Yeah, no. 'Chimera' is not exactly going to make my list of favourite episodes, I'm pretty sure.
It took me for ever to figure out why Scully's stakeout even mattered, until the end when it was clearly meant to be a parallel to Ellen's case. Nothing is as it appears.
Still, I think that could have been better executed.
I have to wonder what young child would even make the distinction between a raven and a crow - wouldn't most kids just call any black bird that caws a crow? Raven is really specific - and is, in fact, a type of crow - but whatever, it's not like it really matters.
Whatever misdirection was intended in this episode, I certainly fell for it. I made the very logical assumption that because Jenny was around whenever there was an attack, she must be behind it. What I didn't notice, and really would need to watch the episode again to find out, is whether Ellen, the actual beast, was present when the attacks occurred, too. It's a pretty neat bit of writing and filming to get us to completely take our eye off the ball like that.
I even thought initially that the key was part of the spell or whatever, and not just literally a key to a motel room. Like something that just happened to appear as a result of the transformation or summoning that was occurring. (That was the other thing - I did think, at first, that the attacks weren't literally perpetrated by any of the characters but were something summoned by one of them. So I guess that misdirection kind of worked, too.)
But that's kind of the best thing I can say for it? The rest of the plot was pretty ridiculous. I think that a trap that this show and a lot of others fall into is that when they create a character who has a hidden dark side, they also feel somehow compelled to introduce a motive for that character's demonic behaviour. But that's just the problem. When a person has an uncontrollable second nature like Ellen did in this episode, no motive is really necessary.
As viewers, we didn't really need all the talk about jealousy or marital problems. That was all part of the long misdirect, I guess. Except that much of it wasn't misdirection at all. We already knew there was a monster of some sort and someone was responsible for it (or, you know, was it). We were being misdirected as to who that actually was, but it's not like these were random crimes that could have been committed by an ordinary person.
Which is why the ending was also very strange. While Mulder tries to explain that some forms of dissociative identity disorder (and I'm glad the show mostly stuck to correct terminology for that, rather than the inaccurate and unofficial, 'multiple personality disorder') can manifest in actual physical changes, it's tenuous at best. And he does mention that, but still, that explanation leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Plus, it's more than a little disturbing - and I think an unfortunate reality of social conditioning - that this strong desire for a perfect, ideal suburban life is at least partly responsible. I don't want to count out the fact that her husband was cheating on her, but there seemed to be a weird implication that she was more to blame for that than he was.
I don't know, I don't even think this episode is necessarily worth analysing that much. Like so many of the standalone semi-filler episodes of this show, it's just kind of there. Not completely dreadful, but also not really memorable, either.
When I get to the end of the series, this will probably be in the same category as episodes like 'Young at Heart' and 'Unrequited' and 'Trevor' - episodes that were neither awful nor spectacular, and therefore have nothing that will cement them in my memory the way the truly horrible episodes like 'Fresh Bones' and 'Teso dos Bichos' and 'Alpha' will forever be.
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