back from that.

Also Scully has cancer.

I started watching the X-Files from when it premiered, it had the 9 o'clock slot after Brisco County Jr. At 8. But after all these years, I really don't remember much of anything concerning specific episodes, it has been too long and I was too young. However, this episode was one of the few I did remember the ending of. Fortunately that didn't spoil a thing for me, BECAUSE THE STORY IS NONSENSICAL AND YOU KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN THE ENTIRE WAY.

One just really has to question the concern and craft the showrunner had to allow this story to air. It's an unquestionable indictment of the show makers' total lack of concern for what they threw up there on the screen. This is a show about a big, silly, stupid alien conspiracy, that's what they went with, it's long ago decided, and part of all that silliness is that Fox Mulder's sister got abducted by aliens as collateral to ensure the cooperation of the Syndicate, the human collaborators. We know this happened, because even the Syndicate admitted it to us. They filled in all the blanks too: Bill Mulder was a founding member of this shadowy organization designed to handle the transition to an alien invasion where they rule over the remaining humans as slaves, with their Men in Black helpers at the top of this lesser social order.

Meanwhile Fox himself found a farm run by clones of his sister. Yup, clones, literal clones, of his sister. He didn't get evidence of it, he found it, he was there, he spent time with a clone. The mystery is LONG over.

But now maybe this serial killer did it. Hey why not?

Meanwhile Mulder is a ridiculous dope the entire episode, and the writers have literally no concern for providing us any sense of reality. Mulder running around crazed, cutting into a guy's car with a knife (literally illegal, it's silly, but really takes you out of the episode because it's absurd behavior that only comes from a TV "cop"), and then he "checks" the serial murderer out of prison? To take a commercial flight with him as his guard, and him alone. I was rolling on the floor laughing. Yeah, next Scully and Charlie Manson will take a day trip alone to San Bernardino Mountains so he can show her where he hid the bodies of the original Brady Bunch. She'll probably even let Charlie pack their picnic lunch.

It's not gripping, it's cartoonish. And people are giving this a 10 out of 10? Yeah this and the better episodes of Inspector Gadget really compete for greatest episode of a crime drama ever! Bwahahaha!

And then guess what happens next? ...HE GETS AWAY! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, you know the guy with a life sentence for raping and murdering 16 little girls, yeah, he managed to slip out of the Motel 6 one sleeping FBI agent was securing him in. AAAHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Oh my God, Barney Fife would pistol whip Mulder for incompetence. So yeah, the rapist/murderer, he quickly abducts a little girl using Mulder's FBI credentials, and now Mulder, Scully, Skinner, and 20 other agents have to manhunt him down before it's too late. Fox manages to save her, I don't know before he raped her or not, but she's going to have PTSD for the rest of her life either way. Her life is destroyed. There's literally no way Fox Mulder COULDN'T be fired after this.

Yes this episode is terrible, yes it's insulting stupid, yes it's directly contradictory to everything established in previous episodes, but really it's the total lack of respect the creators have for their audience that earns this episode my charitable rating of 2/10. And this is one of those episodes where you really have to look at the people giving it 10/10 and go, why are you here? You don't deserve to be here wasting other people's time with your trolling ratings. They should be deleted, truly.

Not a terrible episode from a purely experiential view, but ultimately we discover this two part episode was all about a plot within a plot within a plot to accomplish something that would have been more easily accomplished by not using any plots. And of course, Heaven forbid you actually sat down and started writing out evidence to connect the dots here, because I'm quite certain none of the plots actually make sense.

Overall these two episodes are meant to introduce the idea that shadowy world powers are actually trying to play both sides, developing a vaccine against the black oil so that when it later tries to conquer the planet it hits a snag. But of course they're too stupid to realize the only reason the black oil aliens can invade is through the collaboration of evil humans and that they would never have involved them if they didn't have to.

Anyways, it's like they say, in Soviet Russia black oil alien reject YOU!

A Lovecraftian doctor villain enacts a bizarrely overcomplicated plot to kill people.

