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The X-Files: The Host

Case: Sailors and sewage workers are being attacked by a mysterious Thing which may or may not be a giant blood-sucking worm.

Destination: Newark, New Jersey

Mulder and Scully are still working for separate departments, but Scully decides to help Mulder with his latest case in an attempt to reinvigorate his interest in his job, which is distinctly on the wane.

My first X-Files review and I'm faced with a tricky issue - an episode well liked and widely praised that, I'm afraid, has never really done that much for me. It's certainly not a bad episode - there's nothing actually wrong with it. I've just never been that bowled over by it.

Largely, I think this is because this episode plods through the motions a bit without offering anything really special. There's some body horror, given the nature of the episode, but not much. There are some cute Mulder/Scully interactions, but nothing out of the ordinary. The Jaws moment when one man falls into the sewer is telegraphed a mile off, which rather drains it of tension. Having said that, the prosthetics on the Flukeman are great, and Mulder gets wet, which is always a bonus in my book.

The main job this episode needs to do is introduce Mulder's new contact, following the death of Deep Throat at the conclusion of the first series. Our as-yet-unnamed source is desperate to get the X-Files re-opened, so he helps Mulder and Scully to solve the case of the mysterious sewer deaths, demonstrating the usefulness of a department that specialises in the weird and wonderful. Skinner turns out to be of a similar opinion - after appearing largely as an antagonist in the first season, this is where we start to see that deep down, Skinner is on our guys' side.

Meanwhile, Mulder is still threatening to leave the FBI, and Scully is determined to keep him. We know Mulder's really depressed when he leaps to the obvious, mundane conclusion that the first body was dumped by drug kingpins or some such. Scully's insistence that if there's a dead body, there's something interesting to be found, is ghoulishly cute.

There are some nice touches in this episode, like the tiny bit of humour and personality allowed to the Russian sailors before they inevitably cop it. But overall, there are a few too many scenes of sewage tanks driving around for my taste, and not enough fresh character material.

Other Thoughts

On Mulder, Scully and shipping - I'm trying to remember how I felt about this when watching as an impressionable teenage girl in the 1990s! I think basically I liked them together, I wanted them to be together at the end, but I didn't necessarily want them to be together during the show. I loved that they were the most important people in each other's lives. I think that is the thing many of us really want out of a relationship (says the old maid in her 30s). We want to be the most important thing in the world to someone - and as long as that was true, I didn't necessarily need them to be doing the nasty, though I did want to imagine them going off into the sunset together when the show was over. Basically, I'm a Mulder/Scully shipper who wants to drag out the UST as long as possible. And I was totally in love with Mulder. His picture was plastered all over my Friends pencil case.

The Flukeman was played by one of the great X-Files writers, Darin Morgan.

The closure of the X-Files is a help in the tricky issue of needing to hide Gillian Anderson's pregnancy, as she can plausibly spend most of her scenes sitting at a desk or behind an autopsy table, wearing a lab cost or one of those glorious huge trenchcoats that were all the rage in the early 90s and that I coveted so badly. It's not that you can't tell, exactly, but it's hidden enough to suspend disbelief. I've seen worse.

Over the course of The X-Files, Mulder and Scully travel the length and breadth of Vancouver-pretending-to-be-America (and later LA-pretending-to-be-other-parts-of-America). Sad to say I have seen hardly any of America, so I was quite excited that this episode took place in one of the two places I've actually been to - I landed at Newark airport for my trip to NYC!

I also liked the little bit of location filming in DC, which reminded me I need to get back to The West Wing...

Quotes

Mulder: They don't want us working together Scully, and right now that's the only reason I can think of to stay.

Mulder: I didn't want to tell Skinner that his main suspect is a giant blood-sucking worm.
Followed by:
Mulder: It looks like I'm gonna have to tell Skinner that his suspect is a giant blood-sucking worm after all.

Skinner: We all take our orders from someone, Agent Mulder.

Scully: Mulder, nature didn't make this thing. We did.

Scully (to Mulder): I hope you know that I'd consider it more than a professional loss if you decided to leave.

Final Analysis: Some sweet moments, and it moves the season's story arc along, but I just can't get that excited about this episode. Two out of four giant blood-sucking worms.

Juliette Harrisson is a freelance writer, classicist and ancient historian who blogs about Greek and Roman Things in Stuff at Pop Classics.

4 comments:

  1. Congrats on your first XF review, Juliette! It's so fun to have different perspectives (and the help covering the show really rocks, too). I'm sorry this episode doesn't do anything for you.

    Strangely enough --- because I'm not usually a "gross bits" person --- I really love the grossness of this episode. The flukeman is so horrendously gross, and between the toothpaste thing, then the shower thing, and also the port-a-potty thing, there's just a lot of really memorable gross stuff going on in this episode. My favorite part, though, is Mulder's gloriously unfazed reaction at seeing that freaky ass thing for the first time. It's too, too funny. Scully looked more freaked by the small version in the corpse!

    I really want to know what happened to Ray, the guy from the sewage treatment facility. Did he get bit after getting dragged under the water with Mulder? Does that mean he's going to die, too? If so, that sucks, because I enjoyed Ray. He seemed to like his job, even though he was in charge of sewage in New Jersey.

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  2. Thanks Jess! I must admit gross stuff doesn't really do it for me, which may be why I'm not so struck on this one - but on re-watching, I actually found there was less gross stuff than I was expecting. That might be to do with the things I've watched since, like True Blood...

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  3. This is not one of my favorites, either, but I do like the small character beats.

    I remember the first time through being shocked that Skinner was actually backing our duo. He had played it so cool and so distant that the reveal that he, too, believed this was an X-File made me sit up and take notice.

    Great review, Juliette.

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  4. Skinner interests me now, after finding him incredibly annoying in the past. But the main thing is it's really cool to finally see what that image of the Flukeworm man is from lol, always saw it everywhere. Parasitic stuff is cool to me, and this one made me think of the Regenerators from the Resident Evil 4 videogame, except for the fact that the poor thing looks like its teeth were pulled out and there's something more disgusting than scary about the sight of its face. Oddly pitiable, it sorta makes me think of that skin condition there... harlequin baby syndrome or whatever it is, I don't want to look it up because the pictures scare me.

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