Season 8, Episode 10
Director: Tony Wharmby
Writer: John Shiban
The X-Files‘ ‘Badlaa’ is the first outright stinker of an episode within Season Eight. It’s not badly written (in terms of dialogue) or particularly badly made. By this point, the creative team knows how to film and score an episode, so we’re never really faced with unprofessionalism here. Instead, the episode unwisely focuses on a foreign “monster of the week” that unscores the entire episode with an unecessary air of xenophobia – fear of the foreign born. Additionally, the monster’s powers are seemingly endless and all-encompassing in an illogical and unexplained way. The final result is an incredibly weak and really ill-advised outing that immediately sinks to the bottom of the pile.
The episode begins with a very rotund man return to the U.S. from a business trip to India. While in the airport, he encounters a paraplegic beggar (Deep Roy) who persistently follows him through the airport, eventually ending up in the bathroom. The man is then pulled down on the floor of the bathroom, screaming as one would in an airport bathroom. He next appears in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., where he silently sits on the edge of his hotel bed and bleeds to death. Naturally, the majority of the episode is spent with Scully and Doggett investigating this and similar subsequent crimes as the beggar makes his way through suburban D.C. Scully eventually performs an autopsy where the beggar has inserted himself into the stomach of a victim and is effectively reborn, using some mind control abilities to hide himself from Scully. The episode eventually finishes with two children, somehow able to see the man in his true state where others cannot, convincing Scully to shoot what she thinks is a white teenager. She kills the beggar, but the episode finishes back in India with the same beggar seemingly targeting another victim.
There are so many things wrong with “Badlaa,” an appropriately named episode, that I literally don’t know where to start. First, the seemingly endless powers of the beggar, a sort of Indian shaman, are completely ridiculous. He travels into the United States and around the country in the anal cavity of his victims who he can apparently control like a ventriloquist’s doll. Then, he has the ability to cloud the vision of those who see him so that they imagine either someone else entirely or see nothing at all. This ability can apparently persist when he’s not even in the general vacinity as he was able to create the illusion of another man who is arrested, questioned, and discovered to be a hologram of sorts. None of this makes even the slightest bit of sense and falls totally outside of the realm of possibilities even for an X-Files monster. This is more than a slight suspension of disbelief – this is a “throw out the book and just go with it” approach. It did not work for me at all. Plus, how the hell did the beggar go back to India after being supposedly shot to death in D.C.? You say it’s not the same man perhaps? Oh right, all brown people look alike… (groan)
That brings me to my second major objection to the episode: its practice that all white people must fear the foreign brown person. Not just an Indian but one who is covered in shit and blood for half the episode. One who isn’t even granted a single line of dialogue. Even Scully, in the end of the episode, mourns the threat of potentially shooting a white boy when she was aboslutely fine with killing the Indian beggar. This episode is shockingly insensitive to the cultural differences between Americans and Indians, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch and inexcusable to absorb. I mean, the guy rides in the anal cavity of his victims. How low can you go?
If you’re looking to watch an X-Files for Christmas, then skip this garbage and watch the inspired Christmas outing from a few seasons back called “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.” It’s so superior to “Badlaa” that it doesn’t even appear to have come from the same television series. “Badlaa” is just shit.