I think the writers knew this was embarrassing schlock for adolescents sitting at home on a Friday night hoping to be scared, and leaned into not caring or trying. The initial part of the episode sets up the ruling cabal of doctors and administrators as being shady, and continues to present them that way, but then for some reason this is a sham (not a red herring by the way for any non-writers thinking maybe this qualifies as misdirection) and actually its just one doctor who's made sure to schedule enough patients with the right birthday so that he may complete his evil ritual.

Really when you consider how powerful this guy is, it's kind of hard to believe he could fail, he's like a tenth level sorcerer, he can transport knives into anyone with a thought, levitate, live forever, and also his hand-eye coordination and reaction times are Spider-Man-esque. That nurse burst out of a pool of blood with the knife ready and he still caught her by the wrist. And then did it again 30 seconds later when she attacked him from behind. I don't care how athletic you are, been practicing Karate for the last decade, you wouldn't have caught that knife, except right in the chest. Mulder and Scully are just basically there to watch, they can't stop this guy.

Overall this was a throw whatever at the wall and see what sticks monster of the week episode, it lacked the hunger to be good that you got in season 1, or the competency you got in season 3. The story was muddled, lacked action, and was poorly executed on the screen.

I really liked this episode, just on a gut level, I just like it. There's something about it that's firing off so well, the way the mood and the story meld together, it just has a pleasant, meaningful feel.

But let's just get to it then, the biggest problem with this episode is it seems to start in the second act. There's no proper setup, we didn't actually BEGIN a story to tell. Mulder and Scully are involved in a Branch Davidian style raid, and ten seconds later Mulder and this random lady are swept up in this reincarnation plot, where they were together in the Civil War.

I've watched enough television to follow along just fine, I get the tropes and the beats, but there's just no story here actually laid down to experience. Like I get what the plot is, I understand what they're going for. But they don't actually tell the story. There's no beginning to connect all these later dots, and there's no stakes or world built to be meaningful as things progress toward a tragic end.

The other review which mentions they had to cut 20 minutes of the episode away is very helpful, that's exactly what it comes across as. It's an episode that was meant to be 50% longer than what it is.

But I'm judging on what I can see and what everyone who watches the X-Files experiences, and basically we have what looks like an intriguing episode that doesn't properly set itself up, hook Mulder into this paranormal plot, and then doesn't build up the relationship or stakes sufficiently. Such that you're left watching what's probably a really good episode in full, but is in actuality, fragments that look like they're from a good episode. Which I still give a 7/10, which is pretty strong given that the pacing and story as presented are a mess.

It's just so bad. They start off well enough. Using the idea of psychic photography imprinted by a murderer. The stuff about him giving bad lobotomies, and weird demons, it's goofy, but okay.

But, is this what we should expect from professional TV writers? How does the serial murderer man get out of jail? What incredibly clever yarn have you bards weaved this time to explain so crazy a circumstance??? Well you see, all 37 other officers are rushing to the place he dumped the body of his last victim, you see because none of them have ever seen a dead body before, so all 37 of them have to go, including those officers responsible for operating the jail cells and securing prisoners, they all had to go too, because it's a dead body. So then you have one guy left behind to book the murderer, we arrested him for murder hours ago, but now we gotta book him, you don't book him until you've interrogated him all afternoon and got him to admit to a bunch of murders and tell you were he dumped the bodies. Only then do you get his fingerprints for the fingerprint records, so we can check them against his last fingerprint records from the last time we arrested him for beating his father to death, and then that way we can cross reference them to make sure he isn't using new fingers. But the guy booking him was all bummed out and confused he didn't get to see the dead body, and so he didn't have his head on right, so he's like, okay you walk over here, and now walk over here, and now walk over here, and touch this thing, and now I'm gonna walk over here, oops I left you unhandcuffed and you stole my gun while I was makin' copies, you rascal murderer!

If only we had left a second guy behind! Well, live and learn, it's hard being a cop.

And then Mulder's like, Scully, head on down to dark alley row to get our car I parked 10 miles from here, so we can get back to hunting down this dangerous psychopath who hunts women walking by themselves in this area, and be quick about it too sweetcheeks, I gotta stand here and wave this Polaroid around so it'll develop faster. And so Scully gets abducted again.

