The X-Files Season 4, Episode 3: Teliko

Um, guys. Writers. Composers. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

'Tribal' or 'exotic' music in an episode about West African immigrants? Yes, clearly someone must have thought that was a good idea.

This is going to be 'Fresh Bones' all over again, isn't it? Yeah, this isn't going to be easy to write about, because like 'Fresh Bones', I didn't really like the episode.

Well, not quite 'Fresh Bones'. Maybe there's a little more to 'Teliko'?

OK, so the episode starts with a plane and something bad happening on said plane. My first thought was that maybe J.J. Abrams had a hand in this episode, because he loves his airplane tragedies. But no, it was written and directed by people entirely not J.J. Abrams.

But halfway into the episode, not much has happened. The investigation has turned up relatively little, and Mulder and Scully are chasing Samuel Aboah, who is played by an Olympic runner, so, uh, they're not going to be able to outrun him. Well, plus, he's able to, for lack of a better term, squeeze into a very small space in order to hide, but somehow Mulder is able to find him, looking into his hiding place on a hunch.

But, like Eugene Tooms, Samuel Aboah is able to hide himself in impossibly small spaces, allowing him to escape from the hospital in the bottom of a cart.

Eventually, they discover a connection between a Bambaran folk legend and Aboah's crimes, with Mulder actually making some sense on the matter. Folk tales often do originate from some form of reality, often something that people otherwise cannot explain. Not that this necessarily helps solve the case, because the case, like many previous X-Files, and a few Fringe episodes, as well, is about an otherwise normal human being with a biological need that he can then extract from others.

It's that simple. And that overdone. He's nothing more than a vampire, in that sense.

Except that people with conditions like his - maybe nothing that extreme, but hormonal deficiencies in general - can often get treatment for them. It would have made more sense for Aboah to come to the U.S. for treatment, but not to murder people and steal their melanin. That's kind of ridiculous. The even worse part is how planned the whole thing is - that he first disables his victims with a seed from a plant with cortical depressant qualities.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's rather horrifying. Nightmare fuel, indeed.

The best part of the episode involved Aboah attacking Mulder, because as is often the case, there's just not all that much tension unless Mulder or Scully are somehow put in danger from the main villain. I was never worried that Mulder would actually be killed or have his hormones harvested, but still! I'm glad that Scully was able to save Mulder, despite making the mistake of turning her back on the room they're in. Apparently she has some kind of ability to know what Mulder is thinking and trying to communicate just by rolling his eyes back and forth.

I don't really have a lot else to say about this one.

Oh, right, one more thing - the makeup in 'Teliko' is atrociously bad, too. They had to use so much of it to thoroughly whiten the skin of the victims that it made their skin texture look completely unnatural in the closeup shots.