Holy crap. 'X-Cops' was kind of a spectacular episode. The only possibly negative thing I could say about it is that the handheld video action made me quite dizzy at times. Otherwise, it was perfect.
The best episodes are the ones with either great banter between Mulder and Scully or the ones that are just completely outrageous. This actually managed to be both.
Oh, and the monster of the week was totally a Boggart. This is my headcanon.
This may also turn out to be one of my favourite episodes when all is said and done. I love that Mulder couldn't seem to get enough of the camera and that Scully seemed intent on avoiding it, even going so far as to hide behind the open door of the ambulance every time they tried to get her on video. I think what made that scene so great is how well Gillian Anderson sold it. She totally looked timid and camera shy, and then later aggressively anti-camera. And naturally, the camera followed her. A lot.
I've never actually seen COPS, but I've been informed this was basically filmed as if it was a COPS episode, and I only later realised it was done pretty much entirely in real time. There weren't long cuts that spanned multiple hours at all. I also liked that in the spirit of the show this was parodying, faces of suspects were blurred out and the camera work was less than perfect due to the less than ideal conditions faced by the camera operators. (It made me dizzy, but it was effective.)
'X-Cops' was certainly an unusual slice of life kind of episode from the show, and while the villain was certainly supernatural (I'm still going with Boggart), it didn't really feel much like a typical X-File. Which, yes, I realise, was the point. Humour was clearly also a point, and as is almost always the case with this show, episodes that are either entirely funny or contain bits of wry humour from Mulder or Scully are among the best.
In this one, the usual banter between Mulder and Scully is intensified because it's taking place on camera - in a meta sense, I mean. Obviously they're always on camera anyway, but here they're on camera in universe. Everything is magnified, as I'm sure it is on the real show, COPS. Ordinary police situations are turned into high drama. Though my understanding is that they tended to air the most dramatic cases anyway.
And speaking of dramatic, let's talk for a moment about Steve and Edy. As a straight guy, it's certainly hard for me to identify the appropriateness of their portrayal, which seemed rather stereotypically flamboyant to me, but one thing I think was appropriate is that no one at all made an issue or a comment about them being a same-sex couple. They were just normal, which is pretty damn awesome, especially thirteen years ago.
The other important thing about this particular couple, though, is that their fear - at least Edy's fear - was not of any kind of physical threat, but of Steve leaving him. Like the other fears in the episode, though, it was irrational and extreme, at least as far as we know. And it seems that making that fear known was what allowed them to reconcile in the end.
What's also interesting, and I really only just noticed while writing this, is that it seems Mulder and Scully have no fear. The Boggart never went after them. At least, they have no specific fears of things that can kill them. Either that, or everyone else just had greater fears. But in the scene with the autopsy where the assistant is killed by the hantavirus because she was irrationally afraid of it, why did the Boggart not then go after Scully or the camera crew? If it's able to manifest as a rare contagion, you'd think it would be capable of killing anyone in the room in pretty much any way.
So the only conclusion can be that Scully, being of extremely logical mind, is able to conquer any irrational thoughts she might otherwise have, allowing herself not to become a victim. I suppose it could have manifested her fear of the cameras and I don't know, caused one of the camera people to follow her around uncomfortably closely, but they kind of did that anyway.
I think Mulder may be truly fearless, though. He's faced death so many times, I think he just kind of accepts his mortality.
Interestingly, my own fear is not death, but fear of death. I accept my mortality, I just don't want to know about it in advance. If it's sudden and painless, that's fine. If I'm in a plane doing a nosedive from 30,000 feet, that's much less fine. So I don't know how the creature would manifest for me, if it would at all. I guess it would come up with some way to kill me by first mentally torturing me with the knowledge that I was about to die. That's far more terrifying than death itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment