Season 5, Episode 12
Director: Cliff Bole
Writer: Vince Gilligan

It’s good to have Vince Gilligan back on an X-Files script that truly engages him intellectually. His fingerprints are all over “Bad Blood,” an ultimately minor vampire-based entry in the series that, nonetheless, features enough wit and playful banter between Mulder and Scully to recommend it. It won’t shake you to the core, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with an episode that’s simply good enough.

“Bad Blood” beings in a dark forest as a man runs screaming from a seemingly caped assailant, who slowly gains on his prey. When the pursued man trips and falls to the ground, he is immediately staked through the heart by what turns out to be Mulder. When Scully arrives, the victim is dead, and the vampire teeth Mulder considered real were actually cheap plastic replicas. As Mulder says before the cut to the opening credits, “Oh, sh…” Back in Washington, both Mulder and Scully have been called to give their individual accounts of the events to Agent Skinner, and Mulder wants to hear Scully’s interpretation of the events. They roughly align as such. Mulder excitedly reported a rash of blood-letting in Texas, first on several cows and eventually on a human tourist. Scully isn’t thrilled about going to Texas, but her attitude changes when she meets the local Sheriff Hartwell (Luke Wilson). One version has Sheriff Hartwell as a suavely confident Southern gentleman; the other has him as a buck-toothed hayseed yokel.

Mulder tasks Scully with performing the autopsy, much to her chagrin given her immediate attraction to the sheriff. Mulder and the sheriff then run off to a local cemetery to look for the killer, assuming he was a vampire (or someone who believed himself to be a vampire). Scully eventually discovers that the local pizza boy has been lacing pizzas with a knock-out drug and draining the blood of his victims. She arrives in time to save Mulder, who ate a pizza intended for her, but the pizza boy escapes. Scully shoots out his car tires, so he must flee on foot, returning back to the beginning of the episode. In the present day, while awaiting Skinner’s cross-examination, the pizza boy comes to life on the autopsy table and attacks the attending doctor. Skinner instructs Mulder and Scully to return to Texas where Mulder finds the pizza boy sleeping in a coffin and Scully discovers that the sheriff is actually a vampire himself – a nice touch. They wake the next morning unharmed with all of the local vampires gone. The episode ends with Mulder and Scully giving their versions of the story to Skinner, differing mostly on whether or not Sheriff Hartwell had buck teeth.

“Bad Blood” isn’t a great episode by any means, but it’s incredibly fun. Much mileage is made out of the gentle skewering of the characters – something The X-Files has been doing a lot lately. She’s a bit of a shrew. He’s a goofball. You get the picture. The best joke in the episode is Scully’s dismay at having to perform so many seemingly ordinary autopsies, particularly when she has to give up her Magic Fingers time in the seedy hotel. The differing versions of the same story have logical variations in the telling – imagine a horror-themed The Affair, and it makes for the kind of episode that you can only appreciate with lived-in, defined characters who know each other as well as we know them. Kudos to Vince Giligan for bringing out this challenging aspect of the show.

In the end, it was fun watching Luke Wilson give a strong comic performance, bouncing off David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson effectively. Did we get any answers as to who these green-eyed vampires were? Did we find out why there seemed to be a hive of vampires in Texas of all places? Not at all. But, this time, it just doesn’t matter to me. It’s not that kind of episode. “Bad Blood” is a light, breezy, comedy affair that glides by on its considerable charm and flipped-on-its-head storyline.

Season 5, Episode 11
Director: Rob Bowman
Writer: William Gibson, Tom Maddox

Following an episode penned by a horror writer (Stephen King), “Kill Switch” features similarly famous authorship – popularly proclaimed cyberpunk pioneers William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Tom Maddox (Halo). As a result of Chris Carter’s heavy-handed influence, the episodes are able to remain faithful to the overall characters and standard storylines while providing a spin unique to the authors’ sensibilities. Would I call “Kill Switch” a more successful outing than “Chinga?” Not necessarily. “Kill Switch” is cleaner and more efficient, yet it misses something in the end since it lacks a central villain. Sure, “Chinga” lacked a flesh-and-blood villain as well, but the creepy doll is a far better villain than a faceless computer entity.

