X FILES season three 1 to 9

 THE X FILES: SEASON THREE ep 1 to 9

1             "The Blessing Way"‡  R. W. Goodwin              Chris Carter    September 22, 1995 3X01    19.94[18]

The Cigarette Smoking Man works quickly to recover the stolen computer files, but finds himself thwarted by a man who he hoped was dead. Meanwhile, Scully finds herself at a loss for her next step and turns to her family for support, since Mulder is otherwise engaged fighting for survival.

 

Scully’s an idiot. She never believed that she was making a huge mistake going with Skinner, thinking he was sent to kill her and she went with him to stop him BEFORE warning her sister NOT to go to her apartment. So she never intercepts her sister while she goes with Skinner, thinking HE is going to be her killer. In the meantime, her sister goes to Scully’s apartment and is shot and killed…by Luis Cardinal and Alex Krycek…Krycek having been let go before by HER! What a dope. Her sister died because of her. She immediately should have told her sister to stay away from her and her apartment. To be fair, Skinner was so completely vague about EVERYTHING, he could have been sent to kill her. He was loyal but sort of working for the CSM. The Well Manicured Man appears here and while he’s more police, less grim, less menacing than the CSM AND Skinner himself, for some reason, he creeps me out more. He IS less of a threat and more of a warner who seems to want Scully (and Mulder?) to live and has some sort of morality about him. But does he? He feels more of a menace just by NOT being one!

 

Melissa’s death is one of the saddest things in the X FILES. I also wondered if we could trust the hypno therapist Melissa sent Dana to. I also was not completely trusting Mulder’s mom! LOVE the American Native parts! Love that we see Deep Throat again but why didn’t Mulder’s father’s ghost tell him EVERYTHING? Sigh. Truth is the writers didn’t know it all at that point? Maybe?

 

 

 

 

51          2             "Paper Clip"‡  Rob Bowman Chris Carter    September 29, 1995 3X02    17.20[18]

Mulder and Scully search for answers regarding the old photograph with his father and other unnamed men. Their search takes them to the abandoned Strughold Mining Facility where they uncover a dangerous secret.

 

Really riveting. Of course, we know Scully and Mulder will not be killed but everyone else is fair game and that makes this intriguing and dangerous. It’s sad that Scully’s sister dies after a sort of promising but guarded report from doctors. I did not know how the agents on the run would get out of this and this episode cements Skinner as a goodie and on their side. It’s also odd Scully never mentioned the little alien beings she saw in the mining facility.

 

It's also nice to see the CSM sweating it out. Still not sure about the Well Manicured Man. Who are the others? The Fat Man? The secretary who answers phones? The Cigar Smoking Man? We also get a bit of a reveal here but it is sort of a dead end…for now.

 

 

52          3             "D.P.O."               Kim Manners  Howard Gordon            October 6, 1995           3X03    15.57[18]

Mulder is skeptical over a coroner's report regarding the fifth person to be struck by lightning in a small Oklahoma town. Their investigation into the latest death seems to point to the only person to have survived a lightning strike, an emotionally charged youth.

 

Not impressed by Jack Black, ever. But he’s okay here I guess. This is the Beavis and Butthead episode? Only they’re evil? On the other hand, he has a rather small victim part to play where as Giovanni Ribisi is fantastic as DPO, the kid with the lightning power. It’s amazing as he makes him spectacularly super heroic as a low class, evil unredeeming dummy. He’s really quite stupid against Black’s better friend who is loyal but gets killed by DPO for his efforts. DPO might have had no one care about him (at least in his head) and the teacher Sharon is the object of his affection and she wants to stop bloodshed but he’s a disgusting low life who causes car accidents for the fun of it or for no reason or to lure her husband out to the scene to kill him or hurt him so he can take the wife. He’s one of the worst X FILES human beings ever, killing cows and his friend alike. He is totally unsympathetic and when Sharon goes with him to prevent bloodshed (Scully’s, her husband’s), all he can do is remind her of a yellow flower dress she wore the first day in class that was see through. What a despicable person.

 

It's amazing that Ribisi almost didn’t get the role! He sort of makes the episode. Some reviewers find this boring but while I didn’t like it on the first airing, I sort of really like it now. Mulder makes another joke or two.

 

Teller, the sheriff, is almost as stupid as Darrin and deserves to get killed like he does. He let him go! Then confronts him with a gun. The lightning study research project is a red herring and never has anything to do with the plot.

 

Darrin, in a ward, watches TV and sees, on it, Chris Carter’s credit at the very end.