If I was the showrunner on this show, if I ever made Scully the damsel in distress, bound and gagged for some serial murderer's pleasure, I would make it a big event. Like this is the episode one of the heroes is in real danger! In reality though, we're in double digits at this point for Scully kidnappings, aren't we? She's seconds away from being another statistic how many times now? And is saved only because Mulder rushes in to rescue her ever time? Not very subtle messaging about the suitability for women being in law enforcement here, what's the average number of times a girl can expect to be stalked, overpowered, bound and gagged per year according to The X-Files? About 4.2 times per year? Yeah that sounds about right Chris Carter, good work.

They tried to make an African Tooms. You all remember Tooms, the mutant monster man who could fit through any hole and ate people? Well, we did it again!

This episode could have at least risen to the level of mediocre had they just let the thing be a spirit. I don't know where they took this wrong turn of making him into a guy who evolved to suck people's pituitary glands out with a straw, but it's an exceptionally stupid twist idea.

Just let the folk tale about a spirit be about a spirit. It figured out how to get on a plane and fly to America. Spirits are mischievous, just let him want to come watch TV in America. He even spends the entire episode acting inhuman, when spoken to he takes a several second beat as if he doesn't just not understand the language well, but doesn't understand the concept of language well. He fits his entire body into spaces which would hold less mass than his body is, no matter how flexible he is. Just let him be a magical creature.

I actually have a feeling that's probably how the episode was written, or at least not everyone was on the same page. He's hiding in a 2' x 18'" shelf for God's sake. It's hilariously stupid looking.

Mulder and Scully spend the whole episode wandering around having no idea what they're doing, other than Mulder correctly suspects a magical creature is responsible for this series of strange deaths, because that's what he always correctly suspects. Except it's not a magical creature, it's a guy who sucks out your brain through a straw in his throat (evolution, you know, like Darwin talked about!) because that gives him the nutrients and vitamins his body needs to live. It's science people!

Also, would it have killed them to have Mulder find the guy's secret lair through some police work, rather than seeing a construction site as he's driving and just guessing? "The guy worked at a construction site... there's a construction site over there!" It literally wouldn't have taken any more work to do it that way. It's just random coincidence. Perhaps the writers felt this whole episode was going stupidly and gave up at the end. Scully does spend approximately six minutes wandering around an abandoned factory looking at nothing with her flashlight. Seemed like they needed filler.

Also, I hate to be personal, but to the people putting 10/10 on these terrible sideshow episodes, why are you like this? Why review things if you fundamentally don't comprehend the abstract concept of reviewing things? Episode 403 of the X-Files that's terrible? 10 out of 10! The Godfather? 10 out of 10! The taste of this old peanut I found on the ground and still has mud on it? 10 out of 10! Really perfect? What's the differentiation between anything thing? It's such a scummy thing to go around doing under the guise of positivity, but you're just a troll. Imagine doing this in other arenas of life: "Hey do you know how to get to the court house?" "My friend, justice can be found everywhere!" "Doctor what do you recommend to treat my deadly cancer?" "All treatments are equal under the eyes of God." "Should I feed my child fruits and vegetables or battery acid?" "Yes."

You all are less amazing human beings than you think you are.

Creepy mutants bury a newborn mutant in their neighbor's yard, sparking an FBI investigation.

Let me just start by saying, this episode leans heavily into the modern American "rural fantasy." The local sheriff's department is two guys. They don't even carry guns. 'Cause there's no crime. Ever. Why they're so far away from civ-i-li-za-tion that you can't even get the TV antenner to work. You know, in the far frontier state of Pennsylvania.

So you have to accept these rather broad and ridiculous elements of the episode's setup. Law enforcement is outnumbered by even a tiny number of criminals. Reinforcements from Pittsburgh is a day away, it's a 23 hour drive at least to get this far into the state. And also don't ask why the mutants hopped a barbed wire fence to bury a still living infant on their neighbor's property when they own an entire farm.

(BTW if you were wondering could you go to a remote part of the United States and commit crimes because there's only two cops with no guns within a hundred miles, the answer is no. Even the most remote and rural of counties employ dozens of officers and can request assistance from surrounding counties who can usually be there in force in less than an hour. No town of a hundred people has their own police force because that would be stupid.)

The mutants, upset at having their mutanty ways uncovered murder the sheriff, who keeps his gun in a lock box, in the basement, in a safe. Not that he had enough bullets to kill three mutants, because he didn't.

Mulder, Scully, and the guy from the SyFy channel show about an alien invasion I used to watch therefore have to storm Old Mutant Farm. "Are these bullet proof vests really necessary?" whines Scully at the idea of following proper equipment regulations while practicing dropping her gun. To be honest, the guy from the SyFy channel's plan is stupid and he's immediately killed by an axe trap so ridiculous that later research by the Fox Broadcasting Company revealed over 99% of viewers were cackling with laughter so loudly that they missed Mulder's entire three-minute-long follow-up soliloquy discussing how these mutant troglodytes were bizarrely troglodytic in their behavior.

Mulder and Scully then come up with an equally ridiculous plan to let the brothers' pigs loose so they have to come out of the house, claiming this will allow them to avoid what we can only assume are hundreds of other Rube Goldberg contraptions featuring sharpened farm implements. They immediately violate their own plan however, and rush into the house, careful to first set off a spring loaded spear trap protecting the back door. Inside they discover the interior structure is somehow darker than the pitch black voids of space despite it being a sunny day outside and the entire house being covered in windows and glass doors. Strangely neither agent mentions this or attempts to investigate it despite there being obvious implications across dozens of fields of science and technology at this incredible occurrence that defies every known fact of empirical knowledge.

They do however find the mutants' deformed mutant mother who lives under a bed and gets around by pushing her cart with her one good hand. Mulder comes up with some cockamamie scheme for the mother to talk her sons into surrendering instead of just shooting them all like real cops would, and I feel a great sympathy for real cops watching this. Also there's this gigantic Loony Tunes wooden spike trap in the hallway! We're showed this in a deliberate slow pan shot that lasts an entire minute to build suspense.

Anyway, the boys realize there are FBI agents inside the house and the most hilarious fight scene ensues. Mulder threatens to shoot one as he bangs on the door to get in, failing to realize two have come up through the kitchen crawl space to get him from behind! Scully shoots one of the crawlspace mutants, but is too busy checking to see if she broke a nail to shoot the other one. Mulder drops his gun. The two surviving mutants then beat on Mulder while Scully points her gun around the room, I'm pretty sure she drops it, then picks it back up, then points it some more, then shoots down a mutant who has broken off his attack to pick up Mulder's gun to try and eat it. Then Scully runs away from the last mutant, who trips and lands on his own tripwire and gets killed by the giant wooden spike, which when you really pay attention to it, would only harm someone lying on the floor, as opposed to someone standing. Tripwires don't usually trip a person, it's just a name.

Sadly one of the mutants and his mother manage to escape as Mulder and Scully are laughing about the spike trap. And when Mulder notices he even refers to the mutant by his first name like he knows him, how you could tell one mutant apart from the other, I have no idea.

I certainly wouldn't want to give this episode a bad rating, they should have made more episodes like this! It's embarrassingly bad, it leaves the viewer laughing at them and not with them. It's no better than the worst movies they review on Best of the Worst. Schlock of the highest order!

It's obvious this episode was meant to be set in the deep South and they changed the setting last minute before they shot it without actually changing all the details. One wonders if Fox management felt it was too over the line to insult their Southern audience with this one. Probably.

Somewhere in Canada a power line repair man is killed by a bee as the Children of the Corn look on.

Back in our current timeline, Mulder needs a magical alien to heal his mother, but the matter is complicated by an unstoppable alien bounty hunter who never runs. And I don't mean runs away, I mean, he never goes faster than a mildly brisk walking pace.

Okay, I remember way back when we first met the alien bounty hunter and he just had this small spike device that he shoved into shapeshifting aliens' necks and it killed them. It was literally just a little spring-action stabbing spike. But now you see, it's actually an amazing alien artifact of unimaginable killing power.