The episode begins with an elaborate sequence in which a man huddles over a laptop in a deserted diner. In subsequent vignettes, a series of criminals and U.S. Marshals are called and informed that someone – all of them different names – is waiting in the same diner. When the disparate groups come together, a shoot-out ensues, and the man (Donald Gelman, a pre-Bill Gates visionary) with the computer is murdered. Mulder and Scully arrive and take the man’s laptop which contains a mysterious CD. They take the information to the Lone Gunmen, but they are unable to determine what the CD actually does thanks to advanced computing algorithms that they cannot crack. When they search Donald’s email, they uncover the identity of an associate – Invisigoth.

Invisigoth (Kristin Lehman) is tracked to a shipping container, and she attacks Mulder and Scully when they attempt to question her. They apprehend her just before a beam of light shoots from the sky and blows up the container. Invisigoth claims this is Donald’s artificial intelligence creation that he uploaded into the Internet to learn and grow – kind of an evil variation of Her. The rest of the episode involves Invisigoth, Mulder, and Scully trying to find Invisigoth’s former partner and the central location of the artificial intelligence which apparently needed to build itself a central hub to thrive. All roads lead to a seemingly abandoned trailer that just happens to have a T3 connection leading into it. As one does… Inside the trailer, the computer reigns supreme and is able to capture Mulder in a convenient human-trapping device. Thus begins an intriguing sequence in which, as we later discover, the computer simulates a realistic environment for Mulder, convincing him he’d lost both arms and was being cared for by slutty nurses. In the end, Scully and Invisigoth find Mulder and rescue him with Invisigoth managing to upload her thoughts and consciousness into the Internet.

“Kill Switch” is a fine exercise in technological suspense. It feels authentic and within the realm of possibility thanks to Gibson and Maddox’s contributions. But, outside of Mulder’s amusing and intriguing virtual reality sequence, there really isn’t anything that drives suspense in the traditional way. The down side to having realistic computer circumstances is that the audience somewhat gets trapped in all the computer jargon, and the human interactions necessary for suspense simply aren’t there. Plus, with a faceless computer entity who can track you at any given moment as your enemy, what’s the point? To some, this may be scary, but to me, it’s an exercise in futility. I’m not saying a technological entity couldn’t be threatening, but, with all due respect, Gibson and Maddox haven’t really created a foe that threatens. Maybe in their world, it does. But in the flesh and blood world of The X-Files, the drama needs something to focus on, an entity to drive our fears. Chips and lines of code won’t scare us. Not today anyway.

Season 5, Episode 10
Director: Kim Manners
Writer: Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King), Chris Carter

The X-Files‘ “Chinga” has a mostly negative reputation among television critics and those who have evaluated it in the context of the series at large. And I’m not really sure why. Coming off of the dreadful “Schizogeny,” this episode succeeds, in my opinion, on many fronts including the gentle parody of Mulder, the world-weariness and dedication of Scully, and the terrifying child/doll combo at the center of it all. Perhaps some of the episode’s production lore has colored its reception, but who knows? All I can tell you is, you can do a lot worse than “Chinga.”

The episode begins (in Maine, of course) with a nervous mother taking her daughter into a grocery store. Immediately, we’re definitely in Stephen King land as one of his biggest themes – the everyday horror of the family – comes into play. Inside the grocery store, Polly, the daughter, begins to whine about wanting to go home, and the mother sees a gruesome image in a reflection of a man with a knife through his eye. Terrified, the mother tries to leave the store as quickly as possible, but it becomes too late as the doll – Chinga – opens her eyes independently and influences the patrons of the grocery store to nearly scratch their eyes out. The butcher, later revealed to be the mother’s boyfriend, sees Chinga in a reflection, and he is forced to drive a butcher’s knife through his eye, mirroring the image the mother saw in the reflection. On vacation, Scully hears of the commotion and dances between wanting to be involved and wanting an actual vacation. Over the course of the episode, she tries to work with local law enforcement and then retreats into vacation mode. Her sense of duty finally pulls her into the case.

Meanwhile, Polly and her mother barricade themselves inside the house to avoid any further deaths, but many do occur in gruesome style, all accompanied by Polly’s (the doll’s?) favorite record. By the end of the episode, Chinga has grown suspicious of Polly’s mother and attempts to influence her to stab herself in the head with a hammer. Scully and the local sheriff arrive on the scene just as Polly’s mother attempts to burn the house down. Multiple struggles ensue before Scully is finally able to take the doll and nuke her in the microwave. In the end, a fisherman discovers a doll in one of his fishing traps – the same way that Polly’s father found Chinga.

