7ABX09 - Signs and Wonders [REVISITED]

Summary

What can I say — I really hated this one. Scheduling-wise, it really caught me at a bad time, as I am at the point of overdosing on religion-based eps right now. As someone has already said, why has The X-Files turned into Millennium? This one pushed all the wrong buttons so badly that it made me question whether I should go back and downscale my rating for the Millennium episode! I can't believe that an episode as strong as The Goldberg Variation managed to find its way out of Jeffrey Bell if this is the stuff that he's following up with... this one was just plain irritating. It brought to mind Die Hand Die Verletzt and I can't say that I was a fan of that one either. Let's just say that there are episodes where, twenty minutes in, I know I'm going to be in for a memorable ride and there are those — albeit few, Travelers comes to mind — where twenty minutes in, I feel like turning off my VCR. I disliked this so badly that I won't even bother going into all the reasons why. I know, I know, real reviewers can't get away with simply saying that they hated it "because" but no one's paying me to do this, so... ;-)

Not digging Mulder's new "style"

Oh, it's the "proud and fancy-free" episode where Mulder looks like he lost his luggage on the way to Blessing, Tennessee. (I briefly wondered if the costume guys wanted to mess with the online fans by dressing Mulder like a dork... or maybe they were just repaying DD for a practical joke that he played on them.) That said — and I didn't read my original comments above before re-watching this one — I didn't seem to hate it with the same passion as before. I went in recalling that it was a "religious" episode, but I kept an open mind. At the end of the hour, having had some curve balls thrown at me (since this was only the second time I have seen this one), it occurred to me that TXF has not often treated religion with any great respect.

I suppose it's the nature of the program; after all, we are talking about weird and unnatural stuff on the X-Files. And in that context, we have seen the nutbags, psychotics, and lunatics acting out the word of God many, many times on this show. In this case, the creators manage to convince the audience for the better part of the hour that those who appear moderate and modern in their approach to religion are the way to go... until we learn at the eleventh hour that they can be even more dangerous than the out and out extremists. Wow. That is sort of disturbing, isn't it? Even more disturbing than those truly disturbing scenes of Reverend O'Connor "preaching" to his congregation.

I do want to try to explain my original commentary for this episode. S7 was largely anticipated to be the end of the series given David Duchovny's announcement that he did not want to renew his contract beyond that time. Each hour of that season leading up to the end was — in my mind as a fan, anyway — a chance to prove how great a show TXF could be as it wound down. Each episode that did not achieve even "average greatness" started to grate on me and that's why my original assessment of this was so poor. Funny enough, however, when I read that I thought I should go back and downscale my rating for Millennium... what do you know? I did do that this time!

And this one will get a single uptick. Apart from all the snakes, it's still a far cry from being a memorable TXF episode. It's a "bad guy turns out to be not bad guy" plot, but I'm not wholly convinced that "not bad guy" is totally righteous, either. God wants you to put your money where your mouth is, indeed.

Best or Worst Moment

Best moment? Mulder lying in his hospital bed proclaiming himself to be "proud and fancy-free". (At least he was out of his silly looking clothes.) There. That's all I want to say about this episode.

Original Rating: *
Revised Rating: * *