You can't kill a shapeshifty alien without one of these spikes. Don't bother trying to make your own, it has to be a special alien spike.

Yes, that's how lazy and silly our alien mythos stories have managed to become. Mulder's mother has been hiding a little alien spike weapon in her summer home on the lake for 30 years. That's her big secret.

I mean, are they aliens or are they vampires? It wasn't enough of a juvenile stretch in story telling that they could only die by being stabbed in one specific spot, like some ridiculous creature from a campfire tale, now it's gotta be done with a magical alien spike made of Uranium 239.5, forged in the Antares cluster, and blessed by a high priest of Kodos?

What if I cut the alien bounty hunter in two with a katana? Oh what's that, he's filled with magical death virus that's as magical as he is? Well I'm wearing a respirator I bought on Amazon for $34.95 so now that won't work. Do the two halves of his body magically pull themselves back together? How about I torch him with a flamethrower? He can't burn? What if I superheat him with a microwave array and boil all the liquid in his alien body? Do his desiccated remains scoop themselves back together to go find a jug of water to drink?

I can't help but think of all the ways Mulder, or anybody else on Earth if they were so inclined (and they aren't except for Mulder), could murder this alien bounty hunter. I know aliens often have magical biology in science fiction, it's how you work the supernatural into the story. From Who Goes There to Alien to ET, they all have capabilities that defy scientific reason. Yet Scully never chides this alien for breaking the bounds of empirical knowledge like she's constantly chiding Mulder.

Anyway, literally all that happens this episode is that Mulder drives the magical good alien around Canada, while the bounty hunter alien tracks them, and by tracks them, I mean magically knows where they are at all times for no explicable reason rendering the whole running away from him thing seem rather stupid. Oh, and we set up that the pollen is dangerous and the evil aliens are doing something with crops, and that tracks back with the smallpox vaccination and the massive medical records warehouse in the mountains. Why all that made the bee at the beginning of the episode so deadly I don't know.

Why the bounty hunter alien could get stabbed in the neck by Mulder and not die, I also don't know. Why all these people trying to help Mulder uncover the truth never just give him a 15 minute rundown of the entire alien conspiracy, I again do not know. They even call that out in this episode. The alien bounty hunter catches Mulder and is all like, "That stupid magical alien keeps giving you little pieces of the puzzle instead of explaining it all in five minutes as he could have done at any point in your many hours long car rides together." Which is a solid observation on his part. I don't buy his explanation that the magical alien only does this because he's a just a little meaningless cog in a large plan, that doesn't follow any causal relationship, but the point stands. If anybody just wanted Mulder to know, they could tell him everything. Why does he get so much bad help?

Anyway, the alien bounty hunter offers no menace because he's so arbitrarily unbeatable and magic, and also, and this is something I'm really noticing rewatching this series a second time, our heroes take some savage beatings and terrible injuries on the regular and are always fine after. You know the main character isn't going to die and isn't really in danger or else TV Guide would have already tipped you off about it, but we put that fact aside and let ourselves get scared for the hero in like 99% of all television shows and movies we watch. But I'm realizing when the hero is actually shown getting beaten and injured, it suddenly makes the fights lose all tension. Because I've seen them get beaten before, they're not going to die.

It occurs to me there is a bit of a trick to it, to maintaining the danger, and that's to not neuter the violence such that it doesn't worry me any longer than Mulder or Scully may get thrown through a car by a super strong alien or shot repeatedly in the face and chest. If that super strong alien can punch your head clean off, then I'm really worried if he swings at Mulder. The secret is, have Mulder duck. But if it's sort of like a professional wrestling match, then violence itself no longer suggests a lethal threat because you keep seeing the same violence done over and over with no lasting consequences. Whereas a likely lethal blow that just keeps missing maintains that ongoing menace, all it has to do is land and your hero goes splat.

If only our hero was an alien, in that case only a magical spike made by Cthulhu could kill them.

In the end the alien bounty probably kills everybody he wanted to kill, and then he heals Mulder's mother, but only after demanding an explanation from the Smoking Man so the Smoking Man can explain it to the audience. And then after hearing the explanation the alien heals her because he didn't actually need an explanation and was always just going to do what he was told to do.

These mythos episodes aren't as bad as the worst monster of the week episodes, but they are routinely boring and meaningless, and I can definitely see how they weren't everyone's favorite thing about the series back when it first aired.

This episode's just dumb. I strongly suspect they somehow got rushed in writing it, as it's quite poor and doesn't really connect its own dots.

Skinner stands accused of breaking a prostitute's neck with his bare hands by twisting her head clean around. I know you may not know this, but the strength actually required to do that is insane. I'm not talking a big dude, I'm talking a big bear.

But he refuses to talk to the police, which is smart, but the police act like it makes him guilty. Anyway, Skinner also sees an old woman shrieking at him intermittently. And won't tell anyone what's happening. And acts very shifty.

None of this is related to what's actually going on though, so that's fun. It's all just unrelated nonsense to the actual plot.

In the end, Mulder and Scully are easily outwitted again by government goons, Scully drops her gun, and Skinner is saved thanks to Skinner through unknown means.

I would be hard pressed to imagine ever writing something this dumb and disjointed. Which is a shame because I rather like the premise, and there's some interesting ideas for an episode here. It's just a bad episode.

A young boy with the power to bleed uncontrollably is targeted by a demonic serial killer, and the only one who can save him is himself by running, because nobody else bothers to do a damn thing.

This episode is too filled with idiot plotting for my taste. I think the writers were mostly enamored with the idea of making Mulder the skeptical idiot for a change, and he definitely comes across like an idiot, but they kicked their heels up and celebrated a little too soon.

Our two heroes show up to investigate this boy because a serial killer is hunting people like him, but somehow that gets twisted into an unrelated social worker plot where the county suspects the mother of abuse based on no evidence. So they place the child in an unguarded orphanage where anyone can walk in and do anything they want to him. Huh?

Mulder and Scully just spent several thousand dollars in tax payer dollars to travel halfway across the country to... do nothing and forget their own plot?

The boy is then almost murdered by a man he clearly sees and can identify, but this is just forgotten. They get no description of the man from him, they place him with no special security, they themselves of course aren't interested in watching him... What?

It's only after his mother has been killed (my God do The X-Files writers like being weirdly sadistic) that Scully decides not to give the halfway home for soon to be murdered children a THIRD try.

People in this episode never cry out for help when they need help, never share information that would save lives even when it's practically demanded by the law that they do so, and they rarely ever get off their lazy butt to do their job. It's idiot plot central, which is great for idiots, but what about for the rest of us?

This episode feels, almost personal. It's that insulting to the intelligence of the viewer.

To add to our story we are shown a summer camp in West Virginia where aliens are being kept. Evil soldier goons show up and execute them.

Back to our heroes, Mulder tries to find a Japanese doctor so he can get into a train car with an alien on it, but then an assassin finds the doctor first and kills him, but then the assassin leaves the door to the alien train car open, but then the assassin was hiding in the wall and is strangling Mulder to death, but then the train guy has a gun and he makes the assassin quit killing Mulder.

Meanwhile Scully goes to the summer camp and is literally shown a mass grave filled with alien grays, literally filled with their recently murdered corpses, but after being captured by a group of unknown soldiers who murder the last of the camp survivors, a fat guy explains to Scully they were just experimented on medically with radiation and diseases, and it made their heads all big and inhuman, and they all shrank like two feet in height, and had four fingers instead of five, and were silicone based instead of carbon.

Because she's a medical doctor Scully immediately recognizes all of this as true. Also she has proof that it's true, the President issued a vague, non-specific apology for government testing in the 70s that involved radiation (no I'm not making that up or even misstating it for comedic effect, that's literally what she says). So you see Mulder, it was all just the Japanese perpetrating a hoax on the American public to cover their tracks by pretending to be aliens. How do I explain the Japanese having anti-gravity utilizing space ships, the technology to read people's minds, the ability to abduct me from the side of a mountain without use of a manmade flying machine on a rendezvous set up using telepathy with a crazy man, I'm sorry Mulder you'll have to repeat all that, sssscrrrrrr, ssssscrrrrr, I'm sorry Mulder there's so much static right now I can't hear you, bye.

Oh, she also claims Mulder's train will explode with the "totally human test subject" which will expose tens of thousands of people to hemorrhagic fever---let me just stop you right there, doctor. Of all the ways you might realistically spread any kind of virus, or of all the ways you might unrealistically spread any kind of virus that a regular person may still just go with, exploding a patient infected with it using 50lbs of C4 is not one of them. Viruses have shown a remarkable irresilience to being exploded.

Anyhoo, nothing else really happens but we're expected to be super, super, duper worried that Mulder might finally die in a midseason episode of season 3 of a very popular television show because of that bomb. Fortunately Scully helps Mulder open the door, although the assassin, who Mulder has had his back turned to for most of the half of the episode he has him captured, without any restraints whatsoever, somehow manages to sneak up and knock Mulder out before kicking him repeatedly for good measure.

But then Mr. X shows up, shoots the bad guy, and carries Mulder off the train. The end. Oh except Scully shows up one more time to berate Mulder for even believing in aliens when clearly this can all be neatly explained by a rogue Japanese scientist giving people small pox or something.

And I'm quite sure as a kid I was left wondering if I had missed some episodes that retconned seasons 1 and 2, or was I misremembering a different television show about FBI agents who look for aliens as being The X-Files, or hmmm...

Our episode starts with Mulder and Scully hunting down the seller of a genuine alien autopsy video, only to discover him freshly murdered, execution style. Mulder is able to run down the karate kicking assassin, only to later discover from Skinner that he's a high ranking Japanese diplomat! "Ohhhh you stepped in it this time Mulder!!!" yells Skinner in his annoyed voice. "He must be released immediately before it causes an international incident!"

Yeah, a diplomat gets caught executing a bound American citizen with a bullet to the back of the head, and he's free to go once the Emperor of Japan makes a phone call, that's how that works. That's how that really works.

That's how diplomatic immunity is used for Dr. Doom in Marvel Comics. Make no mistake, that's the level of reality we're at here, comic book for 10 year-olds. Oh, and of course the local news doesn't catch wind of it. Not something they would report on the news, a gangland style execution murder clearly done by a high ranking Japanese diplomat. Nope, we've got county fair pictures to run.

And then Mulder sneaks around a dock, Scully finds an alien abductee support group, Mulder sneaks around a train yard, Scully does nothing of value... and we end on a cliffhanger!

So let's start with the good stuff, I think adding Japanese people is kind of neat. It takes the story someplace new, an international angle to the conspiracy, maybe different groups at odds with each other. For that, I give this episode +2 bonus stars.

And now the bad, it's more poorly executed, going nowhere Chris Carter alien stuff. To explain a little more thoroughly, the problems with this from a writer's point of view are that our characters' motivation only makes sense superficially, the story is all journey in a tale that is all about the destination, and the world we're presented with does not allow for meaningful drama.

Now let's unpack each point: The characters lack good motivation. Midway through this episode Scully decides she doesn't believe in aliens again, and says she just isn't as sure as Mulder about all these aliens. Boy it's very hard to keep track of just where Scully's skeptometer is on any given day, because it bounces back and forth like a thermometer. Anyway, and Mulder is like, come on Scully, I know there are aliens out there and I'm not going to stop until I have definitive proof!

See that's a problem, because what does that really mean? What does Mulder intend to ACTUALLY do? You don't know. I don't know. Chris Carter doesn't know. Mulder really doesn't know. He's got superficial motivation for chasing after train cars and breaking into tramp steamers, but if your life depended on you saying Mulder will accomplish "A" to be able to "B" so he can finally "C", you wouldn't be able to fill in A, B, or C with proper nouns. What does success look like to Mulder? We in the audience don't have any idea. Superficially we do: "he wants the proof of the alien and the government conspiracy, so he can show people how there's all the aliens and governments, and then that'll fix things." Which is fine, but what actually does that mean?

