'Unrequited' was kind of a retread of 'Sleepless', wasn't it?
A soldier subject to some kind of experimentation, or in possession of a natural ability, was mistreated by the military, and now wants his revenge, which he exacts by killing generals. Eh.
Yeah, this is the dud at the end of a string of really great episodes.
I did like that they specified how Teager's ability worked, though. Not enough to actually watch the episode again and look for clues about it, but it's certainly intriguing. He can make himself invisible only to people in his line of sight, with or without eye contact. Though that would seem to imply that if he were surrounded, some people would still see him.
But I don't think we're ever shown or even told about the origin of his unusual ability. It's unlike 'Sleepless' in that there's no specific reason Teager can do what he does. I suppose there's a slight implication that he learned something from the VC holding him prisoner, but it's never really explored in any more depth than that. In either case, it wasn't done by the U.S.
I know there were some real life horrors perpetuated by the U.S. government involving American prisoners of war in Vietnam, maybe not the coverups and denials shown in this episode, but more just an unwillingness to make the effort to find the truth. Red tape and government incompetence at its best.
No wonder The Right Hand is pissed off. Well, OK, they're fringe nutballs anyway, so maybe they'd always find a reason to hate the government. (They're essentially Tea Partiers, right? Only possibly smarter.) But Right Hand or not, I can at least see why Teager himself is angry, given that he has more direct experience with being left for dead by the government. His physical invisibility is a pretty good metaphor for how POW/MIA were treated during and after the Vietnam débâcle (yes, there are diacritical marks in that because my computer redlined it without them).
I also have to believe this episode came in short for two reasons. One, the opening scene is repeated near the end of the episode, and looking back at it, there was no point in telling the story this way. They could have left out the opening scene entirely and the episode might have been better. It would have been easy enough to establish Teager's ability without first showing the crowd scene.
But secondly, there was the most ridiculous scene of Mulder and Scully running from three attack dogs at The Right Hand's compound. It's completely absurd and kind of funny, but why is it even there? Again, they could have very easily shown us that Markham was paranoid and extremely distrustful of the government without setting up a silly chase scene.
There's another big problem here, especially in the crowd scenes, which is that an invisible person still takes up space. Teager is still moving through the crowd, so even if he's invisible, couldn't someone tackle him?
This is one of those cases where I just don't really care that much because the episode was otherwise so uncompelling as compared to the previous few. I'll pretty much just accept that it was a Thing and go from there.
I also don't really understand why Marita is in this episode. For the most part, Mulder would only go to Deep Throat or X when there was some conspiracy regarding aliens and government abductions, not some run-of-the-mill conspiracy. Since she's the new replacement for those characters, I'd expect her to be more involved in the mythology episodes than the case of the week ones.
Though I will say I like the way the scene at the Lincoln Memorial was shot. We saw the statue of Lincoln; we saw Mulder and Marita talking in its shadow. Only we didn't because they never left Vancouver. They did a good enough job with the colour and the lighting, though, that it looks like they are actually there. The live scene was well matched to the stock/B roll footage.
And lastly, the ordering of episodes again becomes a problem because unlike 'Kaddish', which was aired first after 'Memento Mori', this one doesn't really have the feel of having come right after Scully's cancer diagnosis. And actually, I looked it up, and it was actually even intended to air more or less when it did. It was only the earlier episodes that were somewhat scrambled. So why does it seem so ordinary?
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