Episode Reviews

(by original air date)

Season Three

The Blessing Way:    Mulder was able to escape from the boxcar before CSM had it blown up, but he's later discovered in the desert by the Native Americans, and they successfully complete an ancient ritual to bring him back to health. Meanwhile, the DAT tape containing the files stolen by The Thinker is still what everybody is looking for, although Mulder had it all the time. The search for this tape is apparently what it took to allow us to see CSM visibly upset for the first time. We meet the Well-Manicured Man at Bill Mulder's funeral, where he warns Scully that someone she trusts is going to kill her, and later she sees Skinner waiting for her at her apartment. She goes to Mulder's apartment and runs into Skinner there, and when there's a noise outside, they both pull their weapons on each other. End of part two.

Paper Clip:    The person in the hallway outside Mulder's apartment was, of course, Mulder, back from the dead and ready to party. The three of them concoct a plan to give over the DAT tape in exchange for their lives, and Skinner agrees to do the handing over. Unfortunately, he's assaulted in a deserted staircase by three men, one of whom is Krycek, who steals the tape. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully check out a deserted mine which now houses seemingly endless rows of file cabinets. In these cabinets are millions of files, presumably of people that are being tracked by the Syndicate, and there's possibly some kind of involvement with alleged alien abductions associated with this tracking. Mulder finds a file on his sister, but the tag on the file is taped over his own name, leading him to believe that it was he who was originally supposed to be taken rather than Samantha. The tape in their possession, the Syndicate sees no more use for Krycek, so they attempt to have him blown up by a car bomb, but he wises up at the last second and escapes. Finally, when all seems lost for Mulder and Scully (with the tape gone, they have nothing with which to bargain), CSM receives a nasty surprise. Skinner introduces him to Albert Hosteen, one of the Navajos, and explains that they've memorized the contents of the tape according to their ancient tradition, as a result certain stories might be revealed to the public should anything bad happen, and despite the low-tech strategy of this approach, there's nothing CSM could do to stop it. Gaining this precarious balance, our agents are back in business.

D.P.O.:    A dud that gains something on rewatching it. Side effects of lightning research near a small town has apparently given Darren Peter Oswald the ability to control lightning. He kills someone with this ability, our agents show up, he kills a couple more people, and then he's captured and brought in to be himself researched. Although nothing is done with sinister doings related to the lightning research, there's something else going on here. It's almost like a parable about how older generations see Generation X - expecting things they haven't earned and using violence to get them if they aren't given. Also, maybe somebody can explain to me the "Diarrhea" thing at the end.

Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose:    Unquestionably one of the best episodes ever due to several factors, including the first appearance of The Stupendous Yappi, some of the best playing off each other that Mulder and Scully have ever done, and most of all a haunting performance by Peter Boyle as the title character. He's an insurance salesman who can see the future but is frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. When various palm readers and storefront psychics are murdered, Bruckman is brought in on the case as an unwilling consultant. Unfortunately, all his leads are only helpful after the next murder has been committed. Because he's so believable, it's unnerving to see his vision of Mulder's murder in the near future, which I guess means that it was possible after all for him to change future events (since Mulder remembered his warning and used it, although Scully still had to come to his rescue).

The List:    Just plain bad. A guy is set to go to the electric chair, but before he goes he comes up with a list of five people upon whom he's going to rain his vengeance after his death. A couple of the people on this unseen list are killed in particularly gruesome ways, and the warden (J. T. Walsh, and lordy but don't we miss him) pulls out all the stops as well as all the revisionist prison movie cliches to try to defend himself from falling victim to this mysterious list. All things considered, despite an electrocution, a head in a bucket, a bunch of maggots, and a car crash, it's still pretty boring.

2SHY:    Another wink/jab at philes on the internet (as in the case of a typical Gunmen activity revealed during One Breath), as a guy who needs to suck the fat out of people in order to keep a decent color to his skin uses chat rooms to lure his victims. All in all, it's pretty bad, although there's a scene near the end when a blind girl finds herself in this person's apartment that produces a few of our own skin crawlies.

The Walk:    A quadruple-amputee is able to astrally project himself (I assume) in order to wreak vengeance on those he blames for his condition by killing their family members but making all efforts to keep those same men themselves from killing themselves afterwards. It's almost though-provoking as far as posing the question: how much do those military commanders who send their men into battle really feel for those anonymous men when their primary goal is to achieve some tactical objective. Surely they'd give more thought to how important it was to rush into a battle if it were their own family members who were on the point.

