This really would have been the perfect episode for Mulder to be in. Alas, he was not.
OK, let's start with Doggett, though. I'm getting a little tired of his constant hard-edged 'my way' attitude. He has clearly never dealt with children before, because his approach with Billy was more likely to further traumatise him and close him off than to get him to open up and help solve the case. A little kid who's been abducted doesn't care about all the various police aspects of solving the case, you have to simplify it. Good guys, bad guys. We're trying to find the bad guys.
I feel like Scully's approach would have possibly been better. If Billy had even existed at all, anyway.
But this is an abduction story, and those are meant for Mulder. Doggett's also just not that interesting, but maybe I'm still biased by the fact that he's just Not Mulder. Because there is a hint that maybe he's not so far removed from abduction cases, though it's never really explicitly spelled out (presumably it will be at some point).
There's another problem with this episode, which is that again the science, or even the paranormal activity, is not explained at all. Are we suddenly just supposed to take all the weird stuff for granted? What happened to the old X-Files where Mulder would come up with an outrageous theory and Scully would use science to determine that maybe there was some validity to it, and that was a large part of the investigation. Explaining the unexplainable.
Now it seems to have become much more simply an investigation of what happened, not so much how, except, I guess, the idea that he was simply returning in spirit form to help solve the case. But ... why now? Why wait ten years? I guess the point, which is kind of what Scully was getting at in the end, is that the case did end up being solved, and Doggett helped solve it. At that point, it really doesn't matter very much how they got there.
I didn't even realise until Billy vanished at the very end what had happened in the first place - I thought he was somehow more 'real' - and that they would find his body buried where he had apparently been standing. Except he was real. There were medical tests and everything! Well, and the creepy bit where he didn't talk and tried to stab his brother, who seemed to get that something wasn't quite right from the beginning.
Kids on this show. Seriously, they're always evil or possessed or able to see through things, aren't they? Maybe that's kids in science fiction, actually. Josh gave the impression he knew Billy wasn't right, though it's possible that's just because he's 10 and suddenly has a 7-year-old brother who's actually older than him. Billy disappeared before he was even born, so I'm not sure what his parents would have told him. It's not like it happened when he was old enough to be aware of what was happening at the time.
But again, that's another angle they played within the other mystery - and let's face it, at least there was a legitimate mystery here, even outside the X-File. We were definitely led to believe from the beginning that Ronnie, who was certainly an extremely creepy person, was responsible for Billy's initial disappearance. And for quite a while, it was hard to tell who the real villain was - most of the somewhat peripheral people came off as creepy and possible suspects. It wasn't really until the very end that I was able to pick up on Cal being the killer all along.
And we were also led, at one point, to believe Billy was simply not himself and had returned to exact his revenge on a family that had 'forgotten' him? He was number one, and now Josh is. They were certainly playing the 'younger' sibling jealousy angle until they decided that apparently wasn't very interesting, just creepy.
But is it just me, or is there just not much else here? Season eight is not exactly off to the best start with a string of pretty mediocre episodes out of the gate and a tremendous change in the cast and characters. And I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record with that, but it's true. I'm a little scared to check alt.tv.x-files, because I'm sure things probably weren't going well from the perspective of fans at the time, either.
Maybe the next one will grab me somehow and make me realise what I'm missing as I simply cannot bring myself to care about this season so far? Maybe?
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