The X-Files Season 2, Episode 2: The Host

'The Host' was a really disturbing and kind of gross episode. I will never look at pipes and water treatment the same way again. Or creepy sewer-dwelling monsters, but you know, I don't really have to think about those very often as it is.

I think I would have preferred the culprit in this one to be actual aliens, because the idea of genetically mutated monsters somehow seems a little more plausible, and I sure don't want to see one of those things coming through the pipes, or in a swimming pool, or a sewage tank, or really anywhere at all.

So yeah, gross monsters combined with people swimming in shit. This is not going to be an episode I rewatch very often.

"Hey, X-Files, have you got any non-creepy or disgusting episodes to use as the second episode of the second season?"

"Go fish."

I can't deny this episode made me think of the Buffy episode, 'Go Fish' (though the monster itself brought to mind the Turok-Han vampires from season 7 of Buffy), though this one didn't put me to sleep. It was gross, but not boring. But like 'Go Fish', it also involved a mutated Russian fish-man.

Well, worm-man, really, but who's counting?

I'm mostly focused now on the other story development.

Mulder is not happy in his new role. I enjoyed how he identified himself so casually at the crime scene, "Mulder, FBI," but in a very bored-sounding voice, and then asked them to wrap up the body and send it to Skinner himself. The conflict between him and Skinner is interesting to watch, because it appears Skinner wants to keep Mulder around - otherwise, why not just suspend him?

Obviously, the later scene in Skinner's office shows that Skinner is answering to someone else who must have it in for Mulder and the X-Files in general (Smoking Man?). But I like that he compliments Mulder's work on the report, and then kind of vaguely indicates that he's not really the one in charge, an assertion not entirely lost on Mulder, despite his general paranoia about the way the FBI is operating.

And as always, we get some more excellent interaction between Scully and Mulder, and again it's Scully who insists she get involved, which I'm finding more and more fascinating. She really wants to work with him again, which I really think is something that she wouldn't have considered earlier in the series. She's seen too much to be able to go back to just normal investigative work.

But what I also really like is that Skinner appeared in this episode, despite it being a 'monster of the week' episode, and that a replacement for Deep Throat seems to have arrived on the scene. Mulder has a 'friend at the FBI', apparently, who is possibly even more mysterious and unavailable than Deep Throat was.

But he tells Mulder that the X-Files must be reinstated and that somehow this case is important to achieving that. I suppose that's because this case, while strange, doesn't involve aliens or any of Spooky Mulder's theories that the rest of the Bureau find so laughable.

So we'll see where this goes, because I'm guessing that at some point they'll bring back the actual X-Files within the FBI, and reassign Mulder and Scully to work together again.