Is he going to go on 60 Minutes? With photos of aliens? With tapes of aliens? With an alien? Is he going to show secret video of the Smoking Man discussing helping an alien invasion of Earth to David Letterman? What exactly constitutes success here? No one, and I mean literally no one, in the audience knows beyond the most vague terms.

Next, we're watching a story that is all journey, but only cares about the destination. I gotta watch Mulder steamily sneak around impromptu government black sites for 45 minutes, what's in it for me just looking at that 45 minutes? Forget the rest of the X-Files, I never get to watch another episode of the X-Files because gray alien rebels steal them all from the local library, all I have are these 45 minutes, what do I get out of this viewing experience? Well the answer is nothing. It's 45 minutes of very slow exposition. There's some element of threat with machine gun guys running around, there's a little drama in Mulder needing to catch a train, but there's no actual tension or stakes. There's no STORY in this episode. It gives us a couple largely unuseful clues about the BIG CONSPIRACY, but that's all it's about, dropping those clues. We don't actually have an episode of the X-Files along the way.

Everything that happens is just a "and then" plot point following the last. Mulder catches a murdering diplomat, and then he finds photos of a boat, and then he looks at the boat, and then at the boatyard he sees an alien space craft, and then he sees photos of a train car, and then he sees an alien go on the train car, and then he jumps on the train car.

I enjoy finding out about the alien conspiracy actually, I really do. But that's no excuse for making bad television.

Finally, the world we're presented with has no meaningful drama. This relates back to the first point, and what Mulder's motivation and plans are. Here in this episode we are once again presented with an enemy force that is omnipotent and omniscient, can do anything, can know anything. So... what exactly is Mulder hoping to accomplish?

He's going to get evidence of the conspiracy! He's done that already, what feels like dozens of times before. They've secured alien-human hybrid cultures, brought three or four aliens to FBI headquarters, Scully stole an alien fetus from a government science facility that had a security clearance higher than the President gets (same Scully who doesn't believe in aliens two seasons later by the way), they have a strange alien virus that violates all known laws of biology, chemistry, and physics isolated from autopsy samples, Scully got abducted by aliens and had a high tech tracking device pulled out of her, Mulder tracked an alien assassin to an atomic submarine that had had it's entire crew murdered, they found a train car full of grays, or human hybrids, or gray hybrids, Mulder even saved a body from it as a souvenir, Mulder got ahold of a copy of the bad guys' entire paper trail and plan as stored by the Department of Defense, they have a photograph of the heads of the conspiracy posing together at their secret government record keeping facility and examined the facility and all the documents there. Given all the evidence they've acquired, and the exponentially greater amount of evidence they could have collected on their escapades had they actually been trying to collect it (a video tape and some tissue samples from the fetus before you turned it over Scully? Some tissues samples from the aliens who wanted your protection or from the bounty hunter you tracked and captured, Mulder?), if the bad guys are so powerful that they can STILL FOIL THE HEROES' EFFORTS then what will any new evidence do? If the people around Mulder and Scully (and perhaps including Scully) REMAIN SKEPTICAL OF A CLEAR ALIEN CONSPIRACY then what good would literally any evidence be?

If any evidence can be stolen back, destroyed, or erased, then there simply is no point in acquiring said evidence in the first place. If the supposed target audience of this evidence will discount any evidence they see as fake, hoaxed, and silly then there simply is no point in showing said audience the evidence in the first place. You see the problem there?

Chris Carter has made a world where the Syndicate is more powerful than the rest of the government combined. And the only group more powerful than them, apparently, is the aliens. So what is the credible threat to the Syndicate? If Mulder uncovers evidence who can he show it to? Congress? Nope, sorry, Mr. X told us they're all compromised. The military? Nope, they take orders from the Syndicate. The US' intelligence agencies? Nope, sorry, they're completely infiltrated by the Syndicate.

Literally Mulder's only actual recourse would have been to shoot the Smoking Man in the face when he had the chance. Everything else is pointless. There are no stakes and so there can be no drama.

So again, I'd say this episode is 5/10 stars, but adding the Japanese doctors into it is kinda fresh, so bump it up to 7/10.