I initially liked the drug metaphor here - much better than the 'magic is drugs' on Buffy - but wasn't sure where the episode was really going or how it would be resolved.
I also kind of hoped that Mulder and Scully would enter the light and become super fast, too.
Also, while I didn't exactly recognise the teacher - at least I couldn't identify where I'd seen him before, because I thought he looked familiar - I looked him up later and it turns out he wears the cheese, it does not wear him. I don't think I would have noticed that, even though 'Restless' is my favourite Buffy episode and I've seen it more than a dozen times.
Otherwise, this is, as we find out at the end, a pretty straightforward story about a teenager (played by a 30-year-old) who had problems with authority figures, and a possibly slightly nerdy kid who wanted a piece of his power but then had a change of heart when he realised what that power was being used for.
I think the biggest problem, though, was that Mulder and Scully weren't really needed. This was certainly an X-File, since no one really knows (still!) what the source of the strange light was or why it gave people certain powers when they stepped into it. Was it a portal to another dimension or some kind of time flux whose effects would still be felt by a person leaving it?
There's also a bit of a chicken and egg situation with the drug metaphor, or maybe just a question of what the actual effects are. Is it moving quickly that causes the high or are there two separate effects of the light, one of which is being able to move quickly and the other being a general good feeling, like with many stimulants? The effects of those drugs are related, obviously, but in a lot of cases, the physical effects are just a side effect of the actual reason people take the drugs. I prefer to think of the effects as separate in this episode, too, because it makes the title a better play on words, much like 'Field Trip'.
Maybe there was also a message here. Drugs are bad, m'kay?
By the time Mulder and Scully got there to investigate - well, and clean up the bodies - it was way too late. The power was gone, whether it had just ended naturally or been used up, and the authorities weren't going to take any chances and just filled the cave with concrete, so in theory, no one should be able to abuse this power again. Unless, you know, it relocates.
But the other problem is that we didn't even find out about the source of the power until too late, and therefore spent most of the episode watching a kid move way faster than a normal person, nearly destroy his body in the process, and lash out against people he perceived to be holding him back. But really, that could have been established more quickly, which would have allowed more exploration of the actual paranormal activity in the episode.
Initially, when Max crashed the car to show Tony what he was capable of, I couldn't figure out how Tony ended up outside the car. I seriously believed that something about the thrill and fear of impending doom brought on the magical ability to move super fast and that Tony wasn't even aware of doing it. And of course that sounds stupid when I write it out, because it's obvious that Max just pulled him from the car before it crashed into the tree at really not a hundred miles per hour. A car hitting a tree at that speed would not be recognisable as having once been a car.
Can you tell I'm kind of running out of stuff to talk about for this episode? It wasn't awful, but there just isn't a lot to say about it. It was one of the more straightforward episodes and there weren't really any major twists and turns. Even the reveal of Max's issues with authority seemed obvious in hindsight.
Well, that and since the 45 minute episode might have taken days for these kids to watch, maybe it's only fitting that the post about it is shorter than most of the others. It went by in a flash, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment