Episode Reviews

(by original air date)

Season Two

Little Green Men:    The X-Files are shut down, and Mulder and Scully have been split per the conspirators' design - he on a staggeringly boring surveillance detail and she as a forensics instructor at the academy. We finally get a brief look at one of Mulder's connections in Congress, who sends him off to Puerto Rico because big things are in the making down there. Once again Mulder takes off for parts unknown, and once again it's up to Scully to show up and save his ass. We already knew they'd find a way to work together, but the real thing here (other than the possibility that Mulder actually did see a real alien at the doorway of that listening station) is the understood frustration of those unknown conspirators as they watch events transpire.

The Host:   Although this is a generally well-regarded episode, I've always thought there wasn't much to it. A radioactive mutant shows up in the New Jersey sewers, kills a couple of people, and gets cut in half, but as it turns out is still out there somewhere. And? Is that all there is? Sure, we get a hint at a new informant when Mulder gets a phone call in the middle of the investigation warning him that success in his present case is of utmost importance, but other than that and a couple of gross-out scenes, there's really not much here.

Blood:   This is another dud that could have been much more with just a little work. Combine the chemical spraying and the electronic manipulation, and you've got something big going on, and yet the cause is hardly addressed - the episode is really only interested in the effects (almost as if it's an excuse to throw in the White Bronco chase footage). The effects, by the way, basically consist of using the subjects' worst fear to incite them to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do via some kind of subliminal electronic suggestion (although is it really "subliminal" when the person can actually read the message?).

Sleepless:    The entrance of Alex Krycek here, particularly the revelation of who really pays his salary, opens doors to myriad other possibilities, many of which are taken advantage of during subsequent episodes. One of the few remaining subjects of a Vietnam-era military experiment to create a soldier who doesn't require sleep is cleaning house, killing other test subjects and the doctors in charge and justifying it by seeing himself as some kind of avenging angel. One question, though - did Krycek really see a gun in Preacher's hand? I'm sure part of his assignment was to finish cleaning up the mess (i.e. - kill the remaining test subjects if they weren't already dead), so why is the effort made to make us believe that Krycek thought Preacher was holding a gun? As an (allegedly) intelligent operative, wouldn't he have realized that Mulder getting killed during such a relatively mundane assignment (and it would have been abundantly obvious that "this crazy guy" had killed Mulder) might have gotten rid of the Syndicate's worst pest, and as such would Krycek have backed off, letting Preacher shoot Mulder first? I wonder this because he's not told until later how much they believe Mulder should be kept around, and the aftermath of Krycek's hesitation. It's just a thought.

Duane Barry:    Thus begins a story arc that could have been disatrous for the series but instead is still its greatest triumph. It's already the stuff of legend - how Gillian Anderson became pregnant and had to be written out of the show for several episodes, and so Scully is abducted by an escaped mental patient who believes himself to have often gotten unwelcome extraterrestrial probings in the past, doing this in the hopes that she'll be taken this time instead of him. Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Duane Barry instigates a hostage situation, and Mulder gets thrown into it, using it to gain information about the possibilities of what might have happened to his sister. The situation is resolved, but Duane gets away and abducts Scully. End of part one.

Ascension:    Part two begins with Scully in the trunk of Duane's car. Mulder and Krycek follow him to Skyland Mountain, and while Mulder hangs onto a swinging cable car, Krycek finally starts to earn his money by attempting to sabotage Mulder's rescue attempt. By the time Mulder reaches Duane, a bright light has briefly appeared and Duane is energetically celebrating the fact that "they" won't take him anymore (and, honestly, isn't he doing a disturbing amount of jumping around for a guy with a recent gunshot wound to the chest?). Krycek briefly visits Duane, and a couple of minutes later the latter chokes to death (so we know who killed him... or do we?). By the time Mulder gets called on the carpet by Skinner, Krycek is nowhere to be found. End of part two.