 

 

 

 

53          4             "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"    David Nutter   Darin Morgan October 13, 1995        3X04                15.38[18]

Skeptical of a famous psychic's predictions regarding the death of several prognosticators, Mulder instead finds someone whom he believes truly can predict the future. Catching the killer could prove difficult, though, particularly if the killer can also see into his future.

 

If Ribisi last episode did a good job, Peter Boyle this episode did a great job. The stor is tight and funny and dark and scary and creepy and different. It also, I believe won the writer an Emmy as well as Boyle for his turn as the psychic. There’s a lot going on. BUT honestly…while I enjoyed this episode, it’s far too dark and depressing, not even really melancholy and/or poignant but…disturbing. Darrin Morgan may have won an Emmy but he’s a really sick man. I mean sick in the head.

 

What reason was there to have the dog eat the remains of the old woman that he lived with? Scully gets the dog, given to her by Clylde’s goodbye not and not sure who later has this written in but a gator or croc eats it. WTF?

 

The idea that fate cannot be changed is a false premise. There is no fate. I think the episode sort of says that when the killer is killed instead of Mulder AND Bruckman is not killed by the killer. Maybe. He kills himself. Which is sad. Yes, Morgan is a seriously disturbed man. He’s later use the same suicide stuff in MILLENNIUM. Thus, I’m not sure one can fully enjoy this episode as it’s not only sad but sick. On many levels.

 

Well, while watching it, it was quite okay but how it turns out…dark and depressing. So, no.

 

 

 

54          5             "The List"          Chris Carter    Chris Carter    October 20, 1995        3X05    16.72[18]

A death row inmate makes good on his promise to come back from the dead and kill the five people involved in his death. The fear of his retribution has everyone scrambling to determine if they are on the list, while Mulder and Scully attempt to determine how he has returned to execute his tormentors.

 

Reviewers call this a nasty episode and a boring one. I can’t agree that it is boring but I do agree that it is nasty. I could do without maggots and constant death on screen but this IS the X FILES. In addition, unlike other X FILES of this nature (and others) there’s not really one person (maybe the inmate trying to barter for his escape to another prison who is killed by the crooked warden?) that we can sympathize with. After DPO, which sort of worked by giving us a very unsympathetic pathetic villain, here, EVERYONE feels like they are angling for something selfish and nasty. It’s all just nasty. No one feels as if they have any depth and this becomes yet one of the many X FILES revenge episodes (of which, this only being the early season three, there have been quite a bit of---too many but I guess that works for a law and order FBI series).

 

To be honest, I have about 11 more minutes to go of this episode but can’t bring myself to get back to it.

 

 

55          6             "2Shy" David Nutter   Jeffrey Vlaming             November 3, 1995      3X06    14.83[18]

Meeting insecure women through an online service, a serial killer seduces his prey with the right words. However, Mulder and Scully determine these killings are far from ordinary by the presence of a strange substance coating the victims, a substance which seems to digest the fatty acids in flesh.

 

I know there are differences but this, maybe because of the number of victims, reminds me of the original NIGHT STALKER and maybe THE NIGHT STRANGLER, too. I know the motive is almost entirely different and yet…is it? This monster man eats the fat of people and sets up meetings via the internet rather than ads. Something about how many victims, and the killer’s resemble to the killers of THE NIGHT STALKER, THE NIGHT STRANGLER, and THE RIPPER all remind me of those Kolchak horror stories. I really felt for all the victims here, too. It’s shocking and immensely rewarding that the last victim survives and it is SHE and not Mulder who rescues Scully from becoming a victim. That he was in the shower is startling and yet…shouldn’t Mulder and Scully have checked there first? Someone hiding the shower was not exactly a fear of mine but so many movies made a thought in my head (for some reason the early HBO showed BLACK CHRISTMAS, which didn’t have a shower scene that I remember) but when the entire entourage of friends left, I checked the shower (and under the bed, too---hey I was not even a teenager yet or was I?).

 

THE LIST is not the greatest episode but not the worst. The acting is solid, the monster man gross in both the way he destroys hope in the dating world and the physical body, as Scully told him, he destroys their minds and hope, too. Disturbing episode but not as disturbing as it once was.

 

Tense and suspenseful, a good episode.

 

 

56          7             "The Walk"       Rob Bowman John Shiban    November 10, 1995   3X07    15.91[18]

Another suicide attempt by a patient in a military hospital interests Mulder with the talk of a "phantom soldier" which has prevented the man's death. The general in charge is at first opposed to the FBI's involvement until the phantom soldier begins haunting him. But when the primary suspect is a quadruple amputee, they are met with ridicule.