Oubliette:    A partially haunting story about a girl who was abducted years ago by a fiend, and now that he's gotten another girl, she's developed some kind of spiritual connection with the new victim. The old victim has had a relatively hard life since the time of her abduction, and although it colors how she feels about whether she should make any attempt to help in the present case, her conscience gets the better of her in the form of the visions and feelings she gets from the new victim. Although the reasons for what happens at the end are debatable, I think it was her choice to be taken in place of the new victim because of her subjective perception of the value of her own life, which she saw as not worth much of anything, and becomes the final tragic element of the story.

Nisei:    After a lengthy drought, we're back to the mythology, with the revelation that although it's now commonly known that Nazi scientists were given refuge after World War II to continue their sometimes vile work, Japanese scientists who were at least as bad were given the same protection. Just about everything in this two-parter centers on a train that travels the countryside. What goes on inside it? During the teaser we see the ominous arrival of some Japanese scientists, some kind of autopsy-like activity going on within one of the cars, and an attack by an unnamed paramilitary unit that leaves the scientists dead and the body (which appears to be the typical gray-type alien) taken away by the soldiers. As a goof on the Fox network's Alien Autopsy specials, our agents find themselves watching this activity on a purchased videotape. The video's producer is found dead, the Japanese suspect has diplomatic immunity, and thus begins the labyrinthine plot that involves the sleuthing abilities of the Lone Gunmen and Scully's disappearance a year earlier that leads to Mulder jumping from a bridge and onto the top of this train. It's here that the continuing plot thread that will climax with Scully's cancer crisis more than a year later begins in earnest as she comes into contact with a Mutual UFO Network group composed of alleged fellow abductees who remember her from their own experiences. Despite the overall plot and the halfway revelations, my favorite part of the episode is Scully, remembering pieces of her own abduction experiences while listening to the MUFON girls describe the same thing, and her struggle with her rational nature to reconcile what she's hearing and what she thinks she might remember with what she's believed all this time.

731:    Opening this conclusion of the two-parter is quite a horrific scene: a research complex ostensibly for the treatment of leporsy in West Virginia is overrun by some type of military-esque troops, who proceed to line up the alien-appearing residents and gun them down - a scene that chillingly recalls what we've heard about similar mass executions in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The Syndicate, brutally covering its tracks. Meanwhile, Mulder jumps onto the passing train and tries to find out just what's going on with what he believes to be the non-human being he saw herded aboard. Thanks to Agent Pendrell's efforts, Scully locates the facility in West Virginia, goes there, and finds the few survivors who were able to hide from the roundup earlier. As it turns out, the ones hiding are the real lepers, and the ones who were executed appear to be the human-alien hybrids we've heard so much about. Back on the railroad car, Mulder finds the Japanese doctor murdered, makes his way to the "special car", sees one of the surviving hybrids sealed off in one of the compartments, and finds himself in a standoff with the doctor's assassin inside a railroad car that's wired to explode sometime soon. Back in West Virginia, Scully meets The Fat Man, who explains a little about what's really been going on there. The doctor had been carrying on his own experiments on innocent test subjects, beyond the view of even the Syndicate, and even Scully believes that this explains her own disappearance, although the idea of human-alien hybrids don't figure into her ideas at all - it's an evil but strictly earth-bound explanation as far as she's concerned. Once again, this is my favorite part of the episode. Scully, despite what she saw in the mass grave, can easily convince herself that there's a perfectly logical explanation for everything that occurs strictly within the science she already understands, although to her credit (and the Syndicate's), it's a pretty good explanation, although we know it's not the whole story.

Revelations:    Although the rest of this story about a stigmatic child who is being pursued by one man while another (more scary-looking) man shows up to act as his selfless protector isn't bad, my favorite part is still the teaser, with Marine Corps drill instructor-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey as a small-time fundamentalist preacher with fraudulent claims of his own bleeding hands. He brings a phony piousness and greedy attitude to the role that, short lived as it is, provides an excellent counterpoint to the more forthright child who's the real prize for this particular apocalyptic nutcase.

War of the Coprophages:    This is another of the occasional (and mostly welcome) comedic departures from the usual business of the show. Much of the give and take we're used to seeing between Mulder and Scully is viciously parodied, as in how Mulder's insisting that each victim has been killed in some unknown way by killer cockroaches crumbles each time he brings it up when Scully is able to come up with a more mundane medical reason for each person's demise. The amusing spirit of the episode is enhanced when it turns out that she was correct in each case, and her long distance diagnosis came while cooking dinner and washing the dog. Mulder's interaction with Dr. Bambi provides more humor, first in his hanging up on Scully when Bambi appears, then when he's in rapt attention as she lectures on the beauty of insects (only to confess to Scully later that he's terrified of bugs), and in his "grabbing" motion toward Bambi to emphasize his point. The episode turns to broad but still sharp comedy in its scenes of a town in chaos, with Scully hearing one wild story after another of what the cockroaches are doing, a sailor grabbing chocolate and panty hose, a duel to the death over the last can of bug spray ("Die! Bug! Die!"), and the instant clearing of the panicked citizens from the store by the horrific sight of chocolate candy rolling on the floor. This is the second funniest episode of the entire series, after Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'.