3:    Suddenly, we have a brief intermission from the riveting Duane Barry story arc, allowing Mulder to investigate a case on his own. A group of people think they're vampires, although it takes Mulder just a little longer than usual to believe them. In the process, he becomes emotionally involved with a girl who's trying to outrun them. In short, he gets some, although that point is still hotly debated on occasion. Mediocere at best.

One Breath:    The conclusion of the Duane Barry arc finds Scully in that region somewhere between life and death, sitting in a rowboat as some kind of existential metaphor. Her comatose body is found in a hospital bed, delivered by persons unknown, and Mulder finds a newfound conviction that leads him through events including witnessing the impromptu execution of an enemy operative by his new informant, meeting Scully's sister and hearing a childhood story by her mother which leads to a greater understanding of the adult she's grown into, listening to a story by Skinner which partly explains why Mulder is becoming more often supported by his superior, and confronting the Cigarette-Smoking Man at gunpoint. This last event is one of the series' defining moments. Needless to say, Scully recovers after Mulder reveals that he's really an ol' softie after all.

Firewalker:   Essentially, here we have a remake of Ice without the original's paranoia, style, or character insight. Okay, so Mulder's concerned about Scully going out into the field so soon after her recovery, but beyond that, what do we have? A new form of life that lives as a parasite in a remote location, and if it's not stopped there, it might never be stopped. Change the worms to silicon-based spores, change the setting from an arctic outpost to a geological research station in the immediate vicinity of a volcano, and take away the uncertainty of who's infected (it's not long before we get the idea that everybody's infected, although who knows why it takes our agents so long to figure it out), and there you have it.

Red Museum:    Here we have a vastly underrated episode - one that comes out of nowhere and makes the viewer wonder after thinking about it. The kids are getting mean in a small Wisconsin town, which also contains a disturbing cult-like vegetarian group which gets the blame when kids disappear and later turn up with writing on their backs. As it turns out, a cattle growth hormone is to blame for the increasing aggressiveness of the kids, and the Church of the Red Museum is the control group, so they're actually the "normal" ones (physically speaking, anyway). Remember when we had the inter-network crossover between Ally McBeal and The Practice? By all accounts, it was a success, and yet three years earlier the same stunt was attempted that would have had this episode concluded in the episode of Picket Fences that immediately followed (it turned out to be the one with the cows being used as experimental prenatal incubators for human fetuses). Of course it could have worked, but CBS, with absolutely no forethought, decisively stopped any ideas of a crossover. It was this same type of narrow thinking that sent Picket Fences straight to hell within the next year, but enough about that. Anyway, we get another appearance by Deep Throat's murderer, who's killed before he can be caught, once again preventing our agents from finding the right answers.

Excelsius Dei:    A plain old dud. Experimental drugs allow nursing home residents to astrally project themselves and do cool stuff. Did I say "experimental drugs"? They were actually some kind of mushrooms - an "ancient Chinese secret" - used by an orderly. For some reason the ghosts of deceased residents show up in the hallway around Scully on occasion, although I still don't know what they were doing there.

Aubrey:    Mostly a dud but still has its moments. A woman in a relationship finds herself pregnant by her superior at work (they're both cops), and before she knows it she's blacking out and digging up undiscovered bodies from crimes 50 years ago. The person who committed the crimes is still around, living actually nearby, and as it turns out the pregnant woman is the daughter of the product of one of the criminal's rapes years ago. Genetic memory? I dunno, although we're also left with the possibly disturbing questions concerning the unborn male child and what lies ahead for it.

Irresistible:    An overrated episode which is still at least partially redeemed by a very creepy Donnie Pfaster. He's an "escalating death fetishist" with his own personal dream job as an assistant in a funeral home. He goes too far with one of the clients, gets fired, and does exactly as Mulder predicts: he begins killing so as to gain the corpses he feels he needs. He starts to get a thing for Scully, and she finds herself as possibly his next victim. At one point, he begins to morph into men of different races, and there's a demon-like being mixed in there somewhere. Was this from Scully's subjective point of view, hammering home the point that Pfaster could be any anonymous-looking person, raising the question of whether we really know anybody else, or was it how Pfaster sees himself, searching for his own identity? By that point, I didn't care, as I was instead waiting for the obligatory scene of Mulder coming to the rescue.

