Oh, X-Files. Why?
Whose idea was this? Why was this supposed to be good? Or was it supposed to be good? Maybe it was just filler. Yeah, I'm going with filler, because there's really no reason for this episode to exist otherwise.
Here's a brilliant idea: introduce a character who is an apparently disabled, extremely poor person from a country Americans don't really know that much about, use some real mysticism mixed with some science fiction, and voilà! Instant X-Files villain. Sure to offend just about everyone.
I mean, really, what are we supposed to take away from this? Give money to people begging or they'll come after you, climb inside your body through the digestive tract and make you bleed to death horribly? I don't understand what the man's motive was. It's not at all clear that he actually was seeking revenge for the industrial accident or if he was just an asshole. Given the scene at the end, my money's on asshole.
But again, WHY? Sure, the idea of someone who isn't all they appear to be is not a terrible one - it's been played to great effect in the series with the stories about the shapeshifting alien bounty hunter, and to great comedy in 'Small Potatoes', and to great poignancy in 'Humbug'. But here is an episode about someone who has a certain power, more commonly associated with religious mysticism, and uses it entirely for random murder.
How did he choose his targets? I mean, sure, I guess the guy at the beginning makes sense 'cause he was kind of a jerk, but the others? Why get a job at the school? Who was supposed to be there that he was after?
Did I fall asleep while watching this train wreck and miss some important information that would have explained it? I really don't want to go back and watch 'Badlaa' again, so I'm going to assume either I missed that critical moment and the episode was actually better than I thought, or, more likely, I stayed awake through the whole thing and it really was that bad.
We're 31 episodes from the end of the series, and they give us this?
The only redeeming thing about this episode was the final scene between Scully and Doggett and maybe even the action that led to it. It's not like we need to see another crisis of faith from Scully, but it's interesting that while I had observed this season that she had become more the believer with Doggett as the skeptic, she was actually having a hard time with it. She doesn't want to believe. She wants the science to make sense. She wants the universe to make sense.
And here, it doesn't make sense. She knows that she didn't kill a teenage boy, but she can't explain how she knows. The whole time she was trying to get Doggett to open his own mind, I took it at face value. She's obviously seen enough to believe. What I didn't realise was that she was trying to open her own mind in the face of her otherwise dominating skepticism.
So I can see them maybe doing something interesting with this in the future. I didn't expect she had entirely become Mulder, but I assumed she actually believed what she was saying most of the time. It turns out nothing is that simple, is it?
I'm reminded of the movie, when both Mulder and Scully echoed the line, "If I quit now, they win" to each other. She didn't believe it at first, and Mulder didn't quite accept it at the end, but I do enjoy when this show takes one character's attitude, forces a change in it over the course of an episode, and then uses their newfound understanding to broaden the mind of the character who initially led them there. Obviously, I'm being vague and it was usually Scully and Mulder, respectively, but here it was Doggett and Scully.
Doggett knows what Scully saw and what she did and is able to logically get her to a point of understanding about everything that happened in the episode, and if the entire point of the episode was just a catalyst for that development, maybe it wasn't quite as bad as I initially thought.
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