 

A good premise and idea, well acted, well filmed but…this season’s been particularly nasty and I’m afraid it will continue. Here, an eight year old plays in a sandbox ditch (?) and a phantom telepathically seems to pour sand all over him until only his hand sticks out and the next scene indicates that, although the soldier guarding him (who went for a smoke and had him out of eyesight) found him moments after, he’s DEAD. That’s just nasty.

 

It does raise the threat and danger level higher up than even before (remember, earlier this season, the government didn’t kill the Native American family helping Mulder, so maybe they balance it with this and other things, like a pet dog dying, which stinks).

 

On the other hand, this is really just another revenge story where Mulder and Scully have a few engagements with each other and others and a few quips here and there but mostly a staid, serious endeavor with nothing new. It does beg the question, like next episode, do they ever save anyone? Or are they just witnesses?

 

 

 

57          8             "Oubliette"       Kim Manners  Charles Grant Craig   November 17, 1995   3X08    15.90[18]

When a young teenage girl is kidnapped from her home, a fast food worker miles away collapses on the job, apparently experiencing exactly what the child is feeling. When Mulder learns that the woman was kidnapped and held hostage for years as a child, he begins to believe that she may be the key to help find the missing girl.

 

Geeze, this is great. The actress playing Lucy is fantastic but so are David and Anderson, especially, here David. It’s a touching story but a harsh one and the end speech by Mulder about the only way Lucy could escape was not necessary because they should have left it that Lucy did what she did to help Amy live (a young Jewel Staite as Amy, later of SPACE CASES). The whole thing seems like a later MILLENNIUM first season episode with links between Lucy and Amy and truly at the time, it was difficult to know what would happen, even if a bit predictable here. The episode made me emotional for Lucy and for Mulder (about his sister, not everything is about his sister he says but sure it is). That there are men like the evil Wade makes things even tougher in this episode.  

 

“That’s spooky.”

“Well, that’s my name, isn’t it?”

 

 

 

58          9             "Nisei"‡              David Nutter   Chris Carter & Howard Gordon & Frank Spotnitz    November 24, 1995            3X09    16.36[18]

A mail order videotape of an alien autopsy blossoms into a much more complicated investigation when Mulder and Scully find the distributor of the tape killed in his own home apparently by a high-ranking Japanese diplomat. While Mulder's search for the video leads him to a train car, Scully investigates a Mutual UFO Network group and discovers several women who claim to know her.

 

At last, another alien conspiracy episode and a brave one and a good one so far. With an excellent cliffhanger. It’s also brave of them to make WW2 Japanese scientists villains who experimented on innocents (in real life they did this and it was horrid). Scully’s plight seems almost discarded by Mulder who is realizing his own adventure and obsession with finding aliens. Here, he finds at least two aliens and another on a video tape (Scully even references the FOX channel’s ALIEN AUTOPSY) and then sees one of them put a train. He also sees a spaceship.

 

I don’t know which is scarier: the serial killer and mutant episodes and/or mutant episodes, monsters of the week, or the unnamed kill squads that were almost a staple of the show from the start: booted men, sometimes in army gear or SWAT like teams aiming to kill anyone to cover up the conspiracy of mostly aliens and related events, shooting to kill without care or compunction and/or the government assassins (or at least we think it’s the gov’t using these lone wolf highly trained killers, the one here played to perfection by good actor who is almost always a villain Stephen McHattie, who played a villain BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and whose character might be the one who killed Catherine in that show). I’d go for all of them.

 

Who is behind this? Our gov’t? The Japanese gov’t? or some other cabal of men? Did the man that Mulder talked to at the ship yard call them in? He didn’t seem very cooperative with Mulder but then asked to see him when Mulder had already taken off to find the ship that picked up the alien craft. We also see an alien in a special air tight suit.

 

Not knowing what was going on then was annoying. Now, it’s just part of the puzzle and fun of the X FILES.

 

And the location work, which this almost all is, is great.

 

Not sure but Skinner here, AND X both play nefarious but now X seems determined to help Mulder by alerting Scully to tell Mulder NOT to get on that train, which he HAS to and jumps onto it. Meanwhile, McHattie’s assassin is killing more Japanese men (are these men all evil, too?).

 

Love Mulder’s, “Look, a beacon in the night,” as Skinner walks toward them early on. After this episode HOW can one not watch the next one? Amazingly good.