Die Hand Die Verletzt:    A great example of how an episode might have a ludicrous premise (a witchcraft-practicing school board, although as a teacher now I'm starting to wonder just how ludicrous it really is) and ridiculous scenes (frogs falling from the sky, a guy swallowed by a snake which instantly leaves behind a skeleton as waste products), and can still be done well and be fun to watch. A substitute biology teacher (Mrs. Paddock) turns up at the school, although she's really an "emissary" from the devil, a kind of satanic enforcer sent to remind the school board in no uncertain terms that they've forgotten how to show the proper respect. Despite its dark subject matter, this one is still a lot of fun.

Fresh Bones:    Taking its plot from headlines concerning American soldiers in Haiti killing themselves, this episode offers a possible explanation - voodoo. The commander of an internment camp for Haitian refugees tries to get voodoo secrets from a shaman who's one of the prisoners and/or to seek personal vengeance for his men who died in Haiti, using decidedly unfriendly tactics (including beatings and murder) to do so. The shaman retaliates by using his own knowledge to cause soldiers at the camp to kill themselves and otherwise create mayhem. A mediocre episode with a mostly unnecessary subplot in which a boy acts as a guide for our agents, and it turns out that this particular boy has been dead for weeks.

Colony:    Here is the beginning of an excellent two-parter that provides more defining moments for the series. The Alien Bounty Hunter makes his first appearance, seeking out and killing abortion doctors who are really clones using properties of fetal tissue to further their own plans for colonization. In an associated plot thread, Mulder finally meets his sister Samantha, who explains that the doctors are her adoptive parents and spins tales of how she was a repeat alien abductee. One defining moment: Mulder shows up at Scully's apartment, and while he's there Mulder calls her on the phone (insert dramatic music here), and this is where part one ends.

End Game:    The Alien Bounty Hunter takes Scully prisoner, demanding that she be exchanged for Samantha. A sniper is put into position to kill the ABH in the only way known - by piercing the base of the neck - and as a result both he and Samantha tumble from the bridge (the site of the exchange) into the water. He isn't recovered, but Samantha's body is, although after Mulder runs off to wallow in his guilt privately it's revealed that the being posing as Samantha wasn't human at all. As it turns out, these colonists knew Mulder's story and used it in trying to get help from him in escaping the ABH. Unfortunately, he accomplishes his mission and gets away. One defining moment: a brutal confrontation between Skinner and X in an elevator as the former goes through "unofficial channels" to discover the whereabouts of Mulder (who's by then in the Arctic). Another defining moment: Mulder finds the submarine in the Arctic that was commandeered by the ABH, and is willing to die to learn what really happened to his sister. The ABH seems to know ("She's alive"), but we don't get any other information. Why doesn't he kill Mulder then? Apparently he already understands how important Mulder is to whatever this project is.

Fearful Symmetry:    Not a bad attempt to find another angle for the alien-related storyline. Animals at a zoo are escaping and going on rampages while invisible (I think). What's making them crazy? There's a distraction involving animal rights activists who believe it's the conditions at the zoo that are doing it, but it turns out that these particular animals have had offspring delivered and taken away from them. By whom? By what? Unless I misunderstood, the offspring have been taken by some alien intelligence to produce some kind of extraterrestrial Noah's Ark. This aspect as well as a gorilla's cryptic signing of the phrase "Man save man" answers no questions while raising several more.

Dod Kalm:    Beyond the gimmick of having a couple of pretty young people aging rapidly, there's not much here. Our agents travel to Norway to check out the phenomenon of a group of young Navy sailors who abandoned their ship and suddenly appear to be of an extremely old age. There's some talk of wormholes and the Philadelphia Experiment to explain the temporal anomolies, but in essense it's all an excuse to put us on a decrepit-looking ship in the ocean and give us some make-up effects.

Humbug:    An exhibition of freaks, weirdos, and Darin Morgan's brilliant debut as a writer for the series. The actual story concerns unexplained murders occurring in a community composed primarily of circus performers and freaks, with the culprit eventually revealed to be an only partially formed Siamese twin who is looking for another brother, but the main targets found in Morgan's writing include a consistent off-center atmosphere and attitude as well as the sly jabs at Mulder's dry personality and dour appearance (which will become a Morgan trademark). This was the first episode to be played mostly for laughs (albeit darkly), and it set a welcome precedent for the occasional departure from the usual mythology and monster episodes.

The Calusari:    Speaking of dark, here's an episode whose tone is set in an opening sequence in which a child is run over by a train. It has something to do with the child's older brother being possessed by his twin who was stillborn. There's something about an ancient Romanian curse and the kid's grandmother who is trying to protect him from it, although she gets - if I understand this correctly - pecked to death by roosters. We get an exorcism scene that is overtly reminiscent of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, but it still works.

F. Emasculata:    "Emasculata"? I dunno... that in itself is a pretty scary name as far as I'm concerned. As far as biological crises crossed with prison dramas go, it's still pretty good. A prison is used, as are many of its unwitting inmates, for research involving a parasitic organism. Since the situation can be passed off as a shipping mistake if anything were to happen (which it does, of course), a pharmaceutical company is the one doing the research at the prison with the tacit cooperation of the government. CSM puts in an appearance and weighs in on the situation, so involvement in this research is apparently yet another aspect of the Syndicate's operations.

Soft Light:    Research into "dark matter" leads to Dr. Chester Banton's accidental development of a fatal shadow. We get a little insight into Scully's recent history after learning that one of her former students at the Academy is now a detective in charge of the case as well as an amusing false lead early on when an accidental victim happens to be an executive with Morley Tobacco (CSM's favored brand). Also, X turns up to collect Banton, meaning that once again the Syndicate is somehow involved, although as time progresses they'll be less interested in such varied projects and more involved with bees, smallpox, and black oil. However, this episode primarily belongs to Tony Shauloub as Banton, who flawlessly creates a tragic character who has the unenviable ability to disintegrate others by only putting his shadow in their direction, and as a result literally watches every step. The sympathy for him is compounded by the final scenes, in which, having become an "unperson", he's getting the "brain suck" he so much feared..

Our Town:    Cannibalism as a means of longevity? Whatever works, I suppose. It's off to Arkansas, to the Chaco Chicken processing plant. The area has a strange record of missing persons, and the latest was a food inspector who was going to recommend shutting down the Chaco plant due to health code violations. It's revealed that occasionally people have been eaten during local ceremonies that Mr. Chaco brought back with him from the South Pacific during World War II. The people who are sacrificed during these rituals are usually beheaded, and it looks like Scully is going to be the next victim when Mulder shows up and saves the day. Finally, it appears that Chaco Chicken will soon be history as dozens of people contract a fatal disease carried by the food inspector, having picked it up from presumably eating him.

Anasazi:    The beginning of another classic story arc - one that will have dire consequences for just about everyone concerned, including the Mulder and Scully families. An earthquake in New Mexico unearths a boxcar filled with non-human corpses, and the Syndicate finds itself in a serious crisis because of this as well as because a hacker known to the Lone Gunmen as "The Thinker" has hacked his way into more of those secret government files. Unfortunately, the files are in the written language of the Navajo, making them useless for all practical purposes. This seriously pisses Mulder off, but he's been very touchy lately, and Scully discovers why when she finds that the water in Mulder's apartment has been contaminated with something that's been causing Mulder's erratic behavior. Mulder's father is about to confess some of his past sins when he's killed by Krycek. Later, Mulder almost kills Krycek, but Scully shoots him in the shoulder before he can, realizing that Mulder would subsequently be framed for his father's murder. They fly off to New Mexico to find out what's been discovered there, but CSM is hot on their heels. Mulder is believed to be trapped in the buried boxcar when CSM orders it blown up, and that's the end of part one.

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