DO IT! DO IT NOW! DO IT AGAIN! KILL 'EM ALL!
When I first saw 'Blood', I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought that was a great episode. And now they've remade it and called it 'Wetwired' and instead of Mulder being the one affected, it's Scully, and the paranoia runs much deeper than before, and the violence seems much more real.
And this episode is significantly better than the already outstanding 'Blood'.
I suppose this is the next step in the evolution of the perceived manipulation of digital displays. Now there are colour-coded subliminal suggestions in TV broadcasts to trigger paranoid delusions in the minds of anyone watching. As in 'Blood', the trigger comes from the person's existing fears.
In Scully's case, this fear was that Mulder was not her ally and would eventually turn on her. When she believes she sees him sharing videotapes with Cancer Man in his car, this cements her belief that Mulder has finally gone to the other side and will soon more openly betray her, leading to one of the tensest scenes in the series, in which she threatens to kill Mulder, only to be talked down by her mother when Mulder fails.
I'm glad they answered the question of why Mulder was unaffected, while at the same time introducing a previously unknown character trait: Mulder is colour-blind. This makes him the perfect person to analyse the ridiculous amount of video recorded by the first victims. It reminds me of the Fringe episode, 'The Box', where a deaf man was able to survive a device that kills everyone else with an ultrasonic sound.
Like, seriously, ridiculous amounts of video. Who records that much cable news or home shopping network and keeps it around? Why would you re-watch old news or infomercials? Am I forgetting that much about the '90s?
Also, I am thoroughly amused that Mulder's hotel room is small and plain, but somehow Scully got a nice suite with a fireplace. Your tax dollars at work.
I don't quite understand how they were able to rationalise the woman thinking she killed her husband. I mean, there's a serious implication there that had it actually been her husband and had he actually been cheating on her, she would have been perfectly justified in murdering him? Like, the only thing she did wrong was believing the dog was a woman and that the man in the opposite yard was her husband, but otherwise, OK? I know that's probably not where they were going with that, but some of the lines read a little strange.
Left alone to investigate while Scully recovers from her delusions, Mulder finally tracks down the doctor who was treating the first murder, only to find he was meeting with Cancer Man, as evidenced by the Morley cigarettes in the hotel room ashtray, and then shit gets completely real as Mulder later tracks him to a house where he's gunned down by X. The doctor, not Mulder. Mulder's OK, but seriously pissed at X for withholding information, and rightly so.
I like the character of X, but I do not actually like him. He shows up completely on his whim and expects Mulder to just do exactly what he says with very little explanation as to why. Yes, he's helped Mulder out of some serious jams in the past, but I don't see how he's actually helping anyone otherwise, except that he's clearly working both sides, since he's shown talking to Cancer Man.
If nothing else, this further cements my theory that the Death Eaters want to give Mulder just enough information to keep looking, and to allow him to keep looking, because they are absolutely confident he will never uncover the entire conspiracy. I'm only absolutely confident he will not uncover the entire conspiracy any time soon.
And while we're on the subject of vast conspiracies, the season finale is next, and I'm sure it will be tense and disturbing, as always.
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