Summary
The more I watch this one, the less I like it. On first viewing, I found the unease between M&S quite alarming after their "love-in" during the movie (although truth be told, I found their bantering in the movie quite strange after the tension at the end of Season 5, so I guess there's precedent). Spender and Fowley still don't seem to be serving any purpose other than annoying us all to hell and the Bureau's sad treatment of M&S's work to date is frustrating to watch. Got the impression that by giving us more evidence, the creators had to take us several steps back on other fronts.
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| The ugly lizard sheds its skin to become a vulnerable "grey" |
Next: Sandy (TXF's casting director making a guest star turn) bites the Arizona dust after "accidentally injecting himself while working on the virus". Har! His buddies did not seem too concerned that he really was looking rather nasty for just needing a bathroom break when they dropped him off. One of them pays the price the next morning when BabyLizardAlien has his first fresh meal before taking off through the suburbs of Phoenix.
Okay, really?
When I re-watched Pine Bluff Variant, I turned on John Shiban's commentary track and in it, he talks at least twice about how CC stresses "keeping it real" to promote believability. Well, WTF happened here? BabyLizardAlien — and we know he's not small and he's definitely mean — manages to roam 60 miles eastward, ending up inside the Rolling Hills Nuclear Power Plant. (Where someone arguably worse than Homer Simpson is taking care of the safety detail. Mind you, I can't blame him for falling asleep. I have absolutely no idea what sort of lighting would be normal inside a safety engineer's workspace at a nuclear power plant, but the "photo darkroom lighting" that they have here more than entices someone to fall asleep!) It is beyond my suspension of disbelief abilities to buy that "this thing" was able to navigate himself to this location unnoticed! Did he also have his own access card to get inside the facility once he got there?
Next: Mulder embarrasses himself in front of a hearing yet again. Having to explain that a shadow conspiracy within our own government is "growing corn in the middle of the desert which features pollen which was genetically altered to hold a virus which will be taken away by bees whose sting transmits the virus, causing the growth of an extraterrestrial biological entity inside the human host" is absolutely worthy of a clown suit. (Note to TXF creators: you guys were the ones who made this up. I can confirm that it sounds pretty much as silly to us viewers as it does to Wendie Malick.)
Next: Spender is such a dweeb. What a poor, sad excuse for a character, never mind an FBI agent. He seems to exist only to "get" Mulder, and for what reason? Because he thinks his mother is missing because of him? He's carrying more grudges for Mulder than CSM and the Conspiracy times ten! At least Fowley shows a little depth in that you really don't quite know where her loyalties lie.
Next: For a guy with thought reading abilities, Gibson is too easy to abduct. He knew that guy was coming to take him from his hospital bed... couldn't he have made a bit of a ruckus so as to alert someone? And why are hospital staff on TXF so zombie-like as to stand around going "duh" when people have important questions on the whereabouts of patients?? (And when Mulder later sees Gibson trapped inside that room, he must have been thinking, "What the hell, Scully? I thought you were taking care of him!")
Next: Right back to square one. All right, in The End, didn't Mulder say stuff about dormant, "turned off" genes and alien astronauts? So why did he seem so surprised when Scully gave him this exact same information at the end of the hour? And really, unless one actually subscribes to the theory that "God" made man on one of his great creation days, on a scientific level, it's not that big a deal to think that we could have evolved from some form of "alien deposit" millennia ago. It's just whether or not you think that those origins come with plans to re-colonize at some later date with Armageddon-like results.
Oh, and the transformed little dude at the end will probably be "offed" by CSM at some point, right?
Picayune Peculiarities
As if this whole episode didn't qualify as one huge nitpick...
Back to that part about Gibson showing up at the power plant. Mulder and Fowley must have been there for a long, long, long time... undetected. Just think about it, Gibson is taken by Scully to the hospital at the same time as Mulder and Fowley leave for the power plant. At the hospital, he is admitted and some preliminary tests are done on him and results have actually been made available to Scully before he is snatched away. (Mulder has found BabyLizardAlien's "coat" by the time he is on the phone with Scully talking about those findings.) In virtually the next scene, Gibson is right there at the power plant. Very bad security at that place, that's all I can say.
I guess the FBI's technical wizardry has its limits. Up against the great software that we've seen over the years, we now have Mulder trying to piece together and scan physical sheets of paper to restore his files.
I know Mulder has been accused of being insensitive to Scully in this episode (I guess the "I can't accept that" comment was a bit rough). But holy man, Scully saying "What I saw was very little" re: her Antarctic adventure? Well, lady, if you hadn't been busy making quips about "I had you big time", maybe you could have paid a little more attention to the loud squawking of aliens coming alive all around you and chasing you through the vents of their spaceship! [Yes, I know, it's not Scully's fault. It's Chris Carter's fault for making her so silly and obstinate. Brings to mind Jessica Rabbit saying, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."]
Best or Worst Moment
I'm going to go with worst moment here: the "Scully takes Mulder's hand and repeats the whole person quote back to him" moment. The camera zooming in on their hands was clumsy enough, but it was made worse by the fact that it led viewers to think that the two had not discussed any of "that stuff" in the days, weeks, or months before.
And here is the best moment: when Gibson says to Scully, "You already know. You just don't want to believe it." I'll bet Gibson then heard Mulder's unvoiced thought: "Woo hoo!"
Original Rating: * *
Revised Rating: * *
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