Syzygy:    Another amusing episode, but this one's laughs come not from the situation itself but from our agents' behavior within it. Scully doesn't smoke and Mulder typically doesn't drink while on a case, and he certainly doesn't mess around with local collaberating female detectives, yet they both find themselves doing the above actions, and it's because of some confluence of the planets (or something like that - I don't remember what the local astrologer described it as after she checked Mulder's credit). Is there also something below the surface here about what any teenaged girl would do with unlimited power? Nah, I guess not (for the politically correct among you).

Grotesque:    From my point of view, the most absolute worst episode yet (and I figure none other in the future could sink to such depths). A veteran FBI agent (the usually indespensible Kurtwood Smith), one of Mulder's former superiors, is hot on the trail of a murderer who has a thing for gargoyle sculptures. It's by the numbers for most of the episode, and if they'd left it like that, it would only have been a terrible episode. However, the revelation of who the real killer is and the lamebrained excuse for an explanation of why he did it causes this one to sink to an abyssmal level.

Piper Maru:   Another mythology two-parter, and this one first introduces us to the infamous black oil that will become a pivotal story thread thereafter, although it seems that even the writers had no clear idea of what the black oil really was at the time. It gets brought up from the floor of the Pacific by a salvage crew, and from there it jumps from one person to another a couple of times. While possessing a body, it has the ability to produce some kind of radioactive emissions that are soon fatal to anyone nearby, although the person possessed seems to suffer no ill effects after the oil leaves other than being covered by some kind of residue that wipes off.  On the personal front, Scully is having a hard time dealing with the fact that the investigation into her sister Melissa's unsolved murder has been made inactive. Krycek turns up again, and it's revealed that he's been selling national secrets in a partnership with the owner of the salvage company. Mulder grabs him at the Hong Kong airport and takes him back home, but not before the black oil jumps into him, and back home Skinner is shot by the same guy who killed Melissa, although I really wonder if it was supposed to be fatal because the shot was to the stomach rather than the head (or maybe this would-be assassin's work ethic leaves a lot to be desired).

Apochrypha:    A rousing conclusion finds the possessed Krycek escaping from Mulder and confronting CSM, ready to make a bargain with him. Scully is riding in the ambulance with Skinner during a transfer to another hospital, and during the trip the assassin shows up to try and finish the job. Scully gets the better of him, and when he realizes he's caught, he's ready to spill his guts instantly and give up Krycek. Unfortunately, Krycek is not himself at the moment, and apparently whatever it is in the black oil that's driving Krycek's body wants to get back to whatever it is that it knows as home - a recovered UFO hidden in an abandoned missile complex in North Dakota. Meanwhile, the Lone Gunmen get in on the act, ice skating and scoping the area before opening a locker which Mulder believes contains the digital tape he wanted from Krycek. There's no tape there, but he does find Well Manicured Man's phone number instead. While meeting with WMM, Mulder realizes that this guy doesn't know where Krycek is, either, although he learns of the above mentioned missile complex. Mulder and Scully show up there, but someone's already arrived, as proven by the soldiers dead and dying of radiation burns within the complex. Krycek is locked into the silo containing the spacecraft, and the black oil leaves his body and returns home. This episode contains my favorite closing scenes, with Krycek's fitting but still horrific fate contrasting with Scully, standing at her sister's grave, hearing that her suspected murderer has "killed himself in his cell", and sadly realizing that she might never find justice for Melissa..

Pusher:    An intriguing premise is partially brought to fruition, with our agents on the trail of someone who can "push" people mentally into doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do. Prisoner Robert Modell is being transferred but escapes after pushing his car's driver into deliberately crashing. Another policeman is pushed into dousing himself with gasoline and setting himself on fire. The detective in charge of the case is talked into having a heart attack over the phone, so we learn that this ability is based on the guy's voice modulation and simple suggestion rather than any kind of psychic ability. The centerpiece of the episode, though, is what happens when when Mulder falls under his control and Scully follows in an attempt to resolve the situation. For neither the first nor the last time, one of our agents is pointing a weapon at the other. Although Modell ends up in a coma, he returns two years later in Kitsunegari.

Teso Dos Bichos:   I'm sure there was some kind of intended message here regarding the conflicts between archaeology's search for facts about the past and what defines proper respect for the former inhabitants of those sites, but it gets lost here. Instead  we're left to endure a substandard monster-in-the-dark plot in which, as near as I can figure, some spirit which protects the ancient city unearthed at the dig site is carried back to the museum which is the destination for the artifacts, and it leaps into dogs, rats, and even a pack of killer kitty cats in a finally successful effort to bring the objects back to their home.

