Another episode with absolutely no Scully and almost no Mulder, either. In hindsight, it's now obvious why this episode wasn't very good.
Also, I'm pretty sure this was the first episode I watched after eating dinner on a night we marathoned several episodes. WHEN WILL I LEARN NOT TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE AGAIN. I mean, seriously, this was also kind of unnecessarily disgusting, with that thing coming out of Skur's mouth.
But speaking of unnecessary, this episode. This episode served no purpose other than maybe to show that Bill Mulder was involved in plenty of shady things, which I guess really only helps to further influence the present day's Mulder's opinion of his father and the various things he's investigating that it seems his father played a large role in. It's another way to force Mulder to rethink his work, I guess.
Also, it was a way to go for a kind of noir style, which actually worked pretty well, since Arthur Dales totally had the voice for the narration.
We do learn the apparent origin of the 'X' designation for the unsolved and rather unusual cases, though I'm not sure why they skipped over 'V' and 'W' to get there. Maybe they started there and also quickly ran out of space. There do seem to be a LOT of cases that fall under the general label of 'X-Files'.
So yeah, I can't quite figure out what I was supposed to think about this episode. The young Smoking Man wasn't even in it, but young Bill Mulder was. And younger Fox Mulder was, too, for a few minutes, though he really didn't appear on screen for more than a couple of scenes. And that was in 1990, as we were told in very large letters - seriously, who makes the captions for these things? Well, I guess they wanted to make it clear that it was not the present day, and figured a small caption in the style of all the others would be insufficient.
I'd like to see more Mulder flashbacks, like to his time at Oxford and Quantico. I want to see him become Spooky Mulder. Not just because I think that would make for an interesting story, but because it would sure as hell be better than 'Travelers' (yes, spell check, I know it should be spelled 'travellers', but the episode title inexplicably has only a single 'l' - is that a regional thing I didn't know about?)
The scariest part of the episode, interestingly, was not the creepy creature thing in the mouths, though I have to say, that ranks up there with some of the worst things ever introduced on The X-Files, but no, it was the communist witch hunt. I've read about it in history books and on the internet, but the idea that these people could use communism to discredit anyone they wanted discredited is, well, Orwellian.
Not to mention, arresting Skur in front of his family was pretty much the worst possible thing they could have done, and I'm guessing that probably happened a lot in the 1950s, as well.
It's always tricky when the show incorporates real history into an episode, as it last did in the underwhelming 'Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man'. And I think it doesn't entirely work here, either. It has potential, but in an episode that's kind of all over the place, it just makes me feel like something is missing.
Or that, as has been said before, communism was just a red herring.
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