If I believed what I saw on television and knew nothing about reality, I might believe that all blind people had special abilities they used to compensate for their inability to see.
'Mind's Eye' was a legitimately creepy episode, though thanks to some well-worn tropes, I was pretty easily able to figure out that the killer was Marty's father. It's the same thing that happened in 'Aubrey' and that I thought would happen in episodes like 'Born Again'. A genetic link causes a special ability.
In this case, that special ability is also associated with, and maybe even requires Marty's blindness. But Marty has adapted pretty well to that at least, if not the fact that she could otherwise see the world as her father saw it.
What I cannot figure out, though, is why she ended up in prison at the end. Couldn't she claim self-defence? Or was what she did essentially revenge, even if he gave the appearance of coming to attack her? I guess she did still assault the detective, so there's that.
I liked the way this episode was filmed, especially the scene in which Marty finally shot her father and we saw his vision go completely dark. It's interesting to think about because a person who is completely blind from birth cannot describe to a sighted person what that is like. We have no perspective to know what it's like to not have any visual input - even when we close our eyes, we still have visual input, it's just dark, which seems like it would be different from being blind. There's just nothing to compare it to.
So it's a little fascinating that the blind woman in this episode, like other, non-paranormal blind people, cannot see her world. But because of her special ability that was imparted to her when her pregnant mother was murdered, she can see her father's world, and there's an implication that she sees it all the time, but we only see the flashes of it when he's in the process of killing someone or when she's about to kill him. It only became an issue for her recently because he was released from prison.
Which makes it rather sad, too, because for Marty's entire life, all she would have seen would be the inside of a prison cell - and she wouldn't even have any idea why. And with the episode ending with her actually in prison, it's almost as if she never left the cell at all. Despite her independence and strength, she didn't really do much with her own life, and now she can't. She's essentially been in prison since birth, except for the few days of 'freedom' she had while her father was out, which weren't exactly free for her anyway, since Mulder and Scully spent most of the time interrogating her.
I also considered that maybe she would completely ace the polygraph test, having likely honed her ability to control her heart rate like those contestants on that really bad game show a few years back where they'd have to answer questions while also being held over a huge flaming pit or in front of vicious animals or whatever and have to keep their heart rate steady. But it was not meant to be, as she had obvious trouble answering questions about seeing things.
The one bit that confused me a little was the scene where Marty was being transferred. Because initially, we'd only been shown flashes of her vision when she witnessed a murder, so it never occurred to me that she could always see what her father saw. I was initially worried that she'd be the next victim and the episode would somehow take a weird turn and become something else entirely. And it took some time to realise the connection between her father creepily watching her and what she was witnessing.
The immediateness of her later visions reminded both of the X-Files episode, 'Unruhe', and of the Angel episode, 'Epiphany', in which Cordelia gets a vision of herself moments before being attacked.
Though this episode has nothing on 'Unruhe' in terms of the creep factor. That one was way scarier.
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