Hell Money:    This is among the most reviled episodes, and with good reason. It has something to do with Chinese immigrants, a detective who is somehow mixed up in the case, and the black market organ trade. One of these Chinatown resident families has a daughter who's desperately in need of some kind of organ transplant, and it's this plot element that partially drives this episode. When it's all said and done, however, the daughter doesn't get her kidney (or whatever it was) from her father's participation in this huge event that seems to cause so much excitement among the spectators. Afterwards, she's put on an organ recipient waiting list, which begs the question, if this is the solution, then why didn't they do that with her in the first place? The only answer is that if they don't get involved with these festivities, then there's no episode. We can only wish.

Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space':    This is among the best and most memorable episodes of the series, and certainly the funniest. Charles Nelson Reilly plays a respected literary writer who intends to write a "non-fiction science fiction" novel and who listens to Scully's tale of a most unusual case. The episode is many things: in part an homage to Kurosawa's Rashomon in which everybody saw the same events, but each person tells it differently, and it's through this device that the unforced comedy emerges. The funny (sometimes uproarious) elements include the references (sometimes overt, sometimes almost subliminal) to prominent UFO investigators and skeptics, Close Encounters, and how a person on the outside of an investigation might interpret Mulder's personality and motivations (Chung calls him "a ticking time bomb of insanity").

Avatar:   Skinner is finally given an episode in which he's the focal point, and it's generally successful, although as a mythology episode it still feels almost like it's marking time until the real business starts back up again. Now that the Syndicate (at least I think that's who it is) knows that Skinner is on the side of our agents, they decide to discredit him by framing him for the murder of a prostitute. Skinner spending time with a hooker? I'd have thought he wouldn't be the type, although the plot makes efforts to show that he didn't know what she was. Why not just try to kill him again, as was attempted by the inept Luis Cardinale in Piper Maru earlier? The Syndicate apparently feels that another attempt would be too obvious, and besides, sometimes it's more convenient to have a shamed adversary than a dead one when the goal is the manipulation of public perception (again, efforts are made to convince us of this). We learn that Skinner's marriage might be headed for a divorce, when the real shocker is that he's married. Why did it take us this long to learn this?

Quagmire:   Ostensibly about an alleged Nessie-type monster in a Georgia lake, this episode is really about Mulder and Scully - their working and personal relationship deepening and how each of their diametrically opposed points of view are advantageous to have on the same case. Although there might be a lake monster in the neighborhood, the centerpiece of this hour is a conversation on a rock in the lake after their rented boat is sunk. Lines from Moby Dick are invoked, and the not unobvious comparison between Mulder and Captain Ahab is made. Although the monster turns out to be not what we were led to believe, I could have done without the "punch line" shot in the final scene. By no means does it ruin anything in the episode, but for once I still would have liked to have seen Scully entirely correct and Mulder completely wrong all along.

Wetwired:    Here we have a return to an area similar to what was explored in Blood during Season Two, but this episode is far superior to that effort. Issues of trust between Mulder and Scully are addressed, but it's good that this time it's the rational Scully who begins to find herself paranoid and distrustful of her partner. A community's cable TV system is being used to experiment with subliminal suggestion, and several murders among the experimental subjects result. During the investigation, Mulder discovers this while Scully unknowingly begins to fall victim to it, at one point even believing she sees Mulder conferring with CSM. She believes he's betrayed her, and when he finally finds her hiding at her mother's house, the manufactured distrust is such that she even points her weapon at him with the full intention of firing.

Talitha Cumi:   The conclusion of Season Three sees the return of the Alien Bounty Hunter and references to the recent past of the Mulder family hinting that it might not have just been Mulder's father who had a long association with CSM. The immediate aftermath of a shootout in a restaurant reveals the existence of a new type of being that has ABH-type shapeshifting powers as well as the ability to instantly heal humans of even fatal wounds. The one who turns up in the restaurant is named Jeremiah Smith, and unlike the others like him who have internal positions with the Social Security Administration (using those positions to keep track of everyone for the Syndicate, we're led to believe), he's using his powers for random acts of goodwill, making him a renegade. He finds Mulder and wants to explain what he knows about "The Project", but Mulder wants to use him to help his mother, who's just had a stroke. Unbeknownst to Mulder at the time, this stroke was brought on in the aftermath of a confrontation between his mother and CSM. Jeremiah Smith wants to take Mulder to Canada to actually show him what's going on, but the ABH shows up, and apparently he's intent on eliminating this troublemaker. Before we see what happens in this final confrontation, we see that Season Three has ended. To be continued.

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