The backstory of “Chinga” details a phone-based relationship between Stephen King and Chris Carter. Stephen King wanted to write a script for the series and did so, but Chris Carter did not approve of how King used Scully and Mulder. He effectively re-wrote a significant portion of the story which, by all accounts, resembled King’s original script only in the most general sense. And perhaps that’s why critics don’t appreciate the episode. To me, regardless of its authorship, it’s an above-average outing that features some effective scares – basically that doll is just creepy as hell. It gets a lot of mileage by that simple fact. I mean, Polly’s father pulled the doll out of the ocean and gave it to his daughter… That is, after he stabbed himself through the mouth with a hook.

Aside from the chills, I really enjoyed the Mulder / Scully banter, particularly in the scene where it is insinuated that Mulder is watching pornography (Mulder is a bit of a perv) when he’s really watching a documentary about killer bees, or something like that. There are a few scenes like this sprinkled through the episode, and the humor works well. Finally, this is another very strong Scully outing, centered by a solid Gillian Anderson performance. The rest of the cast acquits themselves nicely, but Anderson continues to find nuances within the character. This series would not be as half as successful as it is without her presence.

And it’s just the doll. That doll is ridiculously scary. That’s really what I responded to in “Chinga.”

Season 5, Episode 9
Director: Ralph Hemecker
Writer: Jessica Scott, Mike Wollaeger

The very real and serious topic of child abuse is saddled with an unbelievably awful “monster of the week” in the shape of killer trees. Yup, you read that right – killer trees. And not just killer trees, but killer mud too. The homicidal plant life ultimately becomes the extension of a heavily abused girl with significant daddy issues, but what it all amounts to is a bunch of garbage. “Schizogeny” is one of the weakest X-Files episodes I’ve ever seen.

It begins in something emotionally akin to a Beastie Boys video. A stepfather comes home and finds that his stepson never completed a project he was asked to do. Of course, the son is upstairs playing video games and listening to rock music (the nerve), and the stepfather accuses him of never amounting to anything. Outside, Bobby, the young boy played by Chad Lindberg of Ghost Stalkers fame, threatens to hit his stepfather with a shovel but runs into a nearby orchard instead. His stepfather chases him and eventually trips on a branch only to be sucked into the mud below. Bobby’s mother runs on the scene to see what appears to be Bobby trying to pull his stepfather out of the muck without success. For some unexplained reason, Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate the crime which, on the surface, bears no connection to an X-file or to anything resembling federal jurisdiction.

Mulder and Scully meet with Bobby’s therapist, Karin Matthews (Sarah-Jane Redmond). She explains that Bobby was significantly abused by his stepfather and insinuates that, if Bobby did indeed commit a crime, it was completely justified. There are some high school scenes where Bobby is picked on and threatens to kill a classmate (something that would have him arrested immediately today) in front of his crush Lisa (Katharine Isabelle). Lisa’s own father is later ripped from a window and plummets to his death after he yells at her for being Bobby’s friend. After examining the evidence, Mulder begins to wonder if the foliage isn’t responsible for the deaths, and Gillian Anderson manages to pull out one more “What the actual fuck are you talking about?” look from Scully. In the end, after a few more tree-related incidents, the real culprit is revealed to be therapist Karin who has assumed the persona of her father, stashed his body in the cellar, and learned how to control plant life.

Sooooo…..

If you’re looking for a critical appraisal of this psychobabble / horticultural mess known as “Schizogeny,” then you can look elsewhere. I don’t have it in me. What I do have is a heaping mass of contempt for the 45 minutes The X-Files wasted of my evening. So, I’m supposed to believe that Karin’s grief and rage gave her the ability to control plant life? I’m also supposed to believe that she’s secretly lurking around nearby houses waiting for parents to become angry with their kids in order to kill them? I’m also supposed to believe Karin summoned the roots to bring her father’s skeleton into her cellar? For what purpose?

And there’s all that Psycho stuff that just feels completely unnecessary. I’m not even getting to the terrible performances by the teen actors or the trees that seemingly bled real blood or the guy that hulks around the backdrop, wandering through scene after scene, carrying a massive axe that no one questions? It’s all just an awful, horrible mess of an episode.

And, in cases like this, sometimes it’s just best to cut your losses. That’s all I have to say about that.