Wow, this was a fantastic episode. Duplicity, conspiracy, and Holland Manners. Er, Sam Anderson, but if you've seen Angel, you know what I mean.
My initial (perceived) complaint about 'The Pine Bluff Variant' was that Mulder's use as a double agent was revealed too early. But that was a comment I made when that was revealed, not at the end. By the end, because there were so many other twists and turns, I was more or less OK with it, because they were able to create plenty of tension through other means.
Watching Mulder in his ridiculous mask taking part in a bank heist will never not be funny. When Scully said she recognised him, I thought, "Of course you did," but it turned out she recognised the fact that his fingers had been broken, which is really far less amusing and interesting than the idea that she somehow knew it was him through a giant rubber mask.
Every time Sam Anderson was on the screen, I referred to him as Holland Manners, because I know him better as that character from Angel. There's something about his voice that just seems inherently untrustworthy. And he was completely horrible at the end in covering up the bank operation and taking the dirty money somewhere to infect who knows how many people. He even talks to Mulder much in the same way Holland talks to Angel. Very patronising, very condescending. He treats Mulder like his ideals are delusions, that his goal of justice and truth is not reasonable.
Oh, right, and he's in on the whole plan to use the world as a laboratory. Hey, that sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it, Walter Bishop?
So I'm still having a little trouble unravelling the various connections, because obviously the supposed 'leader' of the group Mulder had infiltrated was actually on the government's side... or was he? There is, perhaps, a third side in this, though the Smoking Man and his affiliates are absent. Given that Leamus seemed to be this episode's version of the Smoking Man, but with more legitimate government credentials, I'd say there's a group within the government that's working to do these experiments and that Bremer simply took advantage of these particular extremists' desire to commit acts of terrorism and use it as the government's testing ground.
Or he just used it to get rid of people who were enemies of the state anyway. Because Haley is dead now, and will be nothing more than a pile of goo by the time anyone finds him, and the other supposed participant in Mulder's execution is also dead. I'm not sure what everyone else will say when Bremer returns to them, because it'll be clear Mulder escaped and that one of their own members is 'missing'. But since this probably won't be revisited any time soon, that likely doesn't matter.
I have to say, I was very confused at the beginning, to the point of shouting at my TV, "Mulder, what are you doing?! He's RIGHT THERE in the car. How do you not see him? Wait..." And then everything came together. Or fell apart, I'm not really sure which.
And then I was very scared for Mulder, because well, he had a gun in his face. A lot. And got his fingers broken for his troubles. I don't know that real FBI work would be that, uh, for lack of a better word, thrilling, but these kinds of shows do tend to glamorise detective work, which probably isn't that exciting or even that undercover most of the time. Still, Mulder's in an interesting predicament, especially when he has to participate in the bank job and even potentially kill an innocent person. I'm really glad he was let off the hook on that. Well, not so much for the victim, but still.
The premise of exactly what they were actually testing was horrifying. Not only does their weapon cause horrible burning away of human flesh, but all you have to do is touch it. I suppose maybe an aerosol could be worse, but that's very dependent on where it's released. Putting something like this on money is pretty scary. I'm sure everyone has seen the various dollar bill tracking websites and such, or heard about just how gross our paper currency is.
Yeah. It's handled a lot. Wherever they took that money from the bank, if even one bill ended up in circulation, it could potentially infect dozens of people, though it seemed to be fairly fast acting and didn't really stick around on stuff. Even so, it's unnerving to think about a weapon with that kind of delivery mechanism. It makes me think the people who have such extreme OCD they always wear gloves might actually be on to something.
Also, random trivia I discovered: the employee at the movie theater was Frohike's daughter. Well, Tom Braidwood's daughter. As far as I know, Frohike doesn't have any children.
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