The X-Files Season 3, Episode 5: The List

'The List' was an episode I kind of liked with an ending I really hated. Way to leave us hanging.

The plot, though, centering around a condemned man making his final threat from the electric chair, was compelling at the beginning, and initially I thought everything was just a coincidence, but then I remembered this is The X-Files.

The best line of this episode, by far, is in the scene where Mulder and Scully are discussing the case:

MULDER: Imagine if it were true, Scully. Imagine if you could come back and take out five people who had caused you to suffer. Who would they be?

SCULLY: I only get five?

MULDER: I remembered your birthday this year, didn't I, Scully?

Hee!

The rest of the episode isn't really funny at all, and whether it meant to or not, it managed to show how utterly awful things are in the American prison system. It's never stated outright, but in a place where most of the prisoners are black and most of the guards are white (except for the one guard who isn't, but turns out to be a suspect anyway. *facepalm*), there's a very obvious racial imbalance, too. I guess it also reflects the reality of prisons, unfortunately, because many more young black men are more harshly prosecuted and given more extreme punishments than their white counterparts, often for exactly the same crimes.

And as we see in a couple of scenes, the brutality shown by the guards and the warden is another of those things that probably also happens a lot in real American prisons. After all, they have an easy enough way around it, since prison violence does exist, and they can just claim it was a fight in the shower, and whose story is more likely to be listened to and believed?

Yeah, prison is awful. The American justice system is extremely broken.

As for the plot here, it seems confirmed by the end that the executed prisoner, Neech Manley, really had come back from the dead somehow to exact revenge on those who had wronged him while he was in prison. And suddenly I find myself thinking about Scully's line, "I only get five?" because I can't believe that with the way that prison environment was depicted that there'd have been only five people he thought had abused or mistreated him while he was there.

The other prisoners seem to know something about his list, but aren't particularly forthcoming about it to the warden or to Mulder. Not that I really expect them to, since they've suffered the same experience as he did, and have absolutely nothing to gain from helping the investigation. They know the warden is crooked and won't actually make the deals he promises. (Unless he promises to beat them to death in the shower, then he's probably true to his word. Unfortunately.)

And when Scully is accosted by one of the guards - Parmelly - who hides in a dark corner and tells her of Manley's list, she becomes rather nervous about the place, but also has to deal with the very sexist Fornier and becomes even more unnerved, or maybe just angry (and rightly so!) and insists they need to leave. I mean, really, what was Parmelly thinking cornering her like that? He's a guard, so shouldn't he be part of this investigation and cooperate more openly? If he knew who was on the list, and he wasn't, he had nothing to be afraid of, right?

But that's another thing that I think this episodes suffers from - way too many characters crammed into 45 minutes. Every guard, every prisoner, the warden, the girlfriend, the lawyer... I think I was confused because I couldn't keep track of everyone and what red herring they were supposed to be behind, if there even was such development. For the most part, the guards were all scared or didn't know anything; the prisoners all hinted at knowing about the list but wouldn't say who was on it; and the lawyer and executioner were simply murdered. No depth there at all.

I'm mostly left with a feeling at the end of this episode that someone at the prison was covering up something else - maybe just the abuse or maybe Manley's special abilities - and the episode never really got into it. There are so many possibilities, and while we're directly shown that it was Neech Manley killing everyone on his list, Mulder and Scully just leave town and ... that's it?

This seems to be another of those weird half-resolved episodes that didn't come together quite the way the writers - wait, this was written by Chris Carter, wasn't it? - probably hoped. And maybe it's especially disappointing coming off a spectacular episode like 'Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose'. That is going to be hard to top.