The good episodes are easy to write about. The bad ones, not so much. I make no promises about the quality of this post about 'Teso dos Bichos', which was incomprehensibly bad.
Normally, every episode has some redeeming feature. This one had pretty much nothing going for it. I would have expected more from something with hundreds of cats in it.
So I'll at least make an attempt here.
'Teso dos Bichos' explores - well, OK, let's not go overboard here - lightly brings up the negative events apparently brought on by removing an object of cultural and religious significance from its proper place.
Plus, there's the arrogance of white Americans when it comes to protecting artifacts of cultures that still exist. This urn obviously had significance to the Ecuadoran people, and even if the gas pipeline was going to otherwise destroy it, maybe relocating it within the country would have been a better idea than stealing it? But also letting the people decide how best to handle the situation? Again, better than simply removing the artifact to the United States.
What I want to know is, did the researcher who dug up the urn ever watch any Indiana Jones movies? Because that pretty much always happens. Remove the sacred object, and all hell breaks loose. That's the point of stories like that. Well, maybe not the point, but a point? Points for trying? Hell, even without the threat of horrible things happening, it's still generally frowned upon to steal important relics from anyone.
Of course, the ramifications of this theft are much more serious than anything Indiana Jones ever faced, because as far as I know, he never encountered hundreds of apparently domestic cats who had been possessed by a jaguar spirit. (Also, speaking of the jaguar spirit, was it necessary for them to make Dr Lewton's car also a Jaguar? Talk about heavy handed metaphor!)
I guess one thing I should mention, since this is The X-Files, is Mulder and Scully, except they didn't really do much in this episode? Or much that was interesting or significant? Really, they investigated. They didn't really find out very much. Or at least not enough to prevent basically everyone else in the episode cast from being mauled to death by house cats.
And by the end, Mulder was, of course, fully on board with there being some kind of ritual involved, and Scully is, as always, skeptical that this was anything more than cats behaving weirdly combined with a petition to the U.S. government to have the urn returned.
I sometimes have a hard time understanding how a show that can have episodes as phenomenal as 'Ascension' and 'Humbug' and 'War of the Coprophages' can also produce the complete other end of the spectrum in this.
Sheesh. And I thought 'Fresh Bones' was bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment